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Thinking of Voltaire

It was long ago I read Voltaire alone in the college library. Nixon was in the White House; students ran across campus “streaking” and everywhere I looked, people who were perfectly respectable were smoking as much marijuana as they could get their hands on. I understood at 18 there was something overtly deleterious in the air, a disatisfaction with fortune. Voltaire was just the balm. As to authority Voltaire got me laughing with: 

“Wretched human beings, whether you wear green robes, turbans, black robes or surplices, cloaks and neckbands, never seek to use authority where there is question only of reason, or consent to be scoffed at throughout the centuries as the most impertinent of all men, and to suffer public hatred as the most unjust.

A hundred times has one spoken to you of the insolent absurdity with which you condemned Galileo, and I speak to you for the hundred and first, and I hope you will keep the anniversary of it for ever; I desire that there be graved on the door of your Holy Office:

“Here seven cardinals, assisted by minor brethren, had the master of thought in Italy thrown into prison at the age of seventy; made him fast on bread and water because he instructed the human race, and because they were ignorant.”

And so around this time I began to ask questions. “Why to you think that?” “What is your proof?” “Show me?” 

In graduate school I got into trouble as people would make aesthetic judgments and I would argue any position against inoculation. It is best to learn early that you’re a contrarian. Voltaire assured me: 

“If you want to be an author, if you want to write a book; reflect that it must be useful and new, or at least infinitely agreeable.

If an ignoramus, a pamphleteer, presumes to criticize without discrimination, you can confound him; but make rare mention of him, for fear of sullying your writings.

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Someone says you are ill, be content that you are well, without wanting to prove to the public that you are in perfect health. And above all remember that the public cares precious little whether you are well or ill.”

Thinking of Voltaire

It was long ago I read Voltaire alone in the college library. Nixon was in the White House; students ran across campus “streaking” and everywhere I looked, people who were perfectly respectable were smoking as much marijuana as they could get their hands on. I understood at 18 there was something overtly deleterious in the air, a disatisfaction with fortune. Voltaire was just the balm. As to authority Voltaire got me laughing with: 

“Wretched human beings, whether you wear green robes, turbans, black robes or surplices, cloaks and neckbands, never seek to use authority where there is question only of reason, or consent to be scoffed at throughout the centuries as the most impertinent of all men, and to suffer public hatred as the most unjust.

A hundred times has one spoken to you of the insolent absurdity with which you condemned Galileo, and I speak to you for the hundred and first, and I hope you will keep the anniversary of it for ever; I desire that there be graved on the door of your Holy Office:

“Here seven cardinals, assisted by minor brethren, had the master of thought in Italy thrown into prison at the age of seventy; made him fast on bread and water because he instructed the human race, and because they were ignorant.”

And so around this time I began to ask questions. “Why to you think that?” “What is your proof?” “Show me?” 

In graduate school I got into trouble as people would make aesthetic judgments and I would argue any position against inoculation. It is best to learn early that you’re a contrarian. Voltaire assured me: 

“If you want to be an author, if you want to write a book; reflect that it must be useful and new, or at least infinitely agreeable.

If an ignoramus, a pamphleteer, presumes to criticize without discrimination, you can confound him; but make rare mention of him, for fear of sullying your writings.

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Someone says you are ill, be content that you are well, without wanting to prove to the public that you are in perfect health. And above all remember that the public cares precious little whether you are well or ill.”

Bleak House and the New Year

Last night I “tuned out” the New Year’s hype as I always do. I read Charles Dickens. I was occupied with Bleak House and if you’re a reader you’ll get the humor—“occupied” is a hopeless understatement. One is never done with Bleak House. Its about a multi-generational lawsuit that promises to end when pigs fly and steals lives both young and old. It was the perfect thing to read as 2014 ended for Bleak House is the greatest soap opera ever written—by definition a soap opera must be endless and rife with past miseries and a cast of opportunistic cynics who trade on dysfunction. Again, its the apparent endlessless of the controlling incitement of plot that lands a novel in soap opera land. And so I read from it as another chapter in our soap flake sponsored American narrative ended. We’re caught up in the miseries of our past: racial profiling by police forces; violence against black children, adults; against women and citizens with disabilities—all these realities are products of unresolved hostilities that steep in the unhappy coverts of America.

Dickens understood unhappy coverts—the mansions and board rooms where decisions affecting the poor are debated and enacted. The men in coverts (they are mostly men but there are some women) don’t like the ugliness of poverty which means your covert must be impregnable. Bleak House is a soap opera about the collective terror of human monstrosity. Money, Dickens says, promises to lift us up, or, in turn, hide us from the terrible streets where the poor, the dazed, and the deformed live.

Across the Atlantic in these United Sttes ugliness and disability were fused in laws designed to protect ordinary citizens from encountering cripples on the streets. Example:

“No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowedin or on the public ways or other public places in this city, or shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view.”

2014 was the year when Americans struggled with improper persons allowed in public.

If you don’t look right, you don’t look right. The wealthy build more coverts. But you see, those of us who are black or blind or are otherwise troubling in a hundred protean ways have the right to stand, walk, jump, laugh, or shout in the village square. This is an inalienable right. It’s a global right. Back to the soap. The covert-istas want to have clean streets.

In Bleak House the only morally addmirable character Esther Somersen becomes disfigured from smallpox—she becomes ugly and blind, thereby assuring she won’t go outside again. She’s forced to stay in the covert where the avaricious and greedy hide.

 

 

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Last night I “tuned out” the New Year’s hype as I always do. I read Charles Dickens. I was occupied with Bleak House and if you’re a reader you’ll get the humor—“occupied” is a hopeless understatement. One is never done with Bleak House. Its about a multi-generational lawsuit that promises to end when pigs fly and steals lives both young and old. It was the perfect thing to read as 2014 ended for Bleak House is the greatest soap opera ever written—by definition a soap opera must be endless and rife with past miseries and a cast of opportunistic cynics who trade on dysfunction. Again, its the apparent endlessless of the controlling incitement of plot that lands a novel in soap opera land. And so I read from it as another chapter in our soap flake sponsored American narrative ended. We’re caught up in the miseries of our past: racial profiling by police forces; violence against black children, adults; against women and citizens with disabilities—all these realities are products of unresolved hostilities that steep in the unhappy coverts of America.  

Dickens understood unhappy coverts—the mansions and board rooms where decisions affecting the poor are debated and enacted. The men in coverts (they are mostly men but there are some women) don’t like the ugliness of poverty which means your covert must be impregnable. Bleak House is a soap opera about the collective terror of human monstrosity. Money, Dickens says, promises to lift us up, or, in turn, hide us from the terrible streets where the poor, the dazed, and the deformed live. 

Across the Atlantic in these United Sttes ugliness and disability were fused in laws

designed to protect ordinary citizens from encountering cripples on the streets. Example:

 

“No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so

as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowedin or on the public ways or other public places in this city, or shall therein
or thereon expose himself to public view.”

2014 was the year when Americans struggled with improper persons allowed in public. 

If you don’t look right, you don’t look right. The wealthy build more coverts. But you see, those of us who are black or blind or are otherwise troubling in a hundred protean ways have the right to stand, walk, jump, laugh, or shout in the village square. This is an inalienable right. It’s a global right. Back to the soap. The covert-istas want to have clean streets. 

In Bleak House the only morally addmirable character Esther Somersen becomes disfigured from smallpox—she becomes ugly and blind, thereby assuring she won’t go outside again. She’s forced to stay in the covert where the avaricious and greedy hide. 

Poem Written on the Last Day of the Year

What is it about the spruce trees in snow? 

Trains arrive and depart in their branches.

Other people’s childhoods are up there.

There’s a newborn girl and a man of his times near the top

where a star would sit if this nearest one was indoors. 

Outside the trees are ripe with souls,

dark, end of the year, 

souls in their soul museums. 

Tree of the World

Now the children have climbed into the trees though it is winter. They have done so because of an ancient textbook—DNA or universal subconscious—it doesn’t matter. Look at them, they are both preoccupied and disinterested. 

 

{Marginalia} True: the writer hasn’t shown the children. Accordingly you have only propositions. The children high in the snowy branches look like scientists or aesthetes. But are they boys and girls? Girls only? 

 

{Marginalia} The poet is full of ideas but stingy. 

 

So the poet goes back to work: the year, 1919. Finland. Starvation. The children were sent into the branches since the elders believed air was cleaner up there. The adults imagined influenza was down by the roots. 

 

{Marginalia} Images make poems, facts make essays. One little girl in a tall birch had such impudent beautiful eyes. Eyes blue-going-to-grey. “Wisdom eyes” as her grandfather called them.  

 

Why My Money's Still on Orwell

Always the televisions. They’re everywhere. Airports, taxicabs, hand held via smart phones. They make a single melancholy whisper: your life isn’t adequate; you must buy something and fast. Remember: when you’re in the mood to buy, you’re likely not thinking. Here’s some excellent prose from the opening of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, written almost forty years ago:

 

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

 

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley‘s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

 

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”  

 

**

 

Postman’s prose seems dated now. Like so many American writers he was captivated by choices—our Victorian inheritance perhaps. Orwell didn’t merely fear that what we fear will ruin us—he feared the falsified nature of fear, its easy plasticity, the way fear itself can be the distraction. All advertising is built from fear—or “agitation” if you like—your skin is loose; you’re bladder is insurrectionary; you drink the wrong brand of soft drink; or worse—you’re driving a proletarian automobile. Orwell understood the entertainment industry of fear all too well. Lately there’s been a ubiquitous commercial for a British luxury car which suggests that you also can be a James Bond-esque villain if you fork over $75,000 for the accoutrement. People are indeed controlled by inflicting pain, and imagining that you’re doing the inflicting is one of the centrifugal bumble puppies of falsified fear. So my money’s still on Orwell. 

 

    

Dare to Be Individuated

Once in graduate school I inserted some ideas from Heidegger into a paper and my professor wrote: “trite” in the margin. I asked him what he meant and he obfuscated but when pressed said Heidegger was a Nazi. “Well,” I said, “say what you mean. There’s no such thing as a trite Nazi.” 

 

We are living in “The Age of Glib”—everyone from public officials to your neighbor stinging Christmas lights seems to believe the first thing that comes to his or her mind is fit to be shared. Jack Kerouac famously said of creative writing: “first thought, best thought” but its one thing on paper and another thing at a press conference. When did it become fashionable to appear as if we don’t know better? The ghost of Gore Vidal whispers saying it was always fashionable, but Gore would admit its worse now if we could summon him. 

 

Say what you mean. But dare to think it through. As Christopher Lasch famously said: “we demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.” Another way to say it is that our apparent helplessness when we stand before the world will always be experienced as disappointment, now think. For God’s sake, think. 

 

Back to Christopher Lasch for a moment: 

 

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.” 

 

 

 

 

 

    

Dare to Be Individuated

Once in graduate school I inserted some ideas from Heidegger into a paper and my professor wrote: “trite” in the margin. I asked him what he meant and he obfuscated but when pressed said Heidegger was a Nazi. “Well,” I said, “say what you mean. There’s no such thing as a trite Nazi.” 

 

We are living in “The Age of Glib”—everyone from public officials to your neighbor stinging Christmas lights seems to believe the first thing that comes to his or her mind is fit to be shared. Jack Kerouac famously said of creative writing: “first thought, best thought” but its one thing on paper and another thing at a press conference. When did it become fashionable to appear as if we don’t know better? The ghost of Gore Vidal whispers saying it was always fashionable, but Gore would admit its worse now if we could summon him. 

 

Say what you mean. But dare to think it through. As Christopher Lasch famously said: “we demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.” Another way to say it is that our apparent helplessness when we stand before the world will always be experienced as disappointment, now think. For God’s sake, think. 

 

Back to Christopher Lasch for a moment: 

 

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.”