Readingthinkinglistening 10/18/23

The lightgiving word who comes from mind

Old German* guys and Hermes Trismegistus try to explain the world+Hunger

I’m afraid this was another relatively sedate week for reading, one mostly spent returning to books I’ve already discussed here in support of an essay on the officer class and its place in the world. with one of the only real departures being that I’m partway through Leo Strauss’ (in some sense) epochal Natural Right and History. I have an odd relationship with Strauss because I’m not that convinced by what he (seems to have) thought: I don’t think Aristotle grasped the Highest Good or that some people are just innately better than other people, but his approach, his way of seeing himself and his reader as engaged in a continuum of history and thought that never ends, that never changes such that you can’t cite Aristotle or Plato in the same breath as William James or a never-named Heidegger, is brilliant and I think something that should be recovered.¹ I’ve written somewhere that I think some sort of esoteric perennialism will be the next big thing-based more on vibes than anything else-and while I don’t think Strauss quite has the juice² to provide what hungry intellectuals are looking for, who knows?

I also read Carl Jung’s 100-page introductory section to his posthumous 1964 sort-of work, Man and His Symbols. It makes for a decent introduction into Jung’s theories and the worldview of analytic psychoanalysis as a whole. Jung I have always thought, has a slight edge on Freud (and probably Lacan, if I understand the little of him I’ve read, which is a big “if”) in that he better understood what he was doing, that with psychoanalysis a new metaphysics was being sprung upon the world. His mythic-symbolic view of the human seems more capacious than Freud’s image of the bourgeois family as the summa of psychic life, even if he has his moments of datedness or a slightly crankish universalism.³ Jung can sometimes be a bit of a kook, but then Freud can sometimes be a bit of a crude positivist, and there’s an argument to be made that human cognition itself is a fundamentally kooky process.

In the spirit of slightly offbeat perennialism, I reread Corpus Hermeticum I, otherwise known as the Poimandres in preparation to revisit the Corpus as a whole. The Hermetica are an enigmatic body of Greco-Egyptian texts mostly dating from late antiquity, but thought for most of the next millennia to be much older-the oldest ancient wisdom in fact, predating Plato and Moses.⁴ As such they occupy a central place in the western esoteric and to a lesser extent occult traditions, despite the basis of that claim being widely acknowledged as a fiction since the 1600s! Fun stuff. The Poimandres is particularly notable and interesting, a syncretic Platonic-Hermetic origin myth of a sort that seems to descend from the Timaeus and the Book of Genesis in equal parts, bolstered by hints of Stoicism and ancient Egyptian religion. The mind of the universe(?) instructs the speaker on the creation of the cosmos, how the primordial man descended into matter not in punishment or in sin, but out of love.

When the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the unreasoning form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced him, for they were lovers.”

[15] “Because of this, unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold-in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has authority over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he is subject to fate; thus although man is above the cosmic framework, he became a slave within it. He is androgyne because he comes from an androgyne father, and he never sleeps because he comes from one who is sleepless. <Yet love and sleep are his>masters.

I also began, so late into writing this newsletter that it hardly even feels worth discussing, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. I’m liking it so far!

Listening:

I mentioned last week that for some reason I tend to listen to a lot of hip hop in autumn, and this week was no exception, the most notable instance of that was probably 2Pac Shakur’s 1991 debut album 2pacalypse Now. It’s an engaging listen, definitely a very 1991-sounding album in terms of production, lyrically outstanding, Pac at this point was more contemplative and less angry than contemporary Ice Cube or the various N.WA. spinoffs, political to be sure, but less overtly so than Public Enemy. Overall if this reminds me of anyone else from the period (at least on the west coast) it’d probably be Ice T’s material from roughly the same era, although slightly less streetwise and a lot angrier.

A longtime fascination of mine (in an extremely oblique way the reason why I even write this substack) is the Ralph Ellison-Albert Murray-Stanley Crouch-Wynton Marsalis lineage of black liberal (in its later stages arguably neoconservative) intellectual criticism. One of the sticking points for this particular school is hip hip, of which they are largely dismissive in the extreme.⁵ There are several possible explanations for this, ranging from the standard conservative classism and respectability politics one often ascribes to a more substantive critique involving the blues aesthetic and transcendence and the like. In part there’s just the matter of a certain inheritance descending from the radicalism of the 60s to the Emcees of the 80’s and 90s-an inheritance perfectly embodied perfectly by a figure like 2pac, who in his very person-his mother was famously a Panther-joins Black Power to gangsta rap. It’s a funny position because I certainly don’t agree with the critique-I saw someone argue that Crouch’s jeremiads at hip hop didn't hit because he clearly never really listened to any of the music to critique it, but I’m also not completely able to just dismiss some of the questions raised, as much as I do love hip hop. Nor for that matter, am I completely sure what I as a northeastern WASP-even one as shabby as I am-should make of the way the streets pulled Shakur under and drowned him in his prime-if I should make anything of it!

And never the twain shall meet: a defense of being a snob and the necessity of cracking up

One of my “favorite” (in a very loose sense) films is Kevin Smith’s 1995 flop-comedy-turned-cult-classic Mallrats, a picture probably best described as “dorm room John Hughes” which charts the failure and redemption of two twenty-something manchildren’s respective relationships over the course of a day’s visit to their local New Jersey mall.⁶ It’s no Citizen Kane, but it’s a fun flick that reminds me a bit of my own college experiences (somehow I was always the least nerdy person in any of my given friend groups, so T.S.’s situation of standing on in semi-comprehension as Brodie rants about Star Wars or Kryptonite condoms is a familiar one for me) and mine was probably the last generation in which the mall served any social function whatsoever.

There was a mode that was very much en vogue in academia (or at least the unemployed castoffs of academia whom one encountered online in that time after the collapse of the job market but before it became an accepted social reality that we’d have a class of gutter intellectuals doing freelance work) when I was younger, stuff that would be like “a Lacanian analysis of subjective desire and the phallus in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats” that kind of thing. Ten or so years ago I used to love that species of writing, found it fascinating and quite amusing in a slightly nihilistic way to be doing this kind of high-powered critique of stupid bullshit. These days I mostly just find it tiresome. There is perhaps after all something like Philip Rieff’s idea of a deathwork, not in the sense that he intended, but in the sense of wasting intellect on bullshit, on not acknowledging that there are higher things to aspire to than twenty-five hours of video content about a sitcom for teenaged girls or hermetic-marxist analysis of kanji films.⁷

I think this is partly because as I’ve aged my tastes have changed, evolving from a pretty unabashed snobbery to a postmodern poptimism that I found invigorating for a while, but never could sustain in the long run, to something I’d tentatively describe as “Metamodern Perennialism” …which is still snobby, but in a more capacious and ironic (in the mature rather than puerile sense) way . I’ve become every step of a common (and distressingly, one suspects probably white-supremacist in origin) meme one sees so often now:

I’m aware of the irony that I’ve written in the past in defense of exactly the opposite principle, but I would perhaps cite this as an example of my metamodernism, if I’ve understood the term correctly. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about something like what I mean in his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up” which also lent its title and some ideas to my favorite Fleet Foxes album.

the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

I have only briefly experienced the delusion that mine is an intelligence of the first-rate, but it seems to me that something like that exercise is a prerequisite for existing as a critical intellect in the 21st century. Everything is at once absolutely meaningless, a “heap of broken images” signifying nothing beyond what is placed upon them by the self-perceiving eye and a unity ordained by God Himself. Truth is an impossibility perpetually glimpsed just beyond the horizon of our abilities and something to be urgently sought. This is what I understand metamodernism to mean. Yes, there is a hierarchy of art, but at the same time it’s all stupid bullshit, and those two thoughts exist in tension, each equally true in its way.

1. Which is itself ironic because as someone who trained as a historian and for a decent chunk of time assumed I’d pursue a career in that field, I don’t think Straussians are generally very good as historians. They tend to flatten the diversity of human thought and lifestyle over time-Strauss’s signature contempt for historicism and his esoteric hermeneutics makes for a good philosophical framework but is mostly dead to the ways that culture and civilizations do change with the ages.

2. He’s probably a bit too focused on political philosophy and a very particular vision of Classical Antiquity and the middle ages that seems to have been common to educated men of the first half of the twentieth century. Strauss isn’t pious or as romantic, but his view of the premodern world still strikes me as not entirely dissimilar to that of someone like C.S. Lewis. I suspect we’re more likely to romanticize Late Antiquity or the Early Moderns these days.

3. This is the problem with most perennialism at the end of the day. It’s hard to avoid a slight crankishness with that sort of thing, one either needs a kind of “truth is a relative term” winking refusal to believe that 2+2=4 or to be completely credulous to all sorts of wild claims.

4. This is doubly interesting because much of the Corpus Hermeticum bears a marked influence from what is retrospectively called Middle Platonism, which… well it’s in the name!

5. It’s really neither here nor there to this discussion, but I know it will interest at least some of my readers that a pre-fame Ta-Nehisi Coates once compared Stanley Crouch to Suge Knight in the pages of the Village Voice. The occasion was Crouch’s at the time celebrated but now mostly forgotten punching of the critic Dale Peck for giving one of his novels a less-than approving review in the New Republic.

Stanley Crouch is a gangsta rapper. Throughout his career, Crouch has moved through black nationalism, bohemia, and places we haven’t yet developed the vocab to name. But if there’s one thing we’ve gleaned from Crouch’s recent assault on novelist and critic Dale Peck, it is this—we have found Crouch’s muse, and his name is Suge Knight.

6. It wouldn’t make my top 10, an iteration of which I’ll probably share at some point, but it has a certain charisma nonetheless.

7. In that spirit I’m quietly announcing that at some point in the next two months I’ll probably stop uploading essays for a while to really get down to business finishing the novel that’s been limping along for the last year or so now. The weekly newsletter will of course continue, and I have a raft of essays to put out over the next little while, but I thought I’d offer an early warning.