Obiter Scripta, no. 59

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It is good to go to bed early in Winter, and tonight as we sleep our dreams take punctuation from the thudding of snowploughs as they roll and bluster up and down Route 4, shaking the house yet comforting our sleep: Someone takes care, the solitary captains in their great snowships breasting through vast whiteness, cleaving it sideways into gutter drifts. If we stir as they thump past, we watch revolving yellow lights flash through our windows and reflect on the ceiling. We roll over and fall back into protected sleep.

— Donald Hall, “Winter,” Seasons at Eagle Pond

We don’t get quite enough snow in Virginia to justify it, but I still enjoy the fantasy of having a four-wheel-drive vehicle to drive in the snow (or better yet, an all-wheel-drive Subaru — I love those little tanks). It’s a lingering urge from the days when my family owned a newspaper distributorship and we were often the first ones out breaking trails through a snowstorm. I remember the satisfying feeling of security and preparedness in a vehicle designed for snow, the pleasure of being alert and focused on overcoming the danger of slick roads. Alone in a vast sea of white, I never thought of myself as the captain of a snowship, but that’s a great image, as is that of snowplows as patrolling guardians making the roads safe for the rest of us as we sleep.

The Thoughts You Think Become Unthunk

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Brad Warner:

Let me see if I can describe what I actually do each day. I’ll be sitting there, trying to do good Shikantaza for quite literally the 723rd time that year alone. And some thought comes along. And I get interested in that thought. What if I wrote a rock musical based on the life of Buddha? Maybe it would be as big as Jesus Christ Superstar! I could get Zero Defex to play it live at the Highland Theater in Akron.

Shit. OK. Shikantaza. Leave that thought. Check the posture. Yup. I’m slumping forward. OK. Shoulders back. Chest open. Spine balanced on hips. Zhweeeeeeeeeee.

No thoughts intrude for a while. Nice. Nice word, that. Nice. So many ways you can say it. Noice! Or maybe Cockney. Naaaaice, guv’na! Or Nice, France. That’s spelled like nice but pronounced Nice. If I wrote that in a blog how would I make it clear…

Shit! OK. Shikantaza. Put away that thought. Check the posture. Yup. I’m slumping to the left. OK. Shoulders back. Chest open. Spine balanced on hips. Zhweeeeeeeeeee.

What’s that smell? Should I tell someone about that smell? How can I tell someone about that smell without making any noise? Noise annoys! I love the Buzzcocks. So sad Pete Shelly died.

And so on.

That’s the way Shikantaza goes for me and I’ve been doing it roughly two times a day since the Autumn of 1983.

In a letter to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, C.S. Lewis noticed his own attempts at meditation bedeviled by a more consistent, but still maddening, form of “monkey mind”:

During my afternoon “meditations,” — which I at least attempt quite regularly now — I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sorts of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought “What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!” I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I’m going to be and how he will admire me….And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It is like fighting the hydra….There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self-admiration.

Blaise Pascal famously said that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Like many great aphorisms, this has two sharp edges to it. For many people, this intuitively seems like an endorsement of introversion; quoting it can be a way of feeling superior to the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. I haven’t checked, but I’d be willing to bet that there exists a Caspar David Friedrich image with the Pascal aphorism atop it decorating some disaffected adolescent’s Pinterest page. In context, though, Pascal seems to be describing what Warner, Lewis, and countless other meditators have all discovered — the tragedy of the human condition is present in the microcosm of one person’s mind no less than the grand scheme of world events. There is no escape from it, not even by “thinking the right thoughts.” As Warner says in another post, meditation practice is not trivial. Far from being just another productivity enhancer, stress reliever, or “lifehack” {shudder}, being alone with your thoughts for long enough will bring you face to face with the grinning unknown.

The Edge of the World

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Steve Edwards:

I’d started coming to bookstores because I wanted to learn how to write and the only consistent advice I got from established writers was to read everything. It was good advice. It’s still good advice. It’s also impossible. No one reads everything, nor even all the books they’d like to. You make your choices, come what may.

Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron once calculated that if one reads two books a week over the course of an adult life (from roughly age 20-70), the final tally will be about 5,000. I’d never suffered from FOMO until I read that. No actuarial life table ever hit me so hard. After my yearly physical this week, there was a brief 48-hour window where my doctor was investigating the possibility of me having an aortic aneurysm, but even the wait for the ultrasound results didn’t bring with it the cold touch of the grave like that unforgiving numeral sitting there, marking the end of all potential. Today I counted the total number of books on my shelves (1500 exactly) and it was like watching sand falling in a hourglass. “Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!”

Strange Bedfellows

By in books, fresh hell, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Hans Rollmann:

He goes on in his next essay to attack “professional victims, those who make a nice living off their victimhood”, by which he implies everyone who is not also a privileged white man. He writes off both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, saying that their support comes in large part from guilty voters, not from political acumen on their part. He characterizes Toni Morrison as “a connoisseur of victimhood”. And so on and so forth. He recycles and churns out a succinct array of half-baked bigotries in essays such as these, which will no doubt be picked up within a few years by men’s rights activists and neo-nazis and other distasteful reactionaries. One can’t help but wonder what Epstein feels at churning out fuel for those reactionaries most determined to wreck “the best that has been thought and said” in liberal culture.

Joseph Epstein, guilty of giving aid and comfort to neo-Nazis. And here I thought there were no new smears under the intersectional sun.

The Meaning of Is

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If we do not know the ultimate reality, we stand in somewhat the same relation to it as blind men to color. If I am to describe color to a blind man, I can do it in one of two ways. I can tell him what color is like, or I can say what it is not. I cannot possibly tell him what it is. I can compare it to variations in temperature, speaking of red as “warm” and blue as “cold,” though this will  perhaps mislead the blind man into thinking that red is warm. On the other hand, I can say that color is not hard or soft, round or square, liquid or solid. The danger here is that the blind man may easily suppose that I am talking about nothing, for I have denied to color every positive quality that he knows.

To some extent this is the difference between the religious doctrines of the West and the metaphysical doctrines of Asia. The former wants to say what reality is like, and the latter what it is not, but the average mind supposes that both are trying to say what it is. Hence the confusion.

— Alan Watts, “The Negative Way,” Alan Watts — In the Academy: Essays and Lectures

In one of my dictionaries, the French word animateur is defined as “one who is capable of simplifying difficult concepts for the benefit of a general audience.” (I’ve never seen this particular definition backed up by any other source, but never mind that.) As soon as I read it, I thought of Alan Watts. There are many things I love about Watts’s books, but his gift for explaining things in clear, memorable images is possibly the quality I love best.

The material in this book was compiled by a couple of scholars who feel that Watts has been given short shrift by academia for being a mere “popularizer.” The 45-page introduction struck me as an unnecessary justification of their efforts. Those who care more about credentials than substance will remain unimpressed. Watts was representative of the mid-20th century golden age of the middlebrow, when there was a widespread, optimistic belief that ordinary people would be interested in hearing philosophy and literature discussed in a straightforward manner, minus all the status-seeking and turf-defending common to intellectual life. I remember being at a library sale last fall and being greatly impressed by the quality of some of those old Book of the Month club publications. What a shame that that sort of aspiration became something to be embarrassed about, but what a joy it is to be reacquainted with it in this book.

Algorithmic Blues

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J.E.H. Smith:

There are memes circulating that are known as ‘bingo cards’, in which each square is filled with a typical statement or trait of a person who belongs to a given constituency, a mouth-breathing mom’s-basement-dwelling Reddit-using Mens’s Rights Activist, for example, or, say, an unctuous white male ally of POC feminism. The idea is that within this grid there is an exhaustive and as it were a priori tabulation, deduced like Kant’s categories of the understanding, of all the possible moves a member of one of these groups might make, and whenever the poor sap tries to state his considered view, his opponent need only pull out the table and point to the corresponding box, thus revealing to him that it is not actually a considered view at all, but only an algorithmically predictable bit of output from the particular program he is running. The sap is sapped of his subjectivity, of his belief that he, properly speaking, has views at all.

Who has not found themselves thrust into the uncomfortable position just described, of being told that what we thought were our considered beliefs are in fact something else entirely?

I have to admit that one of the most useful goads to my own intellectual growth has been that still, small voice that wonders, “Wait a minute…am I a cliché?”

For example, when I was nineteen, I thought this book was the most profound thing I’d ever read. Yes, I know. Do be kind, and try to keep your laughter muffled. Still, even though I was emotionally predisposed to give myself completely over to the romanticism of nature worship and Noble Savage-ism, I managed to outgrow it, in no small part because I was aware of the fact that many other people treated it dismissively. Why are those people over there laughing at me? What do they know that I don’t? The thought that others might have already investigated the object of my enthusiasm and found it lacking worried me like a pebble in my shoe. I couldn’t rest comfortably until I had seen myself from their perspective. I seemed congenitally incapable of the self-assurance of the true believer who confidently dismisses all critics as envious fools.

The Lady of the House has a friend who is a man of intense and varying enthusiasms. At forty years old, he has a predilection for the sort of self-aggrandizing self-improvement schemes that you would normally associate with precocious adolescents. From foodie fads, to his conspicuous contrarianism regarding the ordinary habits and conventions of social life, to his current obsession with biohacking, his optimizing never rests. I’ve never seen anyone who better exemplifies Chesterton’s line about how the danger isn’t that people will believe in nothing without God, it’s that they’ll believe in anything. He thinks of himself as proudly atheist, yet everything about him hums with the intensity of someone who yearns, more than anything, to believe, to devote himself to a cause. Each new enthusiasm is described with the zeal of the newly-converted. He is a perfect example of what a former age would have called a holy fool. And yet, he seems serenely untroubled by doubt, well-practiced at rationalizing objections away, completely oblivious to the possibility that his heartfelt convictions might be just so many squares on someone else’s bingo card.

The bingo-card formula of argument is maddening precisely because it is dehumanizing. We would rather be accused of evil than predictability. Being evil would at least be satisfying to the ego; it would place us beyond the comprehensible and flatter our vanity with other people’s fear. Contempt and dismissal is far more wounding. To be told that all of our subjective experience is merely the predictable unfolding of a preprogrammed script is to feel ourselves as a powerless object of study in a laboratory, to be perfectly under someone else’s control. Nothing is more satisfying in an argument than to toy with your opponent, holding him securely at arm’s length while he flails and thrashes futilely. Ideally, we should resist that urge to thoroughly dominate someone, but realistically, domination is such a visible and gratifying example of mastery, whereas understanding is more passive and hidden. Most of us can’t resist the urge to show off, to demonstrate our understanding in an active way, to prove that we have anticipated every counter, blocked off every escape route, and left our opponent at our mercy. Perhaps the best we can do is to turn that imprisoning gaze on ourselves, attempting to box ourselves in, and surprise ourselves with our endless ability to adapt and escape.

In Discipline Is the Preservation of the World

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To me there is an aura of grandeur about the dull routine of maintenance: I see it as a defiance of the teeth of time. It is easier to build than to maintain. Even a lethargic or debilitated population can be galvanized for a while to achieve something impressive, but the energy which goes into maintaining things in good repair day in, day out is the energy of true vigor.

— Eric Hoffer, Maintenance: A Trait of the East

Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele used to work for the NYC Parks and Rec department before the band became popular. He often spoke fondly of his days there, saying that he only gave the job up because the rest of the band wanted the full-time life of rock musicians; he would have been content to keep music as a hobby. His amused bandmates would recount stories of how Steele, when feeling stressed while on tour, would grab a broom and start sweeping the floor of the venue where they were playing. It was his way of making order out of chaos, and, to some extent, reminding himself of simpler, happier times.

I also practice Steele’s method of stress reduction. When angry or anxious, I instinctively channel that energy into household chores. It doesn’t take depth psychology to see this as a means of coping with a breach in the defenses of my psychological city-state. When the tendrils of chaos start creeping in somewhere, I immediately go on patrol around the perimeter, looking to reinforce any other weak spots. I realize this may be a bit odd, but as far as quirks go, at least this one is constructive. If character is fate, perhaps my overall fastidiousness marked me as temperamentally conservative from the start — I start from the assumption that all valuable things are fragile and the threat of entropy and disaster requires constant vigilance. It’s not even that I think this way; it’s more like it’s in my marrow. For many people, it may seem overly gloomy or pessimistic to assume the glass is half-empty, but honestly, I feel conscious all the time of how wonderful it is that the glass is even half-full when it could easily be, and has so often been, empty. Ritual maintenance, whether physical or spiritual, personal or cultural, is the practice of honoring that.

It’s not all grim stoicism and emergency preparedness drills, though. In her essay “Marrying Libraries,” Anne Fadiman quipped about her husband being closely allied with the forces of entropy. I, too, know what it is to share living space with one of the enemy’s agents. We have a running joke that I’m the robot butler who repeatedly insists on removing Donald Duck’s hat in “Modern Inventions,” except in my case, it’s coffee cups and clothing which need to be picked up and put where they belong despite vociferous protest. I don’t mind these homeopathic doses of chaos, though. Like Hoffer said a few times throughout his writings, it’s the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls, and only stretched souls make music.

This Is, My Friends, an Outrage!

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the geist of the zeit, unintended consequences No Comments

Kyle Smith:

The tone of Andy Richter and Judd Apatow’s tweets was not that they were disappointed that C.K. had done a bit that wasn’t funny at a show neither of them had attended. No, Richter and Apatow are outraged. And outrage is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Comics don’t want to admit they’re outraged. Because outrage traditionally makes you a butt of jokes, a bit like the teenaged pearl-clutching brigade C.K. mocked.

What is driving this episode of cultural citizens’ arrest is that the Parkland kids are untouchable. They can’t be made fun of. They are . . . icons. Comics can’t say that because labeling the Parkland kids sacred cows would acknowledge the existence of sacred cows. And they want to reserve the right to barbecue everybody else’s sacred cows.

It’s true that the woke left are the new Moral Majority, and it’s deliciously funny that, like all self-righteous prigs, they honestly don’t see it. Still, not to overanalyze a comedy bit, but I thought the premise of C.K.’s joke, that youthful rebellion should always be cumulative in one direction, the direction of thoughtless hedonism, was pretty flat. And not to lean too heavily on generational stereotypes, but doesn’t it almost seem like a caricature of self-satisfied Summer of Love attitudes to take pride in the idea of your children being even more “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” than you were at their age? How far can things go in one overindulgent direction before it gets predictable and boring?

A friend of mine has an academic career centered on video games and LARPing. Her husband is a guitarist. Her teenage son, she once confided to me, was causing her concern because he seemed to be showing, well, almost Young Republican tendencies. He was interested in the stock market and making money! She was genuinely baffled as to why he would feel the need to differ from their example. “We’re artsy and tolerant!” she actually said to me in bewilderment. How could this Alex P. Keaton have appeared in their right-thinking household like Milton Friedman springing from Jerry Garcia’s forehead? Shouldn’t the old dialectical tension between the thesis of parental authority and the antithesis of adolescent contrariness have resolved itself in the peaceful synthesis of ageless domestic utopia, enabling each individual to create subversive art in the morning, tend an organic vegetable garden in the afternoon, and share free love in the evening, in accordance with their whims? Interestingly, her older daughter superficially adopted all the trappings of hippie nostalgia to which her mom was sympathetic, from tie-dyed shirts to pot smoking, while still being quite angry and traditionally rebellious, rather than archly skeptical like her brother. Unintended consequences are so fascinating.

And unintended consequences are precisely what the censorious among us can’t tolerate. Ironically enough, many people would like comedy to keep moving cumulatively in one direction, always predictably attacking safe targets like bourgeois morality and organized religion with the same old profane weapons. They want it to remain forever 1984, reprising their role as the rebellious kids in Footloose, outfighting the rednecks and outwitting the Reverend by quoting his own holy book at him, winning the right to dance and party the night away. But taboos are comedy’s natural prey, and currently, all the meatiest taboos are grazing in progressive pastures. Good luck trying to keep nature from taking its course.

All the Minor Minor Minorities With Their Navels to be Kept Clean

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After reading yesterday’s post, the Lady of the House, who is an exotic foreigner and sometimes unfamiliar with common rites of passage in American cultural life, asked me why The Catcher in the Rye was ever banned. I’m not really sure, I responded. I assume it was somehow shocking to mid-century sensibilities. Like most people, I had to read the book in high school English class, but it didn’t impress me then and I’ve rarely thought about it since (except for that one time). But while browsing some literary blogs later on, my eye was caught by a link to a post asking if Salinger’s novel was still relevant on the occasion of his 100th birthday. With the Lady’s question still fresh in my mind, I thought that maybe I would find something informative there.

Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.

I’m not sure how this residual naïveté lingers in my soul; I can’t say why, just because I was visiting the column of a Washington Post book critic, I thought I might find something more interesting than another woke sermon. More fool me, though. It’s just the usual potpourri of clichés, presented, as always, by a not-at-all overcompensating middle-aged white man hoping his fervent testimony keeps him one step ahead of the intersectional tumbrils. Caulfield represents the monochromatic past; the new hotness in young-adult literature is a book about a black French-Canadian boy who moves to Texas (whether these cosmetic traits make the book interesting or not is a question left unaddressed). Salinger’s reclusiveness suggests mental illness — the bad kind, apparently, the kind that would make you avoid social media, not the sympathetic kind that can be talked about endlessly on social media and used as the cornerstone of an entire identity. And, of course, Salinger was an abusive creeper, which we no longer tolerate in the era of #MeToo. For those obsessed with the trendy and topical, everything, even a paean to diversity, becomes an excuse to think and talk about themselves and the moment they inhabit. As Auden said, Any heaven we think it decent to enter/Must be Ptolemaic with ourselves at the center.

It’s quite funny because again, just yesterday, I learned that Holden was allegedly the harbinger of Marxism and nihilism in America, the spearhead of a leftist plot against decency and family life; today, I’m told that he’s actually the epitome of white privilege, emblematic of the bourgeois insularity that has oppressed so many for so long. How can he be both at once? Is he a rabbit or a duck? Is he a vase or two people kissing? Whatever the case, at least we can all agree that he’s to blame. If only his name had been Wayne.

The Terror of Existence

By in atheism, books, fresh hell, religion 2 Comments

I had such high hopes for this book. It was billed as “part literary criticism, part philosophical exploration,” a dialogue between a believer, Kenneth Francis, and a skeptic, Theodore Dalrymple, over the search for meaning following the cultural death of God. I envisioned a skillful rhetorical fencing match. I imagined a graceful intellectual tango. What I witnessed was a blindfolded, three-legged sack race.

As a cheerful, Epicurean-style skeptic, I’m always open to the possibility that someone might offer a new way of thinking about the big questions. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard most of the religious arguments, but who knows, more things in heaven and earth and all that, maybe I can still be surprised yet. Instead, Francis’s contributions are the epitome of predictability. He makes one reference in passing to the supposedly-sophisticated arguments being put forth by modern theologians, but he himself is content to rely heavily on what I like to think of as the Dostoevsky fallacy — “without God, everything is permitted” — which he obligingly quotes early on. Any critical caltrops you might think to scatter across his path, such as the fact that the worst of human nature was in clear evidence long before God’s existence was seriously questioned by the French philosophes, or the fact that billions of people have found ways to develop culture and live meaningful lives separate from the axioms of Christianity, would be useless against the rhetorical steamroller Francis is driving. In essay after essay, to paraphrase Matthew 12:30, you’re either with Jesus or you’re with Pol Pot. I’ve seen fingerpaintings with more delicate brushstrokes than this.

The book is structured as alternating essays, with each author addressing different books and plays. Waiting for Godot is the only work to receive attention from both, with a brief three-paragraph “conversation” between them following. Admittedly, I got the book because of Dalrymple’s name on it; I didn’t know or care anything about Francis beforehand (and I certainly don’t care to know anything else afterward). Dalrymple’s contributions are interesting, as usual, though I tend to think of his New English Review Press publications as generally being his second-string essays (and, as is typical of an NERP book, typographical errors abound, which is mildly annoying). But the contrast between the two authors’ efforts side-by-side is like listening to chamber music punctuated by a kazoo and penny whistle. Francis’s essays aren’t just bad, they’re comically bad.  It’s as if a WorldNetDaily column mated with a YouTube comment thread. The non-sequiturs and overall lack of subtlety and nuance attain a perverse sublimity as he free-associates about how the pebble of Holden Caulfield is responsible for the rockslide of post-’60s decadent hedonism. Oh, you think I’m exaggerating.

I have often wondered whether the American novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is a literary hoax, a kind of Leftist propaganda manifesto manufactured to discredit traditional family values. And is it not coincidental that the Leftist generations after its post-1950s publication, were generally disaffected, drug-addled American youth who had become spiritually poisoned during the sexual revolution by a Godless culture culminating decades later in glorifying a toxic entertainment industry with vile lyrics and vulgar role models?

…Isn’t it strange that Salinger, who wrote this frequently censored, anti-family, blasphemous, rebellious, violent, promiscuous, pro-smoking/drinking/lying book became a recluse? Was the cliff in the rye field an imaginary threat, where ‘little children’ must be protected by their Big Brother? A generation of brainwashed sheep kept in line by a ‘good’ shepherd? Or is the story an autobiographical psychological projection of Salinger’s world view? Was he a Marxist? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Sometimes comment would be superfluous, and all that’s left to do is back away slowly.

But since we find ourselves in this rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking, perhaps we should ask: is this book intended as covert atheist propaganda? Did some godless sodomite set this caricature up to discredit the very idea of intelligent religious thought? Is Dalrymple being blackmailed to lend his name to this atrocious effort? Perhaps we’ll never know.

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