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The elegiac calling after–when you’ve lived to see how progress has stalled during your lifetime–the making of art, of poems from this. It’s right to see where we’ve failed, the act leaves a roadmap for younger people who may follow. It’s right also to know we were advocates who did our share, who stood for things, stuck out our necks. We were. We got ourselves arrested. We spoke truth as we understood it. We attempted to shelter people. We demanded justice for children. We rescued animals. We did these things and now we are old. We feel it, the coming of age. Friends say, “this isn’t the America of my childhood” and they mean it. I’ve always admired this poem written in the darkness of the early fifties by Kenneth Rexroth. He addresses it to Eli Jacobson with whom he marched in the heyday of the American labor movement in the twenties:

 

 

“For Eli Jacobson”

There are few of us now, soon
There will be none. We were comrades
Together, we believed we
Would see with our own eyes the new
World where man was no longer
Wolf to man, but men and women
Were all brothers and lovers
Together. We will not see it.
We will not see it, none of us.
It is farther off than we thought.
In our young days we believed
That as we grew old and fell
Out of rank, new recruits, young
And with the wisdom of youth,
Would take our places and they
Surely would grow old in the
Golden Age. They have not come.
They will not come. There are not
Many of us left. Once we
Marched in closed ranks, today each
Of us fights off the enemy,
A lonely isolated guerrilla.
All this has happened before,
Many times. It does not matter.
We were comrades together.
Life was good for us. It is
Good to be brave — nothing is
Better. Food tastes better. Wine
Is more brilliant. Girls are more
Beautiful. The sky is bluer
For the brave — for the brave and
Happy comrades and for the
Lonely brave retreating warriors.
You had a good life. Even all
Its sorrows and defeats and
Disillusionments were good,
Met with courage and a gay heart.
You are gone and we are that
Much more alone. We are one fewer,
Soon we shall be none. We know now
We have failed for a long time.
And we do not care. We few will
Remember as long as we can,
Our children may remember,
Some day the world will remember.
Then they will say, “They lived in
The days of the good comrades.
It must have been wonderful
To have been alive then, though it
Is very beautiful now.”
We will be remembered, all
Of us, always, by all men,
In the good days now so far away.
If the good days never come,
We will not know. We will not care.
Our lives were the best. We were the
Happiest men alive in our day.

 

And here is Rexroth’s breathtaking poem written on the thirtieth anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti:

“Fish Peddler and Cobbler”

 

 

Always for thirty years now

I am in the mountains in

August. For thirty Augusts

Your ghosts have stood up over

The mountains. That was nineteen

Twenty-seven. Now it is

Nineteen fifty-seven. Once

More after thirty years I

Am back in the mountains of

Youth, back in the Gros Ventres,

The broad park-like valleys and

The tremendous cubical

Peaks of the Rockies. I learned

To shave hereabouts, working

As cookee and night wrangler.

Nineteen twenty-two, the years

Of revolutionary

Hope that came to an end as

The iron fist began to close.

No one electrocuted me.

Nothing happened. Time passed.

Something invisible was gone.

We thought then that we were the men

Of the years of the great change,

That we were the forerunners

Of the normal life of mankind.

We thought that soon all things would

Be changed, not just economic

And social relationships, but

Painting, poetry, music, dance,

Architecture, even the food

We ate and the clothes we wore

Would be ennobled. It will take

Longer than we expected.

These mountains are unchanged since

I was a boy wandering

Over the West, picking up

Odd jobs. If anything they are

Wilder. A moose cow blunders

Into camp. Beavers slap their tails

On the sedgy pond as we fish

From on top of their lodge in the

Twilight. The horses feed on bright grass

In meadows full of purple gentian,

And stumble through silver dew

In the full moonlight.

The fish taste of meadow water.

In the morning on far grass ridges

Above the red rim rock wild sheep

Bound like rubber balls over the

Horizon as the noise of camp

Begins. I catch and saddle

Mary’s little golden horse,

And pack the first Decker saddles

I’ve seen in thirty years. Even

The horse bells have a different sound

From the ones in California.

Canada jays fight over

The last scraps of our pancakes.

On the long sandy pass we ride

Through fields of lavender primrose

While lightning explodes around us.

For lunch Mary catches a two pound

Grayling in the whispering river.

No fourteen thousand foot peaks

Are named Sacco and Vanzetti.

Not yet. The clothes I wear

Are as unchanged as the Decker

Saddles on the pack horses.

America grows rich on the threat of death.

Nobody bothers anarchists anymore.

Coming back we lay over

In Ogden for ten hours.

The courthouse square was full

Of miners and lumberjacks and

Harvest hands and gandy dancers

With broken hands and broken

Faces sleeping off cheap wine drunks

In the scorching heat, while tired

Savage eyed whores paraded the street.

 

 

Some days the best thing you can do is make a virtue of your isolation–whether it comes from work, your neighborhood, or most glaring of all, the politics of your time. 

I’ve seen so much human perfidy and outright cruelty and so have you. So have you. There’s a good chance you’ve seen worse than I have–a good chance you fought in Viet Nam or you’ve lived in refugee camps. When I write this blog I remember its read around the world. I have readers in Rwanda, readers who’ve witnessed or outlasted events far worse than the incidents contained in my own biography. And still I know that wherever you live you may need to be singular, to let yourself withdraw, even if its only into the privacy of your thoughts. My wish for you, whoever you are, is that when you enter the realm of your wishes and reflections you think about virtue. I wish for you freedom from privacies of vengeance and morbid irrealities.

 

Soul work requires striving for freedom and a willingness to reflect on pain. Growing is lonely work but true growth isn’t composed of schadenfreude–the easy hope that because you’ve suffered others will also suffer–or should. In our time its the great nations that demean solitude by polluting it, directing the helpless and lost toward naming imaginary enemies. As Carl Jung said: “Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.” Nation states take full advantage of the lost–relativizing external symbols. Although I’m a spiritual person–a lefty Episcopalian–I admire Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. If the propaganda arm of fascism doesn’t stuff a man full of morbid irrealities than organized religion will certainly get the job done. Hitchens offers a resolute and thorough history. 

 

Whoever you are, with your crutches and your homelessness; with your sadness at the plight of your children, I wish you an hour of untroubled capacity–not happiness, not contentment (I wish these also) but capacity–a state of mind that’s composed of dimension. Life is cruel but it changes fast. Your soul is your most precious possession. I want most often as a poet to protect our soul’s candles from wind. Whoever you are, you see I dare write these things. For if the churches and the broadcasting houses cannot make me hate, nor can they make me ashamed. As Adrienne Rich wrote:

 

My heart is moved by all I cannot save; 

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

  who, age after age, 

perversely, with no extraordinary 

power, reconstitute the world.

 

 

 

   

We live in the age of “argument frags” rather than sustained rhetorics. This is not news. Whether you’re on the left–Deleuze, or right–Alan Bloom, you must make your way among clots of reasoning and spurts of semoiology. In literary terms we call writing that forwards fragmentation “lyric” with the understanding that lyric writers are invariably navigating crises, either personal or historical, and that the hot spasm of the fragment is the only way to make one’s way. Emily Dickinson; Miklos Radnoti; Odysseus Elytis; Audre Lorde–lyricists make a long list. I am a lyric writer and prefer submerged and aleotoric offerings to larger inventions, whether we’re talking about a long poem or a cultural theory. Fragments are harder vehicles to drive and they also admit more plurality than big narratives. This hasn’t always been true but I’ll venture to say that imperialism has made it difficult for any thinking person to incorporate wide narratives into one’s thinking without irony. 

 

When big theoretical narratives succeed in our age they are necessarily anti-imperial and contrarian. We read Edward Said, but not what’s his face who wrote “The Bell Curve” because our post-colonial time affords us opportunities to examine the history of destructive ideas. The oppression of people of color; of women; of gay and lesbian, and trans-gendered citizens; of the disabled–the list is long–was built from sustained imperial rhetorics. This begs the question: what does a sustained anti-imperial rhetoric look like? I’m asking both as a disability studies professor and a lyric writer and not without my subjectivities. 

 

The best answer remains Edward Said’s sensibility–that we read fragments as fragment formations. We assemble collages, analyze their frictions. And this is where the theorist and lyricist are in agreement. We’re shoring things up, scattering pages across the floor, building a sensorium and ethos from bits and pieces. In this way we’re all like Walt Whitman in old age who, sitting in his rocking chair, poked at dropped pieces of paper with his cane–always finding the bit he wanted for a visitor. 

 

In his justly famous essay “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of American Culture” Michael McGee wrote about this shoring of fragments, noting: “that the fragmentation of our American culture has resulted in a role reversal, making interpretation the primary task of speakers and writers and text construction the primary task of audiences, readers, and critics. (Interpretation and text construction go together like reading and writing, of course, so it is important to understand from the outset that I am not suggesting that today’s critics no longer need to worry about interpretation, for example, or that today’s speakers need not make speeches. “Primary task” means “the most essential” or “crucial” operation in successful reading/listening and writing/speaking.”

 

In other words, “you’re on your own” or as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would say: “help is not on the way, repeat…”. The primary task of audiences is now the assembly of the means of interpretation. The idea is terrifying if you’re a Victorian, exhilarating if you come from a historically marginalized position. All fragments carry their origins and their specificities. Nowadays our job as literate citizens is to know about the fragments and in turn know what our role must be in re-presenting them. We are all cultural rhetoricians. Michael McGee used Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” as an example:

“As a finished text, “I Have a Dream” is an arrangement of facts, allusions, and stylized expressions. As a fragment in the critic’s text, the speech is only a featured part of an arrangement that includes all facts, events, texts, and stylized expressions deemed useful in explaining its influence and exposing its meaning.”

My text and your text and Dr. King’s text are all fragments in a greater counter-intuitive but necessary enterprise of resistance–we expose influences and meanings. We are all “Rhetors” as McGee puts it. We are suspicious of anything that passes as a finished text. Finished texts are suspect. Dangerous. “The White Man’s Burden” and “The Monroe Doctrine” and Oliver Wendell Holmes famous eugenic assertion that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Finished texts can kill you. 

 

But in the market place of ideas there’s still plenty of room for consumerism. If fragments and lyric assembly are active engagements, there are plenty of readers who want assurances and agreements. They hope for affirmation, to be told there are people who think just as they do. Such assurances and agreements are, in the age of fragments, larger fragments–sectarian, oppositional, phlegmatic, but fragments nonetheless. I first noticed this in my early thirties during a lunch with Catherine Stimpson and several of my English Department colleagues. I was hoping for dialogue–to frame an intersection between feminist theory and the emergence of disability studies. This was in the mid 1980’s and dis-studies didn’t yet have a name, at least not broadly. Professor Stimpson heard me out as I talked about Julia Kristeva’s “The Power of Horror” and the intersection between abjection as experienced by women and by those in the disability community. I was treated graciously but also dismissed, less by Stimpson than by my colleagues. I was, as they say in the vernacular, “OK with this” for I rightly saw that my ideas offered a distraction in just that moment. But you see, distraction is part of fragment assembly, crucial, entirely necessary to working against method (as Paul Feyerabend would say) and counter-politics depends on alert distraction. Feminism, crip-theory, queer theory, post-colonial theory, all depend on our understanding that arrangements–our texts–are only reified examples of larger fragments deemed useful in explaining influence and exposing meaning.  

I’ve always been an admirer of Hannah Arendt’s view of political life, that it should be spontaneous, plural, and public. I worry about disability studies–a field I care passionately about–fear it has generally left out neurotypical people, non-speaking people, those whose disabilities are invisible, favoring models of “super-crip-ism” that could move easily from back rooms to television screens. I fear that all too often disability studies valorizes narratives of sexy contrarianism by leaving out the spastic people and the ones who don’t look so good. Or the ones whose disabilities are just too inconvenient. Our fragments are assembled without sufficient irony. The finest disability writer I know (I know him both personally and on the page) is Tito Mukhopadhyay. 

Tito’s autism has largely prevented him from attending college. He doesn’t have a degree and he’s not likely to get one soon. The latter speaks to how disability studies imagines its fragments rather than to obstacles of accommodation. Tito is one of the best poets I know. This is a lyric poem, searching out its direction:    

The White Cup

 

Nothing could make me

stop thinking

about it.

Its inside was white

and its outside

had

some patches of colors—

orange and yellow,

randomly marked

here and there

by some one who was perhaps

entertaining his vision

with orange and yellow creation.

It lived on the kitchen shelf

like a smile,

watching all the food preparation

from the kitchen shelf.

Who knows what the smile

was about?

No one fed it anything but tea.

Nothing could stop me

from staring at its smile,

its orange and yellow,

randomly patched smile.

It entered my heart

from the kitchen shelf

until it turned into

my obsession.

And then—

I never

wanted to leave the kitchen!

Who knows what might have

happened to the cup

forever after?

The cup, white on the inside,

patches of yellow and orange

on the outside,

turned into a memory.

It returned one dream

to begin this poem.

And ever since then,

at a moment called When,

I began my thoughts

of filling and emptying

that cup of memory—

in orange and yellow patches—

with my story.

 

   

      

 

Richard Posner’s book Public Intellectuals has always seemed to me like a greased pig: fast, inelegant, hard to pin down, and finally, without much utility. But occasionally even a gassy book yields something worth a second look. Early in his study Posner writes:  

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

Saw more evidence of the failure of public intellectuals this morning–the talking head programs are simply "aping" the line from the national security state that Syria is a grave cyber threat.

In my post below about crip culture and theory I mention two superb scholars in disability studies–namely David Mitchell and Robert McRuer. I admire both of them very much. In these febrile times its good to clarify. My position is simply that crip culture has been driven in ways that reinforce vision and visual display. I’m concerned about this because 70 % of the blind remain unemployed, because blind students on college campuses across the US struggle mightily to gan access to books and articles and web sites. Because finally “culture” when its properly contrarian should by its every nature be mindful of inclusion. 

I think its time to say something long overdue, namely “crip culture” isn’t concerned much about blind people. David Mitchell’s canonical film “Vital Signs” which argues the body is political and the crip body is inherently political is not only inaccessible to blind viewers (an embarrassment twenty plus years after the ADA but who cares?) it lays out the ways and means of crip culture which are inherently ophtho-centric as in the end, crip culture is about display and visual irony. As they say in the vernacular, “it is what it is”. 

 

Perhaps this disinclination toward thinking of blindness has to do with crip theory’s strong connection to queer theory–Robert McGruer’s “crip eye for the normate guy”–blindness doesn’t present well as fashion though of course its inherently problematic on the street. I don’t know. I do know that many films and videos coming out of crip culture are not mindful of blindness and that when blindness is theorized it is usually reified as the embodiment of alienation.  

 

I’d like to hear from readers about this. Am I wrong?

Richard Posner’s book Public Intellectuals has always seemed to me like a greased pig: fast, inelegant, hard to pin down, and finally, without much utility. But occasionally even a gassy book yields something worth a second look. Early in his study Posner writes:  

With the flowering of the modern university, an institution that fosters scholarly research and places only limited calls on its faculty’s time the better to encourage creative scholarship, it became apparent that intellectuals had a career path that would enable them to write exclusively for other knowledge workers if they wanted to. But it would also allow them time to write on the same subject for two very different audiences, one consisting of students and academics in the writer’s field, the other of nonspecialists, the educated general public, itself expanding with the expansion of university education. To the extent that his academic reputation or intellectual gifts were portable, an academic might even be able to write for the educated general public on subjects outside his area of specialization.

One wonders when the modern university “flowered” for if the answer, predictably, is one hundred years ago, its worth remembering that institutions of higher learning in the United States were teaching “the white man’s burden” and eugenics. Let’s say the flowering occurred sixty years ago, just after the second world war. If that’s the case then knowledge workers had three different audiences rather than Posner’s two–students and academics in the writer’s field, the non-specialists of the general public, and a new and very hungry post-war media. Non-specialists and the hungry media are not the same audience. Public intellectuals should know the difference. Some do. One good way to know the difference is to hold something that’s a bit like the golden rule though perhaps harder to achieve–an Augustinian Golden Rule that depends on past knowledge and self-irony. It goes like this: never do unto others what you wouldn’t want done unto you, plus, while you reflect on this, remember you used to be capricious, shallow, and self-absorbed…

 

Almost everyone is capricious, shallow, and self-absorbed as a child or teenager and these characteristics are often the catalysts for strong ego formation and adult success so let’s raise a glass to whatever isn’t timorous and fearful in children. But there does come a moment when you’re “in the world”–when self-awareness is not only necessary for preservation, its the key to inclusion in a diverse and just social order. The Augustinian Golden Rule is both ironic and humane. Who are the public intellectuals who have genuinely understood this–who refuse to lie for profit while defending broader human interests? 

 

Cornel West comes to mind for his insistence that all human life has sanctity and his resistance to neo-liberal and neo-con modes of imperial action. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nQbAyMJ2ds

 

Noam Chomsky for his brave and nearly solitary fight against propaganda regarding Israel and Palestine: 

 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/16/opinion/mideast-talks-noam-chomsky

 

Susan Sontag for living a life of citizenly duty:

 

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/172991-1

 

Martha Nussbaum defending human dignity in the age of the internet:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnVWfJIY38A

 

 

 

The examples above suggest how being a public intellectual requires a muscular awareness of the problems of transmission–that the medium must not be the message. I’ve been thinking about this in part because programs like The Rachel Maddow Show or Melissa Harris-Perry–seen here scolding Edward Snowden–have tended toward neo-liberal positions on imperialism, perhaps in accord with the media and corporate interests that pick up their paychecks. Both Maddow and Harris-Perry appear unaware of the problems of transmission I’m referring to–more than unaware–one might say shruggingly immune to the kind of awareness and resistance to media described here. 

 

Does this resistance matter? If you want to be a public intellectual I think it does. 

 

   

  

I’ve been watching “Breaking Bad” like millions of others and though I’ve been “drawn in” I haven’t been captivated–a distinction reflecting disability and cultural theory as opposed to more ecumenical views regarding embodiment and agency. The latter are, to quote Susan Sontag, matters of lying, as in lying about cancer and then lying about our social circles: “patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene–in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.”

 

From the outset it would be wrong to characterize “Breaking Bad” as simply a cancer narrative but it is nearly so since Walter White’s diagnosis is the incitement premium (as Freud would call it) the idea at the top which gets all that art and anxiety going. Walter is ill and though physicians don’t lie to him, he absorbs all the ill-omened, abominable, and repugnant pathos of his diagnosis. Dark history now and then will grant a man permission to behave as badly as he wishes to. Walter becomes an agent in the original sense of the word: someone or something who produces an effect. He’s cancer-man; unbridled; unhouseled–he eschews salvation; he’s vengeful. He understands class distinctions and the cultural impediments to achieving freedom. He’s a contemporary middle class American, one who is falling from the wheel of fortune; he’s every man in the age of the affordable health care act and shrinking jobs; he’s the pure product of Paul Fussell’s status complex–Fussell who said famously, “Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.” Walter is an embittered status hound. He’s terminally ill. He’s going to produce effects. With his slacker ex-student Jessie Pinkman he’s going to “cook” and make money, beat the clock, provide for his family before the big “C” gets him. 

 

It’s hard to like cancer. But aside from the whack-a-mole portentousness of Walter’s diagnosis, the narrative incitement of “Breaking Bad” has everything to do with dark agency: accordingly the show depends on unabashed ableism. By this I don’t mean simple “discrimination in favor of able bodied people” but what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis”–disability as a vehicle employed to reinforce normalcy. Narrative prosthesis deflects the abnormal body by dramatizing its unseemliness and presuming its incompatibility with our better natures. This is “Breaking Bad” in a nutshell. 

 

What makes narrative prosthesis palatable? The answer (as Dickens well knew) is the Tiny Tim effect–the cripple must stand for something larger or more urgent “right now” in culture. You might not ordinarily think of Walter White and Tiny Tim in the same room, and if you were inclined to think of Tiny Tim at all in the context of “Breaking Bad” you would most likely imagine Walter’s son Walter Junior who is portrayed as having mild cerebral palsy. This is a clever prosthetic red herring, a ruse on crutches, for Walter is Tiny Tim in the purest sense: he reflects cultural ideas about illness. Why? Because his diagnosis is inseparable from his latent capacity for dishonesty and cruelty–a matter the show labors to prove throughout its first season as we see him despise friends and former business partners and family members who wish to help him. He’s Ahab with cancer and no health plan and a chemistry degree. He’s a figure for our times: smart, ironic, bitter, a little crazy, shrewd, vengeful, oddly nostalgic for his nuclear family, entirely creepy. But while the show strives to make these qualities digestible its larger Aristotelian template is a simple reduction of ableist ideas about serious illness. Everyone will be made ill by Walter. Everyone is rendered a cripple by Walter from his brother in law the DEA agent to his wife to Jessie Pinkman. And this is the oldest and most repulsive idea about cancer of them all. Cancer as metaphor. Intoxicating. Everyone alive with vices. Even the environment has cancer. The houses. When ableism really works its best magic the city is cancer. As Sontag says: “Before the city was understood as, literally, a cancer causing (carcinogenic) environment, the city was seen as itself a cancer–a place of abnormal, unnatural growth, and extravagant, devouring, armored passions.” 

 

There is one other dichotomy of cancer as metaphor that “Breaking Bad” exemplifies to the hilt. Because cancer functions metaphorically as a reification of capitalism, Walter engages in two kinds of symbolic behavior: before his diagnosis he stands for early capitalism with its sagacity, accounting, and thrift. After his diagnosis he is the embodiment of post-industrial capitalism–expansionist, excessive, speculative, or as Sontag would say he represents “an economy that depends on the irrational indulgence of desire”).  

 

“Breaking Bad” positions cancer as loathsome and fatal and morally contagious. In this way it subverts healthy bodies and disabled ones.  

 

 

 

  

 

Dear Secretary Kerry:

 

Tell yourself about glory but do not imagine its conferred in battle. I recall you learned this once, learned it on the bloody byways of Viet Nam. I urge you to admit the wisdom of the young man who first caught our nation’s attention. 

 

Do not get drawn into a nearly hopeless argument about chemical weapons and the President’s “red line” for the latter was a mistake, one born of decency perhaps, but a mistake withal. Chemical weapons are fearful things and properly despised by thinking people everywhere. But you sir know we used them in Viet Nam–for what else should we call “Agent Orange” and Napalm–manufactured respectively by Monsanto and Dow Chemical–but chemical weapons? This is not a matter of semantics or a parlor game. 

 

I’ve never subscribed to the “cat is out of the bag” view of human rights. We used the atomic bomb twice and I believe these weapons must be abjured by all. Chemical weapons must be viewed as contemptible by every nation. But so should the bombing of civilians and our proposed military reprisal in Syria will undoubtedly kill innocent people. Haven’t the Syrian people suffered enough? Does the United States really need to drop more ordinance to make a point? Apparently you’ve been persuaded this must be so. If I haven’t lost you yet Mr. Secretary, allow me to make an additional observation, namely that great nations know when and when not to use military power. I propose we resist firing ordinance into Syria. Let’s lead the world in promising medical aid, and humanitarian aid. Let’s give refugees throughout the Middle East the money we’re currently spending on the Egyptian military. Let’s stand for the rights and hopes of children. 

 

I mean what I say Mr. Secretary. I haven’t changed much since I was 20. 

Like many who strive to write nonfiction I think often of Montaigne who I encountered first as a teenager–a solitary teen–one who spent considerable time alone with books. In this I am hardly unique for reading and the lives of readers are both wrapped in intensity and privation and that’s a beautiful thing. One night when I was roughly 19 or so, I asked my father why young people needed colleges and universities in order to acquire an education and he said “because they lack the fervor and loneliness to read on their own.” Accordingly I understood Montaigne’s art and his habitation as representing a lonesome man’s curriculum though there’s ample evidence he bothered to mingle. Of mingling Montaigne might have written a fine essay but he didn’t. I imagine him saying its a military art rather than something finer. But I digress. 

 

I was thinking of Montaigne today because I have melancholy, know its older than modernity, a good deal older than philosophy itself and rather of little use. I don’t think of it as a foundation for art or a template for self-knowledge. This is one of the baseless ideas of the past two hundred years (approximately)–namely that despair, hopelessness, alienation, (call it what you will) represent the philosopher’s stone. In our time creative writing programs tend to ennoble suffering as a catalyst for art and I’ve even heard poets and fiction writers at conferences discoursing at some length about the merits of sadness as an incitement premium for art. But this is real bullshit and I know Montaigne would agree–know this because I read him long ago when I was in a cocoon of misery. 

 

“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness” he wrote. 16th century cheer was of course different from our own as it owed less to ideas and more to industry. People in Montaigne’s time had yet to abandon the idea of life as action. Even writing would have been understood as framing an entrance into both a house of ideas and a serviceable architecture of emotional stamina. And the latter was and is happiness. 

 

I was translating a short poem from Finnish the other day. It goes like this:

 

lots of frozen lines, telephone wires, birch branches,

willows, the shore

and the sea wall, lashed by water, wind,

children walking the road in yellow rain suits

making the whole thing feel sad

 

Its safe to say that in our time we are reactionary readers of signs–that even the static clothing of children can ruin our romance with stormy nature. Montaigne would believe our condition preposterous, and that the loss of stoicism is a choice rather than a matter of inevitability. I like the essayist’s honor and his lack of sentiment far more than his early modernist efforts to construct a house or an ironic psyche. “Not being able to govern events I govern myself.”