Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Meditations and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, which is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression.…It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems while you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness as you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand to the floor. “We find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we had anticipated,” Schopenhauer wrote. “We require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, to keep on a straight course.”
February 2011
Is That Grass Just Greener ‘Cause It’s Fake?
So you can scoff and snicker all you like at the shaggy, hangdog 27-year-old next door dressed in a baggy college sweatshirt and cargo shorts, taking empty pizza boxes and beer bottles to the dumpster. He could be a loser just trying to extend his adolescence indefinitely—or he might just be getting ready to change the world with what he creates in his unkempt guy lair.
Or, or, you know, hear me out here, I know this might sound crazy, he could just be content with living a nondescript life of simple pleasures, having seen plenty of reasons in his 27 years to doubt that marriage, parenting and mortgages are really all that. No, you’re right, that does sound crazy. Let’s just reheat some leftovers from Atlas Shrugged and justify his existence by the tiny fraction of a chance that he might come up with some world-shaking invention.
Air Traffic Controllers of the Human Soul
By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it’s under Chinese control. Assuming he’s able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks.
Obviously I know there’s political subtext to all this. But still, passing a law to prevent reincarnation? Choosing where you will be reborn as an act of political protest? Sometimes I just have to marvel at the fact that, you know, when you scratch the surface, human beings are really fucking insane underneath.
Saturday Shuffle
It’s feeling like spring around here, so it’s close enough to being time for another one of these.
- Maximum Balloon — Groove Me
- Emiliana Torrini — Fireheads
- Conjure One — Center of the Sun
- Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions — Drop
- In Extremo — Wessebronner Gebet
- Peter Gabriel — Sledgehammer
- How to Destroy Angels — BBB
- Supergrass — Late in the Day
- Radiohead — All I Need
- Steely Dan — Black Cow
- Basement Jaxx — Where’s Your Head At
- Populous — Bottom 02
- Fujiya & Miyagi — Dishwasher
- The Fratellis — Vince the Lovable Stoner
- Meat Puppets — Violet Eyes
- Elbow — Fallen Angel
- Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears — Sugarfoot
- The Dandy Warhols — Insincere
- Goldfrapp — Little Bird
- Moby — Porcelain
We are Changed by What We Change
This is a really interesting, wide-ranging interview with Reza Aslan. I’m just gonna get out of the way and let him talk:
I mean the truth is that there is a kid in Los Angeles right now that has more in common with a kid in Indonesia because they like the same music and the same movies, than either of them have in common with their own communities. So the very concept of society has shifted. This is one thing that I never get tired of talking about, that from the dawn of humanity the definition of society and community was geographically defined. Community means, who is around me; who’s next to me? That’s my community. Until twenty years ago. From when we started walking upright to about twenty years ago, that’s what society meant. And it doesn’t mean that anymore.…We were talking about this and it occurred to us that when we were in high school we didn’t have email. I completely forgot about this. We didn’t have email, and we didn’t have cell phones. So we were all sitting there, suddenly remembering that in order (because I had a very tight-knit group of friends in high school) to get in touch with each other we would have to call our parents. And we’d have to say, “Is Reza home?” I don’t remember it. As far as I know I’ve always had email and I’ve always had a cell phone. But to be confronted by that change is to become aware that we are living through this catastrophic global transformation.…My very good friend Eli Pariser—he’s writing a book, he created MoveOn. He’s writing this really fascinating book—and this part is not all that unique because it’s something that most tech people would say, is that when we were younger and the Internet was coming along, the excitement was that this would be a truly democratizing thing, this was going to be the technology that not just changed the way we communicate and the way we identify with each other, but it was going to democratize understanding, it was going to create so much access that knowledge would become second-hand. Everything you want to know is now available to you. And what we found over the last half-decade is the exact opposite has happened. What the Internet has done is it’s even more fractured people, it’s become the ultimate sounding board, you never ever have to be confronted by any opposing views for the rest of your life anymore.Guernica: We’re at a time that is very similar to the printing press being invented. I think about this all the time with my students: For a long time I would get on them, I mean, I still get on them in their essays about punctuation, but there are things students are doing with language right now that I was really upset about for a long time and then I thought, “But is it possible we are at a moment when a new language is being created?” And that is terrifying.Reza Aslan: I always love, if you ever read Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, he essentially created spelling. Before that you spelled things however you wanted to spell it, phonetically. And then Johnson wrote a dictionary and then that’s how it’s spelled, forever, all of a sudden. So I wonder if we’re sort of in a similar place like that where if I see text-speak or something, I won’t poke my eyes out with a hot iron, but then I think, Jesus, is this how everyone is going to be writing in a hundred years? And is there anything to be done about that or is it just the evolution of language?Guernica: And I’m also beginning to understand it. I used to get a text from someone and I’d have no idea what’s being said. But now I am beginning to understand the language. And that’s fascinating how at some point it goes beyond my choice even (if that makes sense).Reza Aslan: But, there will always be people like you and me to complain about this.
We Came From the Breeze
I was talking about poetry with a friend the other day, and she said she favored long narrative ballads, naming writers like Service, Kipling, Tolkien, and some Frost.
But you can see in the poems I’ve shown you, this driving, pounding beat, this rhythm that underlays the words and carries it strongly, til it almost echoes. That’s why I got disillusioned with free verse. Sure, once in a while you find one that still manages that rhythm, but they’re so far between, I just gave it up.
On the other hand, as evidenced by the Basho quotation up in the top corner, I consider Eastern poetry a cornerstone of my poetic worldview; haiku was the first form that really enthralled me, especially for its connection to Zen Buddhism. When Buson says:
I go, you stay;
Two autumns.
The space in the poem is so vast, and with time being measured in “autumns”, you get the sense of his melancholy without having to hear him say in so many words, “I’m lonely. I miss you.” You feel his sadness without hearing the words that might numb you to it by dint of their familiarity. We hear those kinds of straightforward sentiments so often, we forget to really feel what they symbolize.
Robert Haas elaborated on this indirect way of expression:
The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. In Basho’s poem quoted above, for example, the phrase aki fukaki, “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens” is traditional and had accumulated references from earlier poetry as well as from the Japanese way of thinking about time and change. So does the reference to snow—yuki, which can also mean “snowfall”—in Buson’s poems. It is always connected to a sense of exposure to the elements, for which there is also a traditional phrase, “winter bareness.” The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear either in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem… These references were conventional and widely available. They were the first way readers of the poems had of locating themselves in the haiku. Its traditional themes—deep autumn, a sudden summer shower, the images of rice seedlings and plum blossoms, of spring and summer migrants like the mountain cuckoo and the bush warbler, of the cormorant-fisherman in summer, and the apprentices on holiday in the spring—gave a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world.
In a chapter devoted to the poet Issa, Sam Hamill pointed out the ubiquity in his poems of mono no aware (a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality) and sabi (a kind of spiritual loneliness). Two of my favorites of his, both in honor of the deaths of his young children:
This world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh, and yet…
A Buddhist equanimity tries to assert itself in the face of intense suffering, but the all-too-human emotions refuse to be pacified. Gets me every time.
Windy fall—
these are the scarlet flowers
she liked to pick.
Again, the indirect focus, not on his daughter, but on the memories attached to everyday objects. The pain of it seems to hit me harder this way.
The Eastern poets appealed to me because that’s how so many of my insights appeared to me — a sudden, intuitive flash, a widening of the eyes, a sharp intake of breath. The words came later, and sometimes just got in the way. I can appreciate a rhythmic story, but when it comes to getting at what seems to me to be the heart of the poetic experience, I tend to feel that the less words, the better. In this case, the poet’s job isn’t to lay it all out and say Here’s what happened, here’s how it happened, and here’s why it happened, it’s to place words sparingly around the experience without trying to land directly on it.
A Long Time Ago I Never Knew Myself
Grunge set me off on a journey I’m still on. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and their peers used rock stardom as a vehicle for exposing gullible teenagers like me to parts of life that were previously obscured or hidden from mainstream view. Records, movies, books, ideas—all it took was a casual reference to something you’d never heard of an in interview or an album’s liner notes to point you toward another avenue to explore, which then led to more avenues. These bands don’t matter? My God, if you were like me, they gave you the world.This music changed me. It was important to me. I guess it always will be.
I have a very vivid memory of sitting at my high school graduation, staring at all the caps and tassels in front of me, thinking about all my peers and their talk over the previous weeks about their futures. They seemed so sure of themselves, sure of why they were going to college and sure of what they would do with the education they got there. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I have that sort of self-assurance, or at the very least, why couldn’t I fake it?
There was one small kernel of an idea in my head that alleviated the worst of the anxiety, though. I was already starting to tell people that I wanted to be a musician.
Just a couple years earlier, though, I didn’t even have that. I was an average student, one of those blessed/cursed with so much “potential”, if only I would “apply myself”. Those Bs and Cs could so easily turn into As and Bs if only I would put in that little extra effort. But I wasn’t terribly interested in most of what was being taught, and as I got into the high school years, those Bs and Cs started occasionally turning into Ds and Fs, mostly when it came to post-algebra math.
It became a ritual almost every nine weeks, the “family meeting”, which essentially meant a lecture from my dad about the latest report card while my mom tried to stake out some meaningless middle ground, pleasing no one. He was well-educated and successful in two different lines of work, and impressed repeatedly upon me the need to start thinking seriously about my future and the need to start preparing for it immediately. Get those grades up. Get involved in some extracurricular activities; colleges like to see someone who looks “well-rounded”. You’re isolated from your peers. You’re isolated from your teammates. You don’t want to end up with no money and no options when you’re older, do you? Do you have any ideas of what you want to do with your life? Once, when I was maybe about fifteen or sixteen, I remember staring at a spot on the table in front of me and saying in a small voice that all I really knew that I loved doing was listening to music. His response was to start talking about the sort of work you can do within the record industry. Office-related work, which had nothing to do with what I was saying at all. At one point, he talked about sending me to military school with the idea that the stricter regimen might keep my mind from wandering. For a kid who found ordinary school brutal enough, this was the closest thing to hell I could imagine. I remember going up to my room, digging out the saddest song I knew at that point to listen to repeatedly, and crying myself to sleep.
I thought about suicide a lot those days.
So sick of not fitting in, so sick of wondering why I couldn’t fit in, so sick of just living in constant fear of everything. I had shoplifted a bottle of sleeping pills at one point, which I kept hidden in my room. Just knowing it was there was a strange comfort, knowing I had a clear way out if things ever got too bad, and luckily, I never reached the limits of my endurance.
It almost seems quaint now, thinking back to how easy it was to feel so isolated in those pre-Internet days. Adolescents have always felt that way and still do, of course, but I think there was a slightly heavier burden to bear when, for many of us, there was really no way to find out about other people, other ways of thinking and acting. We didn’t even have cable TV at the time. If you didn’t fit in with the people around you, that was your problem. You knew the kids you went to school with, and that was pretty much it. And I didn’t care to know many of them. On graduation night, I got my diploma, walked back into the school to return my cap and gown, stood around for a minute in the cafeteria watching them all cheer and slap each other on the back, and thought to myself, Why am I still standing here? I don’t give a fuck about any of these people. I walked on out and went home. I’ve never seen most of them since.
I listened to a lot of heavy metal at the time, and Metallica was a particularly valuable lifeline for me. I had started letting my hair grow and getting tattoos. I was playing drums at the time, and corralling a couple friends to play other instruments. But the year after I left school, there was a video on TV from a band called Nirvana.
I’m not going to try to outline everything significant about that fact; Hyden has spent ten installments going over the same topic and still had to leave a ton of stuff out. For me, the important thing was I finally had a template for a new way to live in what the media would begin referring to as grunge. Here, in magazines and on MTV, were people who looked like me while embodying a passion that I never allowed myself to acknowledge, let alone express. Here were people who talked about literature and poetry in interviews and made it sound fascinating. Here were people who made an example of how to live in a way that didn’t embrace the mindless hedonism of typical L.A. rock music, or the empty, acquisitive values of society in general. How to live — the question I had been trying to answer for myself without even knowing how to ask it. I read William Burroughs because Kurt Cobain talked about him. I read Charles Bukowski because the Red Hot Chili Peppers mentioned him in a song. I heard Henry Rollins talk about reinventing himself from a scared, weak little kid into a hardcore punk legend with the help of some philosopher named Nietzsche. I had a brief handwritten-letter correspondence with Otis from Animal Bag. I could go on for hours. Like Hyden said, it only took the mildest of references to send me off on another ravenous search for more knowledge and experience to add to my expanding worldview, and the search itself was intoxicating.
One day, I came down the stairs softly and overheard my parents talking in the kitchen, unaware of my presence. My dad was telling my mom about this regrettable path I had taken, saying that as far as he could see, I had doomed myself to a subpar life of subsistence wages. No decent woman would ever be interested in me, given the way I looked. He felt that he had done all he could, and was resigned to having to wash his hands of whatever I became. My mom was agreeable as always. I stood there for a moment thinking, and then continued on my way out the door. As far as I was concerned, I was on my own from then on.
I spent the next ten years or so focused on writing and recording music, until developing RA. By then, I had given up on the idea of making a living at music anyway, but I didn’t need that fantasy anymore. I had made a life out of it. I gave it my heart, it gave me the world. I’ll always be grateful.
And So the Conversation Turned Until the Sun Went Down
I haven’t disappeared, I just spent a long weekend visiting with a close friend. Taking turns reading out loud, trips to the mountains to enjoy the almost-spring weather, and lazing around on the couch watching TV. Life is very good. Back to the blogospheric grind as soon as I catch up on sleep.
Give Up Your Vows
Aspects of this evolution in attitudes towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere, too, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job.Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically – or perhaps realistically – confined, by the aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.
Mistermix:
Most of these marriages would be a hell of a lot better if the sexually unsatisfied partner had a discreet affair, but that puts the other partner in a socially untenable situation. “Open marriage” is something for dirty hippies or sleazy swingers, not an upstanding member of society.…If we want to do something about the high divorce rate, we might want to get real about making sexual satisfaction a precursor to marriage, and also about the role of a discreet, mutually agreed-upon affair as a safety valve. Of course, religion and social norms rule that out-of-bounds.
There’s a lone genius—possibly evil and certainly entrepreneurial—behind Ashley Madison. His name is Noel Biderman, and he’s the chief executive officer of Avid Life Media, based in Toronto. “Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment,” he declares. It’s unclear if Biderman actually believes this—he’s married and has two young kids—but like Hugh Hefner before him the business he has created pretty much requires that he say it. Behind his desk, in an office so lacking in embellishment it almost looks like a hastily assembled low-budget film set, is a large flat-screen monitor promoting his company’s flagship brand. It reads: “Life is short. Have an affair.”…Research suggests that 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 20 to 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have an affair during their lifetime. Moreover, men have an evolutionary prerogative to spread their genes as widely as possible, while women are driven to find a mate and try to gain access to the best genes out there by any means necessary.
It is my Buddha Nature to be omni-sexual. If you pluck one string on a well-tuned guitar the one next to it will vibrate because it’s the nature of sound waves. Well, my husband picks a certain chord. Then you, you hit this string and you over there, this string. You can’t hit her string. Your frequency is completely different. It’s not confusing to me. You can’t pluck my husband’s string and he can’t pluck yours.
Rationally speaking, it probably would make a lot of people much happier if the tangled threads of sexuality, love and marriage could be teased apart. Who can even begin to tally up how many decent relationships have been ruined because of a misguided notion that a burning passion, which by definition is temporary, can be sustained over years and decades? You’re not allowed to sign legally binding documents under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but people make hugely important decisions all the time while high on the sorts of chemicals that infatuation releases. Maybe the old way had merit, of looking at marriage as a way of protecting property and heritage, while discreet affairs were for getting rid of those irrational passions before they caused damage in everyday life.
For some people, though, sexual attraction isn’t just a simple matter of finding someone physically attractive and at least tolerably pleasant to have a couple hours of fun with. Sometimes the qualities that others look for in a relationship are what make a person sexually desirable in the first place. Even as a young, studly musician, I never had any interest in casual sex. Granted, some of that was due to my withdrawn nature which made such intimate contact with strangers too overwhelming to contemplate, but some of it was because I just couldn’t find anything stimulating about looking at people like they were a piece of attractive meat, independent of personality.
I know that sounds pretentious and contrived, like the kind of guys who joke about how much more often they get laid now that they’ve learned to talk like a feminist, but it’s true. I was watching Louis C.K.’s recent comedy special Hilarious, and he talked about how depressing it is as a newly-divorced 41 year-old trying to redevelop his atrophied social skills on the dating scene, only to be repulsed by the shallow, predictable identities that people all wear. “Who are you? What are you all about?” “Uh, I’m The Girl That All The Guys Want To Fuck!” You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, from the bimbos to the broheims. It’s like everyone learned their social skills by watching thousands of hours of beer commercials.
Speaking of which, I wonder sometimes why we associate superficial attractiveness with sexual desire anyway. Is it really the product of relentless advertising? Are we just Pavlov’s dogs, trained to connect a certain body type and charisma with all the subtle signals that get the lizard brain going? Is there any logical reason to expect that someone who looks handsome or pretty will be more pleasurable in bed? Or would the evolutionary psychologists say that we’re drawn to certain features that somehow indicate good genes?
I have no idea what to think about any of this. This is why I’m a hermit.
They Act Like Earth Was Terrestrial Prison
In the end, Caruncho and Fernández say they want to separate romance from reality, but their diagnosis leads to a conclusion no less romantic, and no less religious, than the legend: that our own bodies can generate within us a sensation of the divine. From this, maybe the romantics and neoclassicists can be brought together for a new notion of genius, one that allows for, and sometimes necessitates, ecstatic irrational reveries that must still be grounded in practice if good works are to be produced. After all, visions alone are not enough. If Chopin hadn’t practiced his piano, he may never have gotten past the Polish border. But his experience of the sublime, whatever its cause, was a real factor in his ability to compose as well.
Works for me. I don’t get why so many people think our most sublime experiences are diminished unless we pretend they descend, uncaused, from some mysterious dimension outside of space and time. Again, I blame Plato.
Poking at the Giant Eyes of Ancient Gods
But up to now the moral law has been supposed to stand above our own likes and dislikes: one did not want to actually impose this law upon oneself, one wanted to take it from somewhere or discover it somewhere or have it commanded to one from somewhere.– Nietzsche
In conversation with Shanna the other day, the topic of Carl Jung’s work came up. I casually mentioned that I wasn’t much of a fan of his (or of his follower Joseph Campbell). Impudent as always, she wanted to know what exactly I didn’t like about him. Grumbling and grousing at having my authoritative pronouncements questioned, I named a few things. But while looking for a remembered citation on Wikipedia, I saw a brief paragraph that largely encapsulated my answer for me:
Jung’s work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential, much as the acorn contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to our well-being.
Achoo! *Sniff* Sorry, Plato’s overpowering cologne always makes me sneeze.
I had an elderly neighbor once who constantly urged me to read Campbell, and when I did, I realized why she was always giving me a hard time for supposedly failing to fulfill my talent as a writer or musician. To her, I was being a petulant acorn. The Little Engine That Wouldn’t. I had been given this gift, didn’t I see, and I was being dishonest to myself and depriving the universal spirit of my contribution to the whole by refusing to see how much I could maximize my potential. I knew she meant well, but it was hard not to be offended by what struck me as a slightly arrogant position. Who exactly was she to tell me what I should be doing with my life? Just because she thought it was a “waste” to live a nondescript life in a small town with my girlfriend and her kid, it was now a universal edict? Did I get any say in what I wanted to make of my life and how I wanted to arrange the various components in order of importance? I didn’t want to be a Hero; I just wanted to be a cipher, to live unseen and enjoy my ordinary life.
This is what I don’t like about Jung, or Plato, or anybody who cares more about generalizations over particulars, composites over individuals. I don’t understand this idea that the greatest thing, the ultimate achievement, is to submerge your identity in some oceanic whole. It makes me think I’m listening to moths rhapsodizing about the flame. I know that this limited perspective that we call our individual identity has no permanent, underlying essence to it, but I love it all the same.
And I don’t understand this urge to shrug off the yoke of responsibility for what we do with our lives and seek to fall into some preordained pattern, some preexisting script, where we just have to show up and let destiny take care of the rest. Well, actually, I suppose I understand it, but I don’t respect it. You’re not in sole control of your life, of course, but you are in charge of deciding what constitutes living well, and doing your best to embody it.
There is no moral imperative here. Your life is yours to fulfill or waste as you see fit. Sometimes I think we act like we’re driving cars with no brakes; we only ever stop mindlessly accelerating when we hit something. But not every dream is obligated to become a goal. Not every talent is destined to lead to riches and recognition. And abstention can be just as much evidence of wisdom and self-mastery as failure of nerve.
Premature Congratulations
There does seem to be no doubt that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had a significant role to play in giving a voice to the democracy-seeking citizens of Egypt & Tunisia and helping them to create a community of international supporters. If there ever is a judgement day, surely Mark Zuckerberg’s sins of inflicting Farmville and Mafia Wars on the world will be more than outweighed by the events of the last month of so.
And this makes me wonder, will people now stop saying that they don’t see the point of social media and that it’s an absurd waste of time? Of course, many of the things that people choose to spend their time doing on social media – see above comments re: Farmville and Mafia Wars – may not be the most productive things they could be doing. But, the same is true for almost everything; the fact that some people spend their time reading Harlequin romances, doesn’t negate the value of reading in general.
Whether its Second Life, Twitter, Facebook or a plethora of other offerings, there are many worthwhile, often beneficial uses of social media: disease support groups, public awareness campaigns, news feeds, educational programs, and more. Yes, there are an awful lot of videos of cats dancing on YouTube, but YouTube has also become a vital means of communication in and out of Tunisia and Egypt.
Perhaps some people spend too much time on social media; there may be a legitimate reason to worry about young people’s lack of in-person interactions with each other, and of course, there are the usual very valid concerns about privacy, viruses and spam. But can we all just finally agree that, while these concerns are legitimate and need to be discussed and addressed, social media is not a total waste of time and that it’s no longer okay to just wildly fling out the judgement that people who use it “need to get a life”?
I can only speak for myself, of course, but I feel confident in asserting that I have always been judicious and measured in my accusations of life-lacking with regards to social networking, so, sure, we can agree here. YouTwitFace™ can indeed be used in service to various worthy causes, especially when time and mass signatures are of the essence. At the same time, it’s also true that social media, with all the attendant gripes about decaying social skills she mentions, is a symptom of our culture’s relentless drive to increase speed for its own sake, a drive which contributes to a number of other social ills that can’t be easily vanquished by an online petition. And curmudgeons like me with a particular interest in wordsmithery will always insist that the most lamentable thing about online communication flowing downhill to the sea level of social networking is the lost opportunity for people to take advantage of a text-based medium to become better at expressing their thoughts through writing. But as long as we don’t completely devolve into communicating through clicks, grunts, ringtones, hoots, whistles and emoticons, I guess I can grudgingly admit that social networking isn’t totally useless.
About that revolution thing, though. Like most Myrrhkins, I don’t have anything pertinent or intelligent to say about developments in Tunisia and Egypt. I’m merely content to pride myself on not being one of those idiots making the achingly predictable puns on that Bangles song. (You know which one I mean. I’m not even going to say it.) However, I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to suggest that when today’s headlines are talking about a U.S.-funded military junta taking power in Egypt, suspending the constitution, and declaring martial law for the good of the people in the name of eventual (maybe) democracy, you might want to hold off on jabbing that Like button for the time being. Old-timers with some perspective can tell you that history isn’t necessarily quite as enthralled with the seemingly instant results of clicktivism as you are; there’s still plenty of time for blood to start flowing and wheels to start rolling backward.
Eyes of Confusion Looking for a String
The moral of these philosophical biographies is therefore neither simple nor uniformly edifying. For anyone hoping for happiness, or political wisdom, or salvation, philosophical self-examination seems in practice to have led to self-doubt as often as self-trust, to misery as often as joy, to reckless public acts as often as prudent political conduct, and to moments of self-inflicted torment as often as moments of saving grace.
I found myself thinking, as I read his book, about this gap between theory and practice and wondering if maybe the problem is in the folly of ever thinking that the raging floodwaters of life can be tamed and neatly channeled by rational principles in the first place. Socrates/Plato was wrong about many things; what if the idea of intellectual consistency being a prize virtue is another? What if the attempt to define people by unbending logical principles is just as misguided and doomed to failure as the search for some mysterious essence called the soul to define them by? What if the True, the Good, and the Beautiful do not necessarily harmonically converge?
Imagine my chagrin, a few paragraphs later, to find Rousseau, one of my least favorite philosophers, forcing me to grudgingly tip my hat to him:
When Montaigne tried, and failed, to emulate the stoic composure of Seneca, and chose instead to describe himself as he really was in his Essays, he was finally able to step outside the tradition of moral perfectionism that had linked the philosophical ideals of Socrates and Plato to those articulated by Seneca and Augustine. And when Rousseau subsequently, and even more spectacularly, proved unable to live up consistently to his own daunting standard of virtuous conduct, he was unafraid to draw one possible conclusion: “You want people always to be consistent”—the classical idea of rational unity. “I doubt that is possible for man; but what is possible for him is always to be true: that is what I mean to try to be.”
I Celebrate Myself, and Blog Myself
The superficial similarities are certainly striking. His avowed interest in every aspect of his own life and character and their frank revelation in prose of sometimes improvisatory immediacy have (to Bakewell and others) suggested affinities with the world of blogs and social media today. It would be wrong, however, to push this too far. Montaigne’s literal self-centeredness has more in common with the self-portraits of the Renaissance painters who created the form (one element in an evolving complex of ideas about Man and his place in the universe), than with the compulsive exhibitionism of today’s Facebook or Twitter users. For Montaigne it’s a matter not of self-display to the world, but of self-discovery in the world and through engagement with it. Writing in the way he does is essential to that process, as he quietly contemplates the workings of his own mind. He has none of the blogger’s fear of silence or the desperate modern need to connect and communicate.…The happiness he pursued was not the personal pleasure of utilitarian thought, let alone the “quick boosts” and easy (if esoteric) gratifications of modern self-help. His goal, as Bakewell reminds us, was the eudaimonia of Greek philosophy, an altogether fuller conception of human flourishing and joy. And he attained it by not seeking it. He focused, to borrow Minogue’s phrase, not on happiness itself but on concrete particulars, bringing to their contemplation what Bakewell describes as another “little trick” taken from the Greeks: ataraxia, which might be rendered equanimity or imperturbability. The result could be described in Montaigne’s case as a productively detached kind of engagement with life.…There may be a lesson, nonetheless. At the very least, Montaigne’s example offers a valuable counterpoint to a media-driven, mediated modern culture that blurs the distinctions between public and private spaces, and public and private selves, and in which constant communication seems sometimes to mean no more than unceasing noise. Montaigne was happy in a way that no blogger ever could be. There is, in the end, something to be said for the little room behind the shop.
Emphases mine. I had been thinking about this myself as I read Bakewell’s book, the difference between the sort of (literally) self-centered writing Montaigne did, and the more self-absorbed type of attention-seeking communication in social media. (I would also point out, though, that Brunskill is too quick to conflate blogs with Facebook and Twitter; some very good writing by almost any standard is being published on Blogspot and WordPress.)
Personally, I think it’s a bit of a silly conceit to act as if one can approach a topic from a purely neutral, objective view, or at least to act as if removing all explicit elements of a first-person narrative confers greater objectivity. I realize that a lot of what I’m doing here is “self-discovery in the world”, a “detached engagement” with it, but I certainly hope it doesn’t read like someone wallowing in his own thoughts out of narcissistic delight in what a unique snowflake he thinks he is. I aim to engage with ideas and events by grounding them in my own perspective, partially because I don’t have the pedigree to write as a disinterested scholar anyway. I write about whatever interests me to a group of strangers on the Internet who don’t know anything about me as an everyday person, and under a pseudonym at that, because the larger topics are really what matter here. I like to think I’m expressing the parts of myself that are most worth knowing, but in the hope that they’ll resonate in other people’s lives and reflect something else back.
In Your Eyes
For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
– Rilke
I’ve never found Descartes terribly interesting, but I read something last night that I liked: in a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, he mentioned having begun trying to live his life under the motto, “To live well, you must live unseen.” Of course, having seen the persecution of Galileo and the burning at the stake of more than a few philosophers and heretics, he could have very well meant that to live at all, you must avoid the wrathful attention of the Church. But still, my thought was wow, how very Taoist of him!
The people of the world excitedly run about as if they were going to miss the yearly, royal, sacrificial feast, or as if they were going to be the last one to climb a high tower on a beautiful spring day.
I alone remain quiet and indifferent.
I anchor my being to that which existed before Heaven and Earth were formed.
I alone am innocent and unknowing, like a newborn babe.
Unoccupied by worldly cares, I move forward to nowhere.
The people of the world have more than enough.
I alone appear to have nothing.
The people of the world appear shrewd and wise.
I alone look foolish.
I like to be forgotten by the world and left alone.
It also occurred to me that his motto was a much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to get at in this post. Being “seen” can be a description of the ways in which our identities are fixed and reinforced in the sight of others. For people who think of philosophy not as scholarly hair-splitting over the ultimate nature of things, but as the search for how to live well, how to best pursue truth and integrity, the weight and pressure of other people’s attention can be a hindrance, trapping us in egotistic responses to their expectations.
Lords of Misrule
The host of HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” said O’Reilly’s interview with President Barack Obama before the Superbowl was “astounding” and disrespectful, and forced Obama to swallow a great deal of “guff.”The Fox host interrupted the president 42 times in the 15-minute interview, as O’Donnell recently revealed on his show.“I just feel like the most difficult part of his job must be to squelch the rage that somewhere must be inside and say, I’m the president of the United States. You don’t talk to me like this. I’m not some left — I’m not Al Sharpton, you know. I won this job,” Maher said.“And Bill O’Reilly, who claims he’s such a patriot, how unpatriotic to treat a president that way. How does that look to other countries when you’re interrupting and belittling.”
Me, I would think the most difficult part of the job would be to look in the mirror and find even a spark of humanity in your reflection after seeing pictures like these, but yeah, sure, I guess swallowing guff from some peon has to be pretty harsh as well. What will the neighboring countries think?!
Anyway, Bill, bravo for the attempt to play the “My star-spangled boner is bigger than your star-spangled boner” card in some sort of ironic-yet-ineffectual reverse psychology judo flip, but everyone should know by now that you can’t shame the shameless, you can only intern them in re-education camps. Now, as far as the craven, genuflecting, belly-crawling, boot-licking sycophancy, I’m afraid I can only award you a bronze after such strong performances from fellow courtiers Roger Ebert and the one ring-kisser to rule them all, Rick Perlstein.
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