Newt Monk: Of course, I would prefer no leadership, a civil way to live that involved no coaches, no captains, no jefes…. No bosses, no bullies, no bureaucrats and instead just jacks and jennies grazing green grass aplenty. I suppose it’s just a sentimental nostalgia for the imaginary anarchy of Arcadia and all that. If only a way of life could be found that involved no judges, no jailers … and no jerks!
Oak Boat: If only!
Newt Monk: Indeed. Instead I am stuck being an ass from one of Aesop’s old fables.
Oak Boat: How do you mean:
Newt Monk: Aesop of Egypt, the storyteller whom legend says was once a slave, has a fable that goes like this:
At the unexpected sound of an enemy approaching, an old man was stricken with terror and tried to persuade his donkey to run away so that he wouldn’t be captured. The donkey obstinately asked the old man, ‘tell me, do you suppose the victor will make me carry two pack saddles instead of one?’
The old man said he did not think so.
‘I rest my case,’ concluded the donkey. ‘What difference does it make who my master is, if I always carry one saddle at a time?’ [i]
Newt Monk: What strikes me is that how the worker (the ass) asks worthwhile questions, and even knows some of the correct answers to those questions. But that donkey’s master can only cower amid his own ignorance.
Oak Boat: Pitiful.
Newt Monk: Pretty plenty pitiful indeed. But what really strikes me as a reader-listener of this fable is my own self-awareness.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: I am aware (and am aware that I am aware) that I am no master (of any sort) as found in the fable. I’d wager instead that I am akin to something between a man and an ass. Because I don’t sympathize with the old man’s ignorance the way I do with the ass’s indifference, because what drives that indifference is a human-all-too-human cry for freedom. I’d wager that’s why Caesar once observed that “all men naturally long for liberty and despise a state of servitude.” Caesar realized that because he too was once a slave.[ii]
Oak Boat: Still, no team can win all its games without a coach. All politics involves the question of who will rule?
Newt Monk: Yep. I’m afraid something to the effect of what you just said has already been said by every sagacious student of humans being from ancient Plato to the late-twentieth-century political philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) to the early-twenty-first-century British hip-hop artist, author, and social critic and advocate: Akala.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Plato’s formulation of all human politics boils down to: “the wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow,” and “slaves should be subject to the control of their masters.” As a deep reader, and severe critic, of Plato’s ideas concerning governance, Popper has explained that, back in the days of old Athens, “Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?” while these days, “modern writers … believe that the main problem is: Who should dictate? The capitalists or the workers?”[iii]
Oak Boat: Well, who do you think should, bucko?
Newt Monk: I said earlier: I’m no one’s master. I. Am. No. Leader. I am, therefore, someone who’s “for the workers,” of course. Thus the “most fundamental problem of all politics” is for Popper, “the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the state.”[iv] However….
Oak Boat: However! How about hownever, huh? How many “howevers” do we have to have here, bucko? Don’t you know it’s hot out here in the summertime?
Newt Monk: (ignoring him) And despite this seemingly fundamental question of “Who shall rule the state?” according to Sir Popper, most garden-variety Marxists residing in the free West during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries “never realized the full significance of democracy as the only known means to achieve this control.” But I digress (I guess?) ….[v]
Oak Boat: I do not deny that you indeed did suggest: that you did digress.
Newt Monk: Well, I didn’t mean to, because I’m not really that interested in the Marxism stuff. I’m more interested in how and why Popper omits to mention throughout his magnus opus: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) ….
Oak Boat: Ulf, that’s a big book! (But I did kind of like it.)
Newt Monk: No doubt. And, it’s not only big, but heavily (and occasionally highhandedly) critical of Plato’s teachings so that Popper essentially blames Plato for encouraging, promoting most of the totalitarian forms of government that have emerged in the West during the last two millennia.
Oak Boat: That’s a long stretch time there, bucko. Especially for blaming somebody for something, even if that somebody is Plato, and that something is totalitarianism.
Newt Monk: Yeah, a mighty long stretch of time, spanning not only within breathe of Plato’s own Ancient Athens, but extending down through the ages—all the way down to the fall of the final Reich; down to the slow decay of all-things-Soviet; then down to Balkans in 1990s; alongside the Bath Party of Iraq; down through the ages to twenty-first-century America and her domestic infestation of spliner faction militia movements all infected by messianic “identity” ideologies—they’re all totally totalitarian, dude!––though only partially the conceptual progeny sired by Old Man Plato (whom they will never call their “daddy”).
Oak Boat: Totally.
Newt Monk; But while Popper is busy pointing his finger at Plato, blaming the Athenian philosopher for much of the mess that various totalitarian ambitions of the past two thousand years of history have polluted and pock-marked across large portions of the Occidental side to Gaia’s bosom….
Oak Boat: The Occidental side of Gaia’s bosom? Oh, you mean the geopolitical teat we affectionally call “the West?”
Newt Monk: Yeah sure. But I say Sir Popper might also have had the courtesy to have reminded his readers that, amid all that critiquing of Plato as the prime source of totalitarianism, Plato had himself once been a slave—yes, a slave––not unlike Caesar, and not unlike Aesop.[vi]
Oak Boat: You’re saying that if we readers would consider (and dig into) Plato’s past enslavement a little more closely, it might well aid us in our attempt to better understand why the prescription an elderly Plato later dispenses at Laws (690B)––there where he formulates who should (and should not) be leaders as well as who should (and should not) be their followers in his (the author’s!) hypothetical city––seems so severe?
Newt Monk: Yeah, or at least, seems so “severe” to us so-called “moderns,” yeah.
Newt Monk: Basically.
Oak Boat: You’ve reminded me of a passage from a little book by an American philologist Alexander Welsh (1933–2018). It’s called What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (2008), and in it Welsh discusses the work of Jamaican-American sociologist Orlando Patterson, particularly Patterson’s studies into the historical origins of the concept of the Western idea of “freedom.” Summing up some of Patterson’s theories, Welsh writes:
Both Athenian democracy and the Roman republic derived their notion of free independent citizens from the condition of their opposites, the slaves who lived in their midst. The presence of slaves makes it all the more attractive to identify with a group of the citizens.[vii]
Newt Monk: Right, and if you’ve been a slave before, like Plato supposedly was––we’ll never really know for sure––you might sincerely find (as well as strongly feel) that being a citizen is rather “more attractive” than subservience.
Oak Boat: Certainly (I suppose).
Newt Monk: And while slavery remains, with the exception of our nation’s incarceration industrial complex, abolished throughout these United States of 2024, one of our country’s contemporary essayists, Wesley Yang, has I think, quite aptly articulated how our present political situations contain close parallels to the greater Greco-Roman slave situation(s) of the ancient past. Indeed, our present political situations may even project a distinct set of shadows to crawl across the general surface of history.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Because, at least from Yang’s perspective as a Gen X (or Y) American, “You could … say that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.”[viii]
Oak Boat: Ouch! If that’s the truth, it certainly does hurt.
Newt Monk: I’m sorry if it does. Along the same lines of the way ancient slaves were sorted from ancient citizens is the way we moderns partition all of our leaders away from us (their own followers) in day-to-day life! It is along these lines that British author, intellectual, and hip-hop artist Akala, in his book Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), questions how much “self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social processes that shape a shared identity?”[ix]
Oak Boat: Hmm. While it’s, admittedly, quite a ways to stretch oneself across the Atlantic, I feel Akala’s point in regard to Great Britain partially overlaps with some of what Pulitzer Prize winner (and, for us, fellow Austinite) Lawrence Wright was getting at in his cultural survey God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018). I particularly sense some overlap when Wright notes how “Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. “[x]
[i] Aesop, Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, (New York, Oxford UP, 2002, 2008), no. 11, (Phaedrus 1.15 = Perry 476), p. 9.
[ii] Though Caesar was once a slave, his translator Carolyn Hammond reminds readers that “Caesar figures in the historical record as both destroyer of the Republic and founder of the Empire,” (“Introduction,” p. xii). The founders of the Roman Republic, Romulus and Remus, are said to have also suffered as slaves in their younger days. See: Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), trans. Carolyn Hammond, (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), (III, x), p. 59 (quotation); Livy, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) in The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), (I, v–vii), pp. 9–12; Plutarch, Βίοι Παράλληλοι (Parallel Lives), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, (11 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1919), Vol. I, “Theseus and Romulus,” (IV, i–ii), Vol. VII, “Julius Caesar,” (I, iv–II, iv).
[iii] Plato, Νόμοι (Laws), trans. Trevor J. Saunders, (New York: Penguin, 1970, 2004), (690B), p. 95; Karl Popper, “The Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” (1945) in Popper Selections, ed. David Miller, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), pp, 319, 320.
[iv] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[v] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[vi] Sonja Anderson, “This Newly Deciphered Papyrus Scroll Reveals the Location of Plato’s Grave,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 1, 2024; Diogenes Laertius, Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives of Eminent Philosophers), trans. R.D. Hicks, (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925, 1972), Vol. I, “Plato,” (III, xviii–xix).
[vii] Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives, (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 2008), pp. 23–24.
[viii] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ix] Akala, Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (London: Two Roads, 2018), p. 194; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 17–18, 42–43, 135.
[x] Likewise, former Secretary of Defense (as well as former Director of CIA), Robert Gates was informed upon his arrival to be the 22nd President of Texas A&M University, in Aggieland (and elsewhere): “If you’re on the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. If you’re on the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” See: Robert Gates, A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service, (New York: Knopf, 2015), p. 17; Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas; A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, (New York: Knopf, 2018), p. 89.
I again return to Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) final work, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) (1924).
Again, throughout the “story,” the narrator repeats (emphasizes?) the difference between true singing and mere piping—and that differentiating this difference presents an enormous riddle:
Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life.
We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping––yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work––if that were all true, then indeed Josephine’s alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has.
(The Complete Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1946, 1971), p. 361)
In Kafka’s one dramatic work Der Gruftwächter (The Warden of the Tomb) (1916–17), readers-audiences encounter the following exchange:
PRINCE: And what about the guard in the tomb itself?
CHAMBERLAIN: In my opinion this would have a police connotation. It would mean a real guarding of unreal things beyond the human sphere.
(The Complete Short Stories, trans. Tania and James Stern, p. 207)
How would one differentiate the two, between the real singing and the unreal singing?
Thus the riddle: What kind of imagination did Kafka, as a writer of “Josephine the Singer,” display? I’ve generally been bred by books to read the Penman of Prague’s texts as a combination of spontaneity and calculated brooding. Every line in the story seems accidentally inevitable as well as inevitably accidental. He sometimes comes across so precise as to seem mechanical—Professor Nabokov (1899–1977) once said of Kafka’s (Germanic) style in The Metamorphosis was nearly “scientific.”Yet Kafka (as a writer) remains wholly, utterly, and merely human-all-too-human.
Though that’s not so bad. For Kafka (or his literary characters and narrators) are often good-humored humans, even amid intense anxiety of the story’s situation—in the case of “Josephine”—readers are treated to a trial over judging whether certain sounds are vibrant songs or simple pipe tunes.
Confession: I also hear a spirit of reverie welling up out of Kafka’s narrator in the passage from “Josephine the Singer” And in my own reverie of rereading and remembering Kafka and his narrator, I recall what, though in quite a different context, Dr. John Locke (1632–1704) said of the concept of reverie:
When ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call reverie; our language has scarce a name for it:
(An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), (II, xix, 1))
For Marie-Henri Beyle a.k.a. Stendhal (1783–1842), a prolonged period of reverie may involve a thousand details—yet those thousands may lead to what he calls “crystallization”:
The imagination finds its progress barred by the ominous warnings of memory, and crystallization stops dead….
I have been advised in the first place to dispense with this word, or, if I cannot do that, to include frequent reminders that by crystallization I mean a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, and makes it an entity apart. Among those who can only achieve happiness through vanity, the man who wishes to excite this fever must take great pains with his cravat and be constantly on the watch over a thousand details, none of which must be neglected.
(De l’amour (Love) (1822), trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale, (New York: Penguin, 1957, 1975), (I, xv), pp. 64–65)
Under Stendhal’s scheme, such crystallization is what the seriously idle reader would eventually hope for in the grand (and unrewarding) attempt to understand Kafka’s narrator.
For there remains part of me as a reader that wants to say: Kafka’s narrator is engaged in a Franco-Lockean reverie of determining authentic, bardic singing from the derived pipping of jesters. Kafka’s narrator is trying to determine: What is real, what is unreal? He (or she) is trying to unriddle a riddle. And most of us do this to some extent in everyday life. Will the car ahead actually turn left just because it’s blinker indicates it will? (“Are these girl-scout cookies made from real girl scouts?”)
Post Script
Stendhal the Frenchman (though pretending to be an Italian in his essay De l’amour) goes on to explain two kinds of imagination:
1. Keen, impetuous, spontaneous imagination, leading instantly to action, chafing and languishing at a delay of even twenty-four hours…. It is characterized by impatience, and flares into anger against what it cannot obtain. It perceives external objects but these merely add fuel to its fire; it assimilates them and at once converts them to increase the passion.
2. Imagination which kindles only slowly, but which after a time no longer perceives external objects and succeeds in becoming exclusively concerned with, and dependent on, its own passion. This kind of imagination is quite compatible with slowness and even scarcity of ideas. It is conductive to constancy.
(De l’amour, (§ Various Fragments), p. 228)
Thus one can only hope that a deep reverie in piping may lead to the recognition (re–cognosis, as in, a repeatedgnosis—to re-know what you already know, as in Plato’s Menon) of actual singing––a recognition that might even lead to the actualization (via crystallization) of pure song. The great unutterable thing in itself. One cannot rid oneself of the riddle.
Here is another crumb removed from a work in progress, but one perhaps worth sharing nonetheless. Long-distance relationships don’t always work, but long-distance perspectives are often useful for art and science:
Besides, “we are better able,†says Aristotle, “to contemplate our neighbors than ourselves, and their actions than our own,†(Nico. Ethics 09.09). This might even be one reason why Plato chose to write the final words of Socrates within the context of a conversation between two people outside of Athens rather than two members of the jury who sentenced him.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1934) (IX, ix) p. 559; Plato, Phaedo 57a in The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, (New York: Penguin, 1993) p. 109.
In light of having recently finished Václav Benda (1946-1999)’s essays, with its theories of a parallel polis, and amid my preparing to soon read some published works from NewPopLit and Screamin’ Skull Press–both recent and independent publishing endeavors which seem in line with at least some of Benda’s thinking regarding such a parallel polis and culture–I came across this poignant passage from Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893):
After about a hundred, or at most two hundred years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had ceased to flower or blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning with the Alexandrian writers and even before them in the platitudes of Isocrates and his school, spreads over much more than a thousand years. And from this decline the Greek language and literature, unlike the Latin, which has come to life in new forms and been developed into the great European languages, never recovered.
This monotony of literature, without merit, without genius and without character, is a phenomenon which deserves more attention than it has hitherto received; it is a phenomenon unique in the literary history of the world. How could there have been so much cultivation, so much diligence in writing, and so little mind or real creative power? Why did a thousand years invent nothing better than Sibylline books, Orphic poems, Byzantine imitations of classical histories, Christian reproductions of Greek plays, novels like the silly and obscene romances of Longus and Heliodorus, innumerable forged epistles, a great many epigrams, biographies of the meanest and most meagre description, a sham philosophy which was the bastard progeny of the union between Hellas and the East? Only in Plutarch, in Lucian, in Longinus, in the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Julian, in some of the Christian fathers are there any traces of good sense or originality, or any power of arousing the interest of later ages. And when new books ceased to be written, why did hosts of grammarians and interpreters flock in, who never attain to any sound notion either of grammar or interpretation? Why did the physical sciences never arrive at any true knowledge or make any real progress? Why did poetry droop and languish? Why did history degenerate into fable? Why did words lose their power of expression? Why were ages of external greatness and magnificence attended by all the signs of decay in the human mind which are possible?
Benjamin Jowett, “Introduction to Phaedrus,†The Dialogues of Plato in Five Volumes, Vol. I, trans. Jowett, (Oxford University Press, 1892; third edition revised and corrected) pp. 425–26.
I don’t want
to go too much into summary and specifics of plot when discussing Susan Neville’s
short story “Hunger,â€
(Missouri Review, Winter 2017). The title
speaks enough for itself in that regard.
Instead I will note some moments and lines that stood out and elaborate on why they did for me.
At one
point the unnamed narrator tells readers:
Maybe it was choice itself I wanted to rid myself of. Left or right? This way or that? Day in and day out, year after year, I drive in my little rat’s maze. Grocery store. Drugstore. Work. Home. But in what order? And what if I wanted to break out of that maze, as I sometimes do? (p. 31)
Readers learn
only that this narrator lacks a sense of freedom, but not why. This idea that
she’s stuck in a rat’s maze, either entrapped in vacuity or restrained by
oppressive hegemony—she never tells readers, but it really stood out when I
read it.
And this
mention of the maze has both reminded me of what New Pop Lit editor Karl
Wenclas has been getting at as a literary theorist and editor as well as led me
to suspect that Neville is also trying to get at something similar as a writer (through
the character of her narrator in this story): the need to break out of the maze––to
shatter the cookie-cutter, foregone conclusions found in too many short stories
these days.
Neville’s story has what Wenclas hints at in his phrasing of “new, different angles,†and how “in truth there are more than two sides to every story.†And Neville’s story has many sides, though I haven’t apprehended all of them fully (even after at least three enthusiastic readings). But she seems to have created something that Wenclas, myself, and others are looking for as readers, what Wenclas has formulated as “a faster, vastly more readable and exciting short story….†a “prototype so different from the standard.â€
At one
point, Neville’s narrator tells readers:
One of the pleasures of life is that there is always so much to think about and attempt to understand. (p. 32)
This to me
is a key to understanding why the narrator is almost overwhelmed by the
abundance of detail she’s trying to share and the difficulty in expressing why
she needs to share that abundance to her readers. They aren’t just readers, but
readers-as-characters participating in the story by their close listening. But even
an abundance of something Good can be overwhelming and requiring adjustment (Plato,
Republic VII, 518) or worse, so poisonous
as to necessitate countermeasures (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II, ii; II, vii; III, vii; IV, v).
Yet, at the end of the day, the reader doesn’t know beyond a reasonable doubt if Neville’s narrator’s thinking about life qualifies as excessive and overly abundant. (But there may be clues that I as a reader have as of yet unknowingly passed over.)
The
narrator of “Hunger†informs readers that:
I must have complete quiet in the car. I do not listen to music. I listen to my thoughts. (p. 33)
And this
line reminded me of something I’d come across recently when rereading Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), a novel whose
narrator tells readers:
Sometimes I’ll turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from Boston or New York. I can’t stand recorded music if I’ve been drinking a good deal.
(Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1969; 1971) I, 7.)
If one doesn’t listen to music when in the car for long periods of time, as Neville’s (seemingly sober) narrator appears to be doing—does that act of debarring oneself from art indicate excessive thinking? Vonnegut’s narrator seems to imply that excessive drinking leads to excessive thinking. One wants to say to the main character of “Hunger,†“If only she’d listened to music, then perhaps she wouldn’t feel so trapped in that maze she thinks she’s in.†But that may not be the case for this hungry character.
This
notion of too much thinking and not enough music also reminds me of a passage
from Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog (1922):
But they––incredible! incredible!––they never replied, behaved as if I were not there. Dogs who make no reply to the greeting of other dogs are guilty of an offense against good manners which the humblest dog would never pardon any more than the greatest. Perhaps they were not dogs at all? But how should they not be dogs? Could I not actually hear on listening more closely the subdued cries with which they encouraged each other, drew each other’s attention to difficulties, warned each other against errors; could I not see the last and youngest dog, to whom most of those cries were addressed, often stealing a glance at me as if he would have dearly wished to reply, but refrained because it was not allowed? But why should it not be allowed, why should the very thing which our laws unconditionally command not be allowed in this one case? I became indignant at the thought and almost forgot the music. Those dogs were violating the law. Great magicians they might be, but the law was valid for them too, I knew that quite well though I was a child. And having recognized that, I now noticed something else. They had good grounds for remaining silent, that is, assuming that they remained silent from a sense of shame.
(Franz Kafka, “Forschungen eins Hundes†(“Investigations of a Dogâ€) (c. 1922). trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971) 283.)
Notice that the dogs don’t just howl harmoniously; they make music so complex it can be forgotten.
Finally,
there’s the line by Neville from the daughter to her mother, the narrator:
I felt like I was being buried alive, she [the daughter] says and then asks, Where are you? I’m driving, I say, and there’s an uncanny valley sort of blip in her face as she continues doing whatever she was doing when I accidentally called her. (p. 33)
Yes, the
daughter could literally mean, “Where are you, mother?†But sometimes asking “Where
are you?†is a way of asking “What are you thinking about just now?†Readers
don’t know where the mother-narrator is, or is going, for she never mentions a
destination. The mechanic she visits functions only to keep her going, but she
never intends to stop. It seems the means of her getting there have overcome
the goal itself.
But is she
being chased? Yes, some mazes have no exits, but I detect no monsters in this
story. There is no evidence in the text that the mother-narrator is being
chased by a Minotaur.
These actions [of remembrance] are inward, in the vast hall of my memory. There sky, land, and sea are available to me together with all the sensations I have been able to experience in them, except for those which I have forgotten. There also I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it….
One of my motives for starting this series is to get to know contemporary fiction better. For recently I’ve had more luck getting my non-fiction writing published.[2] But I haven’t quite given up on fiction, though I think I need more practice. So I won’t deny that I study the stories in this series in hopes of one day becoming a better fiction writer.
Again, the essence of a story is its center of gravity—the thing holding together what would otherwise be a chaotic mass of random thoughts. The essence of a story doesn’t necessarily confine that story to a particular “form.†No, the essence of the story doesn’t necessarily formalize its story. Why? Because the essence may organize that chaotic mass of random thoughts into something only slightly less random than it would be without an essence. Just a few steps away from oblivion might be all it takes for something Dadaist to arrive at definition.
In other words, something out of the chaos of the page suddenly renders itself in the mind of the reader; something in-and-of the story is realized to be significant, weighty, and indeed, grave. Whatever appears grave gathers the attention of onlookers, which is why we rubberneck at the residue of fatal car collisions as we continue to contribute to rush-hour traffic. So too does the reader’s attention become centered on such gravity. Thus the essence is indeed a story’s center of gravity.
II.
Memory’s huge cavern, with its mysterious, secret, and indescribable nooks and crannies, receives all these perceptions, to be recalled when needed and reconsidered. Every one of them enters into memory, each by its own gate, and is put on deposit there….
The essence of “The Unraveling,†(via New Pop Lit) a short story by Tianna Grosch of the woodlands of Pennsylvania, occurs when Dex, a card shark conman, somehow witnesses his wife-girlfriend Elizabeth being fatally thrown out a six-story window. Yes “somehow,†because either Dex, or someone coming to collect Dex’s debt, threw her through the glass. Or perhaps she threw herself out. In Elizabeth’s last moments she mentions having been pregnant, so maybe she aborted her pregnancy, and once Dex found out he pushed her in a fit of rage. Or perhaps she felt so guilty about the abortion that she jumped herself (again, it’s never fully explained to readers; and that’s okay).
But regardless of what really happened to Elizabeth, Dex feels guilty. The narrator is unknown, unnamed, and tells the story almost completely from Dex’s point of view. There is, however, an extended flashback from the point of view of the doctors of Lethe who perform the memory-removing procedure on Dex, and there are indications that it may have been a botched operation.
Grosch leaves lots of possibilities up to her readers, but most of the story’s underlying concern is about Dex seeking a way to forget his horrible memory. So the essence might be about a guy presently wanting to forget his past fuck-ups. Philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), although he was discussing group behavior rather than that of individuals, once remarked:
A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present. But unless joined with sanguine expectations of the future, an exaggerated view of the past results in an attitude of caution and not in … reckless strivings.[4]
Dex certainly doesn’t glorify his past; but, being human-all-too-human, he probably has an exaggerated view of that past. Thus it might be said that “The Unraveling†is a story of his reckless strivings.
“The Unraveling†takes place in an unnamed city, one in which about the only details a reader can gather are that this city has gamblers, violence, and a subway. But throughout most of the story Dex is trying to get to the town on the outskirts of the city called Lethe. It seems like a place almost impossible to get to, not unlike the impossible journey to get beyond the city limits in Alex Proya’s film Dark City (1998), a film whose tone and mood reminded me much of “The Unraveling.â€
III.
How then can [memory] fail to grasp [itself]? This question moves me to great astonishment.…
Like Grosch’s narrator, the narrator of the story “Jonah and the Frog†(via Five on the Fifth) by Texas writer James Wade is also unknown, unnamed, and tells the story completely from Jonah’s point of view. The essence of this story occurs when the character of Jonah vomits up a living frog––a frog which seems to represent Jonah’s struggle to excrete a painful memory, but one never fully explained to readers. It is clear, however, that Jonah seeks to purge some unknown guilt.
In literature, a frog is usually something between vermin and varmint––not quite a bug, not quite a beast––but in her novel Barren Ground (1925) Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) once compared painful memories to a beast:
Recollection. Association. It was morbid, she told herself sternly, to cherish such fancies; and yet she had never been able entirely to rid her memory of the fears and dreads of her childhood. Worse than this even was the haunting thought that the solitude was alive, that it skulked there in the distance, like a beast that is waiting for the right moment to spring and devour.[6]
Based on mentions throughout the story of “the docks,†“the waterâ€â€“–as well as “The Quarter†being a place where one can publically drink all night––I suspect “Jonah and the Frog†takes place in New Orleans. And in this story, Jonah spits out a frog; somewhat of an inverse of the biblical whale/fish spitting out Jonah the Prophet, though I admit connecting modern New Orleans (surrounded by swamps) to ancient Nineveh (modern Mosul, surrounded by desert) seems too weak for a strong reader to seriously contemplate.
IV.
The affections of my mind are also contained in the same memory. They are not there in the same way in which the mind itself holds them when it experiences them, but in another very different way such as that in which the memory’s power holds memory itself. So I can be far from glad in remembering myself to have been glad, and far from sad when I recall my past sadness.
Both stories of “The Unraveling†and “Joshua and the Frog†focus on their aquatic environments. Both leading characters want to purge memories of guilt and regret. In this sense they remind me of the premise to a movie I’ve never seen, Michel Gondry’s The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) starring Jim Carrey, for in that flick Carrey’s character tries to forget an ex-girlfriend via a surgical procedure:
Â
Moreover, the theme that memories can never be completely forgotten runs through both stories. I believe that if Dex or Joshua were able to (somehow, paradoxically) convince themselves that their painful memories had left them, it would only be temporary. Eventually the memories, or fragments of them, would return. And when those memories did return, they would feel anamnesis: that is, they would remember something which they thought was unknown but was in fact something they already knew.
Anamnesis is one of the primary lessons Plato tries to teach in his dialogue Meno:
Socrates: ‘one thing I would fight for to the end, both in word and deed if I were able—that if we believed that we must try to find out what is not known, we should be better and braver and less idle than if we believed that what we do not know it is impossible to find out and that we need not even try.’[8]
Compare also Augustine, writing about 800 years after Plato:
The answer must be that they were already in the memory, but so remote and pushed into the background, as if in most secret caverns, that unless they were dug out by someone drawing attention to them, perhaps I could not have thought of them.[9]
It is not too much to say that all original discoveries and inventions and musical and poetical compositions are the result of proleptic thought—the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning—and of what may be called analeptic thought, the recovery of lost events by the same suspension…. This explains why the first Muse of the Greek triad was named Mnemosyne, ‘Memory’: one can have memory of the future as well as of the past. Memory of the future is usually called instinct in animals, intuition in human beings.[10]
Both Dex and Joshua seem too close to their memories—both believe they need some “personal space†from certain mental pictures of their pasts. For Georgian writer Harry Crews (1935–2012): “Nothing is allowed to die,†including memory, “in a society of storytelling people.†Yet, paradoxically, “the only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making.â€[11] In other words, memory is a kind of storytelling to oneself, and apparently, neither Joshua nor Dex are capable of coping with their own tales.
And, as Dick Hallorann (a reoccurring character in Stephen King’s oeuvre) knows, memories cannot be completely banished: “Not memories. Never those. They’re the real ghosts,†warns Hallorann in Doctor Sleep (2013), which is the sequel to King’s The Shining (1977).[12] Both novels deal with alcoholism, that is, they deal with people addicted to a substance that allegedly helps them forget unpleasant memories.
Both Dex and Joshua, to their (or their authors’) credit, seek to transcend their memories, not simply destroy them. But by (mostly) destroying them, they prevent themselves from transcending them, as the hero Paul is able to do in Frank Herbert’s (1920–1986) Dune (1965):
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future…. Things persisted in not being what they seemed…. He felt carnival excitement in the air. He knew what would happen if he drank this spice drug with its quintessence of the substance that brought the change onto him. He would return to the vision of pure time, of time-become-space. It would perch him on the dizzying summit and defy him to understand.[13]
NOTES
[1] Augustine, Confessiones in Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) X, viii (§14), p. 186.
[3] Augustine, Confessiones, X, viii (§13), p. 186.
[4] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) §50, p. 68.
[5] Augustine, Confessiones, X, viii (§15), p. 187.
[6] Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground. 1925, (New York, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co. – Old Dominion Edition, 1945) I, v, 58.
[7] Augustine, Confessiones, X, xiv (§21), p. 191.
[8] Plato, Meno (85C–86E) in Rouse, W. H. D. Great Dialogues of Plato, ed. Eric H. Warmington & Philip G. Rouse, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, (New York: Mentor Books, 1956, Twelfth printing) p. 51.
[9] Augustine, Confessiones X, x (§17), p. 189. See also (X, viii (§12), p. 185) where the translator Chadwick notes:
Memoria for Augustine is a deeper and wider term than our ‘memory’. In the background lies the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis, explaining the experience of learning as bringing to consciousness what, from an earlier existence, the soul already knows. But Augustine develops the notion of memory by associating it with the unconscious (‘the mind knows things it does not know it knows’), with self-awareness, and so with the human yearning for true happiness found only in knowing God.
[10] Robert Graves, The White Goddess: a historical grammar of poetic myth, (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1948; Second Edition, 1975) 343.
[11] Harry Crews, A Childhood: the Biography of a Place, (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) 4, 126.
[12] Stephen King, Doctor Sleep, (New York: Scribner, 2013) 45.
[13] Frank Herbert, Dune (1965), (New York: Ace Books Premium Edition, 2010), “II. Muad’Dib,†583.
Rereading Ruthie Leming – Part I: Tattoos & Taboos
Just yesterday in trendy-all-too-trendy Austin, Texas lived and labored the world’s greatest tattoo artist: Homer Milton. He was as blind as the bats reverse-perched under the downtown bridge, but his work was known throughout the world, even among Japan’s Yakuza.
One day Milton could hear cane taps and paw patter outside the store door. A client entered the tattoo parlor covered from top to toe in ink and design. In one hand was a retractable cane; the other, the leash to a docile Rottweiler. His name was Dick McKeon and he was as blind as the mice in Longhorn Cavern. He was a white man who no longer looked white because of the overlap and intricacies and intersections of symbols, numbers, icons, and forms sprawled over his skin. It was as though he were permanently clothed in every tattoo conceivable, where the diversity of one only dithered another.
McKeon: Sir, today I wish to inquire about acquiring a new tattoo. Something to remind me of the joy of good old days.
Milton: I remember someone reading to me a long time ago that the common joy of the soul is the foundation of genuine community.[1]
McKeon: Right, I want a tattoo that will remind me of the common joy created when cheering for local sports teams––cheering for victory!
Milton: You remind me of when and why I quit baseball as a child. It wasn’t because of the winning or the losing or the cheating or the bruising. It was because of everyone else’s parents, the mob rule of the crowd. I remember I quit baseball because I’d rather have gone fishing and taken a dip in the river than deal with the rabble.
McKeon: Well, it sounds like you tried to escape both the conformity of childhood teamwork as well as the herd mentality of the helicopter parents of your fellow players.
Milton. I tried to escape, but successfully failed. For, “wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions.†[2]
McKeon: I’m impressed with your quotation but regret its lack of trendiness. You should be reading newer works that express the old ideas. Like the other day I was listening to this book called The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013). Ruthie’s friends would go to the river to escape from small-town parentage:
During her junior year Ruthie’s crowd began hanging out at the river, where they could build bonfires and drink beer without adults hassling them.[3]
The river at Starhill was (and probably still is) a place to congregate, a place of sociological sifting of wheat from chaff.
McKeon: While Ruthie’s friends tried to temporarily escape from their parents, her brother Rod tried to permanently escape the entire town:
The intolerance, the social conformity, the cliquishness, the bullying. At sixteen this is what I thought small-town life was and always would be. There, on the far side of the river, was the rest of my life, straight ahead. I had no intention of looking back.[4]
Milton: Yeah, but every army needs a system of rank and can’t survive without one. But you’re right. Rod tried, but we suffer no escape. None for me with baseball back then. None for Rod or Ruthie or her friends. None even for small town folks of last century. They could not escape the in-group/out-group resentment inherent to our anthropology. Take for instance the psychology of a small southern town found in Carson McCuller’s novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940):
The place was still now crowded—it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day. The sleepy waitress was serving both beer and coffee. There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everybody a feeling of estrangement…. They shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.[5]
Milton: But it’s unique to no one but us. Everyone from the past would find no difference between now and then.
McKeon: But difference is the key to it all.
Milton: How so?
McKeon: Well, take Dreher’s sequel to Little Way, How Dante Can Save Your Live (2015), where he talks about in the world of––indeed, the anthropology of––his small Louisiana town of Starhill, a place where anything different made for a severe taboo:
As I reported the book [Little Way], I learned from questioning my sister’s friends, her husband, and my parents more about why Ruthie held me in such disdain. It had to do with my moving away to the city; Mike said that she always felt that I belonged in Starhill, and that she took my leaving as a personal rejection. It had to do with my having tastes and beliefs she didn’t understand; for Ruthie, as for Daddy, “different†was a bad word. It had to do with her believing that I was getting away with something, being paid to write for a living instead of doing honest work. And it had to do with, well, me; even her best friend, Abby, said that she couldn’t fathom why Ruthie’s patience with everyone else was endless, but she could barely tolerate me for a moment….
And there it was. We would be held responsible for doing more and more to win the Leming children’s love, though it would be impossible to do so because of our original sin: being unlike my father, my sister, and the rest….
A thick iron gate slammed shut within me, and from behind it I regarded my father with cold contempt. He had struck me where he could do the most damage: my sense of manhood. I followed him and my sister out of the field, my face on fire, this time not with shame but with wrath. And from that moment on, I saw him not as my champion. I saw him as my adversary. [6]
Milton: You should compare Hillary Jordan’s novel Mudbound (2008) whose story is set in the same Mississippi delta region as Dreher, but about 100 years prior. In Mudbound “lend†is a taboo four-letter word.[7]
McKeon: It’s because difference is a debt owed to the community. For community equals conformity and both make up a system of checks and balances that is intolerant toward debt.
Milton: And difference is the key. The atheist anthropologist Gregory Bateson once explained why all information, including cultural information, is binary. Bateson holds that facts—in any context––are but “effective differences,†and “information consists of differences that make a difference.†The human mind “is an aggregate of interacting parts or components,†and “the interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time.â€[8]
McKeon: A––“nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in time or spaceâ€â€“–and you say the guy was an atheist?
Thus the blind tattooed the blind—both knowing exactly what they wanted—both of whose origins and orientations toward the world were completely incompatible in comparison to the other.
NOTES
[1] Buber, Martin. Meetings: Martin Buber. Edited by Maurice Friedman. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co. 1973. p. 39.
[2] Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1854. “Ch. VIII – The Village.â€
[3] Dreher, Rod. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. NY: Grand Central Publishing. 2013. p. 28.
[4] Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming p. 19.
[5] McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. 1940. Modern Library. 1993. I, ii, p. 36; II, vii, p. 238.
[6] Dreher, Rod. How Dante Can Save Your Life: the Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem. NY: Regan Arts. 2015. pp. 26, 32, 11.
[7] Jordan, Hillary. Mudbound. Algonquin Books: Chapel Hill, NC. 2008. p. 117.
[8] Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. NY: E. P. Dutton. 1979. pp. 61, 81, 92, 99. Cf. Plato, Republic 521c–523b, 524e, 525a–526d.
Why All Habits Are Bad: Oscar Wilde & Marcel Proust
Perez Zagorin notes: “[Proust] had actually been introduced to Wilde in Paris and invited him to dinner.â€[1] One could imagine they talked of nothing but women. (Or not.) Or perhaps they discussed the meaning of the word “habit.†For Wilde, habit is the enemy of all creativity, because art destroys monotony. In Wilde’s words:
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing … He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability[2]
….
You are quite delightful, but your views are terribly unsound. I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of some one older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.[3]
….
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. [4]
….
“Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it.â€
“Why?†said the younger man wearily.
“Because … one can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Let us have our coffee in the music-room, Dorian. You must play Chopin to me. The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely. Poor Victoria! I was very fond of her. The house is rather lonely without her. Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.â€[5]
This last passage appears to agree with Proust somewhat: no matter how horrible are all our habits, we wouldn’t be able to psychologically function. We wouldn’t be able to “get by†without them. Memory for Proust is submissive to habit. The most vivid memories are of things most forgotten, and this is because we don’t remember what we already knew.[6] It is like, says Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), an old book we pick up and thumb through before realizing, “I read this already.â€[7] As Proust puts it:
Now our love memories present no exception to the general rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general rules of Habit. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourselves face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our ordinary memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never find them again. Or rather we should never find them again had not a few words (such as this ‘Secretary to the Ministry of Posts’) been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable. [8]
Moreover, for Proust: “in strange places where our sensations have not been numbed by habit, we refresh, we revive an old pain.†[9]
For American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the habits of humans reflect the patterns of their beliefs. Habits don’t just have meaning: habits are meaning. Habits are the rules of behavior that produce our character:
The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect….
Most frequently doubts arise from some indecision, however momentary, in our action…. The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit…. [The] whole function of thought is to produce habits of action.
….
To develop [a thing’s] meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves.
….
And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. We have seen that it has just three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit. As it appeases the irritation of doubt, which is the motive for thinking, thought relaxes, and comes to rest for a moment [stasis] when belief is reached. [10]
….
That which determines us, from given premisses, to draw one inference rather than another, is some habit of mind, whether it be constitutional or acquired.
….
Thus, both doubt and belief have positive effects upon us, though very different ones. Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least such active effect, but stimulates us to inquiry until it is destroyed. This reminds us of the irritation of a nerve and the reflex action produced thereby; while for the analogue of belief, in the nervous system, we must look to what are called nervous associations—for example, to that habit of the nerves in consequence of which the smell of a peach will make the mouth water.[11]
….
Attention is the power by which thought at one time is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time; or, to apply the conception of thought as a sign, that it is the pure demonstrative application of a thought-sign…. Attention produces effects upon the nervous system. These effects are habits, or nervous associations.[12]
Finally, compare some remarks from philosopher of religion James Bissett Pratt (1975–1944), who seems to imply that creativity abides in non-belief:
The truth is, non-belief, like belief, draws its strength not only from reason but from authority; in fact, for many enthusiastic students of science the will not to believe has a good deal to do with the result. In certain scientific circles it is not good form to believe in a future life; and the ascetic ideal which would sacrifice selfish interests for the personal values of science also comes into play. Moreover non-belief, like belief, is not merely a product of logical argument, authority, habit, and volition, but is largely influenced also by the imagination; and the peculiarly objective point of view which natural science inculcates and the habit it produces of considering causation and the laws of matter universal and invariable, give a certain cast to the imagination which makes the idea of the survival of bodily death increasingly difficult.[13]
….
Among all peoples—and the Indians are no exceptions—authority and habit have always been two most important foundations of faith. Moreover, if they regarded nature and the experiences of life, they saw multiplicity and a world of apparently many powers. It was only among the philosophers that reason’s demand for unity was strong enough to overcome all these things.[14]
The subconscious is eminently conservative. And in whatever way you interpret the “subconscious†this remains true. The conservative nature of the physiological is painfully evident to every one who has tried to break a habit.[15]
For Pratt (as well as Wilde) habits are conservative; art is radical. Our habits make us regress, but our imaginations help us progress.
NOTES
[1] Zagorin, Perez. “Proust for Historians.†New Literary History. Vol. 37, No. 2. (Spring 2006.) 389–423 at 404–05.
[2] Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.†The Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde. Vol. VII. NY: The Nottingham Society. 1909. pp. 9–10.
[3] Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist: Parts I & II.†Intentions. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, London; New York, NY: Dodd, Mead. 1891. p. 91.
[7] Montaigne, Michel de. Essaies. (Essays.) “On Books.†1580.
[8] Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. (Within a Budding Grove / In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.) 1919. “Place Names: The Name.â€
[10] Peirce, Charles Sanders. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.†Popular Science Monthly. Vol. 12. (January 1878.) pp. 286–302.
[11] Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief.†Popular Science Monthly. Vol. 12. (November 1877.) pp. 1–15.
[12] Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.†Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Vol. 2. (1868.) pp. 140–57.
[13] Pratt, James Bissett. “Some Psychological Aspects of the Belief in Immortality.†Harvard Theological Review. Vol. 12. No. 3. (July 1919.) 294–314 at 300–01.
[14] Pratt, The Psychology of Religious Belief. NY: Macmillan. 1908. p. 93.
[15] Pratt, “The Subconscious and Religion.†Harvard Theological Review. Vol. 6. No. 2. (April 1913.) 209–28 at 224.
This is a scattered post I’ve been working on for the past three weeks…. Is it pastiche, goulash, a patchwork quilt perhaps? ….
Some old books, such as Plato’s Republic and Dante’s Commedia, act on the reader like spinning tops,[1] where each page can be read both centrifugally and centripetally. The centrifugal reading seeks the essence, the thesis, of Plato and Dante—it asks how those authors relate to themselves within their works. On the other hand, centripetal reading seeks to connect the Commedia and Republic to any and every other kind of knowledge—it asks how their works relate to everyone else’s works and knowledge.
I’m thinking about things centrifugal and centripetal because after Texas’ Super Tuesday 2016 my head keeps spinning. So weary of hearing a conservative political-follower say America has lost its faith in a god––so weary of hearing a liberal political-follower say America has lost its faith in a government.[2] Have we lost faith in political leadership and believe only in our own political followership?
I do not expect our poets to be politicians, nor do I expect our politicians to be poets. Yes, in the days of Plato and Dante a poet and politician could be one in the same, but why now does that dual-role sound like a contradiction? What is the clash ringing in our ears? ….
Both Plato and Dante were politician-poets. But Plato gave up politics, while politics gave up Dante. The Florence comune exiled Dante with threat of death while the Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to self-execution….
Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth. Plato was a corrupted youth who forswore politics. Dante was accused of being an incorruptible politician. Socrates is offered exile, but death, for him and unlike Dante, is a better choice….
In the Commedia, Dante is the representative of the living. In the eyes of the dead he is poet-politician-leader. Neither Plato nor Socrates speaks to the dead. But Plato does bring Socrates back to life, for by the grace of Plato’s pen, Socrates is resurrected into the everlasting life of dialogue….
When Plato has Socrates speak of contradictions, he writes things like:
[Someone] might say of a spinning top that the whole thing stands still and turns at the same time, when it fixes the peg in one spot and goes round and round upon it, and so also anything else does this that goes round in a circle in the same place, but we should not accept that. We should say that such things are not resting and revolving in the same parts of themselves, but they have a straight part (the axis) and a circling part (the periphery); in the straight part it moves round; and when it leans the perpendicular to right or left or front or back while it revolves, then it does not stand still anymore…. So such a saying will not dismay us, and it will never convince us that the same thing in the same place towards the same thing could sometimes be or do or suffer two opposites.[3]
So contradictions for Plato are like spinning tops where two things––a centripetal-axis from which the top spins and a centrifugal tangent of the outermost edge of the top’s surface––almost appear as one. (Yet here it might be apt to recall a dictum from Gregory Bateson: “it takes two to know one.â€)[4] We know that the two things really aren’t one but aren’t quite sure where to mark the divide between them.
Wittgenstein says that when you encounter a contradiction, instead of worrying about whether it exists or not, you must repent from the way of thinking that originally led you to the contradiction––
to get a clear view of the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (And this does not mean that one is sidestepping a difficulty).[5]
For Wittgenstein, comprehending a contradiction is all about backpedaling, retrenching, repenting of present sins (mistakes in one’s thinking) and returning to prior piety. In other words, one must turn around and retread over the previous course, just as YHVH repents to Moses…. [6]
Now when Dante speaks of contradictions, he writes things like:
 [one can’t absolve a man who’s not repented,
and no one can repent and will at once;
the law of contradiction won’t allow it.][7]
The Italian humanist Poggio Braccidini, who lived a generation after Dante, provides a perplexing twist to Dante’s take on contradictions:
A certain man, either seriously or to play a trick on the priest, went to him saying that he wished to confess his sins. Invited to say what he remembered of his wickedness, he related that he had stolen something from another, but added that this other had stolen more from him.
Said the confessor: “One thing cancels out another, so you are quits now.â€
Then the man added that he had beaten a certain fellow with a stick, but that he had received several blows in return from this person.
And the priest said that here, too, one thing cancelled out another, and that all was well.
At last the penitent said that there remained a sin for which he was much ashamed, and blushed before the priest to have to tell it.
The confessor exhorted him to forget his shame and reveal the sin. Yielding at last to the persistence of the friar, the man said: “I once had your sister.â€
“And Iâ€, replied the priest, “on several occasions had your mother, and here, as in the other cases, one thing cancels out another.â€
Does Poggio’s facetiae, his bawdy, brief tale, lead to contradictions, or does it absolve contradictions?
I leave as I came: with my head spinning.
NOTES
[1] See Northrop Frye’s remarks in The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton UP (1957):
Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. (p. 73)
Compare, George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy, NY: Knopf (1961), for whom Dante is more centrifugal than Shakespeare, while the latter is vice versa:
Whereas Dante’s vision bends all light rays toward a controlling centre, Shakespeare’s sense of the world appears to move outward. (p. 21)
[3] Plato, Republic, IV 436A–436D. In Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1969.
[4] Nachmanovitch, Stephen. “Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers.†Leonardo, Vol. 17. No. 2. (1984.) 113–118 at 113.
[5] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 1953. I, § 125.
[6] Exodus 32:9–14; Kaufmann, Walter. “Prologue to I and Thou,†In Martin Buber’s Ich und Du. (I and Thou.) 1923. Translated by Kaufmann. NY: Scribner. 1970. pp. 34–37.
[7] Alighieri, Dante. Inferno XXVII, 117–19. In Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Notes by Peter Armour. NY: Everyman’s Library. 1995.
[8] Braccidini, Poggio. In The Facetiae of Poggio: and other Medieval Story–Tellers. London, UK: Dutton. 1927. LXXX 106–07.
As a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1999, I acquired and have since retained a chip on my shoulder: that I will forever be an under-read individual. It’s silly how often I’ve imagined myself: as a Texan I’m less read than most Americans from other states; as an American I’m less literary compared to most Europeans. It’s all very neurotic—as if I could somehow read a bunch of books, “play catch up,†and become a better writer. Ha!
Made As and Bs in middle and high school, but when I got accepted to Longhorn Land––an acceptance probably based on socio-economic grounds, for I was neither in the top ten percent of my class nor an ethnic minority––I was soon stung by the realization of my lack of acquired mental rigor. ‘Twas only later that I learned that, although I was homeschooled for third and fourth grades, such a feeling of the absence of knowledge is a common part of being a product of the Texas public education system.
Though an arbitrary measurement (because page count varies wildly), these days I read about a hundred books a year (87 in 2015), take notes, and try to continually study them. But this chip on my shoulder––this thorn in my side––refuses to leave. Moreover, whenever I discuss something I’ve read, I tend to over-cite and elaborately quote it chapter and verse, and this, I suspect, seems to have given some of my writings a pseudo-medieval flavor which modern readers generally detest.
Nonetheless, 2016 is a new year for book blogging…. so Bookbread begins with some meditations on:
While it seems a little clumsy (if not quite naive) the way the young Count Tolstoy once said he wanted Truth to be the hero of his written sketches of Sebastopol (1855), today in 2016 I too aim for truth to be the leading character on this blog; although, the requirements for achieving that aim will be, in Dreher’s words, “hard, big, real, and dirty.†[1]
What kind of book is Dreher’s Little Way of Ruthie Leming? It’s a memorial biography of Dreher’s dying sister; a portrait of an ideal community (of the author’s home town) in the American South experienced from a Christian perspective. The book also functions as a requiem, a dirge on the life of the title character. As I told some family members after giving them copies of the book last Christmas, “it’s like Steel Magnolias (1989), but with spiritual grit.â€
What kind of book is How Dante Can Save Your Life? In addition to being a sequel to the above work, this is a how-to book, a spiritual confessional, and a portrait of a flawed individual (as are we all), who is part of a normal, white, middleclass family living in a perceived (at least by the author) ideal, small community in the American South. Themes include fitting in (or not) and forgiving others (or not) in that small community. The book is also a work of reader-response criticism as the author describes how reading a particular book revolutionized both his outlook and insight on life. Both of Dreher’s books include bildung: spiritual journeys, coming-of-age narratives.
What kind of book is the Divine Comedy?
Each shade displayed no less astonishment or less confusion than a mountaineer, who, even as he stares about, falls silent when, rough and rustic, he comes to the city
––Purgatorio XXVI, 67–69 [2]
I fear I have nothing meaningful to say about LaDivina Comedia. Nonetheless: if the text is an Everest—I feel, now as a reader of Dante, like one of those perfectly preserved, frozen bodies splayed about Everest’s mountainside—although mine is the body of one who reached the summit before dying on the way back down. Plato affirms it’s more difficult to reenter the cave than initially exiting it, and why should mountain climbing for Beatrice in Dante be any easier than spelunking for Sophia in Plato? [3] But no doubt after a first reading of Dante I now feel as exasperated as the dying Ivan Ilyich:
It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death. [4]
What kind of book is Why Place Matters? This is an academic anthology that includes various essays on the concept of place and community in present-day America—it covers many perspectives and topics and (often conflicting) suggestions and solutions to an agreed upon premise: that the importance of Place has waned in modern American life.
 What kind of book is Elmer Gantry? It’s a novel set at the turn of the twentieth-century in the American Midwest; it too is a coming-of-age tale, but also a tale about a spiritually aloof Protestant, evangelical American minister. Elmer is a rambler, he never settles, not even in the fictitious Midwestern metropolis of Zenith. The Midwest is in fact emphasized throughout the novel as a place. The book also satirizes a good ole boy who chose Christian ministry as a career because he found it the best way to attain power, attention, and influence. Elmer is not so much a charlatan seeking material riches but a football player who wants to be Christ’s number one cheerleader.
Why did you read these books? I read these books initially because they had to do with topics I am experienced and interested in such as: small town life, the dynamics of modern Christian belief, Southern communities (and escape and exile from them)—but also because, even though I often disagree with his premises and conclusions, Dreher is a particularly a good writer, a deep thinker, someone who writes honestly—which is the most difficult thing a writer can achieve. I identify and empathize with him when he writes things like:
And there it was. We would be held responsible for doing more and more to win the Leming children’s love, though it would be impossible to do so because of our original sin: being unlike my father, my sister, and the rest. [5]
The theme of being different versus fitting in was one of the central socio-psychological dilemmas C. S. Lewis faced in adult life. [6]
And throughout the upcoming explorations of these texts, I will try to keep the below maxims in mind as I ask the following questions:
Part of any spiritual discipline, however, is discovering—repeatedly—that one had it all wrong. You both knew and did not know.
––Gregory Bateson [7]
Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?
––William James [8]
We must avail ourselves of every means in our power to see the situation exactly as it is. What, in short, is the real strength of religion in the community? And here we have a right to look for assistance to the psychology of religion. As yet, indeed, but little has been done toward answering this question; but the task of feeling the pulse of the religious community and investigating the real nature and strength of its religious belief naturally belongs to religious psychology, and, though vast, is well worth its while.
––James Bissett Pratt [9]
NOTES
[1] Dreher, Rod. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. NY: Grand Central Publishing. 2013. p. 216; Tolstoy, Sebastopol, last lines of Section II.
[2]Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Comedia. (The Divine Comedy.) Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Introduction by Eugenio Montale. Notes by Peter Armour. NY: Everyman’s Library. 1995.
[4] Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (1886.) Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. “Chapter 09.†But compare also another passage from this story:
Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction. (“Chapter 12â€)
[5] Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: the Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem. NY: Regan Arts. 2015. p. 32.
[6] Lewis, Clive Stapes. “The Inner Ring.†They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses. London: G. Bles. 1962. Lewis’ essay should be compared alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles,†for there is much overlap among them.
[7] Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc. 2005. pp. 105–06.
