“But then? No then.”
Franz Kafka in “Description of a Struggle,” quoted by Zadie Smith in an essay forwarded to me by Meaghano; more on the essay itself later.
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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“A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.”
Walter Benjamin, quoted by Wesley Hill.
Birthdays and Joy
Today is my wonderful father’s birthday; it is also Paul’s; it is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht and of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Does anyone know how precisely –if at all- the Earth is in the same position relative to the sun in successive years on a given date?
My father has given me a great deal, and I’ve taken even more from him, particularly materially. One of my favorite gifts from him was C.S. Lewis’ marvelous autobiography of youth, Surprised by Joy, which explores a sensation the pursuit of which was to guide Lewis’ life.
By Joy, Lewis means a precise phenomenon which is by its nature indescribable directly; I often think of it as a kind of profoundly asymptotic experience, profound because all reality, all contact, all intellection is in some senses asymptotic; the asymptote is a metaphor I think of often. Lewis says Joy is “an unsatisfied desire which itself is more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He continues:
“Joy…is here a technical term and must be distinguished from both happiness and pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that…it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever…exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
Joy is, for Lewis, most often brought about in contemplation of certain worlds, particularly in childhood, and I think it is most universally understood in that way: think of those worlds, those spaces you adored or considered magical in your youth. Perhaps it was a shed in which you played with a friend in which the sun though a small window illuminated the suspension of dust and made it appear that there was a wall of light. Perhaps it was the universe of a favorite children’s book, the illustrated rooms of which seemed rich in depth, every detail en enormity.
Perhaps it was even more vague; Lewis recalls the stirring of Joy when reading a poem:“I desired, with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote,” and later relates the development of his interest in Norse mythology to this resonance.
The frequency with which I’ve felt Joy has varied greatly; I anxiously worry that my medicines stifle it, but I have come to feel that it is actually ineluctable if one has any life of imagination at all. I feel that it is, in fact, a kind of barometer of my internal world. But it is rare, rarer than anything else I experience.
Lewis writes that “All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” In his life, the catalyst for Joy changed greatly over time and eventually became religious; indeed, there is much in the perpetually anticipatory, asymptotic, ungraspable, unspeakable quality of Joy that reminds one of various mysticisms, particularly of the East. But it is universal, I think; it is what sets us wandering in childhood, searching for beauty less of a formal than an emotional sort.
I’d never known that anyone else felt it before I read Surprised by Joy, and I can thank my dad for bringing awareness of it to me; he has done so with so many things I treasure over the course of my life that I could never repay him. Neither could I repay him all the money I’ve taken, but I think the former debt is the more significant.
Epitaph of Joy Davidman, by C.S. Lewis
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
This is the epitaph C.S. Lewis dedicated to his wife. This quality of the “single mind,” that it contains, reflects, and affects “the whole world”: it is in this sense that every death is the obliteration of an infinity, the end of a reality. In this light, calculations about life and death are absurd. What can justify the destruction of the stars, water, air, field, forest, and everything else one has within oneself?
That is not to say there are no other ways of thinking.
“A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul - those are all details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or on fashion magazines -the ones all women try to imitate nowadays- how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own, they’re just the sum of abstract rules.”
Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted by Quiet-time.
“…the train pulled into Heidelberg station, where there were so many people crowding the platforms that I feared they were fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste.”
W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. Sebald’s novels, it is said, are thematically haunted by the Holocaust even when they do not overtly treat it as a subject. It is perhaps true as well that the Holocaust haunts his novels because as the destruction of a culture and its memory par excellence it exemplifies his real thematic obsession: memory and its disappearance.
That said, the sentence quoted above is exemplary of his style: an ordinary observation of a European scene imbued metaphorically with sorrow or horror. As I read it, I thought of how uniquely we are marked by our metaphors, or by their absence.
When you see a crowded train platform, what do you see?
- “…people…fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste”?
- Enthusiastic moshers heaving to some thrumming cacophony?
- A scarcely distinguishable mass of froth and scum?
- The long-sought crowd into which you can disappear?
- Enormous atoms in a kind of Brownian motion?
- The lonely wanderers of urban life as painted by George Tooker?
Probably something else yet: the process of metaphor-making, which can be rather automatic, is a highly individual one, as one learns in childhood when one describes clouds with a friend: dinosaurs, cars, houses, letters. The last point in the list is notable: when one sees Tooker’s work, it affects one’s metaphor-making dramatically, a process described in this lovely quote posted by Meaghano.
How creative one’s metaphors are varies, but so too does one’s instinct towards metaphorical thought. I imagine many think not of imagery but of description: all these people! Or analysis: it must be rush hour, or perhaps a station is closed. Or some combination, etc.
In Immortality, Milan Kundera says he would like
“…an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one’s life a person devotes to the present, how much to memories, and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being depending on which variety of time was dominant…”
He calls this a form of the aforementioned “existential mathematics.” I would like a poetic psychology which could class humans by their instinct for metaphors, how variegated and constant it is, and whether it delights or upsets them. Surely for every metaphor that amuses or engages there is one, like Sebald’s, that disturbs or discomfits, triggering through the imagination a panic attack or despair.
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
Milan Kundera, Slowness.
“I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalize, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there’s no bridge between the two.”
Philip Roth, quoted by Sometimes a Great Notion.
That Fear of the False
“Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable. Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head.”
-W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. (See also: authorial shame, childhood shame, Sebald).
“…all literature, highbrow or low, from Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me … All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
Michael Chabon, quoted by Alan Jacobs in this excellent piece: Choose Your Own Adventure: Jews with Swords.
“…these philosophies have their perverse charms. If you look at it in the right way, it’s liberating that, as Derrida believes, there is no experience that precedes language, or that poems, as de Man says, are just persistant namings of the void, or that knowledge, as Foucault argues, is a function of a diffuse and vaguely malevolent ‘power.’… From the point of view of an english major, it was intoxicating because it promised to replace art. Why was that attractive? I think because I was impatient. Art was messy and small, reeking of lies and mistakes and humanity. Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic. No longer was I a lowly grad student parasite clinging desperately to Joyce’s belly fur; now I was a carnivore, hunting down the text and killing it. It was kind of like making art yourself, except you didn’t.”
Gary Kamiya, quoted by Little Potato. I am hostile towards theory for many reasons, not least being its unintelligibility and its falsity, but I think this precisely exposes what is worst about it: it exists as a means for the suppression of the artist by those who claim to love art.
Indeed, I think most theory serves this role: masses of gnostic, oppressive, symmetrical, self-referential language smothering whatever natural and human life exists beneath it. Political theory: a means of subordinating the individual to the striking diagrams of some universal set of ideas and logic. Literary theory: a means for denying the import of the author (through the absurd ‘intentional fallacy’) and establishing narcissistic “readings” of “texts” that “explode” meanings and position the tracer of lexical lines as some kind of creator. Explode is a nicely violent word for it, too.
The very clever resent art just as we resent the world; we want to control it, reduce it, bring it to heel with our fine phrases and semicolons and footnotes. Thus we must establish that art isn’t what it claims to be but some secret cipher only we can decode, a hidden message about the sexual anguish of the painter or the unreconstructed bourgeosie sentimentality of the composer or the imperialism of the poet; just as we say to the world: you’re not really happy, with your false consciousnesses!
“Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic.” When reading Chomsky’s infamous assessment of literary theory -that it is all idiotic- one might wonder: how did it come to dominate our intellectual landscape? I agree with Kamiya: what exalts will win favor, and in a world dense with people eager to be involved with art but, unfortunately and undemocratically, without talent, there existed this need: to justify the labors of the academic and critical class.
Now we have an unending rain of essays on how Kafka’s Odradek is about sodomy and need of an army of graduate students to parse and respond to them in their own jargon. This is part of the academic-industrial complex! Complexity of language is their technique for obscuring how little is really being said, and I think many of the participants can even recognize how astray we’ve gone; but just as with the military-industrial complex, there are forces at work here that none can contain: ego, pride, student loan debt, etc.
Update: with apologies for the polemical nature of this post, I want to note that this is what I did with most of my education. I don’t mean to offend.
"A Little Fable," by Franz Kafka
“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I at last saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
“When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. But I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.”
The ape Franz Kafka describes making “A Report to an Academy.”
“As for the natural faculties within me, of which my writing is proof, I feel them bending under the burden. My ideas and my judgment merely grope their way forward, faltering, tripping, and stumbling; and when I have advanced as far as I can…I can see more country ahead, but with so disturbed and clouded a vision that I can distinguish nothing. Then I realize how weak and poor, how heavy and lifeless I am, in comparison with [real authors], and feel pity and contempt for myself.”
Montaigne, uncontested genius and inventor of the essay, in a typical passage critiquing his stupidity and ignorance. I do not compare myself to him when I note that his complaint struck me as familiar, despite the esteem in which he was held. It reminded me of Nudawn’s description of me, which Sydney and others (and I) found amusing.
This thought has occupied me for some time: why is it that I am certain of my detestability, incompetence, fraudulence, and stupidity even when others generously compliment me? I feel ashamed of this arrogance: why should I ignore their kindness? Were they to recommend a writer to me, I’d be ecstatic; but if they recommend me to myself, I think merely that they are inexplicably mistaken.
Of course there are basic psychological reasons for insecurity, which are universal enough to be uninteresting; beyond those, a few points occur to me:
- Consider the ubiquity of quotes concerning ignorance: we hear often that the intelligence to which we aspire consists of knowing that you know little. I know I know very little, less even than I appear to, and much of that knowledge is debatable, wrong, predicated on what I want to believe.
- To whom do we compare ourselves? I do not look at my middling photography and think, “Well, this is better than what I did five years ago.” Perhaps I should. Instead, I think: this is not as good as what Riaz makes; this is inferior to nearly everything I like to see; this is not what I wanted it to be. It is the same with my writing, my conversation, my appearance, my habits. How could it be otherwise? Compared to our idols or our ideated paradigms, don’t we all seem rather silly?
- I fear I know what drives my creativity: the desire for affection, for reassurance, for the externalization of an imagined beauty I can conjure but not exemplify, dream but not embody. How satisfied can one be with what one makes when it is merely a screen for what one wants? A personality is an assembly of coping mechanisms, and creativity is an expression of their deformation, it sometimes seems.
Lately, I have been interested in how impermeable our senses of self are, how resistant they are to praise. When people compliment me, I enjoy perhaps a few moments of elevated glee and then a sense of gratitude and happiness: happiness that we should labor to find nice things in one another, happiness that we search our peers for things to praise. In other words: my sense of self remains the same, but my impression of others improves.
That’s its own sort of gift, of course, one I think more valuable than a change in one’s conception of oneself, which, in the end, matters less than I used to think.
“Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.”
Marcel Proust, whom I’ve quoted before, cited by Alain de Botton, whom I’ve also mentioned a few times. This is a great distillation of the redemptive power of art: imaginatively turning anguish into thought can be a means not merely to some sort of wisdom but also to overcoming suffering. This is true of any real value system.
Perhaps when Murdoch says art can be a “false shortcut” she means that art cannot replace suffering; it can help redeem grief, but those who seek art instead of experience, for fear of grief or timidity, gain nothing but a pose.
