Obiter Scripta, no. 83

By in art, eric hoffer, obiter scripta No Comments

When I go through a shelf of books on a subject I begin with the thin volumes. Now and then I find a thin and a thick book by an author on the same subject. Usually, the thin book is of an earlier date; and it often turns out that in the thin book the author reveals what he knows and in the thick book he tries to conceal what he does not know.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

“Tell me your thoughts, not the thinking of your thoughts.” Is that an actual quotation? If not, it should be. I have to say, I find it generally disappointing to hear writers or musicians talk about their “creative process.” As Isaac Brock sang, “I guess all us snakes find our tails pretty damn tasty.” I’m fully aware that a finished artwork can, and often does, grow from banal origins. Analyzing those origins in detail, though, often produces a deflation as undignified as a whoopee cushion. Give us the transcendent result of your imagination, but leave the rest shrouded in mysterious silence, please.

You Don’t Think That By Leisure and Idling, I’m Talking About You, Do You, You Lazybones?

By in fresh hell, work No Comments

The Idler — as in, the British website devoted to loafing as a spiritual calling, not the series of essays by Samuel Johnson — is, as I’ve said before, in the business of publishing bodice-ripping fantasies of self-sufficiency for bored cubicle dwellers who fancy themselves born free but shackled by chains. Like one of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs, editor Tom Hodgkinson knows one big thing and he says it again and again: much of what we do to earn a paycheck is senseless drudgery. From the seed of this commonplace observation, he produces a hothouse flower of a philosophy. To wit:

If mankind were hard-wired to work, then we would not be enjoying the autonomy of lockdown. Most people don’t gain satisfaction from work, they gain money from it. That’s why they do it.

In fact mankind is hard-wired to write poetry, play music and nurture plants — which is exactly what we have been doing in lockdown. The other day I found myself writing a short poem about the folk singer Sam Lee and his love for nightingales. And I sowed some seeds in a pot. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a bit more time.

By “plants,” of course, he means the pretty houseplants you look at while swooning and composing poems, not the sort that form the foundation of the food chain, which require a lot of intensive labor, performed by, uh, other people. Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it. Point is, it’s no surprise that we find him pointing to the coronavirus pandemic as proof that he was right all along. Still, despite the familiar argument, I nearly cracked a tooth on this logical gobstopper:

It is instructive as to the mutable nature of morality, that a few weeks ago, being very busy was considered morally good, and now we are being told to indulge in its precise opposite. Do nothing, save lives. This shows you that Nietzsche was right: morality, so-called, is merely a tool of control.

I feel like I’ve stepped onto an Escherian staircase, where no matter how many steps I take, I never get anywhere. The deceptively simple formulation here, like the tip of an iceberg, hides a mass of idiotic and incoherent assumptions below the surface. So…the fact that different rules apply in different contexts…means that rules are always an arbitrary imposition by The Man? If there’s no moral rule that holds true at all times for all people, all moral rules are equally random?

For many, many people, lockdown will beat working. My neighbour is using his furloughed time and the lovely weather to paint the outside of his house and spend some time in the garden. He says he is not particularly relishing the prospect of going back to work.

And on my daily bicycle rides around west London, an alien observer would be forgiven for thinking he’d landed in some sort of William Morrisesque utopia. There are no cars, the air is clean, birds sing, and smiling family groups cycle along the river.

This theme runs through the entire piece. Why can’t every day be Christmas? Why can’t vacation be fifty weeks of the year? The kind of people who can afford to live in west London look around and notice that the world temporarily continues to turn without their labor, and from this, they deduce the perennial validity of Bertrand Russell’s looniest ideas about humanity en masse freed from toil to pursue philosophical speculation and domestic garden cultivation. I know the word “privilege” has been contaminated beyond all safe handling, but it does require a certain type of comfortable obliviousness to think that all professions are equally capable of going on strike without dire consequences. Hey, the Idler’s online courses have quintupled in recent weeks! Why can’t all those manual laborers also just use Zoom and Slack to do their jobs, or offer an online equivalent of their services?

And maybe we won’t want to go back to work. Maybe the leisure society dreamed of by people like William Morris and later Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes will start to materialise. Morris believed in what he called “useful work” versus “useless toil”. Russell said that a civilised society would gradually reduce the hours of work, leaving time for poetry, nurturing plants and studying philosophy. And Keynes of course reckoned that technology would usher in a 15-hour working week.

Oh, you thought I was kidding about Russell? Well, let’s just be glad he didn’t quote Marx’s hunter/fisher/cattleman/critic ideal, or Trotsky’s delirious fantasy of the average man in the glorious future rising to the heights of an Aristotle or a Goethe. Come to think of it, even that seems like it might be a lot of work, and Hodgkinson, like Peter Gibbons, seems to aspire to little more than lying in bed all day. Or, at least, that’s the image he projects to the people who buy his online courses and products. Merchandising the eschaton, you might say. What, you think flats in west London grow on trees?

Everybody Hurts, Everybody Cries Sometimes

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit 2 Comments

Emma Pettit:

Seth Matthew Fishman started social isolation with grand plans. An assistant professor of education and counseling at Villanova University, Fishman thought he’d have time to read professionally and personally, revamp his exercise routine, perhaps do some home repair, and learn a language.

“Pretty much none of that’s happened,” he said.

Instead, Fishman has found ways to do what he jokingly called productive procrastination.

The gist of the article is that due to stress over the pandemic, both students and teachers alike are finding it difficult to concentrate on reading. I don’t doubt that’s true, but at the same time, the moral of the story here is “…and that’s okay.” Well, sure; as always, if what you want is an excuse for not doing the things you claim to want to do, a pandemic is a very good one (and at least it’s a nice break from the usual complaining about how technology has shriveled our attention spans and made it impossible to concentrate). Disasters do have a way of clarifying priorities. But perhaps you’d prefer to try being the sort of person who doesn’t make excuses and whine for reassurance? That’s also an option, you know. It’s all a question of emphasis. Are you defined by your restraints or by your improvisational skills?

I’ve been reading at the same pace as before, mostly a couple hours before bed. I’ve had to creatively reinvent my exercise routine. I’ve done some home improvement projects and lots of cleaning. And if you want to be generous and count Duolingo as a legitimate option, I’ve been practicing in a few languages every day (for over two years now). I can assure you this is not because I’m some sort of übermensch. I don’t even mention it to boast, because it’s not anything special. It’s all due to habit. Montaigne called habit “a violent and treacherous schoolmistress,” one who forbids us from noticing just how strange and contingent most of our bedrock practices and assumptions are. That can be true, but if there’s anyone you can trust to keep her head while everyone else is losing theirs, it’s that same schoolmistress. There’s no one better to have at your side during a crisis.

W.H. Auden said about Freud that he was no longer a person, but “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our differing lives.” Freudianism per se might not be so prevalent anymore, but if one had to identify a contemporary climate of opinion, I couldn’t name a better candidate than what I think of as “emotional incontinence,” the deformed offspring of the therapeutic trend in recent decades. (Maybe Oprah is the modern climate of opinion.) The emphasis is always on making a spectacle of our moments of weakness, seeking and expecting reassurance. Just recently, we were treated to the sight of a cable news personality telling us about how he crawled into bed and cried for “our pre-pandemic lives.” I may be cold and unfeeling, but I don’t find this sort of thing #stunning or #brave. I find it kind of tawdry, actually. I was not in need of permission from a complete stranger to wallow in my feelings. I don’t think that sort of wallowing is healthy in any event, as it too easily becomes dwelling. This feels like an imposition to me, like I’ve been emotionally flashed by some pervert in a trenchcoat while I was sitting quietly, minding my own business. I didn’t ask to see your anguished tears! Put that away! What the hell’s the matter with you?

Maybe I’m being harsh. Maybe this sort of public therapy is just further confirmation of Robert Putnam’s thesis in Bowling Alone, that increasing numbers of people have no meaningful intimate relationships, so they seek that sort of connection with strangers through media. But perhaps there’s a middle ground between drill sergeant-callousness and talk-show therapeutics? Perhaps we could acknowledge fear and weakness as understandable and inevitable without becoming exhibitionist about it? Maybe those sorts of feelings should only be shared with spouses, family and close friends out of a (gasp!) sense of social duty?

So Uninterested In Despair

By in fresh hell, montaigne No Comments

Pascal Bruckner:

Like Amiel, we find ourselves condemned to the frightening task of merely existing. We live with the vertiginous proximity of a sterile reclusion and a voracious death that every day devours more victims. We oscillate between being carefree and panicking, feeling guilty for being healthy and at home while around us the sick are succumbing as the reaper does his grim work. Each of our days is a colossal encyclopedia of nothingness, with the certainty that taking a shower, making a meal, getting some exercise, moving our armchair, or calling some friends to reassure them will constitute the only significant events. Intimations come to us that we might become heroes of extinction such as Oblomov, the famous character of Russian literature who deploys an enormous inertia in refusing to get up in the morning and just staying in bed. The larval life is a kind of asceticism, an answer to hysterical consumerism or romanticism. Sixty-seven million Frenchmen are being asked to make themselves into extremists of routine, for their own good. Our disarmed humanity is left at the mercy of some spittle.

I usually like Bruckner’s writing, but here he seems to have contracted a nasty case of performative French intellectualism. Earlier he reported that being confined with one’s spouse and/or children “can seem like a nightmare for many,” and that “we” have learned “love can survive wars, adultery, and conflict, but close confinement . . . not so much.” My man. Come on. Pull yourself together before I shoot you with a tranquilizer dart. Only boring people complain so vociferously about being bored by some downtime.

Thankfully, this pandemic appears to have reminded many people of a different Frenchman, one who makes much more cheerful company:

In each of these apothegms, we find evidence of what Keats would later call, in a letter to his brothers, “negative capability,” a notion that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his essay “The Crack-Up,” summarized as the capacity to embrace two contradictory ideas at the same time and go on functioning. “Of Experience” is one of Montaigne’s gravest works—“We must learn to endure,” he writes, “what we cannot avoid”—but the writing is so vigorous, so uninterested in despair. In the end, we get the sense from the writing that the writing was Montaigne’s method of magnifying enjoyment. Reading him might be as good a way as any to suspend life’s flight.

To Explore the Whole Sphere of the Modern Soul

By in juxtapositions, nietzsche No Comments

Why what is closest grows more and more distant. The more we think about all that has been and will be, the paler grows that which is. If we live with the dead and die with them in their death, what are our ‘neighbours’ to us then? We grow more solitary and we do so because the whole flood of humanity is surging around us. The fire within us, which is for all that is human, grows brighter and brighter and that is why we gaze upon that which immediately surrounds us as though it had grown more shadowy and we had grown more indifferent to it. But the coldness of our glance gives offence!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

****

Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere–a very powerful description in the purely literary sense–of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche’s aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

— G. K. Chesterton, “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family”

****

The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered profoundly – it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer – his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering, he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has at once been “at home” in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing” – this spiritual and silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.

…In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler one: the dangers for the latter must be greater; the probability that it will come to grief and perish is actually, in view of the multiplicity of the conditions of its life, tremendous. In a lizard a lost finger is replaced again; not so in man.

— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

****

In his views on matters of fact Nietzsche, as becomes the naive egotist, was quite irresponsible. If he said the course of history repeated itself in cycles, it was because the idea pleased him; it seemed a symbol of self-approval on the world’s part. If he hailed the advent of a race of men superior to ourselves and of stronger fibre, it was because human life as it is, and especially his own life, repelled him. He was sensitive and, therefore, censorious. He gazed about him, he gazed at himself, he remembered the disappointing frailties and pomposity of the great man, Wagner, whom he had once idolised. His optimism for the moment yielded to his sincerity. He would sooner abolish than condone such a world, and he fled to some solitary hillside by the sea, saying to himself that man was a creature to be superseded.

— George Santayana, The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis

****

For my part I suffer terribly when I lack sympathy; nothing can compensate me, for instance, for the fact that for the last few years I have lost Wagner’s friendly interest in my fate. How often do I not dream of him, and always in the spirit of our former intimate companionship! No words of anger have ever passed between us, not even in my dreams—on the contrary, only words of encouragement and good cheer, and with no one have I ever laughed so much as with him. All this is now a thing of the past—and what does it avail that in many respects I am right and he is wrong? As if our lost friendship could be forgotten on that account! And to think that I had already suffered similar experiences before, and am likely to suffer them again! They constitute the cruellest sacrifices that my path in life and thought has exacted from me—and even now the whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers! It seems to me so foolish to insist on being in the right at the expense of love, and not to be able to impart one’s best for fear of destroying sympathy. Hinc meae lacrimae.

— Nietzsche, Letter to Peter Gast, August, 1880

****

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in the least either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude, nature, music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously against it. Accordingly, when he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent word on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity. What power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a passionate rebellion against it.

The phrases in which Nietzsche condensed and felt his thought were brilliant, but they were seldom just. We may perhaps see the principle of his ethics better if we forget for a moment the will to be powerful and consider this: that he knew no sort of good except the beautiful, and no sort of beauty except romantic stress. He was a belated prophet of romanticism. He wrote its epitaph, in which he praised it more extravagantly than anybody, when it was alive, had had the courage to do.

— George Santayana, The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis

****

To explore the whole sphere of the modern soul, to have sat in its every nook — my ambition, my torture, and my happiness.

— Nietzsche, The Will to Power

That’s When He Told Me a Story About Free Milk and a Cow

By in antisocial media, writing No Comments

Ben Sixsmith:

Still, there are writings that cannot find a home. They are not topical enough. They do not quite fit a brand. Perhaps there is a reason for that? Perhaps. But not always.

There is also something to be said for spontaneity. Sometimes an idea is best played with or hammered out rather than being structured and refined with professional care.

So, the Zone is where I can be wholly myself. Once a week, on Tuesday, I will send a letter with a range of different entries in a vaguely diaristic form. This will not be brow-scrunching political commentary. It will be bursts of outrage, enthusiasm, intrigue and obsession – something more like a blog than a magazine. It will be messy, in other words, but I hope it will be fun.

But…but…you already have a blog!

I kid, mostly. I don’t begrudge anyone trying to earn extra money. But since the arc of first-person online writing seems to be bending toward the paid subscription format, let me just take a moment to reiterate some guiding principles that apply here.

One, I would not want to be “wholly” myself here, and I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t want that either. My stream of consciousness isn’t particularly deep, nor is it aesthetically pleasing to behold, so I’ll continue to shape my thoughts according to the presumed standards of an ideal reader. I love writing and wish I could do it every day, but I am not a #ContentCreator, so if the muse is playing hard-to-get, I’d rather sit quietly than write something insipid just for the sake of keeping the assembly line rolling.

Two, I can’t imagine any circumstances in which I would write for money. Introducing commerce into this labor of love would destroy everything that makes it an enjoyable hobby and turn it into one more product to be delivered on a deadline. I’ve never put out a tip jar and I wouldn’t have the chutzpah to charge money for admission; frankly, I’m always amazed how many of you show up here free of compulsion as it is. I don’t know what’s lacking in your lives that you should want to spend your irreplaceable time here, but we can get into that some other day. Plus, I just survived a four-week layoff from work without having to resort to selling blog posts for food, so I don’t see any other reason why I should ever be so tempted.

And three, I admit, I like the idea of standing in silent rebuke of the world of online media, refusing to join in the tail-chasing from one trendy platform to another, where insecure adolescents of all ages compare likes, retweets and follower counts like teenage boys bragging about their massive endowments. The blog was, and is, the perfect format for the amateur writer. It did not need to be, and has not been, improved upon. There’s nothing as unforgivable as a good example.

Interlude: Type O Negative, “Haunted”

By in music No Comments

In honor of Peter Steele, who died ten years ago today.

Type O is what you might call a cult favorite, especially among the goth subculture. Outside of their core of diehard fans, people might know them as that band who looked sort of like vampires and sang about Halloween and girls with dyed black hair. That’s only to be expected, since the band took nothing seriously, least of all themselves. Clever irony, acidic sarcasm and relentless self-depreciation filled everything from lyrics to interviews. Casual fans talk about them almost like they were a novelty act, but it has always been my contention that Steele was as much of a musical genius as anyone else you care to name, capable of some breathtaking songwriting.

This song has always been a favorite of mine. (The lyrics are typical Steele, tongue-in-cheek, about being tormented by a succubus.) The severely downtuned guitar chords ringing out over the soaring keyboard/organ starting at 1:40; the lush, mournful vocals in the final minute and a half; it’s all so transcendentally beautiful that I don’t even mind the slow, spoken section about halfway through.

I truly miss this man.

But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

By in montaigne, poetry 2 Comments

Lucy Sweeney Byrne:

As for On Solitude, applied to our current predicament, I’d roughly translate it thus: stop seeking approval from others. Don’t feel the need to communicate 24-7. Don’t fall into lazy habits. Get to know yourself. Or, more simply: get off Twitter. Get off Houseparty. Stop watching that shit series on Netflix. Go read Montaigne for a bit instead.

Speaking of whom, one passage in his “Of the Education of Children” caught me recently:

History is more my quarry, or poetry, which I love with particular affection. For as Cleanthes said, just as sound, when pent up in the narrow channel of a trumpet, comes out sharper and stronger, so it seems to me that a thought, when compressed into the numbered feet of poetry, springs forth much more violently and strikes me a much stiffer jolt.

I agree, and I’ve resolved to read more poetry henceforth. It’s strange, though, because while I would also claim to love poetry “with particular affection,” I seem to love a Platonic ideal of it more than most actual examples. I don’t just mean formless, navel-gazing contemporary poems. A lot of classic poems likewise fail to move me, even as I can appreciate their technical qualities. As Dom DeLuise’s Julius Caesar said in History of the World, Part. 1, “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.” Maybe that’s the problem, though. The truly thrilling examples of poetry have made me insatiably hungry for more. No amount will ever be enough.

O Owl!

By in animals No Comments

O owl! / make some other face. / This is spring rain. / ~ Issa

I was sitting on the back porch this evening, listening to music and the spring rain, when I saw a tawny gold shape drop from a tree and glide silently through the woods behind the house. At first I thought it was a hawk, but when it alighted on the branch, I saw the ear tufts and realized it was a great horned owl. It stayed there for about ten minutes, watching the nearby field, giving me a chance to get the binoculars and observe it more closely. A couple of jays eventually showed up and shrieked their displeasure at its presence, but it maintained its calm dignity, only leaving once they had flown away, perhaps not wanting to give them the satisfaction.

I attended a powwow in Pennsylvania nearly thirty years ago. One of the attractions was a bird handler, and he had a great horned owl with him. He explained that the owl’s reputation for wisdom was greatly exaggerated, as this particular species is one of the skunk’s few predators, and as they always attack from behind, they usually stink. Nonetheless, I felt honored to have this majestic fellow visit me. I’ve never seen one this close to the house before.

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