March 2011

Sitting Alone with a Book on My Own

By in foolosophy, psychology, solitude

Leon Neyfakh:

In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.
But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.
Hey. HEY. HEY. Some of us don’t want to be seen as normal. Some of us don’t see solitude as akin to power naps, something to make our worker-drone lives even more productive. Some of us would like to preserve solitude as the domain of the eccentric, the socially anxious, and the slightly mad outcasts to keep it from becoming trendy and overrun by day-trippers and weekend warriors looking for an ultra-compact “40 days in the desert” experience that doesn’t require turning off their cellphone. At any rate, this mountaintop is taken. Fuck off.

We Might Never Have Met

By in foolosophy, poetry

Chris Clarke:

There are a number of stories that include Coyote being killed, then jumping over his own corpse three times and rising again. This morning I imagined the coyote on Route 62 waiting impatiently for the traffic to subside so that he could do so without anyone watching. I know better. I’m an empirical materialist and I find immense solace in it. No meaning, no morals, the mere existence of unlikely consciousness in a physical universe a phenomenal stroke of luck that should awe each of us every moment for every moment of our participation in it. I don’t need pretend mythical Coyotes inhabiting my cerebellum. I know they don’t exist and I have chosen to populate my version of the world with them despite that fact.

Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise.
But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said that life is like going out on a boat that heads off into the sea and then begins to sink. Yet somehow he managed to find a kind of joy and beauty in that. In fact, it is the precariousness of life that makes beauty and joy possible.
There are times, like last week, when it would possibly be consoling for me to believe in comforting stories about souls, teleology, benevolent destiny, and the like. Loss is much more crushing when you really allow it to be loss without seeking to cushion it with semantics. But by the same token, joys are that much more intense when you realize how precarious they are, how fortunate you are to have experienced them at all. I wouldn’t trade this perspective for anything.
Oh, why not; let me quote from Sam Hamill’s poem A Rose for Solitude again:
And if, as I pass,
I should look you in the eye,
do not be afraid: I want
only to glimpse the emptiness
at the center of your heart,
I want to reach for you
because I know,
as you do,
we might never have met.

Erinyes

By in humanitarian diet, moralizing, psychology

Tauriq Moosa:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are travelling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?
So what’s really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason. And it’s only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state we call “moral dumbfounding.” Because they fully expect to find reasons. They’re surprised when they don’t find reasons. And so in some of the videotapes you can see, they start laughing. But it’s not an “it’s so funny” laugh. It’s more of a nervous-embarrassment puzzled laugh. So it’s a cognitive state where you “know” that something is morally wrong, but you can’t find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what’s wrong, you just say: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it’s wrong.” So the fact that this state exists indicates that people hold beliefs separate from, or with no need of support from, the justifications that they give. Or another way of saying it is that the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes.
…The overarching thread that links bestiality and necrophilia and cannibalism – and all manner of repugnant cases – is that we must be consistent in our evaluation. And we need to apply our critical view even to cases we assume are a given: like murder. Being consistent shows that we do in fact have good reasons for applying the term murder to cases like Ted Bundy, but can’t apply that same term to doctors in Belgium. Unpacking our reasoning can help clarify views we find repugnant and not allow the repugnance to cloud our judgement and condemn unnecessarily those who do not deserve it.

Flatliners

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, sex-you-all

Kathryn Lofton:

Assistant professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale, Lofton sees religious preaching methods in the way Oprah hosts her show, as well as a formulaic, sermon-like approach to every topic — whether it’s healing the wounds of sexual abuse or what new exfoliating cream you should buy. Oh Oprah, who art on television, tell us how to live a good life.
…There’s a great book about Oprah by Eva Illouz, “Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,” and Illouz points out something that I dig into, and that is the strange way in which the extremity of human despair — not merely estranged spouses, we’re talking stories of people coming home and seeing that their spouse has murdered all their kids and then themselves — are being dealt with in the same way as these topics that are seemingly shallow. Good glasses for a spring party, best new strategies for boyfriend wear. This exposure of human need at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon made me think, “What is this thing?”

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

If people know anything at all of Nietzsche, they probably know that he’s the guy who said God is dead. Often, they read that statement as sounding a jubilant tone, but he was actually expressing trepidation. Are you fully aware of what you’ve lost? Do you recognize what a vacuum you’ve created, and do you have any idea how you’re going to fill it?
Reading the above articles, the theme that caught my attention was something along those lines. What does it mean that our most wrenching grief and most personal problems have become public entertainment, presented on the same level as advertisements for deodorant and cell phone plans? What does it mean that sexuality is largely seen as just another lifestyle accoutrement of no great significance, as opposed to an exclusive symbol of deeper commitment and intimacy? How do we distinguish between the sublime and the mundane now?
I’m not interested in the particulars of either argument, especially in Douthat’s case, disingenuous sumbitch that he often is. No, the takeaway for me is: What does it mean when things that used to be shared only with those closest to you, things that used to define a hierarchy of importance and meaning, are now in the public domain and ubiquitous? What changed? Have we lost anything, and if so, what did we replace it with?

Conversation and Distillation

By in books, language, writing

Alain de Botton:

What explains such limitations? Why would one be unable to chat, as opposed to write, In Search of Lost Time? In part, because of the mind’s functioning, its condition as an intermittent organ, forever liable to lose the thread or be distracted, generating vital thoughts only between stretches of inactivity or mediocrity, stretches in which we are not really “ourselves”, during which it may be no exaggeration to say that we are not quite all there as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant, childlike expression. Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we have said, and the missed opportunity of what we have not.

By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazes.

Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency to not know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it, whereas writing accommodates and is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts—bare, inarticulate strands—are enriched or nuanced over time. They may thereby appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand, as opposed to suffering the distortion effected by conversation, with its limits on the corrections or additions one can make before enraging even the most patient companion.

Chingónes

By in books, gender, sex-you-all

Richard Grant:

Then he dropped a bomb into my brain. “Many narcos are bisexual and they are my specialty, you might say. At a certain point in the night, with all the drinking and the cocaine, another side of them comes out. And they’re risk-takers by nature. They don’t expect to live long and they will try anything. You know how there is an active and passive position in homosexual intercourse? Well, the narcos are always passives. Always, always.”

“How interesting. Why do you think that is?”

“I think it’s the eroticism of the reversal for them. Normally they are the chingón, the one screwing over other people, the hombre muy macho, and it excites them to turn the whole thing around.”

This was an unforeseen facet of Mexican machismo but in general I was growing very tired of it. At first it seemed amusing and outlandish, the way they growled and swaggered and cursed and talked about their testicles and each other’s mothers all the time. Nowhere in the world had I encountered men more fixated on either subject. The bus driver between Creel and Batopilas, I remember, had a separate wife and family at both ends of his route and a withered bull’s scrotum hanging from his rearview mirror, which he would stroke for luck before swinging the bus around the next hairpin curve.

Then it got wearying, the constant crude sexual bantering and self-aggrandizement of the macho, his contempt for women, his bristling pride and enjoyment of violence, his needless cruelty to dogs and horses and livestock.

…Most long journeys have their sour, depressive times and mine arrived with a vengeance in Baborigame. I was tired and run down and my body ached all over from being rattled and jolted. The constant breaking down of the Suburban wasn’t helping but what I really lost tolerance for, as I chauffeured Isidro on his rounds, met his friends, and dodged his enemies, was Mexican machismo. I came to hate it with as much venom as the most strident lesbian feminist. It was the root of the worst evil in Mexico, I decided, the real reason why men killed each other and raped women in such horrifying numbers. Not that those numbers are available. According to Mary Jordan of the Washington Post, fewer than 1 percent of rapes are reported in Mexico, because it is not treated seriously as a crime and because rape victims who do go to the police are usually mocked and blamed for inviting the crime, and are sometimes raped by the police, who get aroused hearing the victim’s story. In the Sierra Madre the practice known as rapato, where a man kidnaps a girl and forces her to marry him, is still commonplace. Raping an underage girl is not against the law in many Mexican states if the rapist marries her.

…”In a world of chingónes…” wrote Octavio Paz, “ruled by violence and suspicion—a world in which no one opens out or surrenders himself—ideas and accomplishment count for little. The only thing of value is manliness, personal strength, a capacity for imposing oneself on others.”

…There speaks the true macho. How dare she sleep with another man before she met me? The man must be humiliated and the woman deserves to die for such an affront to my masculinity.

Machismo came to Mexico from Spain, a Spain that had been under heavy Moorish or Arab influence for seven centuries when Columbus set sail. This is not to say that Native American societies weren’t patriarchal or oppressive toward women, but the men weren’t macho in the Spanish way. Spaniards, like Arabs, believed that women were inferior wanton creatures whose sexuality needed to be strictly controlled and firmly dominated, and that women from other cultures were fair game for rape. Octavio Paz in his analysis of Mexican machismo points to the old Spanish saying, “A woman’s place is in the home, with a broken leg,” and identifies the conquistador as the model for the Mexican macho, the original chingón, the hard isolate killer who raped and seized Indian women and so brought the mestizo Mexican race into being… If you looked at it in this light, disapproving of Mexican machismo was like disapproving of weather or plate tectonics. But I couldn’t help feeling outraged that the punishment for stealing a cow was more serious than the punishment for rape in most of Mexico. I still recoiled at the idea of a raped teenage girl being forced to marry her rapist, like Chana in Babarigame and thousands of others every year. I still thought it was indefensible that so many unfaithful husbands and boyfriends thought women should be beaten or killed for infidelity. It was pointless to make these judgments. It was none of my business. But I couldn’t help making them.

In a Nutshell

By in books, history, race

JMH:

After a 130 thousand years of all human beings living in the south of Africa, some few were pressured by food shortage to head north into Europe. Far from the equatorial sun, the palest of them survived best because only their skin let in enough ultraviolet to make Vitamin D. After a long time of not much, they found that their land held the largest deposits of iron on the planet. This iron made them very powerful. It made for plows, swords, armor, and later, guns. That happened in the past 10 thousand years.
Only a few hundred years ago, the pale ones “discovered” the continent they had left ages ago. In Europe they were used to fighting each other for land, metal, money, and workers, and here they found these goods undefended by swords, guns, or horsemen. The people they found had very different markers of culture, such that each seemed uncultured to the other. The pale ones wanted to steal the land, metal, money, and workers and not much was stopping them beyond morality. They got past the morality by using their own pale skin as a marker for quality, which they backed up by lamenting the absence of salad forks on the African continent, and then they stole everything they wanted. They treated the human beings there as animals.
For a quick response written in the small hours, that’s not too bad a synopsis of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, come to think of it.

Kaleidostrophic

By in omnigatherum

“What’s your favorite color?”

Such an easy question, wouldn’t you think?

That was my mom asking, though, and given the context, I had a feeling she was aiming to get me a gift, most likely clothing. Gods, please, no. Not that again. Not a godawful honkin’ bright purple shirt that will never get worn, even out of pity and obligation, even while lounging around the house. How do I answer? Let’s go full-on philosophical. Split every hair in sight.

“It depends. What are we talking about?”

“Huh? Just… your favorite color, that’s all!”

“But it depends. Do you mean like pure, abstract, contemplation of color for its own sake? Then I like purples and blues. If you’re talking about clothing, I like faded, worn colors — whites, greys, blacks, olive drabs; nothing bright. If you’re talking about painting my living room for me, I like soft, warm colors, anything from yellows to browns to greens. If you mean when it comes to vehicles, I like that grey-green color that I’ve seen on some Toyota trucks. If you mean hair, almost anything goes. If this is about flowers, the brighter and more varied, the better. So, again, what are we talking about?”

She made an exasperated noise and went back to what she was doing.

I don’t try to make people’s lives difficult, I really don’t. I just can’t play along with questions that demand a one-size-fits-all answer.

Let It Shatter Your Heart and Then Move On, Move On

By in foolosophy, psychology

Joyce Carol Oates:

Profound losses leave us paralyzed and mute, unable really to comprehend them, still less to speak coherently about them. Yet, eventually, we do speak — we breathe, we sleep, we eat, we go for walks in the sun, we find ourselves laughing with our friends — we marry again (as I have), to our astonishment — as we lose the white-hot flame of the most intransigent grief, and pass into another, less desperate sort of being.

Intellectually, I know it’s true, but it takes so long to feel true. And sometimes, in the worst episodes of grieving, I find myself wishing for that white-hot flame to just completely incinerate me, because nothing else will suffice to express the loss. Surviving certain things seems to make a mockery of them, seems like an insult to their memory.

As Lookers-On Feel Most Delight that Least Perceive a Juggler’s Sleight

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, psychology, science

Fear has promoted knowledge of men more than love has, for fear wants to divine who the other is, what he can do, what he wants: to deceive oneself in this would be disadvantageous and dangerous. On the other hand, love contains a secret impulse to see as much beauty as possible in the other or to elevate him as high as possible: to deceive oneself here would be a joy and an advantage – and so one does so.

– Nietzsche
I thought of that while reading this from Ed Yong:
Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.
Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies. Their ruse is so potent that they’ll continue to overestimate their abilities in the future, even if they suffer for it. Cheaters continue to prosper in their own heads, even if they fail in reality.
She showed that even though people know that they occasionally behave dishonestly, they don’t know that they can convincingly lie to themselves to gloss over these misdeeds. Their scam is so convincing that they don’t know that they’re doing it. As she writes, “Our findings show that people not only fail to judge themselves harshly for unethical behaviour, but can even use the positive results of such behaviour to see themselves as better than ever.”
I like to think of myself as a mostly honest person, to the extent that I would often rather face unpleasant situations than weave a tangled web of deceit to avoid them. But that’s just it; it has just as much to do with the fact that I really prefer my life to be as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible as it does any noble idealism. If I didn’t feel overwhelmed and scattered by having too much to focus on, perhaps I’d get a kick out of lying just to amuse myself with my own cleverness. Of course I’ve lied my ass off in various circumstances, and will probably do so again. But it just so happens that I find it too taxing to have to keep various falsehoods straight in my own head, so I generally prefer to just be up front and deal with whatever results.
In the same way, then, the most efficient and effective liars will be the ones who can mostly convince themselves of their story, enough to not get tripped up by a nervous conscience.
As biological beings who mainly need to feast and fuck (and possibly fight) above all else, it really doesn’t matter if we know ourselves. Plenty of unreflective people do just fine in life when it comes to food and sex and driving off enemies. In fact, you could argue that the examined life, while a goal I personally endorse, can be an onerous burden to impose on oneself for what can often appear to be a negligible payoff. What really matters with regards to advantageousness is how others perceive us, how well we can manipulate them to get what we want and need from them. And sometimes, it might be much more to our advantage to be misleading here, especially if we’re so smooth about it we don’t even consciously notice it anymore.

Not a Prisoner, I’m a Free Man

By in philosophy

How about some more Owen Flanagan?

To decide whether the scientific image spells death for free will, we need to know what conception of free will is being discussed. There are two main conceptions of free will. One is the libertarian view, which is relatively new and Western. The other is older and can be found in ancient Greek and Eastern texts (I see it in Confucius, Buddha, Aristotle). The first conception cannot be fused with the scientific image; the latter conception can. So let it return.
The view that won’t work is stated by Descartes this way: “[T]he will is so free in its nature, that it can never be constrained….And the whole action of the soul consists in this, that solely because it desires something, it causes a little gland to which it is closely united to move in a way requisite to produce the effect which relates to this desire.”
…No one has ever explained how any animal, or any natural being, could possess a part—an extremely important part, “the will”—that is not subject to causal principles but nonetheless produces astounding effects.
…We can make peace between the scientific and manifest images in the following way: Accept that (as best we can tell) everything that happens has a set of causes that make it as it is; then proceed to distinguish the voluntary and involuntary, the free and the unfree, in terms of the kinds of causation or causes that distinguish them.
Aristotle championed the voluntary-involuntary distinction long before there was a conflict between the Cartesian image of mind and agency and the scientific image. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle drew the involuntary-voluntary distinction this way: “What is involuntary is what is forced or is caused by ignorance. What is voluntary seems to be what has its origins in the agent himself when he knows the particulars that the action consists in.” What Aristotle had in mind was something like this: An action is involuntary if it results from some sort of compulsion against which effort and thinking are impotent, or if the agent in no way knows or grasps what he is doing.
Voluntary action involves the agent’s knowing what action he is performing, and acting from reasons and desires that are his own. How is this possible? It is possible if I am conscious and if my consciousness has some causal efficacy. And it does. Mother Nature put me in conscious touch with some of my most salient desires, hopes and expectations. When I see what I want and/or need and judge it to be choiceworthy, I adjust some circuitry (thanks to how I am designed, what I have learned, etc.) to do what gets me what I want. These actions are voluntary. We call actions “voluntary” when we think about means and ends and act in accordance with our thinking (or could have).
…[Dewey’s] answer was that the myth of a completely self-initiating ego, an unmoved but self-moving will, was simply a fiction motivated by our ignorance of the causes of human behavior. He saw no need for the notion of a metaphysically unrestrained will or of an independent ego as a prime mover itself unmoved in order to have a robust conception of free agency. For there to be agency, we need the person (or the ego) as a cause, possibly even the proximate cause of what we do. But the person (or the ego) may serve as the proximate cause of action and still himself be part of the causal nexus. Indeed, a person, in virtue of being a natural creature (an animal), must be part of the causal nexus.
…Spinoza diagnosed the source of the libertarian illusion this way: “Men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they have not the faintest idea, because they are ignorant of them.”

All the New Rage Against the Machine

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, media/propaganda, socmed, technology, the madness of crowds

I haven’t paid much attention to the uprisings in Africa and the Middle East so far, and when I have tried to read about it, I find it difficult to keep my eyes focused on the page instead of rolling around in their sockets, given how many people only want to talk about social media’s supposed role in all this. When I kept seeing the story pop up about the Egyptian guy who named his newborn child “Facebook”, I pretty much threw my hands up in defeat and went back to more interesting things.

But Evgeny Morozov earned my appreciation with his dissenting voice against the ubiquitous Nicholas Carr-worship last year, and now he’s done it again with a new book that Ima hafta read:
Social networking mattered in Egypt, but the root causes of the uprising were scarcity, official corruption and social conflict, none of which fit the cyber-utopian narrative or flatter America’s technological vanity.
…The unfortunate propensity to log on to the web and pronounce it a global revolution in the offing is what Morozov dubs “the Google Doctrine”—the overconfident conviction, inherited from the West’s cold war propaganda, that the simple transmission of information beyond the reach of state-sanctioned channels has the power to topple authoritarian regimes. But just as the Eastern bloc’s downfall had far more to do with the internal stresses besieging the dying Soviet order, so does the Google Doctrine paper over a vast nexus of real-world causation in global affairs.
…It has never been the case that authoritarians are allergic to information technologies. Quite the contrary: as pioneers in the production of mass propaganda, they love mass media, and maintain an intense interest in later-generation digital technologies such as GPS and Twitter location that permit them to plot the real-time whereabouts of online dissidents. Yet one never encounters these uses of digital technologies in Shirky-style broadsides on cyber-liberation; in them, digital technology by definition unleashes and pools human creativity and generosity, because that’s what we Western progenitors of these technologies like to imagine them doing.
…”While many in the West concede that the Internet has not solved and may have only aggravated many negative aspects of political culture,” as is the case with James O’Keefe’s gotcha YouTube videos, “they are the first to proclaim that when it comes to authoritarian states, the Internet enables their citizens to see through the propaganda. Why so many of their own fellow citizens—living in a free country with no controls on freedom of expression—still believe extremely simplistic and misleading narratives when all the facts are just a Google search away is a question that Western observers should be asking more often.”

For Loan Oft Loses both Itself and Friend

By in books

Victor Lavalle:

I shut the book. “Can I borrow this?”
She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder—so nice!—and said, “No.”
I almost dropped the book. It bobbled between my hands so she grabbed it from me and slipped it back onto the shelf, right where it had been before.
“I don’t lend my books out,” she said. “I can’t. They always used to come back, if they came back, with stains or bent pages, or even someone’s little ink stains in the margins! I decided, years ago, that I would never let them out of my sight again. I’m sorry.”
Poof, that was it. She left for the kitchen or the front door or the moon. And I stood there for minutes. Actual minutes. Waiting for her to return, laugh, slip the book off the shelf and hand it to me. But she never did. My disappointment burned my face, like shame, but it wasn’t just the rejection. I was also stunned that this person I liked, and respected as a writer, would treat her books this way. As if the objects themselves were, somehow, as valuable as the words and ideas they contained.
My philosophy professor once told us that when asked, she tells friends that she won’t loan them anything, but if she can afford to give it without needing it back, she will. I always thought that was a good idea. Too many times, you get annoyed at your friend’s inability to return things within a reasonable amount of time, or at their carelessness with the object, and they in turn start to avoid you out of guilt, and maybe even start to resent you over their own nagging conscience. I’d rather spend a few dollars buying another used copy of the book, either for myself or as a gift to them, than to go through all that drama.
To me, though, being lent a book is no meaningless gesture. This shit matters. Someone enjoyed this book and has attempted to forge some sort of connection with me through it, hoping that I’ll derive a similar pleasure from it. I’m currently awaiting a book in the mail from a friend who insisted on sharing her personal copy with me as a gift. What greater honor for a bibliophile could there possibly be? As important as books were to me growing up, as vital to my identity as they were, it’s impossible for me to not see the act itself as weighted with major significance. Books are repositories of meaning in more ways than one.
Most of the books on your bookshelves might be beautifully designed, and not exactly cheap, but they’re no more divine than a toaster. They are mass-produced items, sold in (occasionally) mass quantities. So what, exactly, makes them so dear?
It’s not the book, but the idea of the book. Some man or woman spent weeks or months or years or a lifetime bleeding on the page! Now you hold that essence in your hands! And other melodramatic nonsense. It all strikes me as a pretty Old Testament way of thinking. Treating a book like a pair of stone tablets. A series of commandments, inviolable, handed down by a deity.
Point taken that it’s really the ideas contained in the books that ultimately matter. However, allow me to suggest an alternate reason for valuing the books themselves: for ordinary people like me, these are my artworks. These are what I have throughout my house to make it look interesting. I don’t collect things like paintings, antiques, and exquisite furniture, and couldn’t really afford to anyway. Three-quarters of what little I do own along those lines was given to me by someone else. Hand-me-down furniture and a few cheap art prints in even cheaper frames are all I have to show anyone who visits… unless you count the huge wrought-iron CD rack (maybe around 700 discs) and the dozen or so bookcases scattered through every room (1,216 books as of this writing). They bring color and a pleasing sense of symmetry to the room (yes, I’m the type of person who meticulously arranges the books on the shelves from tallest on the ends to shortest in the middle). Two of the bookcases themselves are actually beautifully handmade (given as gifts). That other stuff is just a collection of useful objects. This is where all the meaning resides in my house. I’m baffled by people who would look at all that and see merely wasted space or senseless fetishism.

The Art of Time and Place

By in art, books, music, poetry

From Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness:

But Lessing’s idea was to attribute the difference between the poetic rendition and the sculptural one to the fact that poetry, the art of time, describes an action, in the course of which one can evoke repugnant events without making them unbearably evident, while sculpture (like painting, the art of space) can only portray an instant, and in fixing it could not show a disgustingly distorted face because the disfiguring violence of physical pain would not be reconcilable with the beauty of the portrayal.

I don’t have anything profound to say about that. It just made me think of poetry and music as the arts of time, and sculpture, painting and photography as the arts of place, which for some reason struck me as a fascinating way to start considering them. Shrug.

Blinding Me with Science

By in art, books, music, poetry, science

The Internet sure hasn’t been providing me with much stimulation lately. But fortunately, I have read a book or three in my day, so I can always dredge up one interesting passage or another for your entertainment and illumination. Here’s one from Owen Flanagan:

The claim that science can, in principle, explain everything we think, say and do—that it can, in principle, provide a causal account of human being (a causal account of Dasein)—should be distinguished from the claim that everything can be expressed scientifically. Consider art and music. It is patently crazy to say that the works of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Mozart, Chopin, Schönberg, Ellington, Coltrane, Dylan or Nirvana could be expressed scientifically. Assuming something like the best-case scenario for science, we might want to say that artistic and musical productions can be analyzed in terms of their physical manifestations—painting in terms of chemistry and geometry, and music in terms of sound waves and mathematical relationships.
Furthermore, some very complex combination of the culture, individual life, and the brain of the artist might allow for something like an explanation sketch of why that artist produced the works he or she did. Kay Redfield Jamison has done some very interesting work on the high incidence of bipolar disorder among great nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and musicians. Such work might lead us to understand more deeply what ordinary and creative imagination consist in. But such work does not replace or reveal what Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, or Seamus Heaney says, means or does in the language of poetry.
There is nothing remotely odd about these kinds of scientific investigation of art or music, or of the creative process itself. But although such inquiry takes artistic or musical production as something to be explained, it does not take the production itself as expressing something that can be explained scientifically. The claim that not everything can be explained scientifically is not a claim that art, music, poetry, literature, and religious experiences cannot in principle be accounted for scientifically, or that those productions involve magical or mysterious powers. Whatever they express, it is something perfectly human, but the appropriate idiom of expression is not a scientific one. The scientific idiom requires words and, often, mathematical formulas. Painting, sculpture and music require neither. Indeed, they cannot in principle express what they express in words or mathematical formulas. Therefore, whatever they express is not expressible scientifically. To be sure, poetry, literature and music use words. But their idiom is not a scientific one. And the reason is doubly principled: Many of the relations explored are not explored causally (the relation in which science excels). A good love song can make you feel love, but it never does so by getting into the “pheromonics” and the neurobiology of love. The arts work our imaginations with all the playful tricks of language, allegory, metaphor and metonymy that science, for its purposes, doesn’t much care for.
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