Someone quoting my personal ad recently queried me with an honest question, one that, I thought, really gets to a kind of comforting narrative we like to live by these days. He first quoted me as writing,
"And what is more, true, 'real', relationships are time-bound processes; that is, they take and require time, effort, consistency, a long arc. Trouble is, as many people are beginning to realize, our society does not sustain or support that. It's all about the new experiences, eternal newness, novelty spinning 'round and 'round and 'round."
And then replied to me, writing, "I agree about relationships requiring time and effort over a long period. However, without novelty, how does one sustain interest? I think too much tradition and routine leads towards stagnation, no? Change is not always good, but it isn't always bad either. But change is constant, isn't that how time and space work? Without change, don't time and space stand still? And without change, wouldn't a relationship cease to grow and evolve? Novelty keeps things moving, not necessarily in a good or bad direction, but moving. That's what I like about it."
To which I then had this to say:
Thank you for the note, and the comments. I suppose that what I am getting at is that it's possible to over-value novelty or change or newness, and that if anything, ours is a world which has over-glutted itself on such things. Second, it's true that change is a constant, to put the point paradoxically; but there are orders of change, say, the difference between geological or evolutionary time and the time-scale of atomic or intermolecular processes. And then there is our own time, caught in-between the imperceptible changes of geology or evolution and the impossibly short moments of an atom or molecule dissolving. So, it's true that change is a constant, but the significance of the change depends on how fast is fast. In a way, the oldest truth about us is that we're bred or adapted for rapidly changing situations, as faced in the thick of the hunt in a forest or jungle; but the most 'novel' thing about us, now, is our stability, or at least our yearning for it, our desire to produce stable forms that can, for a while, relieve us from the burdens of a rapidly-changing world. I would say that part of what made past civilizations what they were was their hope for eternity -- always doomed, of course, for nothing escapes time, but nonetheless, they won for humanity a moment, if only one that lasts an individual life time, of real endurance, certainty in the face of our changing fortunes as time-bound creatures. Why should we let go of such utopistic thinking? Why should we not be even more idealist here? Why should we not want to add the counterpoint of stability and station to the constancy of change and motion?
Friday, December 2, 2011
in conversation about 'progress' ...
This question of progress has been coming up in my reading recently. When you analyze the concept, I fear that two issues get conflated: scientific/technological (or even purely economic) vs. moral progress. Indeed, that the two notions are conflated so easily is, in my view, an indication that not reason but ideology is at work -- or simply, a kind of theology, the theology of "progress".
In a book on the roots of America's current slow-motion train wreck of a collapse, cultural historian Morris Berman writes: "We want to believe that the future will be better than the past, but there isn't a shred of evidence to back this up. In particular ... scientific progress [add to that, economic, technical or technological progress, etc.] doesn't translate into moral progress; one could reasonably argue that just the opposite is the case. Truth be told ... we are even more superstitious than our medieval forebears; we just don't recognize it. Nor is it likely that we shall abandon these beliefs. It's utopia or bust, even if the odds are weighted toward bust" (Why America Failed, 2012, p. 82).
And the "definition" of progress advanced at the table -- that, ignorant as to which station in life you would assume (a version of Rawls' "veil of ignorance"), any reasonable person would choose the present over any past culture (the idea being that, whatever station you'd actually get when you arrived in the present, the probability of your landing in a better place is greater now than it ever has been) -- really only serves to congratulate ourselves on a few things, all of which are primarily technological achievements, to the exclusion of others. It may be true that we have the technological means of averting famine and of curing many diseases (let us call these pluses in the column of "positive progress", true advances), but equally is it true that not everyone benefits from these things, that nearly 2 billion people are food insecure (the equivalent of the world population a millennium or so ago), that we've also developed the means of mass ecological and strategic/military (i.e, nuclear) devastation -- and this would be serious points in the column of "negative, moral progress". Indeed, one could make a quite powerful case that not only are our so-called positive advancements inextricably bound up with the negatives, but precisely because of our ever-increasing scientific and technical knowledge, the magnitude of the negatives has increased almost immeasurably: unlike human beings c. 1000, human beings c. 2000 has developed armaments that can basically wipe out the species. Thus, while we have made true, real and undeniably good positive scientific and technological progress, so too with the negative progress. What, then, of moral progress? Have we, individually, progressed? We can certainly feed ourselves, cloth ourselves, medicate ourselves (!), and so on ... but are we individually any more morally advanced than our predecessors, say, in Renaissance Europe or ancient India or even Tang Dynasty China (c. 600 -- 815 AD)? On this question of moral progress, it's not so clear -- especially now that we can factor away scientific or technological progress. Indeed, one can argue that we are slipping morally, as human bonds are dissolved in the corrosive acids of consumerism, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues in Does Ethics Have A Chance in a World of Consumers? (the book I mentioned at dinner, which touched off our conversation). From this point of view, it begins to look that either we've made absolutely no moral progress individually, and therefore, summing over the individuals the same; or else we are slipping into a kind of technological/consumerist isolationism, as in the phrase "you're on your own" or "you owe this to yourself", etc.
In any case, the point is that, with the distinction between scientific or economic vs. moral progress in place, it's just not obvious that we've progress at all. Indeed, this seems to be the jist of William Pfaff's review of Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, found in last week's New York Review of books (24 Nov.; vol. LVIII no. 18; p. 69 -- 71). He concludes by noting that Fukuyama's book is not about the past at all, put is a projection -- it's really about the "modern" era, and how we've triumphed, how we've "progressed" (a ridiculous argument now that we've unpacked "progress" -- there's just as much evidence for anti-progress as there is for progress). Pfaff concludes: "Thus Fukuyama continues his search for scientific evidence, comparable to that in the physical sciences, to support a belief in human progress -- the religion of our times, or the myth". Indeed, "progress" finally can have no "evidence", for what we are really talking about is moral progress, and that is squarely outside the purview of quantitative analysis, but wholly within the purview of human existence, which is, truth be told, always a struggle right unto the death.
In a book on the roots of America's current slow-motion train wreck of a collapse, cultural historian Morris Berman writes: "We want to believe that the future will be better than the past, but there isn't a shred of evidence to back this up. In particular ... scientific progress [add to that, economic, technical or technological progress, etc.] doesn't translate into moral progress; one could reasonably argue that just the opposite is the case. Truth be told ... we are even more superstitious than our medieval forebears; we just don't recognize it. Nor is it likely that we shall abandon these beliefs. It's utopia or bust, even if the odds are weighted toward bust" (Why America Failed, 2012, p. 82).
And the "definition" of progress advanced at the table -- that, ignorant as to which station in life you would assume (a version of Rawls' "veil of ignorance"), any reasonable person would choose the present over any past culture (the idea being that, whatever station you'd actually get when you arrived in the present, the probability of your landing in a better place is greater now than it ever has been) -- really only serves to congratulate ourselves on a few things, all of which are primarily technological achievements, to the exclusion of others. It may be true that we have the technological means of averting famine and of curing many diseases (let us call these pluses in the column of "positive progress", true advances), but equally is it true that not everyone benefits from these things, that nearly 2 billion people are food insecure (the equivalent of the world population a millennium or so ago), that we've also developed the means of mass ecological and strategic/military (i.e, nuclear) devastation -- and this would be serious points in the column of "negative, moral progress". Indeed, one could make a quite powerful case that not only are our so-called positive advancements inextricably bound up with the negatives, but precisely because of our ever-increasing scientific and technical knowledge, the magnitude of the negatives has increased almost immeasurably: unlike human beings c. 1000, human beings c. 2000 has developed armaments that can basically wipe out the species. Thus, while we have made true, real and undeniably good positive scientific and technological progress, so too with the negative progress. What, then, of moral progress? Have we, individually, progressed? We can certainly feed ourselves, cloth ourselves, medicate ourselves (!), and so on ... but are we individually any more morally advanced than our predecessors, say, in Renaissance Europe or ancient India or even Tang Dynasty China (c. 600 -- 815 AD)? On this question of moral progress, it's not so clear -- especially now that we can factor away scientific or technological progress. Indeed, one can argue that we are slipping morally, as human bonds are dissolved in the corrosive acids of consumerism, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues in Does Ethics Have A Chance in a World of Consumers? (the book I mentioned at dinner, which touched off our conversation). From this point of view, it begins to look that either we've made absolutely no moral progress individually, and therefore, summing over the individuals the same; or else we are slipping into a kind of technological/consumerist isolationism, as in the phrase "you're on your own" or "you owe this to yourself", etc.
In any case, the point is that, with the distinction between scientific or economic vs. moral progress in place, it's just not obvious that we've progress at all. Indeed, this seems to be the jist of William Pfaff's review of Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, found in last week's New York Review of books (24 Nov.; vol. LVIII no. 18; p. 69 -- 71). He concludes by noting that Fukuyama's book is not about the past at all, put is a projection -- it's really about the "modern" era, and how we've triumphed, how we've "progressed" (a ridiculous argument now that we've unpacked "progress" -- there's just as much evidence for anti-progress as there is for progress). Pfaff concludes: "Thus Fukuyama continues his search for scientific evidence, comparable to that in the physical sciences, to support a belief in human progress -- the religion of our times, or the myth". Indeed, "progress" finally can have no "evidence", for what we are really talking about is moral progress, and that is squarely outside the purview of quantitative analysis, but wholly within the purview of human existence, which is, truth be told, always a struggle right unto the death.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
anti-Jobs and the contradiction of social experience
Here's the sort of perspective I take on Jobs ... and when I look around me and people are afforded easy ways of disengaging with everyone else around them by staring into their i-This or i-That, you realize that what you're witnessing is the (further) dismantling of what was left of a social experience.
The rebuttal that this is just a fact now (ubiquity of the tech devices) that we're going to have to live with, and that we are finding new forms of social experience by means of them, etc. etc., really rings historically hollow to me when the same thing could have been said after Rome collapsed c. 457 and Europe descended into some pretty dark times, with loss of basic knowledge of farming, loss of learning (unless you count anthologizing & indexing), and so on -- which collapse happened precisely at Rome's 'highest' point of development. Would we have said that, well, we'll just have to learn to live without knowledge of farming and do without complex thought & learning, etc.? Seems pretty absurd to me. Same goes for loss of social experience. And we should be clear: tapping on a screen to a disembodied head or going back and forth with lines of text does not count as a 'social' experience -- it's something else and constitutes a departure from it. It is a greater idealism & romanticism to retain the idea that this in fact is 'social' than to decry a loss such as I do here (and it is a loss: the replacement of one thing for something entirely different yet seemingly the same). No, we should be more radical here: we've given up 'social' and abandoned it to something entirely different, but which is sold to us (literally) as merely another form of what we are already (supposedly) in love with, social experience, being social. We are lured by the verisimilitude, and this allurement merely proves decisively our romantic & idealistic attachment to sociality. Here is where brutal honesty is needed: 'social media' etc. is not social; sociality has simply been negated by the technological form, which retains a simulacrum of the original . Rather, what it "is", is technological media conjoined to separated, spatially distanced people, alone together. It is a media that prevents the abandonment of aloneness by populating that solitude with more lone figures. 'Social media' is a romantic & idealistic fiction, trying to hide what it actually is in the skin of what it has actually abandoned.
Of course, we eventually got the Scientific and Commercial Revolutions out of the collapsed civilization of Rome (c. AD 1600, i.e. 1000 years later or so), but plenty of things had to be rediscovered before that (like how to reason out complicated geometrical demonstrations from ancient Greek texts, an ability that most scholars of the Dark Ages would agree had been lost by about AD 800). In other words, as Rome fell some basic cultural things were lost, and then they returned (perhaps even renewed precisely because of the collapse).
Thus, my argument would be that rather than inaugurating a breathtaking new epoch of technological progress that takes man to a higher state of civilization, this techno infatuation could simply be the very thing that does us in -- the 'progress' is our decline.
But that's just my bet, and the point I'm making is that it's as likely as any other.
The rebuttal that this is just a fact now (ubiquity of the tech devices) that we're going to have to live with, and that we are finding new forms of social experience by means of them, etc. etc., really rings historically hollow to me when the same thing could have been said after Rome collapsed c. 457 and Europe descended into some pretty dark times, with loss of basic knowledge of farming, loss of learning (unless you count anthologizing & indexing), and so on -- which collapse happened precisely at Rome's 'highest' point of development. Would we have said that, well, we'll just have to learn to live without knowledge of farming and do without complex thought & learning, etc.? Seems pretty absurd to me. Same goes for loss of social experience. And we should be clear: tapping on a screen to a disembodied head or going back and forth with lines of text does not count as a 'social' experience -- it's something else and constitutes a departure from it. It is a greater idealism & romanticism to retain the idea that this in fact is 'social' than to decry a loss such as I do here (and it is a loss: the replacement of one thing for something entirely different yet seemingly the same). No, we should be more radical here: we've given up 'social' and abandoned it to something entirely different, but which is sold to us (literally) as merely another form of what we are already (supposedly) in love with, social experience, being social. We are lured by the verisimilitude, and this allurement merely proves decisively our romantic & idealistic attachment to sociality. Here is where brutal honesty is needed: 'social media' etc. is not social; sociality has simply been negated by the technological form, which retains a simulacrum of the original . Rather, what it "is", is technological media conjoined to separated, spatially distanced people, alone together. It is a media that prevents the abandonment of aloneness by populating that solitude with more lone figures. 'Social media' is a romantic & idealistic fiction, trying to hide what it actually is in the skin of what it has actually abandoned.
Of course, we eventually got the Scientific and Commercial Revolutions out of the collapsed civilization of Rome (c. AD 1600, i.e. 1000 years later or so), but plenty of things had to be rediscovered before that (like how to reason out complicated geometrical demonstrations from ancient Greek texts, an ability that most scholars of the Dark Ages would agree had been lost by about AD 800). In other words, as Rome fell some basic cultural things were lost, and then they returned (perhaps even renewed precisely because of the collapse).
Thus, my argument would be that rather than inaugurating a breathtaking new epoch of technological progress that takes man to a higher state of civilization, this techno infatuation could simply be the very thing that does us in -- the 'progress' is our decline.
But that's just my bet, and the point I'm making is that it's as likely as any other.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Talk about simpletons: I watched a "debate" between Prof. Roger Scruton (Brit philosopher) & your typical American "thinker" -- in this case, Tyler Cowen -- who, characteristically it seems, is the "data" guy, the neo-neo-empiricist/pragmatist with neo-behaviorist leanings (the compounding is intended: American thought struggles to both reproduce and throw off still the shadow of European thought). Cowen played the representative of the hard numbers &facts, against the soft, spiritual-leaning erudition of the British clear-headed academic philosopher. After an articulation of a typically conservative narrative anchored in the old distinction between "quantity" (the numbers and stats) vs. "quality" (the inner details of the human being whose spiritual core, expressed in one key as friendship, eludes quantitative analysis or statistical charts), Scruton does in fact rightly suggest that strictly statistical analysis is lacking; but as to what exactly? ... this seemed to be the magnificently implied deeper question which, begging for specification in the otherwise clarion tones of this British philosopher (an analytic don to be sure), could not be adumbrated in the alotted five minutes poorly constructed aphorisms of the slightly disheveled academic intellectual, charged with championing this fading shadow of authentic friendship in the age of F-book and T-er, etc.
Cowen replies with all the positives he could muster, listing stat after stat, spouting all gushy over "data" -- it's empirical, he kept repeating, as in: unquestionable, authoritative. Study X reports that bonds are in fact strengthened, not weakened, by social media; study Y shows that, in fact, bonds that existed prior to the mediation remain, untrammeled; study Z shows that there are a proliferation of social relationships for your average social media user, as opposed to much lower rates for -- surprise! -- those previous unfortunates who had to depend on the telephone (so, if anything, ye disbelievers, damn the phone, not the Net). And so on, unto nauseating infinity.
I was shocked that Scruton could only resort to some fluffy stuff ... I am not concerned with the quantity, but rather with the quality of the social relationships (but he is now cornered, by this attempted refutation, with supplying a criterion; but then the retort by the tech champion Cowen is, always: but why doesn't SM count under your criterion?, etc.); and this typical maneuver is followed with a line about true friendship being a spiritual affair, or some such holdover from a Romantic tradition that tried to refute the startling superciliousness of the philosophes who wished all to be returned to the analytic bosom of Science, the human being nothing more than a collection of atomic material moments collected for a time by, it would seem, chance (the change meeting of another man, woman, and so on around the human billiards table).
The venerable position of the British philosopher, I say: all true, ... yes, yes Cowen is a naif when it comes to this patently superficial celebration of technological forms of sociality (Cowen seems uninformed of the major twentieth or even nineteenth century critical thought, primarily in Europe, that was neither naive nor exaggerated); but Scruton's remarks play right in to the data worship: after all, how can you "measure" that stuff, right? Scruton couldn't quite express his (sound) intuition that there's something profoundly rotten about tech-ized friendships. The problem is precisely that it's not all bad or all good, and it's philosophically unneeded to try to show that one form is "better" than another, or more "authentic". The point is merely to unmask the illusions & nonsense presented in celebration of technological friendship, and how it is precisely -- and simply -- the very distinction between tech. and non-tech. forms of it that gets blurred and finally eradicated in favor of a new form which is neither all good nor all bad. Indeed, when this distinction becomes blurry (or when it is called into question as even a valid one to draw), then the ideological tricks are played: F-book is so great, "social" media is a great boon -- hurray, humanity has progressed.
Total bullshit: social media is used to track down friends & family for State purposes (harassment, death squads, etc.), used to locate dissidents etc. as much as anything else (a never-ending threat that just dons the latest garb for its purposes). But that's the cheap-shot argument.
Tech forms of this or that always pose for us a radical possibility, which is two-fold: (1) inasmuch as a tech form with which I interact presents to me an opaque and inert objective form, to which I must submit in order to get it to "work", I die, I am in a condition of unfreedom. But (2) from the side of the tech. device itself, it is humanity -- a human being -- which poses a radical question to the thing, and offers it the possibility of true freedom, which only we contain as beings open to choice, etc. In other words: the form of the device already constrains us, transforming our relations through its use, remaking those relations in its image. That is our unfreedom; to the extent that we do not remake the device in turn (which means, renounce its inertial form), we are mere slaves to it. But how do we renounce the form and regain freedom, without at the same time acting as if the tech forms do not (or should not) even exist? This seems to me the real, the substantial, question. Posed in this way, we avoid stupid celebrationism, or naive reactionism; we neither embrace nor revere. We see it simply for what it is: a battle, and a promise ... merely a field of confrontations, and a glimmer of hope which only a human being may offer to the other side. The nemesis, if there be one, is to be found within the mere gulf, the separation, between human beings and devices, never emergent from either one singly.
But, the American "thinkers" are not likely to be able to have that conversation, and sadly the Brit doesn't have time for this Hegelian "nonsense" either. A shame. Scruton is sincere if himself ill-prepared or ill-studied on these questions; Cowen simply a joke of a thinker, buried under numbers he has now power to meaningfully bring to the table of human debates.
Cowen replies with all the positives he could muster, listing stat after stat, spouting all gushy over "data" -- it's empirical, he kept repeating, as in: unquestionable, authoritative. Study X reports that bonds are in fact strengthened, not weakened, by social media; study Y shows that, in fact, bonds that existed prior to the mediation remain, untrammeled; study Z shows that there are a proliferation of social relationships for your average social media user, as opposed to much lower rates for -- surprise! -- those previous unfortunates who had to depend on the telephone (so, if anything, ye disbelievers, damn the phone, not the Net). And so on, unto nauseating infinity.
I was shocked that Scruton could only resort to some fluffy stuff ... I am not concerned with the quantity, but rather with the quality of the social relationships (but he is now cornered, by this attempted refutation, with supplying a criterion; but then the retort by the tech champion Cowen is, always: but why doesn't SM count under your criterion?, etc.); and this typical maneuver is followed with a line about true friendship being a spiritual affair, or some such holdover from a Romantic tradition that tried to refute the startling superciliousness of the philosophes who wished all to be returned to the analytic bosom of Science, the human being nothing more than a collection of atomic material moments collected for a time by, it would seem, chance (the change meeting of another man, woman, and so on around the human billiards table).
The venerable position of the British philosopher, I say: all true, ... yes, yes Cowen is a naif when it comes to this patently superficial celebration of technological forms of sociality (Cowen seems uninformed of the major twentieth or even nineteenth century critical thought, primarily in Europe, that was neither naive nor exaggerated); but Scruton's remarks play right in to the data worship: after all, how can you "measure" that stuff, right? Scruton couldn't quite express his (sound) intuition that there's something profoundly rotten about tech-ized friendships. The problem is precisely that it's not all bad or all good, and it's philosophically unneeded to try to show that one form is "better" than another, or more "authentic". The point is merely to unmask the illusions & nonsense presented in celebration of technological friendship, and how it is precisely -- and simply -- the very distinction between tech. and non-tech. forms of it that gets blurred and finally eradicated in favor of a new form which is neither all good nor all bad. Indeed, when this distinction becomes blurry (or when it is called into question as even a valid one to draw), then the ideological tricks are played: F-book is so great, "social" media is a great boon -- hurray, humanity has progressed.
Total bullshit: social media is used to track down friends & family for State purposes (harassment, death squads, etc.), used to locate dissidents etc. as much as anything else (a never-ending threat that just dons the latest garb for its purposes). But that's the cheap-shot argument.
Tech forms of this or that always pose for us a radical possibility, which is two-fold: (1) inasmuch as a tech form with which I interact presents to me an opaque and inert objective form, to which I must submit in order to get it to "work", I die, I am in a condition of unfreedom. But (2) from the side of the tech. device itself, it is humanity -- a human being -- which poses a radical question to the thing, and offers it the possibility of true freedom, which only we contain as beings open to choice, etc. In other words: the form of the device already constrains us, transforming our relations through its use, remaking those relations in its image. That is our unfreedom; to the extent that we do not remake the device in turn (which means, renounce its inertial form), we are mere slaves to it. But how do we renounce the form and regain freedom, without at the same time acting as if the tech forms do not (or should not) even exist? This seems to me the real, the substantial, question. Posed in this way, we avoid stupid celebrationism, or naive reactionism; we neither embrace nor revere. We see it simply for what it is: a battle, and a promise ... merely a field of confrontations, and a glimmer of hope which only a human being may offer to the other side. The nemesis, if there be one, is to be found within the mere gulf, the separation, between human beings and devices, never emergent from either one singly.
But, the American "thinkers" are not likely to be able to have that conversation, and sadly the Brit doesn't have time for this Hegelian "nonsense" either. A shame. Scruton is sincere if himself ill-prepared or ill-studied on these questions; Cowen simply a joke of a thinker, buried under numbers he has now power to meaningfully bring to the table of human debates.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
the "Blase" Attitude in Internet Dating
Dear P,
Interestingly, several people have now written in to report the feelings you've just written about. As a pen-pal of mine puts it, at some point, when you get enough anecdotal evidence, they call it "data".
There is some kind of paradox or inconsistency inherent to these social media things, esp. when it comes to dating, romance, finding a mate, and so on. The dilemma we face is that, on the one hand, on some level, we all know that forming a relationship with substance takes real effort, and cannot be sustained on the basis of what's convenient for either person (lots of compromises are needed, etc.; and more deeply you go beyond even 'compromise' to living in tandem with the other person, for better or worse); on the other hand, we also realize how easy it is to meet anyone, in theory at least, and so, given that ease, there is a perpetual tendency to move on at the slightest bit of dis-ease (in fact, the "move on to find what suits you best" sort of logic is what the 'Net, being consumer-oriented, is all about in the end -- but there's no end to that; hence, fatigue, frustration). The problem is that this "move-on" logic just doesn't ever go away, does it? In some sense, there's always that problem: before the internet, there were bars, taverns ... the general public, a sea of other potential partners, mates, etc.
The important thing to realize is that, with the 'Net, what is new is the ease, anonymity and consumer-oriented nature of the whole thing, and the (implicit) understanding that "my needs can be met" and "I can get what I want instantaneously" (like a call-up on Amazon.com or whatever). Previously, you were more or less caught within various relatively permanent yet local social & cultural situations; not traveling much outside your hometown, you were bound by local expectations, etc. If you violated them, you had to live a double-life, and so there was allot to dissuade you from violating these locally-based expectations. Add to that the constraints of family and jobs and you have what some call a "solid" modern world; now, with such ease of movement, ease of shopping -- the general ease of getting what you want -- we're in a "liquid" modern world where social bonds are quite fragile, easy to loose but in fact easy to obtain (hence, OKCupid).
What is most painful, it seems to me, is that, having now gone on multiple dates with multiple people, the repetition is simply fatiguing. Moving from one person to the next literally drains each one of any inherent significance, the more and more you meet (the early twentieth century German thinker Simmel spoke about this, calling it the "blase" attitude).
Our pains are similar to the pains we suffered in the old "solid" world; but they are also different ... we have new problems to contend with. How do we deal with them? I would answer that -- and is this not what cultures have always taught their children? -- a life without guidance, a life without guides (if only ideals that, transcending any one of us, stand silently above us pointing the way home) is an aimless life.
Who or what are our guides, esp. as we grow older, and as we come to maturity increasingly later in life?
Interestingly, several people have now written in to report the feelings you've just written about. As a pen-pal of mine puts it, at some point, when you get enough anecdotal evidence, they call it "data".
There is some kind of paradox or inconsistency inherent to these social media things, esp. when it comes to dating, romance, finding a mate, and so on. The dilemma we face is that, on the one hand, on some level, we all know that forming a relationship with substance takes real effort, and cannot be sustained on the basis of what's convenient for either person (lots of compromises are needed, etc.; and more deeply you go beyond even 'compromise' to living in tandem with the other person, for better or worse); on the other hand, we also realize how easy it is to meet anyone, in theory at least, and so, given that ease, there is a perpetual tendency to move on at the slightest bit of dis-ease (in fact, the "move on to find what suits you best" sort of logic is what the 'Net, being consumer-oriented, is all about in the end -- but there's no end to that; hence, fatigue, frustration). The problem is that this "move-on" logic just doesn't ever go away, does it? In some sense, there's always that problem: before the internet, there were bars, taverns ... the general public, a sea of other potential partners, mates, etc.
The important thing to realize is that, with the 'Net, what is new is the ease, anonymity and consumer-oriented nature of the whole thing, and the (implicit) understanding that "my needs can be met" and "I can get what I want instantaneously" (like a call-up on Amazon.com or whatever). Previously, you were more or less caught within various relatively permanent yet local social & cultural situations; not traveling much outside your hometown, you were bound by local expectations, etc. If you violated them, you had to live a double-life, and so there was allot to dissuade you from violating these locally-based expectations. Add to that the constraints of family and jobs and you have what some call a "solid" modern world; now, with such ease of movement, ease of shopping -- the general ease of getting what you want -- we're in a "liquid" modern world where social bonds are quite fragile, easy to loose but in fact easy to obtain (hence, OKCupid).
What is most painful, it seems to me, is that, having now gone on multiple dates with multiple people, the repetition is simply fatiguing. Moving from one person to the next literally drains each one of any inherent significance, the more and more you meet (the early twentieth century German thinker Simmel spoke about this, calling it the "blase" attitude).
Our pains are similar to the pains we suffered in the old "solid" world; but they are also different ... we have new problems to contend with. How do we deal with them? I would answer that -- and is this not what cultures have always taught their children? -- a life without guidance, a life without guides (if only ideals that, transcending any one of us, stand silently above us pointing the way home) is an aimless life.
Who or what are our guides, esp. as we grow older, and as we come to maturity increasingly later in life?
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Low and the new Beauty
If 'consistency' were to be given a concrete form, it would be the music of Low. I would argue for an obvious thesis: Low is a band of but one, continuous, evolving Song. The moments when the band stops playing their music seem like a kind of annoyance in the over-all flow; this rest is really just the trough of a single wave motion whose crest is a volume and not a speed: Low can become loud, with the force of its four members playing full-volume, or Low can become soft, brushing at its few drums or plucking softly at its two guitars; and then it can be thinned to a single player, vocalizing over a wisp of a strummed melody. There is no 'fast' for Low; they are adagio.
Settled in a warm church sanctuary (First Unitarian, Philadelphia), after a hot late April day, we first heard Eliot, blowing into a melodica and singing -- intoning, chanting -- a harmonious song. It seemed to be a paean to beauty, in a haunting, ancient mode that matched the Gothic-like architecture that surrounded us. Eliot's musical forces reflected the utter one-ness (for lack of a better term) of this whole musical event (or 'phenomenon' -- I will try to explain in a moment). There were few instruments for Eliot (who seemed to even be beyond gender -- beyond the duality of sexual dimorphism): voice, melodica, guitar, and finally, a banjo so tuned or played -- maybe shaped by the church sanctuary itself? -- as to seem like something ancient, a lost instrument whose music was falling upon us with alien tones. The songs -- again, all seemed to be mere fragments of a whole -- seemed to be songs of love, songs to and about poetry, about integration, putting pieces together (re-union), and they were a gesture towards beauty for its own sake, self-contained, looking inward, finding utter stillness, calm, equanimity ...
There were many elements, at once ancient and terribly contemporary, being grasped this evening within these musics. I want to sketch some of them, put the pieces to you, so that, one after another, their juxtaposition will, I hope, suggest what the significance of this musical phenomenon is for us, early 21st century wanderers in a ruin of cultural fragments.
In a society now completely overwhelmed by distractions, cold calls, continuous on-line engagements, these musics were like a Mass: a holy sacrifice, cut out of the workaday world of noise and clutter, whose performance was a renewal of spirit, a reminder of what the whole purpose of life is: union, integration, Love (putting together elements that have been flung apart). Sacred spaces have always been about shelter, refuge, contemplation, renewal, renovation, rejuvenation, solitude before something greater than your self, putting your selfishness into stark relief: against this sanctuary, this holiness, you are like a nothing, a fleeting wisp, your sorrows fade in the glow of My Love for thee. Seated in pews, almost in devotion, we listed in silence.
There were no references in the musics; there were few lyrics: this music was not 'about' anything outside itself. It was a turn inward. Perhaps another bold thesis, if an obvious one: this music returns to an ancient perspective: do not disturb the soul as it finds itself lost in solitude with the holy Mass. Love, if real, cannot be forced or coaxed into being by considerations external to the lovers. There were ancient, and to us, seemingly brutal and unjust, proclamations decrying the use of music during Mass. Before this, Plato had been perturbed by the emotional possibilities of art (poetry in particular; music less worrisome). We have so venerated the free and liberal expressions of art in our time that we have lost two things in the process: the aim of spiritual freedom; and a coherent perception of sacredness. Yet what we found this evening were two powerful possibilities being actualized, or just, perhaps less grand, essayed: art made into a living movement of soul, art become a holy Mass. For ancient Christians, the Mass was a ritual wholly separated from musics; for Plato before them, Truth was a form only very incompletely indicated by anything visible, audible, sensible. You can see the contrary motion now: Christianity taught renewal of the spirit in the flesh (the Easter proclamation), thus correcting Plato; and then music was incorporated into the Mass, slowly and with reservations (polyphonic music was at first seen as too passionate, too disturbing only to later become officially recognized as spiritually edifying. Again, this is a correction to Plato). Now we have something else, something that, while ancient in perspective, could only be contemporary: the Mass is music, music the Mass. Music is not an appendix to the main story -- this is what constitutes our sacredness. I do not express love through art or music; music is the act of Love, recreated as the Mass recreates the passion of a Christ: life, death and resurrection, that is, renewal of the spirit in the flesh, now, here not elsewhere (in this way, the Mass has only even been about the dynamic motions of Love).
How utterly devotional they were this evening; how utterly un-modern. In the sixties, music was divided: there were musics within the system, and there were musics utterly against it, against its annihilating bureaucratic, monolith of a death-impulse. To a crushing death of spirit, folk music spoke verses of life, peace, wholeness through dissent; it spoke about equality and resistance, not the nullifying and titillating sugar-verses of the plastic bands, mouthing the lullabies of Truth. But in this resistance to the modern bureaucratic system, the system became stronger, more reticent, more voracious in its consumption of all art and human expression. The sixties rebels were ultimately caught in a dialectical bind: the more they pushed, the stronger the opposing pushes, and therefore the more exaggerated and overblown must the rebels become. Until, finally, Rock (an outgrowth of Folk) lost its essence. I can think of that chilling song, sung as Rock gasped for life, sung by Neil Young as Rust Never Sleeps. "Rock will never die," he wails. We can return to Plato for a moment: the truth does transcend the incompleteness of what we can say or do or feel or see or taste or touch with our human hands; the essence slips through. The essence of Rock, a search of love, never dies; it just slips through and, we hope, is reborn somewhere else. But this should not become a morbid hope, a listless search -- and so we must let the visible, audible form of Rock slip away, as we sing, with Neil Young, that this rust never shall sleep.
The hipster generation, much maligned, has let slip the morbid concern with sixties "fight the power" (in its day venerable and necessary). It has, after the eighties and nineties confusions, emerged as a kind of self-contented association of those in need of real culture, with a thirst for creation, and lacking the ambitions of established culture-bearers. Their talents are nascent; their productions small and focused, quiet and needful. There was no anger this evening; nothing but a whiff of concern for justice against injustice: not about big causes, but about local concerns ramified by larger realities (injustice, for example, in the juvenile criminal detention system of Pennsylvania). But this largeness of social and political justice was set aside for inner concerns, which is the only "justice" possible, in the end. The ancient Stoic philosophers remind us that though a man may take my body, may crush it, may tear it to pieces, he may never take my soul, my essence -- and this evening, with attendance mostly of a younger "hipster" sort, songs of spirit, or essence, were sung. They were not about 'essence' or 'spirit'; they constituted the very thing itself. (I will not labor our considerations with morbid talk of 'authenticity' and searches for truth, and so on; funny how the very substance of authenticity includes more than just the concern about it. This is slowly being understood: too much concern for a thing manages to kill that thing itself. We are saying goodbye to modernity and postmodernity by forgetting about it: like awaking from a powerful dream, only to struggle to recall what it was all about, and in that act, you manage to destroy the dream and are thereby pushed to live your life, until the next dream. And so it goes.)
What was going on here, this evening, within these old church walls? I have suggested that what was happening was a confluence of ancient and terribly contemporary things, that, in a way, our contemporary world was being reborn through an ancient vision. The roots of the word temple, or church, go back to ancient Greek words used to talk about the theater, where they set apart a recreation of the struggles of life into and out of death; and from this the Greeks derived a new, philosophical word: theoria, from which we get "theory". A theory is a sacred vision, an insight into reality, a recreation of a portion of that whole reality with our inner vision which, while seeing concrete things, can, as imagination, fly free of them. This is what really worries the gatekeepers of spiritual purity, in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, down to our times, when they worry us about Art: disturbing the soul, distracting it by the free play of the imagination to no good end. But the snare of these spiritual purists is ironic: they say truth is beyond specifiable form, yet they have the conceit to lay down specific injunctions against specific forms! By a kind of withdrawal from the world, these musics answer the spiritual purist without being spiritual purism. This fact, this non-purism, is significant in itself: by not being about grand themes, or not organized around specifiable notions of this-or-that, by simply being what it is, it is pure, not modern, not postmodern, nothing but itself; not concerned with doctrine but with doing, singing, opening up space, sacredness, silence, stillness ... the things themselves which morbid notions try desperately, under the crushing weight of intellectual history, to indicate, to grasp. Sujan Stevens, in a remarkable interview, complained of this crushing weight in his musical context, and his complaint was about something both practical and theoretical: how could one truly express and even be heard, against such a density of musical history? Yes, he is worried about authenticity, but his concern is authenticity itself, and is a sincere questioning of the possibility of art, of what expressions are left to us, of what 'originality' could mean as civilization wears on, and complexifies, densifies, and agglomerates its cultural productions into museums stuffed with cultural goods. As the productions continue, our minds are turned into museums, robbed of living essence, confused by old forms, lost, listless. What else is there to do?
As I have said, anti-establishment is not what the "hipster" is about, nor is it what those associated that evening were "about" (to repeat: there was no "aboutness" at all). It simply is renovation, self-contained, self-moved, and, I would hazard another thesis: self-emptying. The boldness of Eliot and Low was its sobriety, its calmness and equanimity. Into this space we can pour -- yet another thesis I put forward -- our many civilizations, and their many various ideas. These musics open up a space of universality not possible on the uncertain backs of tired notions rendered stiff by the contortions of a self-absorbed civilization (the essence, I think, of Sufjan's worry).
The de-intellectualized is-ness of this music is unique, as I have tried to show: at once ancient and terribly contemporary. I called it, awkwardly, a "phenomenon", but I am, again awkwardly, trying to indicate something more specific than this tired term has an ability to convey.
Johann von Goethe, whom we usually know as a poet, was also a kind of philosophical naturalist or "natural philosopher" in the appropriate terminology of the day (18th century Europe). He speculated that his work in this area would be remembered more than his literary productions; history had another fate for him: almost forgotten were (are) his works on natural philosophy, his study of color (in opposition to Newton's mechanical analysis), and his many studies of plant life (anticipating and going beyond Darwinian evolutionism). Each individual plant, he saw, was a living form (here we are harkening back to Plato, but rejuvenating him), a "phänomen" dynamically related to what he called an "Urphänomen", the "original", "highest" (and most "general") form. Each plant, each species, is a "One which is Many", to sum up his idea in somewhat mystical terms. Think about how you can take a cutting of a plant, root it, and thereby derive another "individual" plant, which is actually a continuation of the "original" plant from which you derived the cutting. Think about the significance of this (biological) act: many plants derive from one which is itself, literally, from another, and so on; we arrive at a (non-mystical) "One which is Many". The seeds of plants may even be dried and stored for years to be germinated and brought to full form again, reproducing the mother plant, continuing this "One which is Many" indefinitely into the future.
Oswald Spengler tried to apply this "morphology" (the term is Goethe's own) to cultural forms in a bold attempt to study the density of civilizations in a new way: by looking at their morphological relationships -- as living forms -- rather than studying their purely chronological orderings (the succession of "one damn thing after another"), as dead and frozen "facts" or "events" strung, immobilized, like beads on a necklace. This Goethean approach to culture is, I think, helpful here, as it allows me to convey to you the phenomenon of what I witnessed but more accurately: these musics were all of a piece; and individually, they were "phänomen": cuttings from one whole, a dynamic One with Many moments, originally unified but momentarily brought out into a definite form. The moments where the music was absent from our ears were the snips cutting the One, the performances themselves the Many, rooting before us in the stillness of the sanctuary. These musics were unities; they were Love.
There was more going on here in these musics that I can convey at length in the space of a single essay. I hope that I have sketched some of the more important, the more significant, without draping a shroud of sterile notions over this phenomenon, unintentionally hiding it from your view. I have also to reflect, if only briefly, on the meaning of a "review" of musical performances -- yet another form laden with historical accretions at once venerable, useful and also deadening...
Ours is a culture searching, fragmented, confused, lost amidst a wealth of options which, in the end, is our very poverty. Ironically, the brilliance of civilization has now burned us (and we could make this more than metaphoric, as we look upon the tormented globe, with its violent quakes and rains and winds and lightnings, and the terrible power now released from its long-dormant radioactive ores). Returning are what we thought lost forms of human oppression: the Feudal State (the debilitating bureaucratic machine worried about during the sixties and seventies), but now floating high above us in the rarefied environs of the globalized (with the Internet acting in the main as its sustaining cocoon, thoroughly colonized). In our world medieval (and let us wax for a moment somberly poetic), as in our prior world medieval, we found pockets of sacred space, following the brutalization of civilizations, with its penchant for the inner life. Yes, it was, during the Dark Ages, a period of little exuberance, of little outward, joyful explorations of individual expression, or of triumphal regal celebrations (little to celebrate in the joyless world of a crumbling, outer, civilization it must have seemed). Surely there was regal triumphalism; there were festivals, liturgical and civil, raising the spirits of the people a notch or two above the bland sobriety of days, and the sorrows of disease and the barbarity of life outside your village, or city, or your monastery. But the land was lighted with flickering inner lights, castles of spirit, containing a flame, passing it on one to another during the Dark Times, in the hopes of starting a fire again for the minds of future generations, hope for a dying civilization. They became somber, earnest, bland even, in their spiritual concerns; they lost fluency with their parent civilization, and could no longer understand the ancient tongue, or comprehend the joyful poems and discourses of their distant forefathers. But they cultivated something without quite knowing what is was, having lost the "critical" spirit of an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher.
What I was a witness to, I think, was a moment -- a microcosm, really -- of cultural significance the language for which we, I, struggle to find in order to do justice to this phenomenon ... of the "hipster" culture, of these musics of Beauty, of Low, of Eliot wailing softly, equilibrating in her self-emptying songs. Our well-worn forms (of language, of musical and intellectual expression) are failing us -- but under their own weight. We are crushed, with Sufjan, under the weight of our civilization, gasping for new air, for new life, for renewal, for spiritual rebirth.
But, as with our first medieval epoch, we must pause, and take a moment in the sanctuary to ask: as the second medieval epoch dawns, will I become a blank slate, going dumb, or will I keep the flame of Beauty within my soul, keeping an inner sanctuary, celebrating an inner Mass, renewing my spirit, in music, as music -- as art?
Religion (without the one idea I have deliberately refused to mention, to write down, to use) has a funny way of creeping up on a civilization. But the essence of religion slips through the gates of our feudal institutions, it slips from the musicians' fingers, from the philosophers' prose it is drained. But, in wholeness, as Music, as Mass, it is reborn ... has been reborn.
I should like to "thank" Eliot and Low; but I don't want to disturb their souls with my prose and to clutter their is-ness with my notions. But thanks, in any case.
Settled in a warm church sanctuary (First Unitarian, Philadelphia), after a hot late April day, we first heard Eliot, blowing into a melodica and singing -- intoning, chanting -- a harmonious song. It seemed to be a paean to beauty, in a haunting, ancient mode that matched the Gothic-like architecture that surrounded us. Eliot's musical forces reflected the utter one-ness (for lack of a better term) of this whole musical event (or 'phenomenon' -- I will try to explain in a moment). There were few instruments for Eliot (who seemed to even be beyond gender -- beyond the duality of sexual dimorphism): voice, melodica, guitar, and finally, a banjo so tuned or played -- maybe shaped by the church sanctuary itself? -- as to seem like something ancient, a lost instrument whose music was falling upon us with alien tones. The songs -- again, all seemed to be mere fragments of a whole -- seemed to be songs of love, songs to and about poetry, about integration, putting pieces together (re-union), and they were a gesture towards beauty for its own sake, self-contained, looking inward, finding utter stillness, calm, equanimity ...
There were many elements, at once ancient and terribly contemporary, being grasped this evening within these musics. I want to sketch some of them, put the pieces to you, so that, one after another, their juxtaposition will, I hope, suggest what the significance of this musical phenomenon is for us, early 21st century wanderers in a ruin of cultural fragments.
In a society now completely overwhelmed by distractions, cold calls, continuous on-line engagements, these musics were like a Mass: a holy sacrifice, cut out of the workaday world of noise and clutter, whose performance was a renewal of spirit, a reminder of what the whole purpose of life is: union, integration, Love (putting together elements that have been flung apart). Sacred spaces have always been about shelter, refuge, contemplation, renewal, renovation, rejuvenation, solitude before something greater than your self, putting your selfishness into stark relief: against this sanctuary, this holiness, you are like a nothing, a fleeting wisp, your sorrows fade in the glow of My Love for thee. Seated in pews, almost in devotion, we listed in silence.
There were no references in the musics; there were few lyrics: this music was not 'about' anything outside itself. It was a turn inward. Perhaps another bold thesis, if an obvious one: this music returns to an ancient perspective: do not disturb the soul as it finds itself lost in solitude with the holy Mass. Love, if real, cannot be forced or coaxed into being by considerations external to the lovers. There were ancient, and to us, seemingly brutal and unjust, proclamations decrying the use of music during Mass. Before this, Plato had been perturbed by the emotional possibilities of art (poetry in particular; music less worrisome). We have so venerated the free and liberal expressions of art in our time that we have lost two things in the process: the aim of spiritual freedom; and a coherent perception of sacredness. Yet what we found this evening were two powerful possibilities being actualized, or just, perhaps less grand, essayed: art made into a living movement of soul, art become a holy Mass. For ancient Christians, the Mass was a ritual wholly separated from musics; for Plato before them, Truth was a form only very incompletely indicated by anything visible, audible, sensible. You can see the contrary motion now: Christianity taught renewal of the spirit in the flesh (the Easter proclamation), thus correcting Plato; and then music was incorporated into the Mass, slowly and with reservations (polyphonic music was at first seen as too passionate, too disturbing only to later become officially recognized as spiritually edifying. Again, this is a correction to Plato). Now we have something else, something that, while ancient in perspective, could only be contemporary: the Mass is music, music the Mass. Music is not an appendix to the main story -- this is what constitutes our sacredness. I do not express love through art or music; music is the act of Love, recreated as the Mass recreates the passion of a Christ: life, death and resurrection, that is, renewal of the spirit in the flesh, now, here not elsewhere (in this way, the Mass has only even been about the dynamic motions of Love).
How utterly devotional they were this evening; how utterly un-modern. In the sixties, music was divided: there were musics within the system, and there were musics utterly against it, against its annihilating bureaucratic, monolith of a death-impulse. To a crushing death of spirit, folk music spoke verses of life, peace, wholeness through dissent; it spoke about equality and resistance, not the nullifying and titillating sugar-verses of the plastic bands, mouthing the lullabies of Truth. But in this resistance to the modern bureaucratic system, the system became stronger, more reticent, more voracious in its consumption of all art and human expression. The sixties rebels were ultimately caught in a dialectical bind: the more they pushed, the stronger the opposing pushes, and therefore the more exaggerated and overblown must the rebels become. Until, finally, Rock (an outgrowth of Folk) lost its essence. I can think of that chilling song, sung as Rock gasped for life, sung by Neil Young as Rust Never Sleeps. "Rock will never die," he wails. We can return to Plato for a moment: the truth does transcend the incompleteness of what we can say or do or feel or see or taste or touch with our human hands; the essence slips through. The essence of Rock, a search of love, never dies; it just slips through and, we hope, is reborn somewhere else. But this should not become a morbid hope, a listless search -- and so we must let the visible, audible form of Rock slip away, as we sing, with Neil Young, that this rust never shall sleep.
The hipster generation, much maligned, has let slip the morbid concern with sixties "fight the power" (in its day venerable and necessary). It has, after the eighties and nineties confusions, emerged as a kind of self-contented association of those in need of real culture, with a thirst for creation, and lacking the ambitions of established culture-bearers. Their talents are nascent; their productions small and focused, quiet and needful. There was no anger this evening; nothing but a whiff of concern for justice against injustice: not about big causes, but about local concerns ramified by larger realities (injustice, for example, in the juvenile criminal detention system of Pennsylvania). But this largeness of social and political justice was set aside for inner concerns, which is the only "justice" possible, in the end. The ancient Stoic philosophers remind us that though a man may take my body, may crush it, may tear it to pieces, he may never take my soul, my essence -- and this evening, with attendance mostly of a younger "hipster" sort, songs of spirit, or essence, were sung. They were not about 'essence' or 'spirit'; they constituted the very thing itself. (I will not labor our considerations with morbid talk of 'authenticity' and searches for truth, and so on; funny how the very substance of authenticity includes more than just the concern about it. This is slowly being understood: too much concern for a thing manages to kill that thing itself. We are saying goodbye to modernity and postmodernity by forgetting about it: like awaking from a powerful dream, only to struggle to recall what it was all about, and in that act, you manage to destroy the dream and are thereby pushed to live your life, until the next dream. And so it goes.)
What was going on here, this evening, within these old church walls? I have suggested that what was happening was a confluence of ancient and terribly contemporary things, that, in a way, our contemporary world was being reborn through an ancient vision. The roots of the word temple, or church, go back to ancient Greek words used to talk about the theater, where they set apart a recreation of the struggles of life into and out of death; and from this the Greeks derived a new, philosophical word: theoria, from which we get "theory". A theory is a sacred vision, an insight into reality, a recreation of a portion of that whole reality with our inner vision which, while seeing concrete things, can, as imagination, fly free of them. This is what really worries the gatekeepers of spiritual purity, in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, down to our times, when they worry us about Art: disturbing the soul, distracting it by the free play of the imagination to no good end. But the snare of these spiritual purists is ironic: they say truth is beyond specifiable form, yet they have the conceit to lay down specific injunctions against specific forms! By a kind of withdrawal from the world, these musics answer the spiritual purist without being spiritual purism. This fact, this non-purism, is significant in itself: by not being about grand themes, or not organized around specifiable notions of this-or-that, by simply being what it is, it is pure, not modern, not postmodern, nothing but itself; not concerned with doctrine but with doing, singing, opening up space, sacredness, silence, stillness ... the things themselves which morbid notions try desperately, under the crushing weight of intellectual history, to indicate, to grasp. Sujan Stevens, in a remarkable interview, complained of this crushing weight in his musical context, and his complaint was about something both practical and theoretical: how could one truly express and even be heard, against such a density of musical history? Yes, he is worried about authenticity, but his concern is authenticity itself, and is a sincere questioning of the possibility of art, of what expressions are left to us, of what 'originality' could mean as civilization wears on, and complexifies, densifies, and agglomerates its cultural productions into museums stuffed with cultural goods. As the productions continue, our minds are turned into museums, robbed of living essence, confused by old forms, lost, listless. What else is there to do?
As I have said, anti-establishment is not what the "hipster" is about, nor is it what those associated that evening were "about" (to repeat: there was no "aboutness" at all). It simply is renovation, self-contained, self-moved, and, I would hazard another thesis: self-emptying. The boldness of Eliot and Low was its sobriety, its calmness and equanimity. Into this space we can pour -- yet another thesis I put forward -- our many civilizations, and their many various ideas. These musics open up a space of universality not possible on the uncertain backs of tired notions rendered stiff by the contortions of a self-absorbed civilization (the essence, I think, of Sufjan's worry).
The de-intellectualized is-ness of this music is unique, as I have tried to show: at once ancient and terribly contemporary. I called it, awkwardly, a "phenomenon", but I am, again awkwardly, trying to indicate something more specific than this tired term has an ability to convey.
Johann von Goethe, whom we usually know as a poet, was also a kind of philosophical naturalist or "natural philosopher" in the appropriate terminology of the day (18th century Europe). He speculated that his work in this area would be remembered more than his literary productions; history had another fate for him: almost forgotten were (are) his works on natural philosophy, his study of color (in opposition to Newton's mechanical analysis), and his many studies of plant life (anticipating and going beyond Darwinian evolutionism). Each individual plant, he saw, was a living form (here we are harkening back to Plato, but rejuvenating him), a "phänomen" dynamically related to what he called an "Urphänomen", the "original", "highest" (and most "general") form. Each plant, each species, is a "One which is Many", to sum up his idea in somewhat mystical terms. Think about how you can take a cutting of a plant, root it, and thereby derive another "individual" plant, which is actually a continuation of the "original" plant from which you derived the cutting. Think about the significance of this (biological) act: many plants derive from one which is itself, literally, from another, and so on; we arrive at a (non-mystical) "One which is Many". The seeds of plants may even be dried and stored for years to be germinated and brought to full form again, reproducing the mother plant, continuing this "One which is Many" indefinitely into the future.
Oswald Spengler tried to apply this "morphology" (the term is Goethe's own) to cultural forms in a bold attempt to study the density of civilizations in a new way: by looking at their morphological relationships -- as living forms -- rather than studying their purely chronological orderings (the succession of "one damn thing after another"), as dead and frozen "facts" or "events" strung, immobilized, like beads on a necklace. This Goethean approach to culture is, I think, helpful here, as it allows me to convey to you the phenomenon of what I witnessed but more accurately: these musics were all of a piece; and individually, they were "phänomen": cuttings from one whole, a dynamic One with Many moments, originally unified but momentarily brought out into a definite form. The moments where the music was absent from our ears were the snips cutting the One, the performances themselves the Many, rooting before us in the stillness of the sanctuary. These musics were unities; they were Love.
There was more going on here in these musics that I can convey at length in the space of a single essay. I hope that I have sketched some of the more important, the more significant, without draping a shroud of sterile notions over this phenomenon, unintentionally hiding it from your view. I have also to reflect, if only briefly, on the meaning of a "review" of musical performances -- yet another form laden with historical accretions at once venerable, useful and also deadening...
Ours is a culture searching, fragmented, confused, lost amidst a wealth of options which, in the end, is our very poverty. Ironically, the brilliance of civilization has now burned us (and we could make this more than metaphoric, as we look upon the tormented globe, with its violent quakes and rains and winds and lightnings, and the terrible power now released from its long-dormant radioactive ores). Returning are what we thought lost forms of human oppression: the Feudal State (the debilitating bureaucratic machine worried about during the sixties and seventies), but now floating high above us in the rarefied environs of the globalized (with the Internet acting in the main as its sustaining cocoon, thoroughly colonized). In our world medieval (and let us wax for a moment somberly poetic), as in our prior world medieval, we found pockets of sacred space, following the brutalization of civilizations, with its penchant for the inner life. Yes, it was, during the Dark Ages, a period of little exuberance, of little outward, joyful explorations of individual expression, or of triumphal regal celebrations (little to celebrate in the joyless world of a crumbling, outer, civilization it must have seemed). Surely there was regal triumphalism; there were festivals, liturgical and civil, raising the spirits of the people a notch or two above the bland sobriety of days, and the sorrows of disease and the barbarity of life outside your village, or city, or your monastery. But the land was lighted with flickering inner lights, castles of spirit, containing a flame, passing it on one to another during the Dark Times, in the hopes of starting a fire again for the minds of future generations, hope for a dying civilization. They became somber, earnest, bland even, in their spiritual concerns; they lost fluency with their parent civilization, and could no longer understand the ancient tongue, or comprehend the joyful poems and discourses of their distant forefathers. But they cultivated something without quite knowing what is was, having lost the "critical" spirit of an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher.
What I was a witness to, I think, was a moment -- a microcosm, really -- of cultural significance the language for which we, I, struggle to find in order to do justice to this phenomenon ... of the "hipster" culture, of these musics of Beauty, of Low, of Eliot wailing softly, equilibrating in her self-emptying songs. Our well-worn forms (of language, of musical and intellectual expression) are failing us -- but under their own weight. We are crushed, with Sufjan, under the weight of our civilization, gasping for new air, for new life, for renewal, for spiritual rebirth.
But, as with our first medieval epoch, we must pause, and take a moment in the sanctuary to ask: as the second medieval epoch dawns, will I become a blank slate, going dumb, or will I keep the flame of Beauty within my soul, keeping an inner sanctuary, celebrating an inner Mass, renewing my spirit, in music, as music -- as art?
Religion (without the one idea I have deliberately refused to mention, to write down, to use) has a funny way of creeping up on a civilization. But the essence of religion slips through the gates of our feudal institutions, it slips from the musicians' fingers, from the philosophers' prose it is drained. But, in wholeness, as Music, as Mass, it is reborn ... has been reborn.
I should like to "thank" Eliot and Low; but I don't want to disturb their souls with my prose and to clutter their is-ness with my notions. But thanks, in any case.
Monday, January 24, 2011
on meeting an online date in "real" life
Much to discuss, needless to say. Well, to sum it up: there has for a long time in our culture been a great divide between the inner world of "the mind", mediated by writing and reading, and the outer world of the experiences we have with other people and objects that appear to us objectively. With online dating, that dimension that has only been allowed to persist as letter-writing and novel-reading -- an experience that was one of a great sequestration -- has been transformed into the basic bread-and-butter of our social experience. In other words, there's not enough of a sound distinction between inner/outer or between public/private; this is quite ironic because most of Western thought has been devoted to either making one or the other reign supreme -- now, they're utterly confused. My point is that the Internet actually represents -- or directly presents to us -- another mode of existence! It actually -- but we might not see it in this way -- has a degree of autonomy from our waking, day-to-day non-Internet life. We do not appreciate how altogether subtle and difficult it is to integrate the two experiences, that is, to make one whole fabric of life out of a mentalized part and an externalize part of our lives. We cannot accept the deep continuity that there is between the two because we imagine them to be wholly contained within themselves: what I do when and on the Internet is, we wrongly think, wholly self-contained; likewise for what is done "on the outside", during a non-Internet (and primarily non-mentalized) mode of life. This is how I understand what you've so well and touchingly described to me.
I don't recall whether I wrote this specific point up or not, but I like to point out how so many times in literary history has there been a radical, and existential, distinction between the author (considered from the "object" and social side of thing -- the author as he or she could be experienced from the point of view of another person) and his or her written works. The poet Rimbaud sounds like a stinky vagabond; but his poetry strikes like a lightingbolt through to life and love, giving us a portion of truth to consider. Would I like to spend a night with him? Would I like to get a drink with him? I don't know -- probably I'd find him insufferable and annoying; but his writings are an entirely different story. Maybe Rimbaud was more fully what he essentially was in his writings, whereas his outer, "objectified" form -- that as it appeared to others, even to himself -- was absolutely abhorrent, or insufferable, intolerable, disgusting, and so on. We are getting into rather deep and difficult philosophical territory -- worthy of exploration, I think, since it really cuts to the heart of things obscured daily to us -- but I think that this is the basic existential dilemma we now must face in spades: the contradictions of the inner and outer worlds, and how to pull them together? Some people you meet "objectify" rather well; that is, what they are as they appear to others, and to the world at large, is real, solid, coherent with the "inner" world. But for other -- perhaps for most of us -- not so much: we lack "integrity" (in this existential sense I am trying to convey). And what I am saying is that the reverse is also true: the outer form -- how somebody "objectifies" to the world at large -- may be not as rich and complete and as well-developed as their inner dynamics. Art is a way of allowing the inner dynamic out into the objectified world -- into the "light of day" (but art is a species of human expression). But how and whether that art, should it be of a high state of perfection and refinement in the individual, matches the inner dimensions to the outer, is always left open. Perhaps the drunkenness of the young Bach, or the toilet humor of Mozart, etc., proves the point -- I am not sure yet -- but I think the point is clear: how we are presented through the objectification of our inner world, through writing, does not indicate who or what we are objectively. This is an altogether different affair: I might express myself in one way, with depth, with seeming conviction and certainty, but in the outer world, might fully and completely contradict that. Neither one, I am saying, is more real than the other; rather, the two form one whole being, and the tension, should one exist, between the two makes us what we are: complex and evolving creatures. The role of psychoanalysis and other searches of the "psyche" are obvious at this point: they are means of compelling integration in us.
I was really impressed with your description of, I think, this duality of text/person, or intention/act (not to make it sound too academic -- but I think you see what I'm pointing to). We are encouraged to live a life of what Freud and the psychoanalytics call "bad faith" (I don't know who coined that expression). I, for one, know that in my writing, I am one thing, and in the workaday world, the outer world, I am another; sometimes the two are sewn together -- often and only by the flight of my imagination -- but mostly the two are flung in different and often contradictory directions. I am reminded, on this point, by the wonderful and profound novel by Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf: Steppenwolf is a divided soul, and struggles to find unity; in the end, as in the end of the novel of Tolstoy's (War and Peace), do we find the only real, the only possible, resolution: ordinary life, moving about here-and-there, or "chopping wood and carrying water" as the Zen Buddhists would put it. Apart from this, there is nothing (Giordano Bruno made this point when musing on the infinity of the Universe -- that apart from the infinity, there is nothing; and he thought the soul a microcosm. The point of contact is too profound to explore!)
When we meet, you might catch a glimpse of my psyche, now having free roam over the keyboard, as I talk, but in person, something else altogether different -- but no less real, or important, or true -- will doubtless take place; another element of my soul, the part perhaps even hidden from the light of my own reflective mind, will appear, and, it might be, you will be privy to an aspect of the completeness that I, or we, so desire. Aristotle said that "man is by nature a social animal"; perhaps we should add: only in the outer world -- the world full-stop -- are we completed. In the later theological writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the doyen of the high medieval scholastic period of Western thought, taught a "worldly" theology; and I think this is exactly what he meant to add to the overly "inner", the sickeningly interior, tendencies inherent in Western religion: the world, the creation we witness in an objectified form, affords soul an opportunity for a further development, for another chance at becoming more fully what the soul is. The world is a necessary part of life! The world is continuous creation; we are a species of this infinite power, the "Will" willing itself into existence over and over, continuously, unceasingly, creatively. We need this world, and, as much and in the very same respect, the world needs us. We tend to loose sight of this -- we do so because we fail to appreciate the balance required to gain the "integration" we seek. But we cannot disregard either side, the interior or the exterior; the outer or inner worlds.
How to really say all of this without destroying the Mystery that sustains it? Of course, I have already said too much.
I don't recall whether I wrote this specific point up or not, but I like to point out how so many times in literary history has there been a radical, and existential, distinction between the author (considered from the "object" and social side of thing -- the author as he or she could be experienced from the point of view of another person) and his or her written works. The poet Rimbaud sounds like a stinky vagabond; but his poetry strikes like a lightingbolt through to life and love, giving us a portion of truth to consider. Would I like to spend a night with him? Would I like to get a drink with him? I don't know -- probably I'd find him insufferable and annoying; but his writings are an entirely different story. Maybe Rimbaud was more fully what he essentially was in his writings, whereas his outer, "objectified" form -- that as it appeared to others, even to himself -- was absolutely abhorrent, or insufferable, intolerable, disgusting, and so on. We are getting into rather deep and difficult philosophical territory -- worthy of exploration, I think, since it really cuts to the heart of things obscured daily to us -- but I think that this is the basic existential dilemma we now must face in spades: the contradictions of the inner and outer worlds, and how to pull them together? Some people you meet "objectify" rather well; that is, what they are as they appear to others, and to the world at large, is real, solid, coherent with the "inner" world. But for other -- perhaps for most of us -- not so much: we lack "integrity" (in this existential sense I am trying to convey). And what I am saying is that the reverse is also true: the outer form -- how somebody "objectifies" to the world at large -- may be not as rich and complete and as well-developed as their inner dynamics. Art is a way of allowing the inner dynamic out into the objectified world -- into the "light of day" (but art is a species of human expression). But how and whether that art, should it be of a high state of perfection and refinement in the individual, matches the inner dimensions to the outer, is always left open. Perhaps the drunkenness of the young Bach, or the toilet humor of Mozart, etc., proves the point -- I am not sure yet -- but I think the point is clear: how we are presented through the objectification of our inner world, through writing, does not indicate who or what we are objectively. This is an altogether different affair: I might express myself in one way, with depth, with seeming conviction and certainty, but in the outer world, might fully and completely contradict that. Neither one, I am saying, is more real than the other; rather, the two form one whole being, and the tension, should one exist, between the two makes us what we are: complex and evolving creatures. The role of psychoanalysis and other searches of the "psyche" are obvious at this point: they are means of compelling integration in us.
I was really impressed with your description of, I think, this duality of text/person, or intention/act (not to make it sound too academic -- but I think you see what I'm pointing to). We are encouraged to live a life of what Freud and the psychoanalytics call "bad faith" (I don't know who coined that expression). I, for one, know that in my writing, I am one thing, and in the workaday world, the outer world, I am another; sometimes the two are sewn together -- often and only by the flight of my imagination -- but mostly the two are flung in different and often contradictory directions. I am reminded, on this point, by the wonderful and profound novel by Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf: Steppenwolf is a divided soul, and struggles to find unity; in the end, as in the end of the novel of Tolstoy's (War and Peace), do we find the only real, the only possible, resolution: ordinary life, moving about here-and-there, or "chopping wood and carrying water" as the Zen Buddhists would put it. Apart from this, there is nothing (Giordano Bruno made this point when musing on the infinity of the Universe -- that apart from the infinity, there is nothing; and he thought the soul a microcosm. The point of contact is too profound to explore!)
When we meet, you might catch a glimpse of my psyche, now having free roam over the keyboard, as I talk, but in person, something else altogether different -- but no less real, or important, or true -- will doubtless take place; another element of my soul, the part perhaps even hidden from the light of my own reflective mind, will appear, and, it might be, you will be privy to an aspect of the completeness that I, or we, so desire. Aristotle said that "man is by nature a social animal"; perhaps we should add: only in the outer world -- the world full-stop -- are we completed. In the later theological writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the doyen of the high medieval scholastic period of Western thought, taught a "worldly" theology; and I think this is exactly what he meant to add to the overly "inner", the sickeningly interior, tendencies inherent in Western religion: the world, the creation we witness in an objectified form, affords soul an opportunity for a further development, for another chance at becoming more fully what the soul is. The world is a necessary part of life! The world is continuous creation; we are a species of this infinite power, the "Will" willing itself into existence over and over, continuously, unceasingly, creatively. We need this world, and, as much and in the very same respect, the world needs us. We tend to loose sight of this -- we do so because we fail to appreciate the balance required to gain the "integration" we seek. But we cannot disregard either side, the interior or the exterior; the outer or inner worlds.
How to really say all of this without destroying the Mystery that sustains it? Of course, I have already said too much.
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