Readingthinkinglistening 11/01/2023
The word is my fourth dimension
This week I finished Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood after a very long interval: I found it a little longer than I would’ve liked but nonetheless a decent portrait of a young man’s coming of age and various failed relationships, troubles etc. It is, as the conventional wisdom goes very different from his other work. The plot and style is a little “slightly more adult John Green” at times, but there’s a place for that sort of thing in the world, and I’m glad I read it. I also read Clarice Lispector’s 1973 novela Água Viva, a dearly loved and respected friend’s favorite book, and I believe (I’m less up than I should be on my Clarice lore considering she wrote my favorite book ) the first of her strange metafictional late works. Essentially an extended monologue by an uncertain figure on the nature of time, experience and life itself, it’s quite an experience (something that can be said of almost all her books) and I recommend it highly. I’m still reading Never Let Me Go- it was supposed to be finished this week, but then Clarice intervened as she often does, and I wound up embarrassingly writing an essay inspired by my general impressions of currents related to Ishiguro without actually finishing the book that started it all! I like what I’ve read of it very much.
I again read several selections from Jacques Lcan’s Écrits, specifically the one about the mirror stage and another (the title of which I’ve managed to completely forget) in a state of semi comprehension. I’ve also been thumbing through a battered 1960s paperback of Jung’s Psychological Reflections, an anthology of his thought. I’ve been thinking about the question I posed to you last week about all this recent psychoanalytical reading, this partaking of differing schools and thinkers (whom I’ve semi-jokingly been referring to as nomothetes)
Why am I doing this? I’m really not sure-some sort of backwash from reading too much Philip Rieff? Intuition that some of this stuff is relevant again? Idle curiosity? Who knows.
I think as best as I can explain it, psychoanalysis picks up the juice that you find in ancient philosophy and abrahamic theology, that tension between the organizing structure of a theorist and the possibly unknowable depths of mind that I find so engaging. It even inherits some of the critiques lodged at theological systems by a particular sort of skeptical thinker-a certain inherent authoritarianism and a tendency to disqualify any objection to its doctrines as pathology rather than evil spirits or inherent sin. As I was for a long time with religion itself in my teens and early twenties, I’m psychoanalytically agnostic!
Speaking of theology, I read Charles Williams brief 1943 essay The Cross, a meditation on the crucifixion (part of a larger symposium of English Christian thinkers) in which he argues in essence that the death of the incarnated God Jesus upon the cross at Golgotha was necessary to justify the continuation of His creation after the fall.
He had put Himself then to His own law, in every sense. Man (perhaps ignorantly, but none the less truly for that) executed justice upon Him. This was the world He maintained in creation? This was the world He maintained in creation. This was the best law, the clearest justice man could find, and He did well to accept it. If they had known it was He, they could have done no less and no better. They crucified Him; let it be said, they did well. But then let it be said also, that the Sublimity itself had done well: adorable He might be by awful definition of His Nature , but at least He had shown Himself honourable in His choice. He accepted Job’s challenge of long ago, talked with His enemy in the gate, and outside the gate suffered (as the men He made so often do) from both His friends and His enemies. Which of us has not known and has not been a Judas? He had no where to lay His head? And we? “Behold my mother and my brethren.”
This then has seemed to me now for long perhaps the most flagrant significance of the Cross; it does enable us to use the word 'Justice" without shame—which otherwise we could not. God therefore becomes tolerable as well as credible. Our Justice condemned the innocent, but the innocent it condemned was one who was fundamentally responsible for the existence of all injustice— its existence in the mere, but necessary, sense of time, which His will created and prolonged.
I’ve always found this a harrowing essay, a grim and yet authentic vision of what it might mean for God to have become human within the (western) Christian framework (the eastern church has a different reading of some of these things) I have no idea how it holds up as good orthodox theology in a broad sense, but it’s interesting!
Listening: Frank Zappa, Insane Clown Posse
This weekend I spun Frank Zappa’s 1972 album Waka/Jawaka. My Zappa fandom has waned a little over the years-while I continue to find his acidic blend of high and low-art snobbery delightful, as I age I increasingly think the puerility and cynicism of the later work enervates rather than inspires the listener to imagine better-but the first decade or so of his career is hard to go wrong with, amongst the best and earliest American postmodern popular music, and this is particularly true for the fusion records.1 Waka/Jawaka features two really standout extended jazz pieces and two fairly average but fun Zappa rock tracks. Those two-both in the middle at the beginning of what was side 2 of the original LP-are a bit forgettable, but “Big Swifty” and the title track are must-listens for fans of seventies fusion.
For my halloween quasi ironic2 listening pleasure I put on the Insane Clown Posse’s 1994 sophomore album Ringmaster, a record strangely sonically akin to a lot of the “patrician” indie rap that I enjoy and have mentioned.3 There’s a dustiness to the beats that reminds me of contemporary Hieroglyphics records (have I talked about Del yet?) and some of what was coming out of NYC at the time, while the album repeatedly samples the Anglo-French Canterbury jazz-prog band Gong, whom ICP are somewhat bewilderingly huge fans of. The rhymes are pretty weak as they are on all ICP’s albums, but as the musical equivalent of bad movie night for Halloween it gets the job done.
Once more the sound of crying: what measure of rage, sorrow, and quietism?
I had a brief exchange with
in the comments of last week’s newsletter about the authorial sensibility of Kazuo Ishiguro, which I've historically struggled with somewhat.4 He’s a great writer, probably amongst our best, the most deserving literary Nobel of the last while, but there’s just always been something about him that puts me off a bit. It’s not a lack of grit exactly, but something else, something harder to define with a pithy one-word descriptor, but which I’ve described elsewhere as “that inner fire, that rage or sadness at the pain of the world that’s probably necessary to consistently produce great art.” It was on that last point about necessity which we disagreed somewhat, and I’ve been thinking for the last week about what exactly I mean by it. Because I do believe that the best art should have some kind of rage or sadness at the human condition, at the world and the limitations of our existences. This shouldn’t be didactic or overly instrumental, but it should be present nonetheless. I can’t promise that I’ve succeeded in explaining what I mean, and perhaps this one got away from me somewhat in writing, but what follows is an attempt.
We are informed by all the great western traditions that there was a fall.5 Whether we transgressed the order of the LORD in the garden or turned inward and fell away from Him, whether we were struck down by darkness and incorporated into the newborn world by the Father of Greatness, there was another state, a better state from which we have descended or been altered into our present condition. It did not happen in time, but it did happen. This may well be the best possible world, it may well be we who are corrupt, whose natures direct us away from appreciating the gift we are given, but it is nonetheless a world suffused with pain and sorrow. We sin against one another in that we cause others to suffer, and there is no possible world in which we will not do so. I am speaking of nothing so grand as war or rape or the mass exploitation of capital or labor, but rather of the minute inhumanities which we inflict on each-even on those we love-so thoughtlessly in our everyday lives. This is what I mean by original sin.6
But then again life, as we know it, is obscene; or, to be accurate, it has in it a strong element of obscenity. Again and again we become aware of a sense of outrage in our physical natures. Sometimes this is aroused by the events of which we read in the papers, but as often by the events which happen to us. The Family, for example, is a sacred and noble thing, but the things that happen in the Family are the result of blood antagonistic to itself. "Love,” it is said, "is very near to hate.” Without discussing the general truth of that, it may be allowed that where it is so, the hate is often of a particularly virulent and vehement kind.7
I am not insensitive to the argument against this sort of thing. I loathe the vulgarized contemporary left version of Adorno-Fisher where the moral life (or whatever simulacra thereof is available under capitalism) consists of a kind of perpetual shrieking venomous scorn at the possibility of happiness or beauty, neither of which is of course available in the slightest in our conditions of industrialized misery. Over the years I’ve come to associate this mode with a kind of alcohol-and-other-substances-induced pity for the self projected outward onto the world, again at times understandable, but also primarily a negative mental state and not a productive worldview.
On the other hand, the secular novel as the book of inner truth, as bottled consciousness is a place where we may set aside our knowledge that this rage is so rarely productive, that the fundamental sorrows of life will never be mended and there is no paradise of-this-world available to us and acknowledge that disgust with the state of things is as much a part of our condition as the state of things itself. On the page we may at least imagine that we have that space which Thomas Mann speaking in the voice of Jacob said that the LORD should have left to us when He made the human:
He would have done better to leave men a refuge before the overwhelming, that men might grumble a little against the unacceptable and think his thoughts about the justice of things.
Even in Henry James, that most English of American writers, one of F.R. Leavis’s three great anglophone writers, the moralist who wrote a novel (The Princess Casamassima) which might fairly be described as an anti-gnostic chronicle of a young revolutionary’s awakening to the finer things in life and an endorsement of a certain quietism, one finds a deep sorrow, a vivid sense of life as a beautiful tragedy.
It is this concept of beautiful tragedy exactly that I was thinking of the other week, describing what I take to be the essential task of the critical intellect in this century. We have come too far and done too much to return to ignorance. The skeletons-and let’s not kid ourselves, everyone’s skeletons-are out of the closets, and they will not go back in easily. There is no return to where we were before that is in any way desirable, and so we are left with the task of holding two opposing thoughts at once. To perceive the beauty and decay inherent to all things at the same time without allowing one to annul the other is the urgent task of the moral aesthete, a task that we’ve neglected for far too long. It is of course possible that mine is merely a diseased perspective bound up in late antique visions, vomiting eschatology and morality onto a roiling world of chaos that can only be endured, or a sinful reformationist or gnostic, but I think otherwise.8
I'm a heretic. No, that's not true. Or am I? But something exists.9
The second half of Zappa’s discography is considerably more uneven but still worth your time. I particularly recommend Sleep Dirt, his various classical albums (particularly The Yellow Shark, and the synclavier albums Jazz From Hell and Civilization Phaze III
I don’t really believe in this sort of irony anymore, and neither should you.
You could write a thesis on the rise and fall and rise again of the Insane Clown Posse and their niche-their prominence both illustrates the racism of 90s white audiences & contrasts with the band’s avowed & longtime (they were arguably “woke” in the 90s!) antiracism- while their status for much of the last 20 years as synecdoche for “bad music” amongst persons with good taste is as much about classism-speaking from experience with jugglos I’ve known their audience is largely the white underclass-as the quality of their output. They’re not quite in the Limp Bizkit zone of “ironically overrated now because underrated historically” but they're close enough.
By authorial sensibility I mean something altogether distinct from the person of the author, something like the demiurgic figure produced in reverse via the reading of the text. Some artists are fairly straightforwardly their sensibilities, but many others less so!
Or they had a fall retrofitted onto them by some enterprising thinker at a later date, as with the Abrahamic appropriation of Aristotle and the Hermetic texts
It took all my efforts not to word this as “that’s my concept of sin”
Charles Williams, The Cross
A quietist analyst might perhaps say that we all just have an issue with emotional regulation, which is one excellent reason to keep some Foucault lying around. If nothing else, it’s an antidote to that kind of thing.
Clarice Lispector, Água Viva