mills

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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Your search for lost cosmos returned 4 posts.
“We could tolerate their odd sexual behavior, but they were also sentimental and cruel -or rather sentimental, therefore cruel. One goes with the other. They are mainly interested in self-esteem… They do not know themselves or what to do with themselves.”

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, in which he proposes a thought experiment involving aliens interacting with humans from which the above comes: an alien’s description of human consciousness.

I adore Lost in the Cosmos, but what struck me about this passage was that it echoes something Hemingway wrote in a Nick Adams short story called “Fathers and Sons,” which I posted some time ago:

“…he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.”

This consensus association of sentimentality and cruelty is precisely the sort of insight for which one must rely on literature, and it reminds me of many in my life, and indeed of myself, and I wonder: why should this be so? What determines this connection? Of what coin are sentimentality and cruelty the two sides? Excessive regard for the feelings of the self? Is it that both reflect the abandonment of social protocols in favor of the freely-expressed emotions of the petulant, volatile inner self, now fawning and now frothing, now extolling and now excoriating, now sweet and now savage?

Our society tends towards easy sentimentality; does it also tend towards emotional cruelty?

Tags: walker percy psychology literature ernest hemingway
Nudawn: “Reading is fun-dimental. A photographic series inspired by mills and the characters of the tumblrvers.” Embarrassingly, I’ve never read any Baudrillard (another instance in which Langer is my superior), although I come across him fairly regularly. I was pleased to see this, however, as I’m rereading Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos at the moment and he expends considerable effort explaining his theory of semiotics as it relates to the crises of the self. Both Baudrillard and Percy derive much of their work, as do all semioticians, from the efforts of Ferdinand de Saussure, the subject of one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs (which I’ve mentioned before). Percy’s discussions of semiotics have always seemed to me among the soundest and sanest explanations for the irreducible restlessness of the self, if such an explanation is even possible. Moreover, they are replete with interesting observations about art and the mind, the role art plays in defamiliarizing signifiers that have encapsulated and reduced their signs into mere, rote letters. Art makes strange what has been dulled by triadic reduction into language. So does catastrophe: war, disasters, upheaval. The attraction the self feels towards states of extremity has to do with the drive to experience reality again as the self did before everything was codified into staid symbols: vividly, powerfully. One cannot remember where one was yesterday; one always remembers where one was when a leader is assassinated. One never notices the birds; one is transfixed by the sparrow over the battlefield.  Etcetera.

Nudawn: “Reading is fun-dimental. A photographic series inspired by mills and the characters of the tumblrvers.”

Embarrassingly, I’ve never read any Baudrillard (another instance in which Langer is my superior), although I come across him fairly regularly. I was pleased to see this, however, as I’m rereading Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos at the moment and he expends considerable effort explaining his theory of semiotics as it relates to the crises of the self.

Both Baudrillard and Percy derive much of their work, as do all semioticians, from the efforts of Ferdinand de Saussure, the subject of one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs (which I’ve mentioned before).

Percy’s discussions of semiotics have always seemed to me among the soundest and sanest explanations for the irreducible restlessness of the self, if such an explanation is even possible. Moreover, they are replete with interesting observations about art and the mind, the role art plays in defamiliarizing signifiers that have encapsulated and reduced their signs into mere, rote letters.

Art makes strange what has been dulled by triadic reduction into language. So does catastrophe: war, disasters, upheaval. The attraction the self feels towards states of extremity has to do with the drive to experience reality again as the self did before everything was codified into staid symbols: vividly, powerfully.

One cannot remember where one was yesterday; one always remembers where one was when a leader is assassinated. One never notices the birds; one is transfixed by the sparrow over the battlefield.  Etcetera.

Tags: walker percy literature magnetic fields
Why writers drink, from Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. This also serves as a good reason why anyone encountering occasional transcendence, even if of a comparatively mundane variety, might be tempted.

Why writers drink, from Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. This also serves as a good reason why anyone encountering occasional transcendence, even if of a comparatively mundane variety, might be tempted.

Tags: walker percy psychology literature

Walker Percy, who’s something of a hero of mine, wrote often of suicide. In the hilarious and brilliant Lost in the Cosmos, he idly explored the liberating power of the genuine yet failed suicide attempt: oppressed by your despair, trapped in your collapsing psyche with its failed sense of scale, overwhelmed and lost, you fire a gun into your mouth, having checked the chamber and switched off the safety. Despite every intention of killing yourself, you fail: the gun jams, and after the ‘click’ which you expect to end your life you hear the hum of your air conditioner, perhaps a passing car.

Percy thought that this would precipitate a sudden release, a sense that you’d rejected life, opted out, but lived to reflect on it; there would be a kind of triumph. Knowing several suicides and not always being an ecstatic camper myself, I don’t know how generally this would be the case (if it would be at all), but there is something to the idea that confronting death exhilarates, restoring to you a sense of radical autonomy and selfhood. Hence daredevil sports, etc.

That’s why I am jealous as fuck of the people in this video (thanks, Kevin!). I have told dozens of people that one dream of mine is to experience a fatality-free plane crash, a doubly-unlikely fantasy, but one which I think would be extraordinary: the fear, the powerlessness, the physical terror, then: the sun, the grass, the air.

Tags: crash plane plane crash walker percy