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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Posts tagged milan kundera.
Simen, of the Daily Meh, is one of my favorites; he posted the above photograph and detail, and wrote what follows about it (I highly recommend his review of Crewdson). Speaking of Kafka, he wrote a cryptic little short story called The Cares of a Family Man (Die Sorge des Hausvaters). It’s really short; you can read it here. The picture above is Odradek, Táboritská 8, Prague, 18 July 1994, by Jeff Wall. Wall is known for his large-scale staged photographs, like Gregory Crewdson, though Wall has been doing it for longer. Some of Wall’s pictures are recreations of works by others. In my review of Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses, I included one of Wall’s pictures called A Sudden Gust of Wind, after a print by Hokusai. Anyway, the amount of time and resources that goes into creating each of these pictures is stunning. Yet when you look at the picture, you may very well miss the little detail in the middle, shown above. That is the point. Huge resources were spent creating the picture; the point is Odradek, whom you might not notice at a glance. I was reminded of Odradek recently when I came across an excellent Tumblr-user who bears the creature’s name. As I mentioned to her, Odradek was important to a course I took on Kafka which concerned not only his works but also the often-absurd ideas of “Kafkology,” the scholarship that surrounds them. Kafkology was memorably defined by Kundera in a tautology: “Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.” By this he meant that the hysterical, bombastic, indefensible ideas of scholars who misunderstood everything about Kafka -on from his executor Max Brod, who thought that his works depicted the horrible torments of hell which meet those who sin!- were never about Kafka at all. Rather, they were about using his powerful, seemingly encoded stories to support whatever the pet interests of said scholars happened to be. My professor, Franz Kempf, shared with us the views of one addled academic who claimed that “Odradek,” the word, in some language or another, sounded like “Oh, there is dirt there,” which he further took to be a reference to the anus. Thus, the academic asserted in his delightfully serious essay, “The Cares of Family Man” concerns homosexuality and Kafka’s ambivalence about it, his simultaneous desire and discomfort, bourgeois repression of the body, etc. etc. ad absurdum. I will concede to Simen that there are problems with assessing the meaning of dreams, and Kafka’s sometimes dream-like stories share that quality: anyone can detect in them indictments of whatever they hate, celebration of what they like, images of whatever they can use to build their thick, dry essays and deep, dull monographs.

Simen, of the Daily Meh, is one of my favorites; he posted the above photograph and detail, and wrote what follows about it (I highly recommend his review of Crewdson).

Speaking of Kafka, he wrote a cryptic little short story called The Cares of a Family Man (Die Sorge des Hausvaters). It’s really short; you can read it here.
The picture above is Odradek, Táboritská 8, Prague, 18 July 1994, by Jeff Wall. Wall is known for his large-scale staged photographs, like Gregory Crewdson, though Wall has been doing it for longer. Some of Wall’s pictures are recreations of works by others. In my review of Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses, I included one of Wall’s pictures called A Sudden Gust of Wind, after a print by Hokusai.
Anyway, the amount of time and resources that goes into creating each of these pictures is stunning. Yet when you look at the picture, you may very well miss the little detail in the middle, shown above. That is the point. Huge resources were spent creating the picture; the point is Odradek, whom you might not notice at a glance.

I was reminded of Odradek recently when I came across an excellent Tumblr-user who bears the creature’s name. As I mentioned to her, Odradek was important to a course I took on Kafka which concerned not only his works but also the often-absurd ideas of “Kafkology,” the scholarship that surrounds them.

Kafkology was memorably defined by Kundera in a tautology: “Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.” By this he meant that the hysterical, bombastic, indefensible ideas of scholars who misunderstood everything about Kafka -on from his executor Max Brod, who thought that his works depicted the horrible torments of hell which meet those who sin!- were never about Kafka at all. Rather, they were about using his powerful, seemingly encoded stories to support whatever the pet interests of said scholars happened to be.

My professor, Franz Kempf, shared with us the views of one addled academic who claimed that “Odradek,” the word, in some language or another, sounded like “Oh, there is dirt there,” which he further took to be a reference to the anus. Thus, the academic asserted in his delightfully serious essay, “The Cares of Family Man” concerns homosexuality and Kafka’s ambivalence about it, his simultaneous desire and discomfort, bourgeois repression of the body, etc. etc. ad absurdum.

I will concede to Simen that there are problems with assessing the meaning of dreams, and Kafka’s sometimes dream-like stories share that quality: anyone can detect in them indictments of whatever they hate, celebration of what they like, images of whatever they can use to build their thick, dry essays and deep, dull monographs.

Tags: franz kafka literature milan kundera jeff wall
“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.”

A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author. I came across it again while reading Wikipedia’s brief treatment of Nietzsche’s comments concerning eternal return, which related to the previous post.

That idea is probably familiar to most from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which questions at its outset whether the lightness of an existence that vanishes irretrievably into the past is terrible or fortunate; would it better for everything that happens to happen eternally, so to speak?

It’s worth noting that physicists would dispute the assumptions these questions make about time; the great Unburying the Lead quoted Albert Einstein recently:“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Update: Nick Barr noted that “the whole syphilis thing is probably untrue,” an assertion which surprised me as the last time I read Nietzsche it seemed fairly widely accepted; much of his lifelong medical trouble is explained by such a diagnosis. But Barr has scholarship on his side, and I thank him for the correction; it appears now to at least be again in dispute, and strong arguments against syphilis have been made.

Tags: milan kundera friedrich nietzsche albert einstein philosophy psychology
“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.
Tags: milan kundera literature
“…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.

Tags: wg sebald george tooker milan kundera psychology literature
“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.
Tags: literature milan kundera psychology memory

Secrecy and Friendship

“I am walking with Elvar D. in the Reykjavik cemetery; he stops at a grave [where] barely a year ago his friend was buried; he starts reminiscing aloud about him: his private life was marked by some secret, probably a sexual one. ‘Because secrets excite such irritated curiosity, my wife, my daughters, the people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn’t forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn’t forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her.’ He smiled, and then: ‘I divulged nothing,’ he said. ‘Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friend’s secrets, and I didn’t know them.’ I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.”

-Milan Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed.

Tags: milan kundera

BMKK, whose posts I love, shared Leoš Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, IV. Adagio, alone with a mysterious epigraph of sorts:

“—The sky is a roof, with windows in it for rain to fall through. People live up there, you see. And if you climb up high enough you can visit them.”—WG

Nearly as much as did Kafka’s, Janáček’s reputation benefited from the intervention of Max Brod, whose relationships with the great Czech figures demonstrates that people who do not understand art can nevertheless love it -consolation for me!- and even help it. Many of Janáček’s difficulties derived from his rejection by Czech musical culture, particularly the Communist devotee of Smetana Zdeněk Nejedlý (never sufficiently punished for his pettiness, viciousness, or conflation of the aesthetic, political, and personal, in my view).

He looks rather like a hipster!

Janáček and his wife Zdenka.

Janáček’s marriage was not a successful one: he fell in love with other women and refused even moderate discretion, provoking his wife to a suicide attempt and an eventual loveless cohabitation as he pursued his affairs and his work.

His music is fascinating and relentlessly inventive; he seems to have been compulsively original, restlessly exploratory, and as such he anticipates many better-known composers of later years. Two of his great popularizers aside from Brod -Sir Charles Mackerras and Milan Kundera, in whose Testaments Betrayed I first read of Janáček- speak of his work as though it approached the prophetic, particularly his interest in psychological realism in operatic melody. Mackerras has said that he was “the first minimalist composer.”

An unrequited object of affection, Kamila Stösslová.

Kundera concludes his brief biographical sketch of Janáček by describing his happier late years, when he was finally afforded international success and no longer required to accept meddlesome and moronic changes to his work. He also finds himself (again) in love with a young woman, Kamila Stösslová. On a trip with her, Kundera says, the 74-year-old plays light-heartedly with her son, catches a cold which develops into pneumonia, and dies in the midst of happiness. I cannot say how much of the anecdote is invented, but it expresses the arc of his life well even if it is apocryphal.

Tags: Leoš Janáček cold war max brod milan kundera music franz kafka

"Art is truth"; but can truth be political?

Andy Sturdevant of South 12th posted an excellent essay about John F. Kennedy’s assertion that “art is truth,” which comes from a speech Sturdevant excerpts, compares to Glenn Beck’s remarks on art, and partially disputes.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth… In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

Kennedy was likely contrasting the art of the West with Socialist Realism in particular, the Russian movement directed by the Soviet government to support official party policy. Art that didn’t directly support Communist principles or “inspire” the “workers” was considered not merely useless but bourgeoisie and reactionary. What was personal, individual, interior was deplored: “The private life is dead in Russia for a man with any manhood,” and this was true for the scribe as well as the soldier.

To be preoccupied with such a scale of life -love, death, family- in a time of global proletarian struggle was clearly anti-social solipsism, and therefore anti-Socialist sabotage. So Bulgakov is censored while Gorky thrives.

For many, particularly survivors of Soviet domination like Milan Kundera, the idea that politics is incompatible with art is axiomatic. But Sturdevant notes several artists, and there are many, who exemplify his claim that “Art canbe an ideological weapon in a free society, obviously, and there have been plenty of times in American history where it has been used as such.”

While I tend to dislike political art -which is not exploratory but expository, which does not seek truth but rather tells us where to find it, which is not existential but teleological (and therefore often dull and dated)- I am interested in what seems to follow from Kennedy’s claim. If art is truth and art cannot be political, is it fair to say that what is political is necessarily untrue?

I think it perhaps is, since what is political is aggregatory, reductive, and systematic, all qualities I associate with the subtle falsity of reason run amok. Kennedy seems to suggest as much when he says that truth emerges when the artist “remain[s] true to himself and… let[s] the chips fall where they may.”

That is: undirected fidelity to the individual, concern with the human, yields meaningful artistic truth. As all politics are teleological and subordinate the individual to theory, the chips cannot fall where they may. Their artificial arrangment may be moving, moralistically affecting, beautiful, but tied to the moment it won’t be enduring.

But that is just one view, and the point is: Sturdevant’s post is awesome.

Tags: art culture philosophy politics milan kundera socialist realism
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything.”
Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted by the brilliant Slaughterhouse 90210.
Tags: milan kundera
“Art is not the imaginative creation of unified public objects or limited wholes for edifying contemplation, with mystical analogies; it is the egotistically motivated production of maimed pseudo-objects which are licenses for the private concluding processes of personal fantasy.”

Irish Murdoch, quoted in an excellent post by B. Michael titled “Art, Love, and Sex - Iris Murdoch.” Murdoch, a novelist as well as a philosopher, makes this assertion against art in conjunction with a Platonic emphasis on the importance of love, which B. Michael very lucidly explains: if transcendence is our goal, does art offer a false shortcut while love, and sex, are better starting points for “moral attention”?

It is an interesting and open question, and I’ll only say this: I have sometimes felt in museums like someone looking for a clue, some bit of sculpted gnosis which will help me ahead of myself, beyond myself, as though this or that painting or novel can spare me the anguish of experience and bring me to an unearned understanding. This is art as a tool for attaining depth one lacks.

On the other hand: some speak of art as a means to do just that, and philosophy might be considered the same: we encode more wisdom into our species and at a faster rate than painful experience, which must be lived by every individual, permits. We learn by doing, but by sharing we spare others. When Kundera says art takes suffering and redeems it by turning it into existential wisdom, we might note that religion, philosophy, and all humanist disciplines attempt to do the same.

B. Michael’s post is worth reading.

Tags: art iris murdoch philosophy milan kundera
As I’ve mentioned, I take requests when possible. It is an instance of odd serendipity that the two requests I’ve received have both concerned dogs: first, how much we love them and second, now, what it’s like eating them. Yumwatch, for reasons both culinary and ethical, has asked that I discuss what it was like consuming my favorite animal while in China. Because I lack the needed vocabulary to describe food well -an effect of living in state of almost total gastronomic deprivation- I’ll be brief on the question of taste: dog was delicious, very tender and very rich in flavor; it did not taste like chicken, or indeed like any other meat. It seemed quite fatty, but in a pleasant way, and even a vegetarian with us made an exception and enjoyed it. On the ethical question, I won’t retreat to spiritual vagaries about “grokking the essence” of a creature I’d as soon have spooned in my bed, but I will say that having worked in a veterinary hospital (and having lost family pets) I know that dogs don’t fear death. Living in the eternal present, without language or super-perceptual consciousness, even fear and suffering in animals are almost magically different. But rare are those not affected by images like this or arguments like those below it, and I tend to be heartbroken by the mortality of even amphibians. Indeed, I don’t even kill cockroaches. What accounts for my willingness to eat dog is not disregard for dogs’ moral value or capacity for suffering but a simple sense of my statistical irrelevance: as my eating cows, which have personalities and nervous systems, after all, and chickens, and pigs, makes no real difference to the quantities killed, so too was my consumption of dog effectively unrelated to the killing of the dog, which was already accomplished. And about dead meat I am not sentimental: nothing resides in the body after death of an animal (or a man, I would note outside these parentheses if I weren’t worried about seeming demented), and so the consumption of this inert material has little emotional impact on me. The reverence for flesh disconnected from life that some feel seems odd to me. In any event, I freely admit that all this violates the chief principle of my morality: that effects and praxis have no place in real moral thought. I have no excuse for that except that, on occasion, I have been tempted against morality by the desire for experience. But I am certain that the distinction between, say, beef and dog-meat is so arbitrary as to be specious: animals feel, and merely anthropomorphizing the cow you eat less than you do your dog is not reason to consider one worth killing and eating and the other sacred. In any event, a story from Kundera: Salvador Dali and his wife were to leave for a long trip and worried what to do with their beloved pet rabbits. One night, as he finished a delicious meal, she warmly told him that she’d killed them, cooked them, and he’d eaten them, feeling that it was only in this way that they could truly bring them along. Salvador found this wanting: he ran to the bathroom and forced himself to vomit. What we want to protect, and how we think we can protect it, are matters of the most personal and private sort.

As I’ve mentioned, I take requests when possible. It is an instance of odd serendipity that the two requests I’ve received have both concerned dogs: first, how much we love them and second, now, what it’s like eating them. Yumwatch, for reasons both culinary and ethical, has asked that I discuss what it was like consuming my favorite animal while in China.

Because I lack the needed vocabulary to describe food well -an effect of living in state of almost total gastronomic deprivation- I’ll be brief on the question of taste: dog was delicious, very tender and very rich in flavor; it did not taste like chicken, or indeed like any other meat. It seemed quite fatty, but in a pleasant way, and even a vegetarian with us made an exception and enjoyed it.

On the ethical question, I won’t retreat to spiritual vagaries about “grokking the essence” of a creature I’d as soon have spooned in my bed, but I will say that having worked in a veterinary hospital (and having lost family pets) I know that dogs don’t fear death. Living in the eternal present, without language or super-perceptual consciousness, even fear and suffering in animals are almost magically different.

But rare are those not affected by images like this or arguments like those below it, and I tend to be heartbroken by the mortality of even amphibians. Indeed, I don’t even kill cockroaches. What accounts for my willingness to eat dog is not disregard for dogs’ moral value or capacity for suffering but a simple sense of my statistical irrelevance: as my eating cows, which have personalities and nervous systems, after all, and chickens, and pigs, makes no real difference to the quantities killed, so too was my consumption of dog effectively unrelated to the killing of the dog, which was already accomplished.

And about dead meat I am not sentimental: nothing resides in the body after death of an animal (or a man, I would note outside these parentheses if I weren’t worried about seeming demented), and so the consumption of this inert material has little emotional impact on me. The reverence for flesh disconnected from life that some feel seems odd to me.

In any event, I freely admit that all this violates the chief principle of my morality: that effects and praxis have no place in real moral thought. I have no excuse for that except that, on occasion, I have been tempted against morality by the desire for experience. But I am certain that the distinction between, say, beef and dog-meat is so arbitrary as to be specious: animals feel, and merely anthropomorphizing the cow you eat less than you do your dog is not reason to consider one worth killing and eating and the other sacred.

In any event, a story from Kundera: Salvador Dali and his wife were to leave for a long trip and worried what to do with their beloved pet rabbits. One night, as he finished a delicious meal, she warmly told him that she’d killed them, cooked them, and he’d eaten them, feeling that it was only in this way that they could truly bring them along.

Salvador found this wanting: he ran to the bathroom and forced himself to vomit. What we want to protect, and how we think we can protect it, are matters of the most personal and private sort.

Tags: animals china dog ethics morality milan kundera salvador dali
“…I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed must ultimately coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.”

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Sebald’s prose alternates between the most luminous, affecting descriptions imaginable, not at all lyrical but structured with unfailing prosaic perfection and a visual density that draws his subjects in your mind almost against your will, and ponderous, subtly amusing formulations of a very Germanic sort. Above, one of the latter that struck me.

Through the various concerns of Sebald and his fictional character Austerlitz runs the quality of futility: whether in shatteringly fruitless pursuit of a history annihilated by the Holocaust or laboring vainly to recompose lost memories from his own life, the terrible elusiveness of the past -which literally does not exist and whose barest outlines fade rapidly from mind despite this or that artifact or record- reduces Austerlitz to exhausted despair. Once one loses continuity with one’s past there is no recovering it, and it is on such continuity that our sense of identity is built.

The furious efforts of totalitarianism in the 20th century to subsume us into their “all-embracing and absolute perfection” involved attacks on identity and historical continuity alongside the actual slaughter of innocents. Nearly as vile as the Communist and Nazi atrocities were the sophisticated measures undertaken to deprive both ordinary citizens and the persecuted of their identity, their sense of connection to the past. The real meaning behind revolution is more than the assumption of power: it is the placement of a caesura, the cutting of the ties to the past. Doctoring photographs, making new calendars, razing buildings, dispossessing business owners, evicting minorities: it is not mere symbolism.

The destruction of culture, of history, and of human beings for the perfecting of scientifically inarguable ideologies went on quite apart from the “chronic dysfunction” of such systems: further evidence that it is the assertion of “being undeniably right,” rather than the quality of being right or wrong, that permits authoritarianism. Error and futility define us.

Milan Kundera famously said that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Inside of a society with sufficiently ambitious control systems, whether it is Marxist-Leninist or National Socialist or Wahhabist or otherwise in possession of absolute truth and an eschatological sense of its inevitability, this is a struggle most lose. They are erased and forgotten, or reduced to figures in textbooks which recount only the “chronic dysfunction” of failed movements without illuminating how it is that, again and again, we rationally conclude that we must kill in pursuit of an “absolute perfection” as elusive as memory; I think it is because, like memory, it is integral to our identity, and for that we will kill readily.

Tags: milan kundera wg sebald politcs philosophy

Who are you?

My comment on a previous post that this site mostly reflects who I am when alone -that is, that the tone and content of my posts tends to come from the iteration of my self that exists in between bouts of social extroversion and the stimulated enthusiasm that comes from them- drew interesting notes from Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings and Raynor Ganan of The Ragbag (two of my absolute favorite presences online, both genuinely brilliant and delightful and fascinating).

Joshua wrote:

ever notice how you’re a slightly different person to everyone you know? & how you play into that, whether consciously or no… & how it makes you feel dirty. & by you, i mean everyone (i think?).

I have, and I think it explains a bit of the everpresent shame I feel about my identity, the persistent notion I have that I’m a fraud: this multiplicity of willed and unwilled personas makes any one personality seem false, manipulative.

Nudawn was emphatic that we are not who we are online, and this is true. But it is also true that we create from our selves, and the question of which self is truer or more authentic is as unanswerable as it is irrelevant. Milan Kundera claims that the self present in an author’s works is truer than the self present in his or her biography, making inquiries into whom this or that writer slept with or what a writer drank or smoked utterly beside any point. This seems only partly convincing.

I know that those who know me as a giggly, gregarious, immature, screaming, profane boy sometimes find these posts affected, as though I pretend to a severity that is not mine, but the reality is that in the hours of the day, and particularly those of the night, when I’m not in laughing conversation, this is closer to how I feel, think, and see. It is the version of myself I know best; it is the least automatic as well.

In other words: for most of my life, this is who I am. Raynor added, with characteristic wit:

i would love for all my favourite tumblrs to fill out a sentence like this. as for me, who i am here is who i am had i been born 100 years ago and in a romanticized parallel dimension.

So, for Raynor, whom we all owe a great deal for his brilliant work: who are you?

Tags: milan kundera psychology philosophy
“Think that you might be wrong.”

Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.

The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.

Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).

Tags: karl popper new orleans errol morris milan kundera
“Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of some coldly worked out experimental discovery.”

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.

Tags: art culture clive james eugenio montale milan kundera