My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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Pauline Kael, from her “Notes on 280 Movies” in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, quoted by Falling and Laughing. Do you think that cinema and television have amplified this problem: the occupation of our imaginations by fantasies? James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was written in 1939. Mitty is a tragicomic character inattentive to his weakly-lived and mundane life, preferring the vivid and meaningful heroics of his fantasy world. Don’t we all? A primary struggle: to redirect my mind whenever it starts to enact its hideous, vain little dreams.
It is commonly proposed that the ubiquity of televisual and cinematic media, and now videogames, amplifies the human tendency to reside in self-satisfying fantasy rather than attempt to shape reality, overcome, transcend, find beauty and meaning in the scrum of the real, and so on. I wonder, though, if the media make as much difference as we suppose; it has always been the case that we fly from mediocrity into dreams; it has always been the case that fantasy –self-aggrandizing, self-confirming, self-mythologizing- is our best opiate. Back to books you can go; back to oral storytelling; the kids always pretended not to be turning into their parents.
But I do note, in my own life, that when I watch a certain sort of movies or play video games to excess, it soon occurs that my dreams are taken over, my automatic reveries replaced. This excellent quote from Marshall McLuhan, posted by Carvalhais relates:
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. Political unification of populations by means of vernacular and language groupings was unthinkable before printing turned each vernacular into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men heterogeneously trained to be individuals.
Our trained individualism exists within narrow parameters; we vary, but drawing on the same sources for our consolatory daydreams perhaps not so greatly. Our community is organized around shared, mediated myths and stories. Everyone is a Mitty, and his community is those Mittys whose fantasies are informed by the same sources and have the same shape. We bump into one another walking down the street pretending to be: in a music video, in a videogame combat zone, in a romantic comedy, in a ‘human interest’ piece on the news, in a documentary, in a…
Richard Powers, from heroine Sarah Belfort’s post of some six word stories; also included were:
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.— Margaret Atwood
I’m your future, child. Don’t cry. — Stephen Baxter
LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING.— Evelyn Waugh
Thought I was right. I wasn’t. — Graeme Gibson
There is also the well-known Hemingway effort -“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”- and it seems to me that many fragments of James Ellroy’s prose could be excerpted and stand on their own in the same way.
Clive James, on the role jazz played in American history. I think this is very beautiful, and not solely because I love jazz; it’s also a sound appraisal of where art stands in relation to justice: it can provoke shifts in mass consciousness that assist change, but it is just as important as a source of meaning when injustice reigns.
James Baldwin, from “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” quoted by my friend Jack July, whom I miss.
I love this letter and I love Baldwin, but I wonder if he isn’t wrong about humanity: whatever its capacity for “destruction and death,” it is less than that of the rest of the living world and indeed of the universe, if one can consider cosmic events destructive. Which is to say: to whom does he compare us? A sublime ideal, one which exists solely by virtue of the tremendous imaginative capacities of the human mind, without which the very concepts of peace and justice, which he feels we violate, would not exist.
The best reason to be philosophical about death and destruction is not because we must resign ourselves to that idiot species known as man, with his imbecilic violence and chaos; no, for though we are violent we alone renounce violence; though we kill we alone regret killing; we alone care for the needy and lame, if imperfectly. I am an animal-lover, but I feel no sense of moral inferiority: animals are beneath morality, while we strive, if imperfectly, to embody it.
No, we should be philosophical about death and destruction because though we stand in opposition to them both persist, almost as though they are integral to the structure of the world: as though life cannot exist without death and creation relies on destruction. We must understand them and come to peace with them as though they are like gravity, heat, entropy.
His position might be restated: “We’re not angels, and I therefore feel we are worse than beasts, although we’ve invented angels and overtaken beasts in all measures of compassion, decency, love.” This is a common enough refrain: we are wretched, scarcely tolerable, and the world would be better off without us. I wonder what the proponents of this view see when they peer out into the emptiness of space, or at the bloody maw of some victorious predator, or the swarming ants devouring a nest of baby birds. We are the only moral agents in the cosmos, yet their moral outrage over our imperfection inclines them to wish us extinct: to leave a universe in which there is no restraint, no quarter for the weak, nothing but instinctual murder and the amoral order of ecosystems.
![Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943.
Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption.
There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are.
Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us?
Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler.
That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism:
It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.”
In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state.
As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted:
The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.
The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all.
(Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).](http://1.media.tumblr.com/2KfNZVJctnqb9hzwRxnQbudFo1_r1_400.jpg)
Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943.
Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption.
There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are.
Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us?
Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler.
That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism:
It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.”
In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state.
As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted:
The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.
The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all.
(Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).
Sigmund Freud, quoted by Wolf and Fox. Psychotherapy in its infancy seemed like an effort to scientifically objectify artistic knowledge about humanity and its fears, longings, dreams; much reads like literature, and some -like Jung- sounds religious. It is emblematic of the 20th century that we attempted this translation of poetics into science.
Art reminds us endlessly that human life is essentially unchanging, that we are not different from our forebears, whose concerns and fears and dreams we share, that history is more cyclical than linear. Science tells us the opposite: that history is linear and progressive, that the world and human society are perfectible, and that we are ever-advancing: it is a kind of post-religious eschatology.
Some time ago, writing about Chaplin and Einstein, I wasn’t precisely sure why we now so strongly prefer science to art, but I partially suspect it is because science offers a much more alluring myth than art does, and consoles us in our mortality by telling us that with every decade our species advances towards an unspecified state of angelic or utopian transcendence.
As with the perpetually preparatory model of life offered to a modern citizen, in which every phase of education, employment, courtship, and leisure is measured by its capacity to position one for the next phase, the implied anthropology of a scientific / technocratic model is one of promise: diseases cured, inconveniences conquered, understanding attained, life extended. The purpose of humankind is to perfect itself and the universe, it is suggested, and this will occur; we are thus part of a narrative journey into an ideal future (and as Frankl and James have noted, deprived of a sense of futurity we tend to collapse).
I mean to take nothing from science in noting that although it is among the finest achievements of humanity, certain facts remain which art is better-suited to convey: that despite the Large Hadron Collider and jet airplanes and vaccines and psychotherapy, we remain deeply strange, hopeful, fearful, loving, jealous, giving, deranged, ingenious creatures as mortal as we’ve ever been, and that whatever humanity’s future evolution every one of us lives and dies alone.
It is well that science incrementally improves us, our world, and our understanding of the universe, but it is not surprising that Freud felt as though he was following poets: art, free from rationalism, epistemological restraint, or the need to solve the problems it finds beyond cathartically bringing them into our awareness, often arrives first, and sometimes goes deepest.
Duke Ellington, memorably stating his view on the problem of art’s relationship to entertainment. Clive James argues that it is not an idle lyric but an assertion of aesthetic philosophy made at the time when jazz began to mirror other arts of the 20th century in declaring that anything enjoyable was unserious. The contrast here, then, is between what swings –what can be danced to and whistled and enjoyed by most- and what requires cerebral engagement of a more seated sort: say, late Coltrane (a favorite of mine who comes in for much criticism in this essay). Ellington and James favor the former.
The latter, an obsession with formal considerations and technical problems in the visual, musical, and literary worlds, is the result of artists turning away from audiences and towards one another, or worse: towards critics and academia. That this inward-orientation, this preoccupation with art about art and concerned mainly with other art, has weakened the arts is obvious enough; what audience pays to be ignored? Who wants to watch artists discuss themselves, once the novelty of the formal invention wears off? I once used a simple test in evaluating any work: if an essay is packaged with it, pasted on the wall alongside or as a program before the performance, to explain why it’s not meaningless, the work ought to have been an essay and is in its present form meaningless. If an essay is needed to convey the point, convey the point in an essay! It’s cheaper and easier and better for the audience.
Hundreds of objections to this stance come immediately to mind, however: how low ought to be our denominator in judging intelligibility? How much erudition, education, sophistication, or even simple intelligence can we say is required before we say the piece is insufficiently apprehensible? In other words: whose capacity to dance sets the limit on what we can swing to?
The problem is highlighted by James’ bizarre attack on Coltrane:
“Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is no real momentum, only velocity…supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration… nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones.”
I adore James, but I could scarcely imagine anyone being more confused about the aesthetic interests of an artist than he is about Coltrane’s. Indeed, this is a perfect demonstration of an unfortunate fact: when someone draws a line in art’s history and says that beyond that point art loses its way, it is in nine cases out of ten merely a declaration of the speaker’s failure to understand. It is comparable to the derided declamation of the aging that this or that technology or style of dress is undermining social mores: it represents the point in history at which the speaker jumped off the train.
Art makes wrong turns; much of modern art (and much more of so-called ‘postmodern art’) is wretched, but most of art has always been wretched; it is just that now most bad art is forgotten. The consensus editorial filtering that takes place over time reduces the chaff of previous eras and makes it seem as though our own is populated by self-involved hucksters selling gimmickry as profundity. Hence the amusingly constant concern on the part of the elderly of every generation that nothing is as good as it was in the old days.
Ellington’s assertion is debatable, but it’s important too. I wish more artists would keep it in mind, even if just to override it after some internal struggle. But when I was eleven years old listening to Coltane’s Ole, nothing seemed emptily virtuosic or cacophonous about it to me; it had as much swing as anything I’d ever heard, and still seems to. Art’s progress requires that we learn to dance to novel rhythms, and I hope not to mistake unfamiliar music for swingless noise. (But I’m sure I will).
(Update: Topherchris feels that I have the swing whether or not it means a thing).
Clive James on Dick Cavett. An awful trap: those who desperately want to be funny alight when they’re soon to share what they hope will amuse us, their faces spreading into smiles before the words even form in their mouths. This is the moment they wait for: to drop the joke and get the laugh.
But that smile is poison: very little is funny once someone wants it to be funny, and the more they want us to laugh the less likely our laughter is to be spontaneous. In most cases, their anticipatory grin is met with our forced grimace, the phony simulated smile we all loathe for making us liars. This is true of televised comedy, too.
When we are expected to laugh, anxiety over whether we will laugh contaminates our otherwise receptive minds; we think only of hurting our friend, not of any humor that might emerge. Also, people who want to be funny are often just not: again, a sad trick of the universe likely related to the fact that for them, humor is not something naturally occurring but a fabricated social resource they want to posses; thus, they don’t get humor at all.
We cannot will emotional reactions, so these sorts of interactions can be extremely painful. It would be best if none of us wanted to be funny (or smart, or handsome, or talented, or whatever), but in lieu of that we might just all work on perfecting our compassionately deceitful faces: “That is hilarious!”
I try to find meta-humor in the whole farce: the escalating dread as I realize that a David Brent-type wants me to guffaw, the tension rising as the awful punchline awkwardly approaches, the gaping stare as he examines my eyes to see if I’m truly amused, the cavern of insecurity in him in which my fake laughter echoes, etc. And one can always laugh at the fact that one has surely made others feel this way.
Incidentally, this dread of failing to have the appropriate emotional or instinctual reaction is why I no longer have sex. Just kidding! Are you laughing? I’m watching very closely: look out of your window. (One reason I never even try to be funny online: too often I want to overtly indicate that I’m joking, a killer failing; I lack the fearlessness of, say, Cameron or Bag Coffee).
Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre. I am not fond of Sartre, who defended Stalin long past the point when it was forgivable and whose language –as George Orwell noted- reflected his willingness to deliberately obfuscate the truth to arrive at fashionable ends. Making a show of his deeds after the occupation, Sartre “pretended to be brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre…lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense.”
Reading that sentence, I am closer now to understanding why James is a persona non grata in academic settings. Unafraid to suggest that Sartre was less a philosopher than a writer, and less a hero than someone living in terribly bad faith -to borrow Sartre’s language- James alienates those whose professional lives are invested in the exegetical treatment of the texts of the West (and who themselves may resent moral judgments of cowardice). Although he marshals substantial evidence to support his claim that because “Sartre’s autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know…his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose,” it remains hard to believe. Even when we read that Orwell and Revel considered him a fraud and his work devoid of meaning, we recoil: he is part of the canon!
I struggle in the same way with James’ dismissal of Benjamin, Derrida, and their ilk, and Noam Chomsky’s famous claim that these “theorists” were all empty charlatans creates a similar sense in me: simultaneous satisfaction that perhaps what seems to be nonsense, language tricks, gimmickry, regurgitation, and outright fraud might be just that after all (and not the sacred writing it is considered in academia) and a fear that maybe, Chomsky and James and I just aren’t smart enough to get what’s being said.
And this is a key point: no one who admits to thinking such writing is nonsensical will be taken seriously by those who maintain that we simply don’t understand it. But few who take expression seriously will claim that cultural ideas require such complexity of writing to communicate! I remain suspicious, despite Jace Cook’s excellent argument, that if something is obfuscatory, it is either through incompetence in craft or deliberate intent; and if the latter, something is being hidden (or perhaps it is that nothing is being hidden).
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. I went to look for where Joyce so describes television. The second attributed phrase -“soulskin with sobsconscious inklings”- comes from Finnegans Wake:
And who will wager but he’ll Shonny Bhoy be, the fleshlumpfleeter from Poshtapengha and all he bares sobsconcious inklings shadowed on soulskin. Its segnet yores, the strake of a hin. Nup. Laying the cloth, to fore of them. And thanking the fish, in core of them. To pass the grace for Gard sake!
To say that this seems not to comment on television is easy enough, although since I don’t understand Finnegans Wake I have to admit that it very well may; indeed, a long preceding passage begins with this, possibly setting the subject:
In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade.
Picking through this fascinating language like an uneducated neophyte at an antique shop, I gathered that “teleframe” and “metenergic reglow” and so on refer to television, and I can even sense what it is about Joyce that is so remarkable: this prose illumines especially despite seeming (because seeming) to obscure. It’s rather amazing.
But this reference to the “charge of a light barricade” is the closest he comes to “Charge of the Light Brigade,” at least anywhere I could find. But I don’t know Joyce at all and feel silly impugning McLuhan’s citation.
In any event: I think it’s rather beautiful.
Eugenio Montale, quoted by James. This is not a condemnation of experimentation, but an observation about the relationship between an experiment’s purpose and its result’s endurance. The purpose must not be the experiment itself.
Milan Kundera said that the “sole raison d’être of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”
As a fan of much abstract and experimental art, Kundera echoes Montale: both assert that whatever the formal nature or concerns of a work, its attention and aesthetic must be directed towards apprehending or expressing something like knowledge or truth, and in a new way. The truth pursued is existential, experiential, human, by and large; this is the most important sort. Indeed, Kundera says that the obligation to seek it is moral and that art which fails to meet this standard is not just “pulp” or “ordinary” or “bad” but in fact immoral.
This is radical among men as modern as they because it is so traditional; in my view, it is also true.
