JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

A number of great thoughts pop up in Adam Kirsch’s review of a book by William Gass, Life Sentences.

Gass insists that “neither story (which can be told in many media and in many ways) nor meaning (which can be expressed with similar flexibility) are active elements in literary work.
…
“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” …

… “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s.…It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

I’m quoting this because I agree with it. Not quite in the way Kirsch describes it in summary, but close enough; I spot on agree as far as the way Gass says it and would expand the idea to all the arts.

Art is about consciousness. Art is an expression of the cloud of identity which is what an individual really is, expressed at a moment in time. It is not a lecture, nor affirmation, nor negation of concept, nor political statement, nor craft decoration to impress, but an opening up of the spirit, mind and heart. Those elements of Being coalesce hopefully, and return the work, which the viewer can better sense than describe.

Art becomes something other than a single person, as the process affects the outcome, like a quantum experiment. That is what persists in art; art which succeeds. A unique voice, not of the ego, as the pop culture often portrays it, but of the sense of living; of a single life, speaking to others at the most fundamental, and trusting (because that is what civilization is) the audience to engage — sharing a brief portal of time.

At 62, Hitchens died far too young. His curmudgeonly, or “contrarian”, as he would have it, angle on the politics of our time, was a blessed commodity in a consensus society like America. Toward the end he rejected the contrarian label, wanting to be thought more substantial than that. But well-articulated contrarian notions are invaluable to a society in correcting course; one of the great strengths of freedom is that allowance for difference.

The current sheep on the left and right, which is what they are, conformists all, repeating slogans without nuance, trivializing and attacking ad hominem, seem nearly a different species from Hitchens, who was polite, but never seemed to ingratiate or seek the kindness of friends. He believed in reason, an odd preference in the political realm, but quite effective in debate.

Remarkably, Hitchens had a surprising array of friends – differing in any and all ways from his own ways of thinking. This most likely came about because of his mother, who, arguing with his father, a father who disdained both working class and upper class, said that, if there was to be an upper class, then Christopher should be part of it. Hitchens managed conviviality to those with whom he disagreed.

He gave a wonderful voice to those who agreed with him. He said things well, with intelligence, crafted almost as though written. It is no surprise he could write fast and on a moment’s notice. Writing for Hitchens must have been like taking dictation. It was an admirable facility which he possessed.

I’m sad to hear of his passing.

Some snippets from around the web:

Michael Totten:

He was the greatest writer of our time who could talk off the top of his head better than most of his colleagues can write.

Ron Radosh, an admirer:

Christopher was a bundle of contradictions, a “contrarian” for life as he put it himself, a man who was charming, witty, a wonderful guest and raconteur, and a man who simply could not put up with hypocrisy and tyranny. I miss him greatly, and like so many others who knew him only from his writing, mourn his loss. R.I.P. And if you meet St. Peter and he asks you why you were not a believer, like the late Sidney Hook, you can tell him: “You didn’t give me enough evidence.”

David Frum about Hitchens’ wit:

He especially liked gallows humor. When the nurses asked him, in that insinuatingly cheerful way they have, how he was feeling that day, he’d answer, “I seem to have a little touch of cancer.” If he was late to emerge from his living room to see you because of the exhaustion and nausea of chemotherapy, he’d excuse himself with, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was brushing my hair”–of which of course there were only a few wisps left.

Perhaps most resonantly, remembered by his brother , Peter Hitchens (a traditionalist/conservative Brit most distinct from Hitchens’ fiercely independent mind):

We got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens. At such times one tends to remember childhood more clearly than at others, though I have always had a remarkably clear memory of much of mine. I am still baffled by how far we both came, in our different ways, from the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools, of battered and declining naval seaports, not specially cultured, not book-lined or literary or showy but plain, dutiful and unassuming, we took the courses we did.

Articles at the Atlantic

We will miss you Chris, even though we didn’t know you; you raised the level of the debate and reminded us, in more than a few ways, of what it means to be civilized.

Charlie Rose’s wonderful lunges at understanding Shakespeare and Hamlet was so provocative it had me noting things to myself:

I had often thought of Hamlet as a representation of a stepson’s possibly delusional, murderous rage – but the rage of a child, not an adult.

Hamlet is about being human because it confronts the dilemma of being human; our deep emotions and sense of right, our sense of unfairness and frustration at the conventions of society; Hamlet is about emotion choking action rather than generating it.

Hamlet can be thought an argument against revenge: about the futility of revenge, as the target seldom suffers as much as the enraged.

Although there was much tortured effort at understanding why Shakespeare persists with an almost biblical weight, his work, like the Bible itself, would only persist if the language and insight were of equal density.

The performances that were intercut revealed clearly that there is no barrier between the brilliance of the writing and the audience — the route of true art; this despite the compactness and arcane nature of the language; it still connects.

What was woefully left out – the English stain of anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice, a clear marker that Shakespeare too was deeply flawed.

The best commentators were Greenblatt and Harold Bloom. Those who deal with the mechanics of the theater can never get it right, and don’t have the insight.

Of the performances:
Captain Picard and Richard Burton seemed Jon Lovitz Great Thespians – drawing attention to acting rather than character.

Olivier and Branagh clearly the best, most brilliant of actors. Astonishing in the revelatory power of their performances.

Rose’s brilliant question: Is Hamlet a sympathetic character?

Shakespeare evokes a truth academic scrutiny alone cannot parse; the meaningless question, asked of his plays, of life, and by Charlie Rose: What does it mean? It means, Shakespeare wisely answers, that there are no pat answers; that the human estate is ambiguous and can be noble.

Someone at metafilter was looking for the long loping rhythms of the 19th century in contemporary writing. There was accord that there is no one who writes like that anymore. Probably true.

One commenter noted an essay by William James, to show the style at its masterly peak.

But the subject of the essay is what most interested me: that of bling, reputation, and the evidence of one’s own eyes. This is an issue that keeps recurring to me as I look at the “expert” classes and their pronunciamentos as dribbled by the media. If you haven’t figured out that the process of gaining a reputation is filled with holes by the time you are nineteen you might never. But some people are predisposed to confusing the uniform with the wearer, the degree with the intelligence, the rhetoric for the character.

This essay by James, besides its beautiful winding prose and brilliant intelligence, makes a point about such badge seekers and their lapdogs. Things have not changed much from the 1903 essay to contemporary times. Maybe it is just that Americans tend to seek consensus, as Tocqueville noted, so degrees are a quick and easy way to rate, without thinking, or testing your own judgment.

An overqualified candidate rejected by a college solely for lack of a Ph.D. Or rather, first accepted, and then rejected when the horror of his three letter nakedness was revealed.

William James and colleagues wrote to the college which rejected the candidate:

… informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his merits, that he was of ultra-Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest men with whom we had ever had to deal.

But the truth was stated more coarsely by the other institution:

To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that the three magical letters were the thing seriously required. The College had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor’s title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. We wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one’s ability to teach literature; we sent separate letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate’s powers, for indeed they were great…

The scholars at Harvard prevailed and the candidate was accepted.

James notes:

America is thus a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease. Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?

The pop culture is really the commercial culture. It is business by other means. But because talented and clever people get involved you periodically get really good results — work that surpasses the defaults and becomes something special.

That is true of Gin Wigmore. Wigmore is from New Zealand but lives in Australia, which, from what I can tell, is California without the pretensions. You tend to form mental maps of places to which you’ve never been.

So how did we hear of Gin Wigmore? Searching for who sang the song in the Lowe’s commercial. The TV version of that commercial, with the dancers morphing into old age, is beautifully directed and choreographed and edited. And then they choose a great song, beautifully rendered.

Wigmore’s father died of cancer when she was sixteen and she wrote the song Hallelujah to tell her family she had finally accepted the loss of her beloved dad.

Here are Gin Wigmore’s heartfelt lyrics for Hallelujah:

Take your last step towards heaven and its glow
Take your last breath of sunlight, don’t let it go
Take your last look to remember, so that you know

I wont let you fade from no mind
I wont let you fade from no minds
I wont let you fade from no minds

Hallelujah for these eyes to see your painted life
Hallelujah for the touch of skin to skin with mine
Hallelujah for this mind that keeps our souls combined
Hallelujah for this life that let me be your child

Have your mind, have your strength to stay alive
Keep your eyes open with mine

You followed the road for the angels and you left me behind
A face without words can last a lifetime but it’s never the same
So, don’t say goodbyes that last forever just for a while
Because I’ll be by to see you some day soon

Hallelujah for these eyes to see your painted life
Hallelujah for the touch now of skin to skin with mine
Hallelujah for this mind that keeps our souls combined
Hallelujah for this life that let me be your child

Hallelujah, to be a part of your life
To see inside of all your smiles
You’re a traffic light of fire
You’re a man who I believe will never die

© Lyrics And Music Composed By Gin Wigmore

PBS broadcast a talk David Brooks gave at the Miller Center last night. It was not a recent broadcast – Brooks was speaking about our social selves and by indirection promoting his book, The Social Animal, as part of the project. The book had been published back in March. I don’t mean it was a cynical presentation, but it shows how discussion is framed in contemporary society.

I’d never watched Brooks in an extended presentation so it was interesting to see more of his character, beyond his gnomic assessments of politics. The generosity of his presentation struck me. Brooks wasn’t, as is the default, laboriously making a few points — the ideas spilled out of him — he wanted to give the audience an understanding about the ideas which excited him; he showed admirable wit and a warm, if a sometimes uncomfortably ingratiating side. This ingratiating side of Brooks is always in evidence, actually. Since he is a man of opinions, the self-deprecating demeanor can border on passive aggressive understatement.

The ideas he discussed circled the preeminence of intuition, emotion and what Hume called sentiment. Brooks quoted many studies as evidence of the primacy of our intuitive selves. All that we are grows out of that core of our intuitive life.

This is not a new premise, but in the current religio-science environment, that is, where science is seen as a religion, where people equate science and Truth, it had a cathartic quality. Science describes our best understanding about physical reality at the moment. It presents a small subset of human consciousness, or better, of being human. It provides no moral context nor meaningful insight about how to live a life. It simply helps set the stage for serious thinking. It does scare off the completely wacky, but too often welcomes the over wrought estimate it receives in a world where ideology vitiates the air. Unfortunately, science itself is subject to the same ideological bias (plate tectonics, “big bang” theory), and is not really meant to be the last word at any rate.

I’ve always thought we are principally emotional beings. Brooks’ tactic, of using reason to convince the audience that emotion is preeminent, and feeling the need to quote scientific studies to prove his point, can be seen to contradict the argument itself. The truth is that many studies about the more complex aspects of human nature are incredibly shallow and misleading. Sometimes they are cynically tendentious. The credulity Brooks ascribes to these studies speaks to media shallowness — the pool in which Brooks swims.

Brooks is a very decent individual, who values demeanor a bit too much, and puts way too much store in status markers. If you really want to understand the human enterprise read Shakespeare.

NYT book editor Tanenhaus has a brief, interesting conversation with the impressive Harold Bloom. Bloom’s stated idea in the interview is that writers who came after the classics were in a state of internal disarray (“Anxiety of Influence”), feeling in essence that everything had been said.

So Bloom places Whitman between Emerson and the King James Bible. This is a critics’s trope, where influence explains or places artists. It is a false approach I feel, because the process of influence is, as Matisse said, a kind of wrestling. Taking out of what you admire something you need for yourself; wrestling, again and again, until self emerges. But no doubt much more than two encounters were required for Whitman to become the great poet he was, and much circumspection was necessary for the poet’s voice to coalesce.

This formulation, that influence is struggle rather than adjusting to predecessors, does agree with Bloom’s formulation in one way: artists like Joyce or Kafka, as Bloom says, are part of an ongoing tradition and not “modernists”. Anymore than the human spirit is more modern now than it was 400 years ago. Art can’t be created in awe of anything or anyone other than life and experience.

Bloom’s impressive memory is in evidence at the beginning of the interview as he recites a magical Crane poem — Bloom called it incantatory. He felt that committing great works to memory meant a lot in his life. Helen Vendler, the great critic of poetry as well felt that her early memorization was crucial to her love of poetry. This is in contrast to the idea that memorization is a mind numbing and useless activity. But Vendler and Bloom are robust corrections to that idea.

Bloom also mentions his discomfort with the identity politics cohort trying to impose on great literature; he justly feels that the outward descriptions of creators have nothing to do with what they have mined in their work. It is actually a racist and prissy, reductive pronouncement — saying an artist is their sexual orientation, skin color or gender. Schools of critical thinking have become schools of indoctrination.

Tanenhaus was a student of Bloom’s at Yale. His review of his teacher’s work is fairly convoluted — it never really clarified for me. Bloom, in the quotations provided, is himself at times obscure. Tanenhaus does however have embedded in the noise a good number of subtle insights.

Joyce’s novella The Dead was made into a movie in 1987 by John Huston, then in his 80s. This was a project of love, with his daughter Anjelica in the lead role. We just saw it in a Netflix rental. The movie begins with a depiction of the long associations of human society and quirks of personality as manifested at a party. You feel the weight of time on these people living in Ireland in 1904. Their characters are all delimited and defined in a way that is a marvel. Like My Dinner With Andre, Huston has taken a minimalist setting and made it something so much more complex. Anjelica Huston is a great actress. Her silent presence in so many scenes gave the movie a tremendous emotional richness.

Underlying it all is the genius of Joyce. His language en-flowers as the story evolves into a meditation on living and dying. At first this human society is mundane, slightly boring, quietly funny. Then on the carriage ride home The Dead opens up into a dark space that makes you shudder, like traveling into a boundless forest. You feel the emotional separation of husband and wife.

When Anjelica Huston tells her husband — a “sensible man” she sneers — of the long lost love of her youth; of her guilt at this young boy’s death, she overflows with grief and finally loses herself hugging, clutching at her husband. But she immediately pushes her husband away — she will not accept even his consolation. Her husband muses over the evening party and falls into a reverie about his life, his beloved wife, and the lives of his friends and family, and then into a reverie about all our lives. It is like a melting into something larger and larger, as Frost defined poetry.

Clearly no one could re-write Joyce in the concluding scene. It has to be repeated and heard in Joyce’s words and so the filmmaker resorts to the slightly awkward technique of voice-over to give full throat to Joyce. Joyce mingles prose and poetry in a great yielding resonance of language and feeling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

After Dance Dance Dance, a surreal mystery by Haruki Murakami, we just finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. This is a title in debt to Raymond Carver, whom Murakami had translated and for which he received permission from Carver’s estate.

The book is a hybrid of a memoir and running journal. As usual, the fluid and wonderful easy voice — a hard won achievement for a writer — makes a big difference. Murakami recounts his many failures as a runner and some successes. The book really spoke to me because I pretty much do the same thing and for the same reasons. I am not interested in the long distance or competitive aspects of running as is HM, but Murakami’s — and my own motivations — are geared towards health and keeping the “instrument”, your body, in shape so it does not become a hindrance in your work.

Murakami is an unusual man. He is a very hard worker, very dedicated. He has the heart of a marathoner in all senses. He started writing when he was in his early thirties and was a success pretty quickly. He wrote his first book while running a jazz club. He is a translator. He admires an eclectic crew: Fitzgerald, Ken Follett, Raymond Carver. His preferences for music are for older rock and easy jazz. He is not burdened by what might be cool, or in, but what he likes. He is free of the snobbiness of pop culture — a contradictory aspect of contemporary life. Murakami is an instance of a true cross cultural sensibility. His narrative voice is American / Russian novelist, but as a person he is neither. He is an artist.

The contradictions in the present book were irksome. He presents as an extremely self-critical and self-deprecating individual. He seldom expresses anger towards others but is often furious towards himself and almost excited to tell you about his goofs. But he also has an ego the size of the great outdoors. He often brags although it is folded into an aw-shucks voice. There are enormous and unresolved conflicts in his self-descriptions: he says he is not a very likable person, but says later that friends travel hundreds of miles to watch him compete in marathons. He says he is not interested in competition, ostensibly all the training is for self-improvement, but there are leaks springing everywhere: he is deeply competitive. He has a retrograde attitude towards exercise: he thinks pain is good and you have to run through it. This does not sound like a health regimen, but a Spartan affectation — a very jock thing, but of another time really.

Is Murakami disingenuous in his modesty? Is he really as confident and uncaring about public response as he claims? Does he really feel he is an unattractive and unlikable person? There is a simple answer: Murakami is a contradictory human being, simply being honest, and an engaging writer.

Like many who came to Arts and Letters Daily I only knew Denis Dutton through his site. Arts and Letters Daily was an oasis. ALDaily spoke of intelligence and wit and seriousness. A paradigm for what the internet could be. It was a happy day when he honored me with a link to this weblog.

Styled on an old style Broadsheet posted in the town square the site’s restraint has resonance.

Some of the many links to Denis’ passing as mentioned at his site.
The New Yorker
Reason
Edge

Dutton’s spirit will live on at his site which his colleagues promise to carry on.

Denis’ site motto: veritas odit moras=Truth hates delay

Galway Kinnell about Rilke:

Rilke writes only what is for him a matter of life and death. There’s nothing trivial, no bright chatter, no clever commentary. He writes at the limit of his powers. There are moments when he seems to write beyond the limit. His poetry gropes out into the inexpressible, like the late music of Beethoven.

That striving for more is a mark of all art. Rilke’s approach, as described by Kinnell, might sound a ponderous load to contemporary tastes, where distanced irony and referential cleverness hold sway. Earnestness doesn’t earn points but rather scorn. But who cares? Contemporary tastes change. Kinnell is speaking with the long horizons of art before him.

The nuance in Kinnell’s brief description, the subtle, complex mapping of a sensibility which he suggests, says much good about Kinnell as well.