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 walker percy.
“She’s the girl of our dreams, Americans! …Prodigal she is with her own perfection, lip tucked, pencil scratching her head. She holds herself too cheap, leaves her gold lying around like bobby pins.”
Walker Percy in Love in the Ruins quoted by Cosmopsis. I love this novel; I love it more even than The Moviegoer, which is probably better.
Tags: walker percy
“Perhaps the biggest question of all is whether the process of inquiry that has revealed so much about the universe since the time of Galileo and Kepler is nearing the end of the line. “I worry whether we’ve come to the limits of empirical science,” says Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University. Specifically, Krauss wonders if it will require knowledge of other universes, such as those posed by Carroll, to understand why our universe is the way it is. If such knowledge is impossible to access, it may spell the end for deepening our understanding any further.”

Petichou linked to an article on some of the preoccupations of contemporary physicists, and I was struck by the paragraph above; Krauss’ is a curious concern.

It is often noted that one of the defining qualities of our universe is its comprehensibility, but it might just as well be said that comprehension is a defining quality of mind. This symmetry between the knowable universe and the knowing mind reflects an important quality of the latter: it does not merely observe, record, and inductively detect intelligible connections.

Rather: it encompasses, interiorizes, virtualizes, and explains holistically. That is to say that the mind is an organ which can contain within itself accurate models of all phenomena in the form of explanations. These models are akin to virtualizations: we can recreate within our minds even what we cannot observe, and we can do so such that those recreations are astonishingly isomorphic to their real counterparts.

This is the metaphorical basis for cognition: we construct metaphorical models (theories, ideas, terms) which retain the logical properties and relations of their subjects so that we are not dependent on accessibility for knowledge. We cannot, for example, see the Big Bang; the perplexing flow of time prevents it. Yet we can model it with incredibly acuity, and our virtualizing computational minds allow us to extract from those models conclusions which predict and explain the behavior of the physical universe.

Nothing about the multiverse would be different, regardless of its observational accessibility. I am surprised to read Krauss’ epistemological anxiety, since it would be an event unprecedented in the history of physical reality were we to encounter something fundamentally incomprehensible. I imagine David Deutsch, in particular, would object that such a development would be unlikely given the evolution of mind within physical reality, an evolution which has allowed the former to contain the latter with profound accuracy.

(In this sense, mind –including its externalized components, such as computer networks- may be the only element of reality which can in theory contain reality, although Walker Percy claimed that mind cannot, as a semiotic matter, contain itself: hence the success of the sciences and the failures of modern selfhood).

Tags: science philosophy karl popper david deutsch walker percy
“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
“Were we to describe the so-called “Copernican Revolution” in brief, we might put it this way: predictive power grew ever more irresistible.”

William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth. Vollmann notes that what made the groping progression away from geocentrism (and other errors in astronomy) inevitable was less that they were not explanatory -they were, and worked with our metaphysics at the time!- but that they were not predictive.

Walker Percy felt this was a major element of the paradigmatic shift to what he called “scientism” in the West: as technology has become the most important concern of our civilization, the predictive capacity of any system of knowledge has become how we judge that system’s value. Technology needs theories that can predict how it can relate to and dominate the natural world: so what tells us what will happen is more important than anything else told.

Science has supremely powerful predictive capacities; it has very powerful explanatory capacities, although those explanations must necessarily be developed in inhuman language; it has virtually no capacity for generating human meaning. That is: it is observational, predictive, explanatory only in the ways dictated by the natural world’s contours.

Culture (religion, art, politics) has less powerful predictive capabilities (most believers will admit that its predictions are either eschatological or vague: this will happen to you at the end of time; this will happen after death; but nothing about what will happen to you if you inhale this or that bacteria or travel at a speed approaching that of light; and its predictions do not expand and refine themselves). Culture is better at providing morality and meaning, however, because it can exist apart from the natural world in the world of the mind and heart and in the language of human experience.

I note this only because I found Vollmann’s condensation fascinating: here is the point in which our obsession with understanding and predicting phenomena -with mastering the natural world and the future- begins to supersede our adherence to value systems of another sort.

“Predictive power grew ever more irresistible…” sounds almost Faustian. And perhaps it is.

Tags: scientism walker percy william vollmann culture history science copernicus
[This concludes the long autobiographical photo-posts of the last few days; I apologize if they’ve been boring!]. In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy describes the transformative power of celebrity with a vignette about young Yankee honeymooners idly -and with increasing malaise- strolling the French Quarter of New Orleans before running into the movie star William Holden: “They are not really happy. He is afraid that their honeymoon is too conventional, that they are just another honeymoon couple. No doubt he figured it would be fun to drive down the Shenandoah Valley to New Orleans and escape the honeymooners at Niagara Falls and Saratoga. Now fifteen hundred miles from home they find themselves surrounded by couples from Memphis and Chicago. He is anxious; he is threatened from every side. Each stranger he passes is a reproach to him, every doorway a threat. What is wrong? he wonders. She is unhappy but for a different reason, because he is unhappy and she knows it but doesn’t know why. Now they spot Holden… The boy perks up for a second, but seeing Holden doesn’t really help him. On the contrary. He can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own shadowy and precarious existence.” But Holden needs a match for a light and the boy casually provides it, with blase nonchalance, earning a pat from Holden and something much more: “He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s, by refusing to be stampeded like [the other tourists]. He is a citizen like Holden; two men of the world they are. All at once the world is open to him…” So far as I know, The Moviegoer was one of the earliest explorations of how fame and mediated imagination, in the form of Hollywood films, both contribute to and heal existential torpor, reducing the vitality of ordinary life but offering a more vital life you might purchase tickets to. I bring it up because the phenomenon fictionalized above was enacted for me on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, a photoset of which can be found here. For me, Will, and S., the evening was that rare thing: a night of exaggerated, sometimes desperate expectations of debauchery that nevertheless succeeds in being fun. But I had friends whose demands of the evening were more concrete than mine: while I was pleased to photograph various absurdities and enjoy gallons of Diet Coke, an acquaintance from Houston demanded with increasing frenzy that we get him… …where? To some place of critical human density where girls would accept his advances because all flesh was indistinguishable? Where the noise and darkness and alcohol would make physical intimacy the default arrangement between the sexes? Where he’d find -through glazed unseeing eyes and a blacked-out mind- something that would fulfill him? I don’t know, but as we illegally set off fireworks in the Garden District at Eric’s annual party -from a house as quintessentially New Orleans as any you’ll find- my drunk out-of-town friend was livid. He wanted to get to the French Quarter, and immediately. So I pointed out to him that Jennifer Coolidge, the actress from Best in Show and various other movies, was with us; she’s a friend of Eric’s and -unlike my drunk friend- was thrilled to be shooting off fireworks in the heart of the city. Immediately, he was transformed. Nothing was dull or delayed anymore. He went to her, slurred whatever he thought appropriate at her, demanded that I photograph them (in this way not matching the coolness of the character in The Moviegoer), and finally shut up about the Quarter, where we went anyway afterward, before wrapping up the night at F&M’s. It was fascinating to see it: in her glow, such as it was, he no longer felt that his time was wasted; he felt alive and engaged and thrilled simply because he was near her, though he knew almost none of her films and has no interest in movies. But I suppose I am the same way about other phenomena: a giant waterfall, heavy snows, art, etc. And it isn’t different. He and I both rely on things external to ourselves to feel that time is meaningful; without elevating distractions, we worry that life is not only elsewhere but is evading us, sharing its riches with others, and we desperately hurry to the next landmark, the next vista, the next celebrity. Combatting this phenomenon is too hard for a resolution, so instead I hope merely to note it and dislike it neither in myself nor in others.

[This concludes the long autobiographical photo-posts of the last few days; I apologize if they’ve been boring!].

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy describes the transformative power of celebrity with a vignette about young Yankee honeymooners idly -and with increasing malaise- strolling the French Quarter of New Orleans before running into the movie star William Holden:

“They are not really happy. He is afraid that their honeymoon is too conventional, that they are just another honeymoon couple. No doubt he figured it would be fun to drive down the Shenandoah Valley to New Orleans and escape the honeymooners at Niagara Falls and Saratoga. Now fifteen hundred miles from home they find themselves surrounded by couples from Memphis and Chicago. He is anxious; he is threatened from every side. Each stranger he passes is a reproach to him, every doorway a threat. What is wrong? he wonders. She is unhappy but for a different reason, because he is unhappy and she knows it but doesn’t know why.
Now they spot Holden… The boy perks up for a second, but seeing Holden doesn’t really help him. On the contrary. He can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own shadowy and precarious existence.”

But Holden needs a match for a light and the boy casually provides it, with blase nonchalance, earning a pat from Holden and something much more:

“He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s, by refusing to be stampeded like [the other tourists]. He is a citizen like Holden; two men of the world they are. All at once the world is open to him…”

So far as I know, The Moviegoer was one of the earliest explorations of how fame and mediated imagination, in the form of Hollywood films, both contribute to and heal existential torpor, reducing the vitality of ordinary life but offering a more vital life you might purchase tickets to. I bring it up because the phenomenon fictionalized above was enacted for me on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, a photoset of which can be found here.

For me, Will, and S., the evening was that rare thing: a night of exaggerated, sometimes desperate expectations of debauchery that nevertheless succeeds in being fun. But I had friends whose demands of the evening were more concrete than mine: while I was pleased to photograph various absurdities and enjoy gallons of Diet Coke, an acquaintance from Houston demanded with increasing frenzy that we get him…

…where? To some place of critical human density where girls would accept his advances because all flesh was indistinguishable? Where the noise and darkness and alcohol would make physical intimacy the default arrangement between the sexes? Where he’d find -through glazed unseeing eyes and a blacked-out mind- something that would fulfill him?

I don’t know, but as we illegally set off fireworks in the Garden District at Eric’s annual party -from a house as quintessentially New Orleans as any you’ll find- my drunk out-of-town friend was livid. He wanted to get to the French Quarter, and immediately.

So I pointed out to him that Jennifer Coolidge, the actress from Best in Show and various other movies, was with us; she’s a friend of Eric’s and -unlike my drunk friend- was thrilled to be shooting off fireworks in the heart of the city.

Immediately, he was transformed. Nothing was dull or delayed anymore. He went to her, slurred whatever he thought appropriate at her, demanded that I photograph them (in this way not matching the coolness of the character in The Moviegoer), and finally shut up about the Quarter, where we went anyway afterward, before wrapping up the night at F&M’s.

It was fascinating to see it: in her glow, such as it was, he no longer felt that his time was wasted; he felt alive and engaged and thrilled simply because he was near her, though he knew almost none of her films and has no interest in movies. But I suppose I am the same way about other phenomena: a giant waterfall, heavy snows, art, etc. And it isn’t different.

He and I both rely on things external to ourselves to feel that time is meaningful; without elevating distractions, we worry that life is not only elsewhere but is evading us, sharing its riches with others, and we desperately hurry to the next landmark, the next vista, the next celebrity.

Combatting this phenomenon is too hard for a resolution, so instead I hope merely to note it and dislike it neither in myself nor in others.

Tags: walker percy gpoyw new years eve celebtiry

Disaster, Art, Life

Although few like to admit it, Walker Percy’s observation about disaster is largely true: in our era of contented tranquility, superabundance, and fading value systems, we tend to crave catastrophe as a source of meaning. We may noisily declaim that this economic collapse is terrible, that this or that hurricane or fire or administration is so horrific that we’ve lost our faith in humanity, but in moments of emotional agitation we are more alive than ever, and this vitality of opposition and ire and fear is more valuable to many than peace.

Artists are in particular infatuated with tragedy, and for good reason: without it, their art has nothing to discuss and descends into the mire of self-referentiality that makes so much contemporary creative work duller than pop-culture (and less enduring!). Creative people are thus always inclined to overreact, to declare that some bit of news is the end of society as we know it, the beginning of a new epoch, “a fundamental shift,” etc.

Of course, artists may also choose to celebrate something, but in a time which makes mincemeat out of sincerity and has discarded or discredited most value systems, what might they celebrate except the most general and boring themes? What art praises heroism now? At most, art might laud the “heroism” of circumstance or victimhood.

Before I am accused of insensitivity, let me add as someone whose father lost his house in Katrina: this lust for disaster, for the dislocation of the normal, the outpouring of sorrow and rage, and the creation of meaning, persists just until we are actually afflicted, and not afflicted as in, “Ever since I watched all that coverage of the disaster I’ve not been comfortable on boats and I have nightmares,” but afflicted personally. At that point, we are reacquainted with reality and reminded of the worth of civilization, peace, stability, abundance.

And that’s the point: to be acquainted with reality is what many of us, and artists more than most, seek. In that acquaintanceship we define ourselves, our values, the purposes of our society and our lives. Hence the thrill of the huddled family watching tragedy unfold on the television or the euphoria of the boy sitting in the darkened house, hearing the wind whip the trees and the rain fall into the flooding streets: they are reminded of death, and thus of life, and don’t have to wonder:

What’s the point of living? What should I write about?

Tags: art philosophy walker percy
Gratuitous Picture of My Self (Predictable and Controlled Crash Edition). Walker Percy on the self: “Read these two sentences [from a psychology experiment] carefully: You are extraordinarily generous, ecstatically loving of the right person, supremely knowledgeable about what is wrong with the country, about people, capable of moments of insight unsurpassed by any scientist or artist or writer in the country. You posses an infinite potentiality. You are of all people in the world probably the most selfish, hateful, envious, the most treacherous, the most frightened, and above all the phoniest. Now answer this question as honestly as you can: Which of these two sentences more nearly describes you? Check (1), (2), (Neither), (Both). If you checked both -60 percent of respondents did- how can that be?” (GPOYW).

Gratuitous Picture of My Self (Predictable and Controlled Crash Edition).

Walker Percy on the self: “Read these two sentences [from a psychology experiment] carefully:

  1. You are extraordinarily generous, ecstatically loving of the right person, supremely knowledgeable about what is wrong with the country, about people, capable of moments of insight unsurpassed by any scientist or artist or writer in the country. You posses an infinite potentiality.
  2. You are of all people in the world probably the most selfish, hateful, envious, the most treacherous, the most frightened, and above all the phoniest.

Now answer this question as honestly as you can: Which of these two sentences more nearly describes you? Check (1), (2), (Neither), (Both).

If you checked both -60 percent of respondents did- how can that be?”

(GPOYW).

Tags: gpoyw literature walker percy psychology
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
Dad’s house, Nashville Ave (approx. 9’). More photos. I don’t know how most New Orleanians feel about this possible hurricane we face, or to what extent the persistent, bruising depression that followed Katrina’s devastation (and the sense of alienation one felt from many of one’s countrymen) has darkened the once-ebullient mood that preceded hurricanes. The NYT quoted one resident still with his wit and wits: “Ain’t nothing too bad gonna happen,” said Vernon Navarre, a contractor, smiling broadly. He was working in the day’s brilliant sunshine in the Milan neighborhood. Besides, he added, “if I go to hell, I get to meet all my friends.” I know that I retain what Walker Percy described: the sensory quickening, the slightly nauseated excitement, that accompanies something so often simulated and so rarely present in modern life: real existential danger, real disruption to our social machinery. But it is muted, for obvious reasons. While I have no idea if Gustav will strike New Orleans with any appreciable force, and am not interested in monitoring the sensationalistic reports breathlessly offered by journalists who desire catastrophe as athletes do tournaments, I am already preparing myself to lose New Orleans again. The despairing fury I feel about it (a stupid and fumbling fury for -though I of course harbor resentment of the various agencies and politicians who failed- at whom can one scream for natural disasters?) is already returning; I am tired, angry, and above all sad. I don’t want to see New Orleans -or anyone- suffer again and again.

Dad’s house, Nashville Ave (approx. 9’). More photos.

I don’t know how most New Orleanians feel about this possible hurricane we face, or to what extent the persistent, bruising depression that followed Katrina’s devastation (and the sense of alienation one felt from many of one’s countrymen) has darkened the once-ebullient mood that preceded hurricanes.

The NYT quoted one resident still with his wit and wits:

“Ain’t nothing too bad gonna happen,” said Vernon Navarre, a contractor, smiling broadly. He was working in the day’s brilliant sunshine in the Milan neighborhood. Besides, he added, “if I go to hell, I get to meet all my friends.”

I know that I retain what Walker Percy described: the sensory quickening, the slightly nauseated excitement, that accompanies something so often simulated and so rarely present in modern life: real existential danger, real disruption to our social machinery.

But it is muted, for obvious reasons. While I have no idea if Gustav will strike New Orleans with any appreciable force, and am not interested in monitoring the sensationalistic reports breathlessly offered by journalists who desire catastrophe as athletes do tournaments, I am already preparing myself to lose New Orleans again.

The despairing fury I feel about it (a stupid and fumbling fury for -though I of course harbor resentment of the various agencies and politicians who failed- at whom can one scream for natural disasters?) is already returning; I am tired, angry, and above all sad. I don’t want to see New Orleans -or anyone- suffer again and again.

Tags: katrina walker percy new orleans
I don’t generally recommend books; there are far too many to recommend, and what can one say about a wonderful book that the book itself doesn’t say better anyway (I don’t mean to disparage criticism or exegesis, which can be wonderful; perhaps I just know my limits). I thought I’d mention, however, that I really and truly loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller Jr. (who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino), and would recommend it unreservedly; of course, many do already: it won a Hugo Award and was praised by Walker Percy and CS Lewis. Some say that it’s lost resonance now that the world no longer waits, as it did daily when the book was published in 1960, for complete nuclear annihilation. Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I see nothing in humanity to suggest that we’ve done more than defer that potentiality. Indeed, I’m often amazed at how quickly the world has come to believe that the ~25,000 nuclear warheads presently in existence will simply never be used, that somehow humanity’s penchant for self-immolation is no longer extant. Our world reminds me, in some ways, of the Vienna described by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities: before World War I, obsessed with crime and entertainment, it had no idea it was to hurl itself into a continental conflagration that would itself lead quickly to an even greater paroxysm of violence. When have our weapons gone unused indefinitely?  And who can look at the nations of the world today and not think that another world war, fought in part by those without fear of nuclear armageddon, awaits? Anyway: it was an enormously affecting work in its treatment of the state and religion, of knowledge and purpose, of history and power, and it was ludicrously engaging as well.

I don’t generally recommend books; there are far too many to recommend, and what can one say about a wonderful book that the book itself doesn’t say better anyway (I don’t mean to disparage criticism or exegesis, which can be wonderful; perhaps I just know my limits).

I thought I’d mention, however, that I really and truly loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller Jr. (who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino), and would recommend it unreservedly; of course, many do already: it won a Hugo Award and was praised by Walker Percy and CS Lewis.

Some say that it’s lost resonance now that the world no longer waits, as it did daily when the book was published in 1960, for complete nuclear annihilation. Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I see nothing in humanity to suggest that we’ve done more than defer that potentiality.

Indeed, I’m often amazed at how quickly the world has come to believe that the ~25,000 nuclear warheads presently in existence will simply never be used, that somehow humanity’s penchant for self-immolation is no longer extant. Our world reminds me, in some ways, of the Vienna described by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities: before World War I, obsessed with crime and entertainment, it had no idea it was to hurl itself into a continental conflagration that would itself lead quickly to an even greater paroxysm of violence.

When have our weapons gone unused indefinitely?  And who can look at the nations of the world today and not think that another world war, fought in part by those without fear of nuclear armageddon, awaits?

Anyway: it was an enormously affecting work in its treatment of the state and religion, of knowledge and purpose, of history and power, and it was ludicrously engaging as well.

Tags: literature religion walter m miller walker percy
From Alexandrious, handa, and gwarf came a post of “Blizzard in Alleyway, Downtown NYC.” Aside from its simple beauty, this photo reminded me of one of the happier times in my life. I was still drinking and a student at Bard when I spent a long weekend in New York with friends; it was the sort of miraculously tempered bender which involves enough debauchery and intoxication to seem memorable (even if not everything was remembered) without there being any weirdness, darkness, or anguish. One night, after being asked to leave some dive and proceeding to a confusingly-arranged “martini bar” at which we only drank bourbon, we emerged late in the night to a sudden blanket of deep and still snow. The indomitable kinetics of the city were paused: nothing moved, no cars were on the streets, the intersections’ lights shone unattended on the drifts, and only the occasional cluster of pedestrians joined us as we sang songs and stumbled home. At the time, I wore cowboy boots which had holes in them; my feet were numb from icy water, but I was in the highest sort of spirits as I hung on a girl who let me hold her without expecting that I’d kiss her: like an early adolescent, I was happy with the simplicity of arms wrapped around bodies. We went through the silent city to her apartment, where we slept next to one another. In the afternoon, when we woke, we were stunned to see that the winter caesura had been short-lived; everything was alive and humming, and the sun was as bright as in the summer. Walker Percy often talked of how severely inclement weather, and even real disasters, produce a giddiness in those not immediately struggling to live: here, at last, is a break from all routines, an interruption of the oppressively constant rythyms of civilization, a return to real freedom: no work, no time, no transit, nothing but life. The day of Katrina, I remembered his words. He noted that such freedom isn’t without cost, and for those drowning or pulling bodies through water the comfort of society is more meaningful than the existential thrill of paddling down what was a commuter avenue in a canoe, or sitting in the dark listening to the thunder while friends try to eat all the food before it rots. Still: there’s nothing like a city shut down when you’re singing with friends.

From Alexandrious, handa, and gwarf came a post of “Blizzard in Alleyway, Downtown NYC.” Aside from its simple beauty, this photo reminded me of one of the happier times in my life.

I was still drinking and a student at Bard when I spent a long weekend in New York with friends; it was the sort of miraculously tempered bender which involves enough debauchery and intoxication to seem memorable (even if not everything was remembered) without there being any weirdness, darkness, or anguish.

One night, after being asked to leave some dive and proceeding to a confusingly-arranged “martini bar” at which we only drank bourbon, we emerged late in the night to a sudden blanket of deep and still snow. The indomitable kinetics of the city were paused: nothing moved, no cars were on the streets, the intersections’ lights shone unattended on the drifts, and only the occasional cluster of pedestrians joined us as we sang songs and stumbled home.

At the time, I wore cowboy boots which had holes in them; my feet were numb from icy water, but I was in the highest sort of spirits as I hung on a girl who let me hold her without expecting that I’d kiss her: like an early adolescent, I was happy with the simplicity of arms wrapped around bodies. We went through the silent city to her apartment, where we slept next to one another.

In the afternoon, when we woke, we were stunned to see that the winter caesura had been short-lived; everything was alive and humming, and the sun was as bright as in the summer.

Walker Percy often talked of how severely inclement weather, and even real disasters, produce a giddiness in those not immediately struggling to live: here, at last, is a break from all routines, an interruption of the oppressively constant rythyms of civilization, a return to real freedom: no work, no time, no transit, nothing but life.

The day of Katrina, I remembered his words. He noted that such freedom isn’t without cost, and for those drowning or pulling bodies through water the comfort of society is more meaningful than the existential thrill of paddling down what was a commuter avenue in a canoe, or sitting in the dark listening to the thunder while friends try to eat all the food before it rots.

Still: there’s nothing like a city shut down when you’re singing with friends.

Tags: new york walker percy katrina
Too Much Awesome quoted Flannery O’Connor’s “The Regional Writer”: “When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsman asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, ‘Because we lost the War.’ He didn’t mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.” Walker Percy is my hero, and I mean that sincerely: he is a heroic figure to me, not merely for his work.

Too Much Awesome quoted Flannery O’Connor’s “The Regional Writer”:

“When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsman asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, ‘Because we lost the War.’ He didn’t mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.”

Walker Percy is my hero, and I mean that sincerely: he is a heroic figure to me, not merely for his work.

Tags: walker percy literature flannery o'connor
Above: an image from the Random Walk theory page at Wikipedia; it discusses the path of a drunkard stumbling through a city and asks: will he make it home? A few moments ago, reading Popper on determinism and indeterminism (which he nicely frames as being ‘clocks and clouds’), I came across a reference to Charles Sanders Pierce, the obscure semiotician and logician and philosopher so adored by Walker Percy. Popper calls Pierce “one of the greatest philosophers of all time,” a statement of significant scope; it is not as though Popper wrote casually, and he goes on to credit Pierce with being “the first post-Newtonian [to suggest] that all clocks are clouds; or in other words, that only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness.” With the term ‘cloud’ Popper is referring to the indeterminable, not merely the not-yet-determined. That is, while we know (more or less) exactly how clocks operate and predict everything they might do based on what we know of them, we cannot perform this feat with clouds. The question of whether the world -and humans- are clouds or clocks or what degree of either has been a significant problem for philosophers, and until quantum physics nearly all thinkers felt that everything was clock-like; there was no free will, nothing unpredictable, just the odd phenomena we didn’t yet know how to predict. Physical determinism may sound absurd, but it was indeed the inescapable conclusion of pre-quantum thought (except, it seems, for the prescient Pierce) and had profound implications for human life, particularly politically; the basic premise of totalitarian rule is that, with enough information, the economy and society can be utterly understood, controlled, and programmed for the greatest good. The restoration of indeterminism supports the development of systems of government and interaction that maximize the agency of actors who -it turns out- may possibly have free will after all. It also connects in a way I find highly satisfying to my previous post.

Above: an image from the Random Walk theory page at Wikipedia; it discusses the path of a drunkard stumbling through a city and asks: will he make it home?

A few moments ago, reading Popper on determinism and indeterminism (which he nicely frames as being ‘clocks and clouds’), I came across a reference to Charles Sanders Pierce, the obscure semiotician and logician and philosopher so adored by Walker Percy.

Popper calls Pierce “one of the greatest philosophers of all time,” a statement of significant scope; it is not as though Popper wrote casually, and he goes on to credit Pierce with being “the first post-Newtonian [to suggest] that all clocks are clouds; or in other words, that only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness.”

With the term ‘cloud’ Popper is referring to the indeterminable, not merely the not-yet-determined. That is, while we know (more or less) exactly how clocks operate and predict everything they might do based on what we know of them, we cannot perform this feat with clouds.

The question of whether the world -and humans- are clouds or clocks or what degree of either has been a significant problem for philosophers, and until quantum physics nearly all thinkers felt that everything was clock-like; there was no free will, nothing unpredictable, just the odd phenomena we didn’t yet know how to predict.

Physical determinism may sound absurd, but it was indeed the inescapable conclusion of pre-quantum thought (except, it seems, for the prescient Pierce) and had profound implications for human life, particularly politically; the basic premise of totalitarian rule is that, with enough information, the economy and society can be utterly understood, controlled, and programmed for the greatest good.

The restoration of indeterminism supports the development of systems of government and interaction that maximize the agency of actors who -it turns out- may possibly have free will after all. It also connects in a way I find highly satisfying to my previous post.

Tags: philosophy karl popper charles sanders pierce walker percy

Any article starting with a quote from Love in the Ruins...

Nerdybird links to an NYT article about the Large Hadron Collider’s odds of destroying the planet; the article begins with a quote from Walker Percy’s wonderful novel Love in the Ruins, which offers “the scientist’s prayer”:

Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.

Tags: walker percy science
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