Pessoa, Wittgenstein, and other prompts Common Place Number 28 | Autumn 2020
Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet consists of two parts, each "written" by a different persona. My quotes are from a 2017 New Directions edition edited by Jerรณnimo Pizarro and translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Ludwig Wittgenstein's miscellaneous, sometimes aphoristic notes are collected in Culture and Value, Chicago, 1984. The collecting is by George Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman and the English translations are by Peter Winch. I originally set out to comment only on Pessoa, but his book is slow going, despite passages of great beauty. I put it down to read Wittgenstein, which my daughter mentioned. Meanwhile, other thoughts occur to me, as they will. The cover is a still from a film my father made of a public funeral in Singapore in the early 1950s. It may be the funeral of the Vice-Governor of Malaya, who was murdered by China-backed, anti-colonial guerillas on the road to Frasier's Hill. We drove the same route not long after. The Vice-Governor negotiated with his captors, securing the release of his family. After we stayed at this highland resort, there was an uprising and the man who kept our cottage murdered its occupants. He seemed a nice man. Would he have killed me? I think the answer is yes.
"And sometimes, in the middle of the road--unobserved, after all—I stop and hesitate, seeking a sudden new dimension, a door onto the interior of space, onto the other side of space, where without delay I might flee my awareness of other people, my too-objective intuition of the reality of other people’s living souls."—Pessoa, p. 89 For my birthday, I was given a Hopalong Cassidy outfit with two pistols. This was in Singapore in midJanuary, 1952. The Mary Poppins series, among my favorite books of this period, depicts the governess and her charges passing into a painting and even into a cracked plate. The idea of entering another world appealed to me. I was already able to project an imaginary life onto the everyday. Giving it portals that I regarded as portable—not the fixed wardrobe of C.S. Lewis that I encountered much later, but any number of doorways that would transform a room into others that opened out into a variety of places. In the Mary Poppins books, she governs every scene that takes leave of the everyday. I took from this a sense that any world I might enter was in my control—a control I exercised like a benign monarch. The analogy might be to the duchy around Weimar that Goethe served, also encountered much later.
I once saw a photo of Goethe's summer house in Weimar. It resembled what I envisioned, more like a province of an evolved and peaceful state than a city. It was agrarian. There was a lake like the ones you see in Switzerland, large enough to require a boat. This landscape is from the Europe I saw when I was six, only just recovered from the war. Eight years of peace had restored agriculture, but London still bore the damage that bombing had inflicted on it. It was not yet really "postwar," not transformed by the jet age, by the prosperity to put cars on its roads. We drove around in my parents' Vauxhall, but traffic was sparse. Those five or so months were the end of the expatriate phase of my childhood, and my wanting to cross into another world was partly to get back to it. The dynamism of another world is similar to that of a childhood book—the story remains the same, but the reader is transformed. The setting stands in for the story, providing a country house and gardens, or a particular model of English car and its driver. What happens varies. Should I return there now, I imagine this would still be true. What resonates for me in this world reflects in some ways what resonates for me there, because it was my compensatory world when I needed it and was in exile from it. Having access to it freed me to live elsewhere, the door always handy.
"The true reality of an object lies only in a part of it; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to the material world in exchange for its existence in space." --Pessoa, p. 76. Architecture exemplifies this observation. Buildings fall into two broad categories—those that aim for this pared-down essence and those that make a display of the tribute paid. Bucky Fuller idealized the former, seeking lightness in the manner of Zeno's paradox. His self-proclaimed disciple Norman Foster makes a fetish of the tribute, structure rendered as ornament. So-called minimalism, if mired in materiality, uses endurance as its building blocks or shrinks things—tiny houses, guestroom capsules, sleeping pods—in hopes we won't notice their solidity. Traditional Japanese houses, with demountable wooden frames, and tatami mats and shoji screens that are ephemeral by design, are the exception. At a certain point, Fuller introduced time into his concept of lightness. Four-dimensional houses were as physically light as he could make them, but they were also intended to be lived in as needed. If this idea is played out, everything might change. We can imagine a service economy in which a fresh set of clothes follows us from place to place, arriving in the night. For ultimate portability, even our shoes might change—espadrilles, sandals, clogs, or boots instead of shoes designed more exactly for our feet. We may retain one seasonal outdoor pair, shed each quarter. To extend Pessoa's observation, this lightness also involves a sleight of hand, an apparatus no less weighty for being external to the houses it serves. The burden of it is carried by others. As we dispose of retail, the goods we still purchase come from warehouses in delivery trucks. Despite the threat of automation, workers still handle this. Artisanal workshops and the specialty markets, breweries, and restaurants and cafés associated with different locales are the walkable counterpart. How the great "houses" of art, design, and fashion find a place is not yet clear to me. Perhaps they form networks of affiliates that both produce bespoke goods and import them for their high-end clientele? If life is local and segmented, retail rents will fall back to earth. The food and beverage business will split between the commodities and imports obtainable in bulk and what a region's farms and vineyards raise to sell seasonally to local buyers through local shops.
The warehouse trade may shift to reflect the way politics is affecting trade. The urge to decouple, for example, reflects a clearer sense of the weight of the tribute. And, of course, this can be extended to much else—intellectual property, for example, which we've more or less handed over to gain access to a market we saw as vast and growing wealthier. True, but a market innately given to import substitution. Ironically, architecture was a leading indicator—the high-grade steel and tailored façades imported from Korea were supplanted by Chinese models five years later—reinforced by a mercantile economy. China needs somewhere to which to export its factories. Southeast Asia has priced itself out, so Africa is the logical choice—resource- and labor-rich. China will revive its countryside, recreating a docile, agrarian village cohort and tone down its restless cities. Only the bought-off, upwardly mobile middle classes will thrive in cities, served by an underclass of ambitious migrants. Industry will be tamed and pollution will be reduced. All that will move to Africa, which will grow fetid catering to this new colonial power. The big democracies—Brazil, the USA, and India—resemble each other in their contradictions. Parts of them aspire to rise to a higher standard; other parts are mired in corruption and ignorance. But they can no longer hide their problems. They will either reform together or experience greater fragmentation. Regions, to the extent they control their own fates, will see smaller versions of the same divisions. A kind of soft oligarchy is already in view, making concessions to the underclass at the expense of the professional middle class to remain in power. Progressive politicians negotiate this process. They extract concessions and buy the support of blocks of voters who feel shut out and blame the professional middle class for this. New national policies to tax the sources of oligarchic wealth may undo this regional condition, forcing corporations to pay the real cost of their regional impact, another sleight of hand. "Object" as Pessoa saw it should be widely applied—not just buildings or blood diamonds, but everything that trades on its essence and keeps the apparatus hidden or unmentioned, whether it takes the form of sweatshops, exploited labor, pollution, or profits that in a societal sense are unearned, even grotesque. The rest is too large, too out of scale with everything around it, to be ignored. We have to reckon with its true reality: the size of the tribute.
"...All of life is metaphysics in the dark, with, in the background, the murmuring gods and our complete ignorance of the way ahead as the only possible way ahead." —Pessoa, p. 157. I wrote what I described as a novella fragment in 2005, finding and editing it in the winter of 2020. A writing class I'm taking now discussed the use of the second person in narrative, and reading an example led me to revisit the text and rewrite the second part. I gave the text a new subtitle "A story in search of an ending," but it could also have been "A life in search of a denouement," an outcome that gives meaning to a life, assures the one living it that it wasn't random. My life conforms to Pessoa's assertion. Not so much murmurings as signs, occasionally explicit and uncanny, and an expectation of someone arriving. It must be odd to await someone long overdue, like the Messiah, sorting out the different claims of arrival. In my case, no one announced herself—the speculation was my own, kicked off with the first, most enduring instance. The second lasted about a year; the third close to seven. "Lasted" is misleading. It refers to what some might call "the main event," but each instance has an afterlife that's specific to itself. This is to say that no instance is of greater or less value than any other, although they vary in sequence. It may be that the sequence matters, but I'm unsure. What's certain is that we ourselves arrive with only our intuitions. We are instructed in life, but not about this. It may be one reason to write about it as Pessoa did. Homer's hero Odysseus hears directly from his protectress. She's not hesitant about this. The oracle at Delphi is less direct. The I Ching, also. We look for instructions, but most of them deal with the aftermath—the ravines we pass through, our guilt over mistakes we made that led to ruptures. We ask ourselves if it could have been different. Of course, but then there would be other ravines, other guilt. If we add it up, we get the sum of our experience—all that we're left pondering plus recognition that what we wanted then isn't what we want now. Strangely, the one who arrives is who we envisioned, but the arrival finds us in a different state, no longer driven by a role and no longer seen as the one to fulfill it. It takes time to live this way, living our life and letting it unfold with all else, the gods there to receive our prayers for loved ones' safety and another morning.
"Each one of us is two, and whenever two people meet, get close or join forces, it’s rare for those four to agree."—Pessoa, p. 155. Who we are reflects our situation, as I saw in Detroit when I worked on a renovation project overseen by a corporate real estate group at their firm's old office, a 1920s building, inherited from the founder, that resembled the Communist Party Headquarters of one of another of the Soviet Republics and may have been its model. These men dressed in Timberline shifts and khakis—a uniform later used by those who destroyed the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon, and menaced the White House. It was clear that they were neutered within their firm's rigid hierarchy. Following the renovation, these men moved to newly renovated office space proximate to the developer that owned the buildings—MBA types in business suits. When I went back for a one-hour meeting, I saw them, clad similarly, their masculinity regained. "Clothes make the man," but it was the situation, out from under the hierarchy, that did it. Whenever two people get close, as Pessoa says, their several natures come forward or recede. This is especially true at the beginning, when improvisation is inevitable. Each partner considers how to spark the other's pleasure, but the question of who leads— who plays the other as an instrument—is set by their natures as they play off of one another. I agree with Pessoa that four natures are involved, possibly more. We may suppress one of them to meet the other's desire, but that suppression may come back to haunt us, boxing us in when what's needed is to be open. Work also takes our several selves and wreaks havoc with them, demanding or imposing cultural expectations that reflect the preferences of bosses. There's a high-school aspect to the workplace that's depressing. I always hated it. What saves work is its camaraderie among likeminded people who find each other, much as in school we are saved by these few who commiserate with us and keep our spirits up in the face of organized and random derision. Admirable are those who make their getaway, who work devotedly on their own projects and live devotedly to their own desires. I think the timing is up to each one. What matters is to make the break and then make the most of it. Work as if immortal, as E.M. Forster put it. Let those natures run free.
"You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. This is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don’t stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet."— Wittgenstein, p. 33e. I write about myself from my own depth. As with Wittgenstein's bare feet, I'm naked but behind whatever scrim I place between me and the reader. This can serve both to hold aspects of myself back and to protect others who were present at certain points. Depth measures how much I acknowledge of the self I know, although writing it or saying it sometimes brings me past whatever limit I thought I'd set, forces me to confront deeper selves. Dreams do this, too. The selves that I take for myself and present as myself are two different selves, the difference varying with the context. I'm most like the self I present as myself when I'm presenting it to others. I'm least like that self when I'm alone and able consciously to be a different self. But this different self gradually emerges as the strictures of outward presentation loosen. It also finds media that permit expression.
Mad, stoked-up crowds and the interpersonal folies of texting and social media make it possible for deeper selves to surface and, unsuppressed, act out. Very soon after Trump was elected, oddball white guys on the train began trolling women and saying hateful or provoking things openly. These selves are deeper in the sense of repressed by fear of ridicule, and Trump's victory emboldened them. Phenomena like the Proud Boys and the khaki-and-white-shirt brigade of torchbearers that invaded Charlottesville reflect this. Stoking these crowds is what fascists do. Here, the deeper self is brought unreflectively to the surface. Deeper selves count as such when they seize our tongues and animate our bodies. This happens—we can be monstrous on occasion. When this happens, what matters is that we account for it. Sometimes the monster is there to remove us from a situation, to be blunt and cruel to save us or break another's hold. It causes pain, but relieves it, too. More often, we act out because we've lost control—handed it to others or are caught up in a situation so filled with anxiety that we act idiotically. We're "all surface," and our madness has free rein. Later, calmer, we look at this, first in horror and then with insight, trying always to prevent it from recurring, get back to the self we thought we were.
"The edifice of pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work."—Wittgenstein, p. 26e. Pride is said to be a sin, which is to say that it has a destructive or toxic aspect. Pride turns a situation into a fixed narrative that helps you forget whatever injured you, move on from it. But in the process, love and affection can turn into hate or indifference. It's as if this aspect of your past is dead. Dismantling the edifice of pride is worth doing because walling off your past removes you from the life you lived, an unfolding present in which love and affection often persist and take new forms. Revising pride's narrative is hard because the demands that the proud make on life are often very specific. If those demands are unmet, whatever they pictured is over and done. But the narrative that pride writes is different from what was felt and shared with another. Pride gives no weight to these accrued feelings. Yet they're the yeast or seed from which something new arises. They're the ink with which to extend the text. Whatever might arise arrives in its own time. The ground lies fallow, taking in everything else. But small shoots make their presence felt. We can treat them as weeds or, conversely, cultivate them, see what they look like in this new season. This garden is always shared, even if one gardener is long absent. It is tended, alive so long as someone is alive to tend it. I don't know how much work it actually takes to dismantle pride's edifice. A narrative continues the moment one takes a pen in hand and writes again. My guess is that it's easier to walk out into a garden than waste much time on whatever mausoleum one erected there. These creations are of papier-mâché. Left behind, they weather into nothingness. When we find ourselves in a garden again, freed from the press of whatever brought us there to begin with, it invites renewed creativity, alone or with another. My coming here to write this is an instance, but I'm the more frequent visitor, tending it and waiting. It's true that life has given me several gardens to tend. They form what the Buddhists call "Mind," the world arrayed around our consciousness, which they say will die with us. Writing and other arts express our unfolding experience, notes we leave behind us that are fragments, too, tentatively tangible, inexact. The narratives pride writes are isolated in time, like the walls that emperors build to keep out disturbing thoughts, prevent their turning into something else.
"Every idea that costs a lot carries in its train a host of cheap ones; among these are even some that are useful."—Wittgenstein, p. 58e. This made me think immediately of the progression from Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo that Arthur Koestler describes in The Sleepwalkers. The part of Koestler is especially interesting, because Kepler drew on the observations of Tycho Brahe, which were accurate but didn't lead Brahe to a theory. And Kepler chose to work on the orbit of Mars, which proved to be elliptical, not circular as Copernicus had supposed. Kepler seems to have grasped that whatever form the orbit took, it would be that form pure and simple. The rest was mathematics, a weak point for Kepler, who reached out to every quarter for help. But he had the data. His task was to fit it to an orbit that made predictive sense. He had the data because he impressed Brahe as the one best suited to apply it, of those at hand. So, part of Kepler's story is finding a source, not such an easy task, I imagine. Another part is breaking with the Copernican model when the data demanded it. (I'm writing this from memory. I read the book at some point in the 1990s.) Kepler's approach is deductive—data to theory. Paul Feyerabend argues that Galileo's was inductive: theory first, data to follow. And he didn't hesitate to assert his theory's validity on slim evidence, forcing him to back down in the face of the Church's query. The Church's cosmology was threatened by the theory, and Feyerabend defends its pushback as reasonable given the stakes. This reminds me of Amy Coney Barrett's remark at her Senate hearing that the science of climate change is controversial. The consensus around that science is still in flux would be another way to put it, and those denying it have a lot riding on their denial. Tobacco's link to cancer is an earlier example, but the science is simpler and the evidence irrefutable at a certain point. She made that comparison, and I think she had a point. Galileo's dispute with the Church was a legal dispute. Unable to make his case with the evidence, he backed down. His theory was right, as the evidence later showed. It seems in keeping with Barrett's originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that she also favors deductive over inductive reasoning in science. Inductive reasoning tends to jump the gun, but it's a valid, useful, even a cheap way to generate a theory.
"Space is not distance, Pissarro says, not a journey to the horizon: it is here where we are, an immense proximity, a total intuition of ‘place’ and 'extent.’ And Time is not becoming, not endless contingency: it is a Now that goes on being Now as we live it, a unique kind of permanence, one we know we have only for an instant but which is not for that reason experienced as fleeting, or even transitory. Every instant deserves to be monumentalized. It is not a 'moment’ fizzing by."—T.J. Clark, "Strange Apprentice," London Review of Books, 8 October 2020, p. 16. Much fizzes by us, which may be why the moments— and I think they're moments rather than instants— that live on in memory are so often related to what slows us down—lovemaking, for example, or a child's birth. By the former, I mean the whole of it, the long interplay before, after, and in between, each with a setting with all of its particulars—everything taken in. The limits to exchange, how what lives on in my mind may have no equivalent resonance except when a poem finds a sympathetic other, finds recognition, is both our human tragedy and the heart of creativity. Even children are unwittingly part of this desire to convey what can't be satisfactorily expressed. If we cry at their weddings or are moved by their beauty, it's because they speak to what we experienced. Landscapes come along with this, sometimes attached to the family that is our first lasting love. There are places we know through them, and others to which we fled to find ourselves. These are the real monuments—the houses we inhabited as children, the rocks we clambered on and swam out from. Life exiles us from them, but we carry them nonetheless. In lovemaking we notice not only every aspect of the beloved, but the incidentals, like the way light strikes a building or a wall opposite, its composition. Nothing eludes us when our senses are heightened. Love ends, but in reality, it never does. We carry it as instances, each uniquely, indelibly itself. And the one who occasioned it is intrinsic to it. It needs no monument, because what would a monument be? This is the futility of any gravestone that tries to go beyond a name and the start and ending dates. And even that is futile. Better to write a poem or a story, to use such artistry as one has to give a kind of life to what was experienced once, leave it for others.
"Realistic fiction, such as Flaubert’s or Kafka’s, is a form of human natural history, and human natural history in the Wittgensteinian sense is something distinct from social or psychological science. The realism of such writing consists in attention to overlooked general facts of human nature—to such things as our experience of time, our capacity to draw rules from instances as also to know when instances do not suggest rules, our abilities to aspire and to concede, our thwartedness."—Eric Griffiths, If Not Critical, Oxford, 2018, p. 183. My sense of my life emphasizes these "overlooked general facts" of my own, oh-so-human nature, on which social and psychological science hasn't shed much light. "One continuous mistake" is Zen's take on what a life is, in essence, as we find our way, living as we do within contexts we only partly understand. As we do so, we also try to make sense of ourselves, alive in the world with our quirks, inconsistencies, shortcomings, virtues, talents, strange and ordinary at once. Descriptors these sciences hand us miss the fluidity, the nuance, the extent of our improvisation. Maturity, if this is what it is, is an acceptance of this without casting our quirks, etc., in concrete. No, we accept the good and the bad, and try for a balance that spares us and others of our worst aspects. I see quite clearly how I defeat myself, sink into lethargy, fail to attend to life's basics, act in short like a child at a certain willful age. And I also see how I snap out of such moods—how readily this is accomplished. Every month, I make a list—I hesitate to call it a plan—of my intentions and obligations. Some of it gets done, some of it deferred. Every Sunday, I take my weight and blood pressure, noting their variation and telling myself, yet again, to eat more carefully and walk the requested 30 minutes times four. The evidence is always in front of me, these general facts. In a neighborhood of mixed ages, I see the coming attractions of getting older and compare how I am with younger folk. They bring their complaints, as every age has them, specific to them. A pandemic levels life slightly, mortality visibly in the picture until it becomes another general fact we overlook. As an elder with a good memory, I can be useful to the young, thinking back to one or another mistake I made that, while disconcerting, wasn't fatal. I drew the lessons. They may or may not apply to them.
An action, event, thing, or being was not chosen dualistically as an action among actions, and event among events, and so forth, in a causal, hierarchical, evolutionary, or means-end model, but rather nondualistically as the ultimate action or the ultimate event, abiding in the Dharmaposition of the realized now that was discrete before and after. There was nothing but that particular event, which consumed the whole universe, and ultimately even the universe was emptied.—Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dögen, Wisdom, 2004, p. 66. A writer friend wrote me that a love affair can have a beginning and an end. It is certainly true that if a love affair ends badly, life can feel entirely emptied. It's hard, when this happens, to remember the nondual nature of emptiness, which is at once the source of every beginning and the repository of every ending. Reading Kim's second book, which focuses on Dögen's philosophy of radical nonduality, I came to respect a view of life that constantly looks around the corner of one state to acknowledge all the others. In the I Ching I read that one's influence can be felt a thousand miles away, although one never leaves one's room. Influencers abound these days, but this influence isn't by design. It may be from intention. The bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings raises the question, "from what?" The answer may be from the delusion that the emptied universe is all there is, the end of the road. Life seems to empty out, this is its entropic reality, yet nothing is lost— this is Einstein's theory, not just the Buddha's. What the Buddha adds is the idea of living within emptiness and seeing it as a blessing to be savored, not as gains and losses, with a total loss at the end. My friend writes sometimes about a particular affair that appears to hover unresolved in her mind. Life has aspects that are significant and incomplete. To the extent they're bound up with love, what may be missing is a proper denouement. We fill this gap by considering things simultaneously as the intimate flashes of memory and from a distance life imposes. In the James Joyce story, "The Dead," a youth who was the first passion of the protagonist's wife lives on in her because his premature death left her bereft not only of him but of some kind of ending. He returns unbidden. As La Rochefoucauld says, "There are three cures for love, none proven."
"Only a madman would soberly demand that a man not occupy himself with himself, that he not concern himself with himself, and that, in brief, he not take himself for himself."–Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, Yale, 2012, p. 140. That we are our subject and our project spares others the necessity of making us do so, because in the end only we can attend to ourselves and attract those who, by strange coincidence, have a reciprocal need for our attention. It is this reciprocity that saves us from narcissism and solipsism. I link this to the bodhisattva's vow, which gives reciprocity its head, demanding that the universe turn inside-out before she will save herself, perhaps by having its first child. "In our eagerness to understand reality, we forget that we are not here to understand reality, but only to express it. We, art, are reality. Art is a fact and not commentary attached to a fact. It is not our job to explain, elucidate, systematize, prove. We are the word that claims: this hurts me, this intrigues me, I like this, I hate this, I desire this, I don’t want this… Science will always remain an abstraction, but our voice is the voice of a man made flesh and blood, this is the individual voice. Not an idea, but a personality is important to us. We do not become real in the realm of concepts, but in the realm of people."— Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, Yale, 2012, p. 104. Lately, explaining is frowned on. Better to leave it to the experts. When I write, I try to be accurate about what I saw, felt, heard, think—my responses to things that may possibly be useful to others but fall short of explaining what I experienced, since what others will experience is specific to them. Simply writing about these things suggests that whatever happened didn't kill me, although men have died for less. I have tried to warn others that the idea of a parallel life is false, and yet even as I set the warning down, I realize that what keeps the idea alive is our human need to live beyond our capacities in space and time in order to honor the possibilities within us that otherwise gnaw at us and are only relieved by living them out, despite the knowledge—the foreknowledge—of its futility. A sign of maturity is to accept this, but it usually comes after one or more disasters, however heady they were in recompense, however much the stuff of poetry.
"Nothing throughout the entire universe is concealed."—the answer given to Eihei Dögen when he asked, "What is the practice of the Way?" Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dögen, Wisdom, 2004, p. 28. When a child is born, her nature is briefly apparent in an almost flamboyant way, as if the shock of being in the world unleashes everything she brought along. At the outset of love, it is similarly possible to see it accurately, although this foreknowledge is of little consolation along the way, whatever the outcome. We see reality constantly and turn away from it, unwilling to take the often=modest steps that would increase the odds of our dealing successfully with it. Occasionally, though, we act on what we see with a conviction that surprises us and others. These acts can seem impetuous, but normally they're very rare and their very rarity is one reason we act decisively. Most of life is lived unconsciously, with only a half-awareness of what's happening around us. We are oblivious, and this is corrosive to those who need us to be aware of them. The close relationships hinge on an affection which is unforced, and part of the art of living with another is to learn to make room for solitude so intimacy is possible. This is equally hard for those who need solitude as for those who need proximity and interaction, and of course they often find each other, valuing the trait they mostly lack. Reality then is a prompt for an awareness that prompts an apt response, an action commensurate with what's revealed, capable of running with it. This can involve casting against type, defying our natures in the interest not just of greater harmony but also of greater possibility. The only thing harder than this is to live within the confines of our nature, whether it condemns us to a narrow existence or a shallow one. The Way, if I read the I Ching rightly, is the line of least resistance associated with a situation—that is, what is natural or innate to it. Awareness means that we see this and act accordingly. I think we're always aware, in reality, even if we lack the capacity to act. Practice to me is an awareness that takes us in hand, which is to say that what we learn is to act in keeping with what we see, moving with the revelation rather than resisting or opposing or denying it. We learn to trust the Way as revealed—trust in that unfolding and get better at sensing it up on the hillside above the beach rather than in the midst of undertow.
"The Fall of Man, Ulrich thinks, must have been like the end of an affair, as a result of which the newly sobered-up lover ‘doubtless sees the whole truth, but something greater has been torn to shreds, and truth is everywhere no more than a fragment that has been left over and patched together again.'"—Catherine Wilson quoting Robert Musil in "Mach, Musil, and Modernism," The Monist, January 2014, p. 148. True or false strikes me as inapplicable to love, whether it arises in an affair or in a marriage. Honesty or openness is similarly useless, in that to insist on it as therapists sometimes do is to assume that right and wrong apply. It's possible, however, to declare that one's own love for another was real at its height, even if its reality remains a declaration, much as a poem is—a mark we make on time's wall, less of one than the red handprints left by the Neanderthal. When I write out the love I felt, its reality lights up its settings and the beloved one within them. This is no leftover fragment, but a story we wrote together even if I alone am remembering it. The phrase "love of my life," newly abbreviated for Twitter, is one I can only apply to my wife and children as my faithful companions. Others came and went, but they live on in memories that are specific to each of them. There is no possible hierarchy here, only chronology. The comings and goings are distinct, as are the nature of the regrets. Again, there are stories, not fragments. I wrote a story and was surprised to find, when I read it again later, how central my wife is to it. I had left it unfinished and when I gave it an ending, I took this realization as my starting point, diminishing the scenes I thought would loom large. But this is what poems do—find the essence of time slowed down. No medium except painting conveys essence in this way. There's a good deal of sobering up in life, not least toward the end when it hands you the bill. What pains us when love ends is the uprooting of tendrils, everything that connects you to the other, vanishing. If the question of truth arises, it's here, when all of this seems to be revealed as a delusion. My sense is that, the Zen teachers notwithstanding, is isn't. As the I Ching puts it, "Nothing is lost." You just have to wait for it to return, oddly poignant in the shadow of time past, as paintings can sometimes move us, resonate, when decades later we see them again.
"Ulrich understands that the contingency of the construction of our world allows us to have the freedom not to be bound by any human situation; but at the same time it also means ‘never knowing what one wants to be bound by.’"—Barbara Sattler, quoting Robert Musil, in "Contingency and Necessity," The Monist, January 2014, p. 94. The parallel lives that experience tells me are ruled out by human life lived within space-time "as given" serve nonetheless to bring us face to face with the moral strictures that tradition imposes on us. We're aware, for instance, of the workarounds that other cultures have tried out to contend with this problem, yet we find ourselves marooned in ours. It surprises us to find how it can vary, granting license in one situation and taking it away in another. Yet license itself is rarely decisive. When we plunge in, we plunge in, even as we hedge our bets, because the lure of this nominally expanded universe compels us. The only honesty that may be valuable in love is the honesty to admit our inconsistency, to admit for example that the world to which ours runs parallel has its virtues, or, more simply, that we can't take the pace that the two parallel worlds require. I can honestly say that the pace is unsustainable. Only one for whom this marathon justifies itself can pull it off.
"Ulrich feels urgently the need to ‘change the fundamental forms of morality that for two thousand years has been adjusted to changes of taste only in minor details to one that will fit more closely and elastically to the mobility of facts. ’"— Catherine Wilson, quoting Robert Musil, in "Mach, Musil, and Modernism," The Monist, January 2014, p. 146. Morality is outward and formal on the one hand and inward and informal on the other. The line between the two conditions varies wildly and constitutes one of the main hazards of life, not just now but always. In the present era, it almost seems advisable to be entirely open, to admit upfront that nothing can be hidden and therefore nothing is hidden—live with it. This is the premise of a certain celebrity and also the refuge of eccentricity, but even here there are rules. The two Jeffreys, Epstein and Toobin, exemplify the unpredictability of transgression's penalty phase. Epstein, realizing the game is finally over, ends his life (presumably); Toobin, accidentally caught in a sort of truth-or-dare game with his colleagues, is still with us. Surely, he considered jumping off a bridge. Such a penalty is too harsh, people likely agree, yet in Epstein's case they wish he were still alive to suffer the humiliation of a trial.
"Evil is not this enemy that crushes or
humiliates us, but a force collaborating with the whole. —Paul Klee, The Inward Vision, Abrams, 1959, quoted by Philippe Mach, "Ethics and Aesthetics," The Monist, January 2014, p. 137, footnote 12. Election Day, 2020 as I write this, late in the day, the sun setting prematurely now that we're back in standard time. The good is also such a force, equally dependent on those who join in. Each has its allies and partisans; each calls the others names: traitors, collaborators, and worse. The cities along the West Coast aren't representative of the whole in the proportions of their mix. They're the population centers, and the vote skews to the left. There's a split; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren split the leftist part and Joe Biden took the center. As Obama's partner, he won their endorsement. It helped that Sanders likes him and sees a place for his agenda in Biden's program. He was endorsed by younger leftists eager to ditch Trump, but their endorsement didn't exact specific promises. If he wins, Biden would be smart to hand off, but that handoff is complicated by Kamala Harris, who isn't a leftist, just slightly left of center. California progressives are mostly of this type, in the neoliberal camp like Obama and Biden. They talk up a leftist agenda, but never fund it. Instead, they rely on regulation and the market. This has the effect of delivering token amounts of what the market isn't set up to deliver. It's why California, an economy as big as France, has a public realm so threadbare. The money isn't there. Public employment and pensions soak it up, and corporations are lightly taxed, despite their wealth and impact. Some property owners, some workers, and most consumers fund it, and their contributions aren't enough. The public realm consists of public goods and services provided as a public benefit. In a tax regime like California's, neglect is visible. Corporations make the money and keep it.
My sense is that the titans who lead these companies are skeptical that the bureaucracy running the public realm currently would use additional tax revenues responsibly. It has a long history of feathering its own nest. Politicians take money from both sides, typically, working within rather than challenging a tax regime so tipped in corporations' favor, but also failing to challenge the public sector unions that bargain for higher wages and benefits despite knowing that the bill, when it comes due, can't be paid, and taxpayers will revolt as more cities are bankrupted and basic services grind to a halt. As we saw with the automotive industry, only crises prompt action in the United States. Politicians finally have sufficient cover to act, despite long knowing that each and every crisis was brewing. This is an evil and too many go along with it. It creates inequities between parts of the public sector and the private sector that pays for it. It blankets the political process with layers of soft corruption—money that leads inexorably to laws that benefit corporate and developer donors. All this is denied, but it's the Achilles heel of the so-called progressives. Young leftists call it out. Democratic socialists are the only political force that's actively working for reform. Their program is a work in progress, still hampered by the neoliberal order that shaped establishment politics until Trump arrived and tried to turn it into a personal franchise. He won because the establishment didn't work for a lot of people. If he loses—as I write this, I have no idea if he will— it will be because parts of the establishment are awake to the fact that it didn't work. Making it work will mix old ideas and new ones, but under Biden and possibly a Democratic Congress will at least have a commitment to trying. Biden has seen a mandate squandered, so if he gets one, he's likely to be sharper about how he uses it. After four years of Trump, he'll have his hands full. Evil is at the heart of Trump's agenda, the only part of it he brought off with any degree of competence, thanks to his enablers.
If Trump wins a second term, the coastal states will be pressed to buckle under, starved of federal funding, but they will also be pressed to resist. I foresee active devolution, refusing to go along with the relaxing of federal mandates that support climate goals, for example, and offering its residents protection from federal abuse. The courts will be where this will play out. Trump believes he's got the courts in his corner, but the arguments will hinge on Constitutional issues that his administration tends to ignore. He may also face a Democratic Congress, which will be much harder to sidestep. His victory, if it happens, could be like Nixon's in 1972. The danger of a Biden victory and a friendly Congress is overreach followed by a midterm election that flips the Senate back to the GOP. It has happened repeatedly. It led Bill Clinton to invent New Labor before Tony Blair did, a fiscal Republican and a social liberal. Biden's need to right the economy complicates the picture, but it may give him grounds to focus his program and sell it to the public in stages. Considering that Democratic Socialism is a sea change, an incremental approach is preferable to one that no one understands, however well-intentioned. Obamacare is a case example. California is already testing the waters, but in the absence of adequate funding (see above), these measures will sink without a trace, leaving residents with barely updated versions of what we have now—markets doing what markets do and crumbs for whatever they don't. Money may be thrown at the worst—that is, the most visible— problems, but it will be band-aid money until corporate wealth is finally tapped at a level in keeping with its impact on the public realm. Our tech titans are pale shadows of their Gold Rush-fueled predecessors, who shaped the state and gave it public and private universities to rival the east coast. They left real and useful monuments and they believed in California, the Golden State, not slinking off to Mars or NZ. They wanted the state to reflect their glory.
"Musil sought to conceptualize the ‘average’ or ‘most probable’ man as the true subject and protagonist of mass society. This was, for Bouveresse, ‘a theory of little causes, small changes and modest progress’, with the virtue of deflating pretentious accounts of the place of human beings in the social order, in a proscientific, even anti-humanist view of modernity that placed a high value on clarity and precision."—Jacob Collins, "Thinking Otherwise," New Left Review, November-December 2017, pp. 61-62. He is commenting on Musil as viewed by the French philosopher Jacques Bouveresse. Just who is "average" or "most probable" is what this election has disputed. Biden projects an image of "normality" while Trump claims his followers as "my people," identified with him and therefore "not average," just as his 2016 win was "least probable." There are at several candidates for "average" or "most probable," but they split into subgroups that blur into each other. Mention demographics and wait to see who shows up. The word "ally" describes those who claim an identification to which they have no obvious claim, but the grounds for saying that people are or aren't what they claim have narrowed. Gender is especially fraught, and the controversies there are spilling over into other categories. The word "average" can be a caricature, "Just who you'd expect," that is, a stereotype that doesn't bother with experience, distancing the speaker from these others. But such an atomized personality is a version of all the others, readily manipulable by whoever can lull his anxiety and alienation. Nihilistic and fatalistic, they make few demands on their gods, prepared to suffer as the price of their being lulled. "Ordinary" is the alternative that speaks to "modest progress" and myriad small but
deliberate, even creative acts. It places us closer to nature and to each other, recognizing that our differences vary around larger themes: our shared humanity; our interdependence; and our vulnerability. "Ordinary" is modesty hard won, its clarity partial and fleeting. Precision feels Newtonian now when so much is beyond that, oscillating between the various poles we set up at different points to keep things straight.
"In fact the beginnings of good originality are already there if you do not want to be something you are not."—Wittgenstein, p. 60e. Originality seems to come down to self-acceptance— that is, accepting the self you feel yourself to be in essence, however flamboyant or simple this may be. These attributes aren't mutually exclusive: there are times when you need to be one or the other, but what they share is an origin story and its development that no one else could have lived out. "Peculiar" has this sense of stamped or marked by the self, bespoke. What though is "bad originality?" Does it stem from wanting to be something you are not? Does this impulse lead you to an originality that is all glittering façade or too close an imitation of its model? I read in a collection of his poems that Basil Bunting only broke through when T.S. Eliot died—a gatekeeper who saw Bunting as an imitator of Ezra Pound. His supposed overidentification made him too close to the real thing to be countenanced, a second rater. Or does Wittgenstein mean those whose originality is malevolent? The great figures of malevolence seem though to repeat themselves, varying a few themes. Their actions are self-coerced, unreflective, banal. They grant themselves license, but this isn't the same as self-acceptance. Originality accepts the self that knows who it is and is interested in learning more. Originality values this trait in others and ignores the self-coerced, unreflective, banal rest. The aforementioned idea of an "ally" is at odds with the originality Wittgenstein seeks. His demand is that the self be true to itself, so that its originality is always a declaration. I don't identify with women but combine traits that the outer world categorizes. These traits add up to the self that I accept, original to myself. When the world tried to coerce me to be its stereotype of a man, I resisted when it didn't fit. Unlike Jan Morris, for example, I never felt miscast as a man. That she recast herself is her originality or part of it, the way it unfolded in that instance. If I could move between genders without chemistry or surgery, I might do so, but that's not possible. Yet my nature is receptive, a midwife to the procreators. Someone has to do the work. This too is a trait. Unfolding the self is work. Originality accepts the particular, sometimes peculiar forms it takes, always curious about the next chapter, how certain issues that dogged life drop away or clearly matter less.
"Perhaps one day this civilization will produce a culture. When that happens there will be a real history of the discoveries of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which will be deeply interesting." —Wittgenstein, p. 64e. Reading Walter Benjamin reinforced my sense, pace Vico, that time's boundaries are arbitrary and that women and men are less a product of their epochs than we imagine. The arts exemplify this, giving us an aural, textual, and visual sense of anticipation and continuity. Perhaps it's just development—the way things unexpectedly persist, like Vico's great book, to find new champions and interpreters. The history that Wittgenstein imagines pries time open and puts less emphasis on provenance. Phenomena turn out to be siblings or cousins, their traits foregrounding their differences and making nonsense of a timeline. It's not that provenance doesn't count, but it counts less than the way the traits themselves evolve and are sometimes reshaped by viewpoints that were overlooked and then rediscovered. Also, methods of working, like Benjamin's talent for synthesis and his conviction that widely dispersed phenomena can be fragments of buried mountains of ideas. This may be what Wittgenstein means by "produce a culture"— unearth one that runs like a golden vein through the centuries, just as the Classical trove surfaced again in Spain and then in Italy after Spain drowned its proto-Renaissance in imperialism and orthodoxy. It doesn't seem coincidental that the Sephardim ended up in Parma and Venice the trove's mass replicators, also carrying the cultural freedom they'd tasted. We learned from Trump and his enablers that science could be dismissed as readily as the rest of culture. Not even medicine was exempt. A pandemic was insufficient to set aside their juggernaut of acts grounded in grudges and payoffs. The loss of life in the end meant absolutely nothing. It was treated as rumor or the machinations of their political enemies. Three centuries of history, going on four, are rife with culture's deniers and suppressors. Is it a hidden vein of gold or a toxic river—or is it both? My sense is that culture is reliably produced under the bleakest circumstances. They salt the earth, but the bees find flowers that desire their ministrations. Life continues, and culture is wrapped up in it, hungry for new things, attuned still to resonance, unable to resist remaking the world, as is our birthright.
"Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. And Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony."—Victor Shklovsky, quoted by Bruce Nanay, "The Dethroning of Ideocracy," The Monist, January 2014, p. 10, note 2. Living, too, is an art. A steady diet of political manipulation and pandemic exigency often made daily life seem baleful, so the end of the Trump era is not only cause for celebration, but an invitation to revive the art of living—the arts of living, perhaps—to restore what we share as human beings, stewards of a tightknit planet we've been pushing into imbalance. The pandemic brought this tightknit aspect home to me—our mutual dependence and how our collective actions affect larger phenomena, whether pandemic spikes or the quality of the air we breathe. We speak of climate science and epidemiology, but our impact on each other and the world around us is more a question of arts and skills we practice with a new awareness—a consciousness that breaks the grip of our habituation to situations that work against us. There is ample peril in the world today, but the opportunity for defusing it and shifting things to a more stable and beneficent condition is there, right in front of us. Individually and collectively, we are artists of our own lives and the larger contexts that support them and the lives of others. We sense their health as much as we measure it. The measurements are important, of course, but we don't need to stare at them to know we're headed in a better direction. We got in the habit of spur-of-the-moment gratification that stripped us of agency, making us consumers of life rather than artists within it. When mass is applied to culture, education, food, goods, healthcare, housing, transit, and tourism, the results are varied. It is possible to have an art of living at that scale, but there has to be a desire for it. That desire is the essence and the spark of urbanity, which wants the public realm to be robust and universal—a human right to a life that's more than subsistence or worse. Jane Jacobs wrote that city and countryside are attached, that the latter is an extension of the former. Extending this, the idea of their mutual alienation is misguided. The goal should be a symbiosis in which each finds its proper place within a resilient whole.
That whole requires cultivation. Its components form an interdependent ecosystem that has to be approached as such. The art of such cultivation is the most subtle art there is—not a question of command and control, but of working across a vast network. The credo, "Make haste slowly," applies in spades. Defining a region by its watershed and weather patterns may be a useful way to proceed. Both speak directly to the idea of interconnectedness and how variations spill over as floods, droughts, freezes, and excessive heat and aridity. How we live within and work a region should reflect its varying conditions. This too is an essential part of urbanity, where it overlaps with the Slow Movement's insistence on an awareness that's hyperlocal—that is, attentive to a place's terroir, the unfolding sum of what defines it. This is neither provincialism nor elitism masking as preservation, but rather a recognition of its nature. From neighborhoods to the regional watershed, place is an ecosystem of nested scales—manmade, cultivated, and true nature in the sense rivers and streams, mountains and valleys, and seismic faults. The arts of living benefit from our urbanity and suffer when we fail to bring it. Politicians and their enablers truck in abstractions, craft legislation that actively seeks to stifle local prerogative in the guise of aiding the public realm but, in reality, aiding those who fund their campaigns and otherwise grease their skids. That think tanks that should know better fall in with this reflects overlapping funding sources. It projects a false consensus that is tetchily defended. At this point, it's holding back something better. The arts of living benefit from an imagination loosed from neoliberal suppositions, especially when they're presented as progressive. Left to markets, the region will cater to the highest bidders and pay lip service to their self-distracting causes. Everyone else will be left with the market can never deliver: a public realm worthy of the name; a region in tune with itself, respectful of and creative with its terroir at every level; an ecosystem around which our lives are organized and capable of shifting as it shifts. The arts of living are necessarily dynamic and responsive. They are necessarily creative and receptive, attentive to the ebbs and flows that typify the whole of nature from tiny organisms to the planet, Gaia, on which our lives depend. She will rebalance, one way or another. Urbanity pays minute attention to the fact.
Common Place Number 28 | Š 2020 by John J. Parman |complace.j2parman.com