"..." 41

“A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”

-Hector Berlioz

"..." 40

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

—Franz Kafka, 1904

Last page of Norwegian Wood

This passage really resonated with me; it's probably my favorite bit from the whole novel. It's funny that endings do that sometimes—a story drags on... and on... and then flowers into something beautiful just as it reaches its close.

Possible spoilers ahead (but not really).

I phoned Midori.

"I have to talk to you" I said. "I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."

Midori responded with a long, long silence - the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited. At last, Midori's quiet voice broke the silence: "Where are you now?"

Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.

The Story of the Monkeys of Shitty Island

From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami:

"Do you know the story of the monkeys of the shitty island?" I asked Noburo Wataya.

He shook his head, with no sign of interest. "Never heard of it."

"Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that have also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”

I drank the rest of my coffee.

"As I sat here looking at you," I continued, "I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I'm trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it."

"..." 38

In John Cocteau's 1950 movie Orpheus, the title character is a modern poet whose poems are dictated to him by a voice on his car radio. He journeys to hell in order to bring back his missing wife Eurydice. While there, he is interrogated by three sinister judges who ask him, among other things what he does. He answers that he is a poet. When one of the judges replies, "What does that mean?" Orpheus says, "It means to write and not be a writer."

This distinction holds generally true, I think. For instance in the title of the contemporary magazine that deals with issues of writing and publishing called Poets and Writers. As it happens, the current number has an article by Ellen Susman about writers should reply when asked at a party, "What do you do?" She says, "You write because it's your passion, your lifeblood, and yet you tell this lovely person that you're an accountant, a house husband, a cowpoke. Repeat after me," Ms. Susman says, "I'm a writer, it's my job, it's what I do."

That's fine if you are a writer, say a novelist like her, but what if you're a poet? You would never reply, "I'm a poet," out of fear that your interlocutor would get up and leave the room. It sounds like you're conferring value on yourself. You can't be a poet who calls himself or herself a poet without leaving open the possibility that you're a bad poet. So you're stuck with the situation of writing and not being a writer.

If this sounds like whining, then let me add hastily that I'm quite pleased with my status in the world of writers. I've been lucky enough to get concrete signs of appreciation over the years. One of them arrived 35 years ago when I got the National Book Award. But even without them, I think I would have continued writing just for the, well, fun of it, because it is fun, although it isn't supposed to be. If it wasn't, I would have taken up some alternate pursuit years ago: needlepoint or designing miniature golf courses. But writing the poetry I write gives me a pleasure I can almost taste, one I can imagine a pianist must feel practicing in solitude, but never alone thanks to the strange experience that is emerging in him. Of course it's hard to write, but somehow the the difficulty is embedded in the pleasure.

Besides the vexacious pleasure of writing and not being a writer, there is a further concern for me in that to many people, intelligent and honest ones among them, what I write makes no sense. It apparently lacks accessibility, a relatively recent requirement.

When I first discovered modern poetry at the age of about 16, I was delighted by its difficulty, a word often used since then in discussions of my work, and in general by what Gates calls the fascination of what's difficult. My first encounter with Gertrude Stein, for instance, inspired me to instant feats of imitation. "She's so great, she's so hard to understand" might have summed up my reaction. Several years later, my advisers at Harvard (they call them tutors just as they call the dormitories houses--a bit of inverse snobbery) assigned me Henry James' The Wings of the Dove, the  first book of his I had come upon. Once again, I tore through it, delightedly. "Wow, this is really difficult," I thought. Contemporaneous was my discovery of the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and the gnomic, early Auden, all of whom became important influences.

My early poetry, I thought, was in the grand, modern tradition of being hard to understand. Besides, wasn't this what modern art was all about? Picasso painted heads with three eyes and viewers looked on with equanimity. Stravinski had four pianists banging the some chord over and over and audiences were enthralled. It wasn't until I began to publish some years later that I realized I had trespassed. It was okay for those god-like figures to traffic in difficulty, I was given to understand, but my own stuff was just a little too difficult--in fact, a lot too difficult, ranking somewhere near root canal on the pleasure principal scale.

Besides, by then, difficulty was out. Accessiblity was in. These thoughts dawned anew a few days ago when wondering what I would say tonight. I happened to glance at the acceptance speech I wrote on getting a National Book Award in 1976--I didn't happen to glance at it, I searched for diligently on the internet.

For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as difficult and private, although I never meant for it to be. At least I wanted its privateness to suggest the ways in which all of us are private and alone, in the sense that Proust meant when he said, "Each of us is truly alone." And I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something which may change us.

I seem to have been writing out of this situation for many years, including in a fairly recent poem called "Uptick" which has the lines:

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,  
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

So the dilemma hasn't gone away, but then I console myself, neither have I...yet. I'm still writing and still not a writer. The pleasure that comes from writing is a sharp as ever. [...]

—John Ashberry

Joseph Brodsky's Nobel lecture

Nobel Lecture December 8, 1987
Translated from the Russian by Barry Rubin

I

For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far - far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny - for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.

This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address 'urbi et orbi', as they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.

The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that - for stylistic reasons, in the first place - one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn't have helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.

These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me - more often perhaps than the case should be - to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists - and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one - if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one's conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured by.

I have mentioned only five of them, those whose deeds and whose lot matter so much to me, if only because if it were not for them, I, both as a man and a writer, would amount to much less; in any case, I wouldn't be standing here today. There were more of them, those shades - better still, sources of light: lamps? stars? - more, of course, than just five. And each one of them is capable of rendering me absolutely mute. The number of those is substantial in the life of any conscious man of letters; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which fate has willed me to belong. Matters are not made easier by thoughts about contemporaries and fellow writers in both cultures, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts I rank above my own, and who, had they found themselves on this rostrum, would have come to the point long ago, for surely they have more to tell the world than I do.

I will allow myself, therefore, to make a number of remarks here - disjointed, perhaps stumbling, and perhaps even perplexing in their randomness. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts, as well as my very occupation, will, or may, I hope, shield me, at least partially, against charges of being chaotic. A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system - but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more honorable.


II

If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I". Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct - free of any go-betweens - relations.

It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a "period, period, comma, and a minus", transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.

The great Baratynsky, speaking of his Muse, characterized her as possessing an "uncommon visage". It's in acquiring this "uncommon visage" that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically. Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on a tautology - regrettable all the more because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose urging a man may be prepared to agree to this tautology, will not go to the grave with him or give him so much as a thank-you.

Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent - better yet, the infinite - against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state's features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics - not to mention its aesthetics - are always "yesterday". Language and literature are always "today", and often - particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox - they may even constitute "tomorrow". One of literature's merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology - that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, "victim of history". What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called "cliché".

Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found "ahead of progress", ahead of history, whose main instrument is - should we not, once more, improve upon Marx - precisely the cliché.

Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.

On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man's ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; The categories of "good" and "bad" are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding the categories of "good" and "evil". If in ethics not "all is permitted", it is precisely because not "all is permitted" in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.

Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.

It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we should understand Dostoevsky's remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold's belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn't like and what doesn't suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature - and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution - is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

I am far from suggesting the idea of compulsory training in verse composition; nevertheless, the subdivision of society into intelligentsia and "all the rest" seems to me unacceptable. In moral terms, this situation is comparable to the subdivision of society into the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely physical or material grounds for the existence of social inequality, for intellectual inequality these are inconceivable. Equality in this respect, unlike in anything else, has been guaranteed to us by nature. I am speaking not of education, but of the education in speech, the slightest imprecision in which may trigger the intrusion of false choice into one's life. The existence of literature prefigures existence on literature's plane of regard - and not only in the moral sense, but lexically as well. If a piece of music still allows a person the possibility of choosing between the passive role of listener and the active one of performer, a work of literature - of the art which is, to use Montale's phrase, hopelessly semantic - dooms him to the role of performer only.

In this role, it would seem to me, a person should appear more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a result of the population explosion and the attendant, ever-increasing atomization of society (i.e., the ever-increasing isolation of the individual), this role becomes more and more inevitable for a person. I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved. A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others - if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person's conduct. It's precisely this that I have in mind in speaking of the role of the performer, all the more natural for one because a novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness - of a writer or a reader.

In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator's line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of "uncommon visage", in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past - the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainments.

In any event, the condition of society in which art in general, and literature in particular, are the property or prerogative of a minority appears to me unhealthy and dangerous. I am not appealing for the replacement of the state with a library, although this thought has visited me frequently; but there is no doubt in my mind that, had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign policy, but about his attitude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only because the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt - whether familiar or yet to be invented - toward a total mass solution to the problems of human existence. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine.

Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. Living in the country I live in, I would be the first prepared to believe that there is a set dependency between a person's material well-being and his literary ignorance. What keeps me from doing so is the history of that country in which I was born and grew up. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority: of the celebrated Russian intelligentsia.

I have no wish to enlarge upon the subject, no wish to darken this evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of human lives destroyed by other millions, since what occurred in Russia in the first half of the Twentieth Century occurred before the introduction of automatic weapons - in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine whose unsoundness is already manifested in the fact that it requires human sacrifice for its realization. I'll just say that I believe - not empirically, alas, but only theoretically - that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.

However, before I move on to poetry, I would like to add that it would make sense to regard the Russian experience as a warning, if for no other reason than that the social structure of the West up to now is, on the whole, analogous to what existed in Russia prior to 1917. (This, by the way, is what explains the popularity in the West of the Nineteenth-Century Russian psychological novel, and the relative lack of success of contemporary Russian prose. The social relations that emerged in Russia in the Twentieth Century presumably seem no less exotic to the reader than do the names of the characters, which prevent him from identifying with them.) For example, the number of political parties, on the eve of the October coup in 1917, was no fewer than what we find today in the United States or Britain. In other words, a dispassionate observer might remark that in a certain sense the Nineteenth Century is still going on in the West, while in Russia it came to an end; and if I say it ended in tragedy, this is, in the first place, because of the size of the human toll taken in course of that social - or chronological - change. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.


III

Although for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would here like to change the subject. What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the comprehension, of this temptation, and rejection of it, are perhaps responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. "How can one write music after Auschwitz?" inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp - and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. "And how can you eat lunch?" the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.

That generation - the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself - that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin's archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty - indeed, a terrifyingly wasted - place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture's continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.

There existed, presumably, another path: the path of further deformation, the poetics of ruins and debris, of minimalism, of choked breath. If we rejected it, it was not at all because we thought that it was the path of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely animated by the idea of preserving the hereditary nobility of the forms of culture we knew, the forms that were equivalent, in our consciousness, to forms of human dignity. We rejected it because in reality the choice wasn't ours, but, in fact, culture's own - and this choice, again, was aesthetic rather than moral.

To be sure, it is natural for a person to perceive himself not as an instrument of culture, but, on the contrary, as its creator and custodian. But if today I assert the opposite, it's not because toward the close of the Twentieth Century there is a certain charm in paraphrasing Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling, or Novalis, but because, unlike anyone else, a poet always knows that what in the vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of the language; that it's not that the language happens to be his instrument, but that he is language's means toward the continuation of its existence. Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical choice.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form - the poem - most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what emerges from beneath that pen on his audience - however great or small it may be - the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language or, more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.

This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well. For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential - that is, by all time Iying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quantitative body of the nation that speaks it (though it is determined by that, too), as by the quality of the poem written in it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity; it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence - or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.

One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.

There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993. [my emphasis]

(Copypasta from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture.html)

Thoughts on casual philosophy

Lately I've been reading The Gutenberg Elegies, and as I've been reading I've been having an odd reaction. I've found myself dismissing the denser, more philosophical parts as purely anecdotal—as though they lacked the legitimacy and insight of more erudite, specialized philosophical writings. It's not so much that the things that Birkerts is saying don't fit in with my conceptual schema (although they sometimes don't), but that I see his remarks as fanciful rather than disciplined. And this interpretation of mine bothers me.

There is certainly a problem with the gulf between literature and "purebred" philosophy. The former can often gravitate towards over-sentimentality, the latter, conversely, can be all but inaccessible to a general audience--or, worse, skirt on irrelevance. I've written elsewhere that I'm not fond of the view that philosophy is a collaborative project akin to modern science, as in the analytic tradition--so I'm in no way suggesting that philosophy is not the business of non-professionals. In fact, since high school I've prided myself in being something of a generalist; I'd like to see more Sam Hamiltons, not less, not overly specialized experts who occupy a very narrow view of the world, more like shards than finished sculptures.

In Birkerts' book, I seem to detect an overreach for sentimentality. I see this elsewhere frequently when people privilege certain musings for their entertainment or anecdotal value rather than didactic value or their coherence to interrelated ideas. (This seems especially common in vague, New Age quasi-spirituality.) At some level this tact also tries to bask in an easily interchangeable, interrelatable model of human communication and human nature that, in my view, just isn't there. It presumes too much; that dressed up prose can overcome the space between people, the worlds of difference between how they understand the same world. Certainly any human communication attempts that, but generality begets generality. And as much as I romanticize the generalist, I don't think they can really function without intense, concerted specificity. A generalist must extend an invitation to the reader but also stake his/her ground.

And in the process I think it may be best to occlude or abandon the general, inclusive "we." I have no problem with systematizing as long as it is attached to an individual's life-history or their intellectual history. Otherwise, I think it ought to be situated in terms of other thought, like professional philosophers would have it. My problem, as I see it now, is that I have trouble taking seriously anything in-between or outside of these.

(Another thought: literature is more in the habit of raising thoughts and concerns than finishing them. When something outside of philosophy attempts to finish something, flags go up--more than usual. Although I don't think philosophy ought to be in the business of "finishing" thoughts either, that's its shtick; I guess it's what I've come to expect.)

"..." 34 (two kinds of lifelong readers)

To the extent that novelists think about audience at all, we like to imagine a "general audience"—a large, eclectic pool of decently educated people who can be induced, by strong enough reviews or aggressive enough marketing, to treat themselves to a good, serious book. We do our best not to notice that, among adults with similar educations and similarly complicated lives, some read a lot of novels while others read few or none.

[Shirly Brice] Heath has noticed this circumstance, and although she emphasized to me that she has not polled everybody in America, her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been "heavily modeled" when he or she was very young. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. [...]

Simply having a parent who reads is not enough, however, to produce a lifelong dedicated reader. According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. "A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. Finding a peer can take place as late as college. In high school, especially, there's a social penalty to be paid for being a reader. Lots of kids who have been lone readers get to college and suddenly discover, 'Oh my God, there are other people here who read.'"

As Heath unpacked her findings for me, I was remembering the joy with which I'd discovered two friends in junior high with whom I could talk about J. R. R. Tolkien. I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. But then it occurred to me that I didn't even meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: "Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you—because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

[...]

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether it's James Joyce's exile or J. D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting a imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."

Source: Franzen, Jonathan. "Why Bother?" How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002: 74-78. Print. [My emphasis]

Comments on the "video games as art" debate

      

Image source: Grim Fandango (1998)


      IN MANY WAYS, the word art is polyphonous. It has a large number of disparate meanings that we tend to invoke indiscriminately each time we use the term. It's not surprising, then, that when someone argues that so-and-such is not art, there is some kind of backlash, and the case of video games is no exception. Film critic Roger Ebert has kindled this debate over the years by arguing on various occasions that video games are an inherently inferior medium. “No one in or out of the field," he says in one interview, “has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic.”
      These and other statements of his have brought on a number counter-arguments—some good, some bad—from game critics, designers, players, and people with too much time on their hands. Many of them pointed to the artwork, music, and sounds in games while others identified storytelling techniques that are unique to the medium; some even gave offered examples which are personal favorites of mine like Shadow of the Colossus. But every refutation I've read seems to miss the point, as I see it, in one way or another.
      Recently, Ebert retracted his comments, graciously agreeing with numerous accusations that he didn't know much about video games in the first place and that he was wrong deny outright the artistic possibilities of a medium still in its infancy. Despite this, I find myself―as someone fairly knowledgeable about games―mostly agreeing with his earlier arguments. In truth, it's rare that any game comes anywhere near the mantle of “high art,” as haughty a notion as that is. But it's also rare that games approach the sorts of art that I consider to be the most valuable: art that opens up new conversations, that brings new light to the old and familiar, that has a profound impact on how we experience and make sense of the world. Of course, this sort of art is in short supply in other media as well (and, of course, it's partly because of its scarcity that it's so treasured). Yes, video games have no “Moonlight Sonata” (although the song appears in some of them), no Ulysses, no Ernest Goes to Jail. But, just as there are countless uninspired first-person shooters, there are countless uninspired mystery novels, love songs, and unexceptional paintings. Where I agree with Roger Ebert is with his argument and not with his irreverent use of the word art: that the core experience in video games, as a medium, is not an intuitive vehicle for art as he and I have defined it.
      In their early days, video games were thought of mainly as children's playthings. Grand Theft Auto and other titles have helped to change that perception over time, but the medium hasn't quite outgrown it. And despite the improved graphics and mature content, the center of today's gaming experience is still a kind of toy-driven exhilaration. Bioshock has some Ayn Rand inspired story elements, but they are ultimately a background for shooting things. Myst, Silent Hill 2, Shadow of the Colossus, and Braid are all excellent examples of subtle, evocative storytelling, but they are ultimately about exploration and puzzle solving. In the same ways that Chess is about warfare and Monopoly is about capitalism, their stories are lost in the “action,” so to speak―at best a host to their interactive elements. As Doom creator John Carmack once said, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
      As Ebert has noted, there is a basic conflict of purpose between the conventional experiences of video games and the works of other established mediums. Games are usually about overcoming obstacles or playing within the parameters of the game world, while novels and movies are more concerned with characters and storytelling. This is not to say that no video games have taken storytelling seriously. Interactive fiction (text adventures) of the '80s and graphic adventure games and interactive movies of the '90s made story the central focus and reduced game play to a series of decisions to advance particular narratives, with mixed results. The problem with these has generally been that player decisions are mostly superfluous. One path leads to the end, the rest to impasses or “Game Over” screens. Some games have multiple endings, but they are usually analogous to a different final paragraph at the end of a novel. All told, very few game story lines necessitate meaningful player decisions. Most are essentially movies broken up by puzzles, hazards, and errands. Even ambitious titles like Heavy Rain, which offer up more complex choices and consequences, are still far from being considered exemplars of an art form on par with film and literature.
      As eloquently or poorly as some stories are told, high-quality stories in video games are extremely hard to come by. I suppose Grim Fandango is a decent love story; Rez is an interesting experiment with A.I. in existential crisis; and Andrew Plotkin's Shade has its flaws but could not be told in any other way. I'm not suggesting by any stretch that my tastes are universal, but anyone familiar with video games up to this point has to admit that there is a very limited number of games out there which competently—much less masterfully—explore contemporary issues or manage to impart a lasting emotional impression. Simply put, most video games do not focus on these things. They have amusing mechanics with challenges to overcome, and they generally don't need the social commentary and emotional resonance to be successful as games. But in so doing they cannot be so easily classified as art (as I've been using the word).
      However, I may be getting ahead of myself in suggesting that good stories are the only ways to get at these qualities. Some exceptional games are able to achieve these through the game mechanics themselves. fl0w, for example, presents a stylized glimpse into the experiences of tiny organisms, and I can't help but think that Katamari Damacy makes some kind of commentary on consumerism and all of the objects and clutter in our lives. As always, the line between art and not-art is tenuous and ultimately subjective, but I still believe that art which breeds empathy, emotion, and understanding is perhaps harder to come by for games than for novels and movies—due, in large part, to the medium itself rather than shortcomings in terms of what has been offered so far.
      All things said, though, my favorite game to this day is still probably Super Mario Bros. 3. It may not engender empathy or count as "art" based on what I've said, but it's damned fun.

 

Update:

Journey is probably for the best argument I've seen yet for games as art. Absolutely incredible.

"..." 33 ("Today's Baudelaire's are hip-hop artists.")

In the nineteenth century, when Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another's work, the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today.

The big, obvious reason for the decline of the social novel is that modern technologies do a much better job of social instruction. Television, radio, and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In Cold Blood, has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly. Few serious novelists can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass of expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like E.R. and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity. The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensibilities. Portnoy's Complaint, which even my mother once heard enough about to disapprove of, was probably the last American novel that could have appeared on Bob Dole's radar as a nightmare of depravity. Today's Baudelaire's are hip-hop artists.

Source: Franzen, Jonathan. "Why Bother?" How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002: 65-66. Print. [My emphasis]

I write like...

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

...and John Steinbeck writes like Kurt Vonnegut, I guess.

--
1. I Write Like

Time Enough at Last* (Poem 32)

Mr. Henry Bemis,
his shattered glasses gleam like shattered dreams
in the wake of broken buildings
and scattered reams,

Mr. Henry Bemis,
his books are tinder now it seems,
fuel for fires, if he has time for fires
or for dreams.

We cannot envy Mr. Bemis,
but may pause to wonder
if circumstances have changed.

The books he read were dead before
the world was silent and defaced.

The ink was conversation,
but he read only for dry consumption
the morsels of Dickens and Baudelaire.

Now, his armchair,
another a place of isolation
in a world far from fair.

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FUI90HIQt8

"Page 19" (Poem 31)

I wonder at times why

one writes an ambitious,
acerbic, everyday,
needlessly-adjective-laden

novel,


why the author

tucking back
his coarse pony-tail

opened with a setting
he knew nothing about—

    "fucking corn[fields]" in Topeka.


I am sure he knows all too well
how it feels to grow up

wanting to misplace one's home

to find meaning elsewhere
down endless stretches of road.


And I am sure he has something
pulchritudinous to convey. But
amidst the word choice...

I can't quite go on.


Still, I can't help but wonder

if once I met him
walking across the world in
sweat-stained Patagonia

telling his evening stories
that were both stranger
and wiser than fiction.


If only those stories
were on this page now.

If only those stories
did not scatter
with morning rain.

Neopragmatist Poetics

Here is a recent essay that more or less sums up my current views on philosophy. I plan to do some heavy revising down the road, but I think it's still worth reading as is.

1. Redescribing Shelley's Defense of Poetry: Rorty, Rich, and the Making of a Neopragmatist Poetics

2. The Plaque Conspiracy with Continual Reference to Derrida (a humorous, misleading cover sheet and preface originally attached to the above essay)

"A Talk to Teachers"1

Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.

All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents’ shoulders which menaces him. And it isn’t long – in fact it begins when he is in school – before he discovers the shape of his oppression.

Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born – where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich – or at least it looks rich. It is clean – because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are – and indeed they do. And it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know – you know instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you?

Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, “Where’s your package?” Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.

There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this “animal,” once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in or4der to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.

The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: “We’ve liberated them from the land – and delivered them to the bosses.” When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930’s failed to make a dent in Negroes’ relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, “What does the Negro want?” I’ve heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.

In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a “nigger” even though you called me one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t , and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.

It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.

Now let’s go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people - the porter and the maid – who, as I said, don’t look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.

All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children – some of them near forty - who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because they didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel; they just didn’t know you were alive. They didn’t know you had any feelings.

What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don’t go into hiding when they hear the word “Communism,” astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.

The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don’t think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced – intolerably menaced – by a lack of vision.

It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them - I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, “He is a Communist.” This is a way of his learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.

1: By James Baldwin (1963)

"..." 29

For me, this is probably the most concise statement that I have found which sums up the relationship between philosophy and language. It is quoted from an interview by Robert Harrison in 2005, which happens to be available on iTunesU:

There are stories—historical narratives—to be told about the emergence of various discourses. My view is that when you’ve told the story about how the discourse emerged you’ve told everything—you’ve found out everything there is to know about the nature of mind, the nature of matter, the nature of God, stuff like that. There isn’t a further question about “Yeah, but what are they really?” All that there is to know is the story of how the words are used.

—Richard Rorty

House of Leaves of Grass

According to a certain publisher's press release, author Walt Z. Danmanewski has a new work that is set to hit the shelves next week.

Here's an exclusive preview of one of its pages, courtesy of the publisher (click to view it at a higher resolution):





4/23 update:

Suggested reading:

1. House of Pancakes

... 26

(Jerome Bruner. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.)

Perhaps Richard Rorty is right in characterizing the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy (which, on the whole, he rejects) as preoccupied with the epistemological question of how to know truth—which he contrasts with the broader question of how we come to endow experience with meaning, which is the question that preoccupies the poet and the storyteller. (p. 12)

The most general implication [of a "hermeneutic" or transactional view] is that a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum for negotiating and renegotiating meaning and for explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for action. (p. 123)

"..." 25

   Adam was saying, "The times are changed. A boy must be a specialist or he will get nowhere. I guess that's why I'm so glad you're going to college."
   Aron said, "I've been thinking about that, and I wonder."
   "Well, don't think any more. Your first choice is right. Look at me. I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one of them to make a living in these times."
   [. . .]
   Lee looked in. "The kitchen scales must be way off," he said. "The turkey's going to be done earlier than the chart says. I'll bet that bird doesn't weigh eighteen pounds."
   Adam said, "Well, you can keep it warm," and he continued, "Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn't be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well."
   "Yes," Lee said from the doorway, "and he deplored it. He hated it."

There was a young man from Stamboul

from Slaughterhouse 5:

There was a young man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool:
'You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,
And now you won't pee, you old fool.'