mills

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.

More jazz!

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 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).

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.

Clive James. I tend to think that only a religion which stands apart from society can meaningfully refer to the proposed eternal world which is its proper concern; excessive preoccupation with the minutiae of contemporaneity degrades any faith.

Like most of Cultural Amnesia, the essay offers aphorism after aphorism, the elegance of its insights demanding multiple quotations. I apologize for the length of the following, but given James’ status as an agnostic (if not atheist) cultural critic and historian par excellence, I feel his view is fascinating. Speaking of how translations of the Bible erode credulity, James notes that:

“The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece… The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Version was the work of men who did not realize that they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that… For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy… For me, the scriptures had provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics -all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion… I don’t want the teachings of Jesus taken from me… If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version… But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity congruent with the impact Jesus must once have had on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counseling.”

While I think substantial exceptions can be taken to some of his points, James routinely delights me by his serious and apolitical engagement with the sources of culture; he is never facile because his subject -the world of meaning- never is either.

Clive James. This idea -that there is some incompleteness to creators in their ordinary lives which they remedy in their art- has many popular manifestations. One is that of the “troubled” artist, who cannot find peace in the real world and must instead live in his or her work. Another, declared by Kundera, is that biographers searching for ways to understand a work of art by looking to the artist’s biography are wrong to do so, because the real self -the completed self- of the artist consists of the works, not the curriculum vitae.

It also suggests that art is the result of incomplete selves, partialized or traumatized selves which cannot heal except through externalized acts of creation. If this is true, one should ask whether one would prefer to be complete -with all that entails- or creative.

Clive James, describing the “lust for discovery [that is] a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never [have] to fear rejection.” James’ point is elsewhere, and I don’t wish to linger on the notion of art as an escape except to note that if it is, it is not necessarily a cowardly one.

Milan Kundera once defended Igor Stravinsky against critics who, romantics and sentimentalists that they were, felt he suffered from a “poverty of heart.” He didn’t emote enough for them, and as music seemed to serve these critics as a mirror in which to observe (and parade) their own feelings he was thus a formalist and a failure.

Kundera mounts a convincing counter-argument before additionally noting that Stravinsky’s critics themselves didn’t “have heart enough to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music,” to see that devotion to art and to form and to beauty is a sort of love in itself, one perhaps preferable for a man so displaced in reality as Stravinsky. (Stravinsky lived in exile, and -Kundera claims- found his home in music’s historical development).

If your country is taken over by savage ideologues and your woman runs off with your friend, taking the dog, you can do worse than turning yourself over to art, which is never insincere in its desire to share something -life, experience, perception, form- with you.

Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, quoted by Clive James in an essay on the craft of writing that was at once illuminating and embarrassing for me; much of it describes, with as much wit is in this sentence, the sorts of failings I detect in my prose (and, it follows, my thought).

There is often a correlation, I think, between how automatic prose is and how weak it is. For language to escape the anesthetizing effects of cliche, which weakens meaning by making words into tuned-out ambient noise, it must be novel -or at least not shopworn- in formulation. This requires effort, as does anything that deviates from normative patterns. But we should not escape from cliche by contorting language into unwieldy or inefficient forms, a mistake I make daily. James separates the various types of chaff:

“With the majority of bad writers the question [of meaning] never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay “Politics and the English Language,” they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually, they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of its components are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with writing too bad to matter… What troubles us is the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability.”

I think that’s a fair description of much of what I’ve written in my life, and it doesn’t hurt to say so: there is something to be said for ambition (which I otherwise lack entirely), and it is after all only in trying that we learn to do. As James notes later, writers “must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is unrelenting self-criticism.” Without that, I suspect one has no hope of writing anything worthwhile except by accident; for this reason, it’s commendable to cringe while editing and flush when rereading one’s writing; indeed, I’m glad I dislike most of it, or it would be quite a lot worse. That said, self-criticism must not be so masochistic that we silence ourselves, unless we’ve determined that we’ve nothing to add, a rare and admirable conclusion I should probably reach more often.

François de La Rochefoucauld. I don’t actually care for this quote, which I think is incomplete if not totally incorrect. But it reminded me of how most of us respond powerfully to aphorisms which seem to justify who we are or perform the feat of inverting what is ordinarily shameful into something about which we’re proud.

For example, in the past year I’ve seen “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” said by the brilliant and alcoholic suicide Ernest Hemingway, posted dozens of times. Each time, I wonder what it is that attracts us to these words: Hemingway’s genius was literary, not psychological or philosophical, and he offers no explanation of why his argument should be true (the usual ones are banal and false). It is a self-congratulatory statement, of course, coming from him, miserable as he was, and it suggests two things:

1. That if you’re unhappy it’s not because you’re shallow, selfish, materialistic, vain, prideful, phony, neurotic, psychotic, immature, delusional, addicted, conflicted, or otherwise damaged, but because you’re just too damn smart!
2. That happy people, like your grating cousins in their happy marriage or those obnoxious coworkers who never cry at their desks, are probably idiots (or liars: movies like American Beauty ensure that we see all contented souls as repressed lunatics).

I happen to disagree with Hemingway, and think it should be noted that true happiness is rare among all people; and that happiness is also a prerequisite for ethical decency in most people; and that therefore if happiness were precluded by intelligence, our wish for a better world might require that we admit that intelligence really isn’t all that valuable. I think, by the way, that this is the case, and I admire the happy.

Similar quotes abound on our Dashboards, and I don’t intend to criticize anyone who likes or posts them: I have done so myself, of course, and in any event they do occasionally contain valuable insights.

But it interests me how purely you can sometimes see the lengths to which we go to perform what Nietzsche described as the fundamental act of resentment: taking positive values and declaring them negative. Happiness is for morons, and if I have tremendous faults it must be because I’m so damn great!

On the other hand: when dying, I hope not to console myself for a life of unhappiness by saying, “Well, but I was so smart and right about everything!” Much better to look back on happy memories, kindness and joy, and not still waste time with pride about mind or body or anything else.

Clive James on Walter Benjamin.

James’ brilliantly lucid, cogent, and comprehensive essays on various subjects from Louis Armstrong to Hegel to Raymond Aron to Leon Trotsky, have been one of my happier recent discoveries. I mentioned him previously here.

In his essay on Benjamin, he discusses the tragic intellectual figure more honestly than anyone I’ve yet read and gives me permission to finally admit something it is quite out of fashion to say: I not only don’t understand Benjamin, but don’t believe the fault is entirely mine.

While remaining sympathetic to Benjamin and frankly admiring his many talents -most notably a gift for examining the peripheral minutiae of life for their cultural meanings- James makes a strong case that Benjamin was mostly wrong: about Stalin and Marxism, certainly, and not just as exposed by history, about the relationship between art and reproduction, and about the theory of science that, as Popper would note, is not used or needed by scientists in any way.

Moreover, he argues persuasively that Benjamin is admired primarily for the reasons undergraduates often love Derrida: they understand him too poorly to do anything but fall prostrate intellectually before him and declare him a god. His suicide while fleeing the Nazis contributes a romantic air to his works, as well.

Most people, myself included, have a naturally arrogant and culturally solipsistic attitude towards thought: what they understand, they accept; what is just beyond their grasp, they may revere or reject based on aesthetics; and what they do not grasp, they declare “meaningless.” Ask an ordinary citizen about modern art and you’ll often hear that “if it doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t make sense.”

I have for years worried that my resistance to Benjamin’s ludicrously difficult and seemingly distracting style -a style which almost seems like a camouflage disguising obviousness or incoherence- was simply my ordinary vanity inclining me to believe that “if I don’t get it, it’s not worth a damn.”

But I don’t think this is the case any longer. James quotes Novalis: “To philosophize is to make vivid,” and on this basis alone I am comfortable abandoning my semi-annual efforts to appreciate Benjamin, whose prose makes vivid neither his subjects nor the esteem in which he is held.