Extremes and Reactions

This afternoon I finally did a little reading, in Robert C Solomon’s book The Passions. He’s a good writer and he often quotes Nietzsche or Camus, plus a lot of literary figures. In passing, he used a quote from Oscar Wilde, something like, “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.” But just the activity of reading was good for me. It settled my mind and calmed and soothed me for the rest of the day. I left off on page 67, at the threshold of Chapter 3.

I’m not certain why my day started out so lousy. I believe it was chemistry: too much caffeine plus ibuprofen. The weather was partly cloudy with a temperate climate, though I stayed home the whole day. At times I can feel how my body is aging and changing, and I know there’s nothing I can do about it. The unraveling of genetics is indisputable: it’s like fate in very old Greek tragedies. The Greeks held fate in a sort of awe and reverence, unless the awe is mine when I read Aeschylus or whatever.

The other late night, I looked up a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm which turned out to be “The Peasant in Heaven.” The punchline is that rich people are admitted into heaven once every hundred years but for peasants it’s an everyday occurrence. I wanted to use it in a WordPress post, but it’s been done already. I hate the attitudes of people toward money currently. It’s because they have bad examples to follow. On the other hand, no matter what people were doing, I’d probably take a reactionary stance to pull away from extremes. A lot of thinkers have been reactions to their world. Rousseau guided people one way to an extreme of sentiment and ultimately violence and revolution, while Edmund Burke saw the dangers of ideas after the French Revolution and pushed for stability and conservatism. The example I like is of Jane Austen, who stuck by her opinions and stayed independent of the Romantic movement with Byron as its figurehead. She also tended to marry opposites to resolve extremes, like with sense and sensibility, etc. She was neither romantic nor rationalist but a little of both, to show the fallacy of the dichotomy.

Why does public opinion seem to veer to one extreme or another? Maybe people are bored with things being moderate and medium?

Stewart Copeland wrote a song with these lines:

I wish I never woke up this morning

Life was easy when it was boring

Snowman

One thirty AM.

Again I’m up in the middle of the night, holding this silly device in my hand and entering characters for no one and no reason. The absurdity of what I’m doing hits me with greater force even as I do it, and the futility. It’s just a pointless labor, as insignificant as Sisyphus and his boulder uphill. But unlike him, I can choose to leave the rock and walk out the exit from hell towards new projects or none at all. Cyberspace has become an infernal prison to me; outside it, there’s a whole world of reality for the realization of better things… I’m tired of being a nobody writing for no one: again like the snowman in Wallace Stevens. Cyberspace is a big nothing anymore, the Gulf of French poetry, the Abyss and the Void. A blank stare from utter nonbeing. After a while I guess I’ll go to bed again.

The thing about snowmen is, snowmen melt… 

Wallace Stevens

The writing I did today was rather interesting to me, and it kind of exposed the difference between 19th and 20th Century literature, or at least until you get to Wallace Stevens and Carlos Williams. It may be difficult to explain this. It seems to me that literature in the 19th Century was full of the great code of the Bible and Christian good and evil; but in the next century, it was possible to divorce nature and reality from the Bible, so that reality became gray and amoral. The breakthrough probably was the thinking of Nietzsche. His concept of nature was a place where there are no stepping stones, no ladders for finger and toeholds, nothing for human convenience: nothing human at all.

I think maybe Thoreau wrote attitudes similar to this in Cape Cod, though whether before or after Nietzsche I don’t know. And then of course there was Stephen Crane’s story of “The Open Boat” that describes nature’s indifference to human beings. “None of them knew the color of the sky… All of them knew the color of the sea.”

Before the 20th Century, Melville showed us a cosmos that was unfriendly, but he characterized it as wicked, as if a joker like the devil were behind it all. He couldn’t help projecting biblical ideas onto the world. This was during the 1850s and later. It was difficult for him to strip nature of human concepts. But Wallace Stevens was quite adept at the distinction of imagination and reality. It took a while, however.

I love his poem called “The Snow Man.” The closing lines go,

And, nothing himself,

Sees nothing that is not there

And the nothing that is.

Is this an expression of nihilism? What do you think?

I just think that common sense can be very calming and pacifying, and the grayness isn’t disturbing at all. Reality is simply there and doesn’t yield to our fictions and what we impose on it. It’s a very long road from Shakespeare to a poet like Wallace Stevens: 400 years in the making; and even then, something like the Millennium could bollix up all our progress as far as epistemology and science, seeing reality as it really is.

Confession and…

Quarter after four.

Aesop is fed. I don’t feel tired just now and I’m glad for the change to spring. Yesterday I saw that my maple is leafing out in bright sea green, little foamy clusters about the limbs. Suddenly I think of English class eighth grade, where I first read “in Just” by E.E. Cummings. What business had the balloon man to be goat footed, and what did that tell us regarding springtime? The next year I read A Separate Peace for class, a story of irrational envy that motivates an evil act, though Gene acts before he knows what he’s doing. We read a number of books that speculate on evil when I was in school. I wonder why the curriculum was slanted that way, as if creating little monsters of us to prepare us for real secular life… But twice that year I ran into the French phrase, “Plus c’est la meme chose, plus ca change.” It’s a way of saying that the only thing that stays the same is change itself. In secular school, we learned the facts of a lapsarian world with no offer of redemption. Also I remember my dad saying incredibly hurtful things to the order taker at a chicken restaurant while she glared at him spitefully and I couldn’t believe my ears. I never told anyone about it until now. Can we be forgiven for everything? It seems like quite a stretch… 

Reading

Quarter after eight.

By now I’ve read a quarter of David Copperfield and the meaning of Blunderstone Rookery is more apparent: Clara’s marriage to Murdstone was a mistake, but owing to her misjudgment or to his deception is difficult to tell. It might be both. At any rate, the situation crushed her spirit and she died along with her new baby. Eventually, David bolted from his London job washing liquor bottles as a ten year old to go find his Aunt Betsey in Dover, where he hoped for a chance at a better life for himself. Now it looks like he’ll be a student in Canterbury, while Murdstone is no longer a problem for him since his aunt verbally boxed his ears and dismissed him back to Blunderstone with his sister.

It was pretty cool how David made friends with Mr Dick, Miss Betsey’s associate in the house, flying a seven foot kite in the afternoons. The words scribbled on the paper of the kite, it was hoped, would make sense with the guidance of the winds while it flew in the sky. Mr Dick is a bit crazy, taken under Betsey’s wing, writing his “memorial” every day that he’ll never finish due to his madness. Still he keeps at this exercise in futility. All in all, he is harmless and a bit of a sad case, though a devoted friend. 

Leverkuhn

Quarter of five.

It was beautiful yesterday. Just now I feel old and worn out, needing rejuvenation. Oddly, in my sleep I was playing the bass, doing fretboard chess moves. What was the song? We play the wrong song but we got the right notes. If only we could hear what we’re doing, listen to the whole symphony. Would it jar on the ear? Like paints shot at a canvas randomly. The noise of Schoenberg. Studied dissonance. It goes beyond randomness to something evil, if you’re a Christian. I guess that’s the million dollar question for Thomas Mann. I left a copy of Doctor Faustus in my hotel room five years ago; I wonder why I did that. Did somebody read it? 

Nighthawk

Quarter after eleven.

It’s rather weird to be up so late at night, like something out of a painting: the nighthawks at the midnight cafe, when people have no secrets perhaps, and the rhythm of everything feels different, and you are privy to that rhythm. 

Friday morning I recommended a book to a friend; I said The Portable Jung was still the best introduction to his own writings, mostly because of Joseph Campbell. I was just surfing on Amazon for Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer, edited and finished by Joseph Campbell. The latter left his mark in a lot of places. He reputedly helped Swami Nikhilananda with the translation of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. I’d like to see a comeback for Eastern philosophy and religion in the USA, or perhaps I’ve been stuck in a rut with the same Christian church for too long. After a while you tend to overdose on particular ways of thinking. 

Years ago I met a guy who was involved with a Buddhist temple and who majored in art history at the UO. That must’ve been very interesting, and I question now why I chose the path I did with Our Redeemer and ending up eventually at Laurel Hill. But I think I probably did so from an instinct for safety and security, like my dad. Also the immediate vicinity around here is quite conservative, whether I like it or not. The good thing about that is my street is quiet and relatively safe, not like the Whiteaker neighborhood, where the liberal climate is good for music and art, but with the side effect of instability and crime. How much do people want to limit their imaginations in the interest of safety? 

A man told me that people only need to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; what you learn in college is extraneous and even dangerous. Ideas do damage, an attitude you can trace to Edmund Burke, in the wake of Rousseau and Robespierre and the French Revolution, which all started with ideas in somebody’s head. It’s a bit like AA philosophy: you mustn’t allow yourself to think.

What if nobody ever thought about anything? What kind of existence would that be?

Thoughts of a nighthawk in the midnight cafe… or a night owl alone at home. 

Comply or Critique?

Quarter of seven.

Daylight will come in a half hour at last. I walked to the store in pitch darkness using my flashlight, but when you reach the stop sign on N Park it’s fairly safe from traffic because of the sidewalk. There was no star-shine or a moon, and the streets were wet from recent rain. The amazing thing is to think of something like sociology, the changes in human behavior as a group from time to time. I don’t like where it’s going, yet resistance is quite futile and in the end you roll with it if it doesn’t roll over you. When I was a child, there was a little song on a Sesame Street record called “Play Along.” The record was a gift from my brother, but honestly I didn’t like the song very much. “You can play it on a big bass drum / You can play it on your finger and your thumb / But we all gotta play together / Play along.” Another way of looking at it comes from “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. When enough people agree on a policy or a practice, any kind of tradition is possible. But if no one thinks critically about it, it’s even harder to stop its progress. I like the Jackson perspective better because you are encouraged to use your brain and not blindly comply. 

Otherness

Five twenty five.

It was hard trying to sleep. My mind was hung up on a problem, perhaps the difference in words like “morality” and “mortality.” I slept lousy or not at all. Also I was confused about the mother complex in psychology, and what was I supposed to do when my mother had passed away? Even more so if she had a destructive impact on my life. But I remind myself that Jung was only a man with an opinion, and psychology never did me any favors. At least with philosophy, the field is wide open to posit your own identity. My French is not very good, but it seems to me that Mallarme constructed his heaven and installed himself as its god through language. Maybe this was hyperbolic and maybe I misunderstood what I read. Mallarme is difficult enough for a native French speaker to read. I’ll have to wade through the book again to find the same passage. A foreign language and a difficult thought: it’s like a different universe or a different bucket of my brain. I’m also minded to go back to bed. 

Henry

Four o’clock.

I’m forgetting my dreams already. Aesop had a nice Iams breakfast. He’s a smart dog. I did dream some about Henry the pug. He was not as bright, but a sweetheart. He symbolizes the past to me, old times and old things, and when I had more youth and innocence. He represents my very self at that stage, my own soul. I remember realizing our connection was like a tale by Poe, “The Oval Portrait.” A projection, really. I placed my alcoholic sins onto the little dog in my mind, who aged and whose health decayed as I looked on. In effect, Henry was my savior, as I conceived it. Totally a psychological thing.

Music: “Nocturne” by Larry Tuttle. I think I hear rain outdoors. Aesop is resting, letting his food digest…