Pretzel Logic

 

The end of the 19th century

On the end of the revolutionary syntheses: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Solovyov (and by extension Dostoevsky), and, improbably later, Girard.

The Island

What is guilt? Who is guilty? Is redemption possible? What is sanity? Do persons have a telos, a destiny, both or neither? Ostrov (The Island) asks and attempts to answer all these questions and more.

A film that improbably remains one of the best of this century: "reads" like a 19th century Russian novel; the bleakly stunning visual setting is worth the time to watch alone.

Unlike Dostoevsky, the film is saturated with a literalism that is more or less typical of Eastern mysticism (in Karamazov, the corpse of Zosima begins to stink: it could not have been otherwise in his novel). Whether this is a virtue or a flaw or something else for Ostrov, I suspect depends strongly on the viewer. My own take is "something else".

Sacred Forests

An acquaintance sent this article on the small forest preserves in Ethiopia. The video is less than 10 minutes and well worth watching. The pictures in many ways tell thousands of words. Interesting to me: many of the visuals remind me of parts of north and central California where the trees and shrubs were removed to make way for cattle grazing - the visual effects I think are best captured by the late great radical novelist Edward Abbey's description of a "cow-burnt west". Deforestation in Ethiopia was also driven by agriculture to a large extent as well.

Now these forests are occupied by a handful of eremites. Their lived experience in these patches of natural oasis lends toward a wisdom that we seem to have lost in our industrialized and bustling commercial existence: "“In this world nothing exists alone,” he said. “It’s interconnected. A beautiful tree cannot exist by itself. It needs other creatures. We live in this world by giving and taking. We give CO₂ for trees, and they give us oxygen. If we prefer only the creatures we like and destroy others, we lose everything. Bear in mind that the thing you like is connected with so many other things. You should respect that co-existence.” As Alemayehu explained, biodiversity gives rise to a forest’s emergent properties. “If you go into a forest and say, ‘I have ten species, that’s all,’ you’re wrong. You have ten species plus their interactions. The interactions you don’t see: it’s a mystery. This is more than just summing up components, it’s beyond that. These emergent properties of a forest, all the flowering fruits—it’s so complicated and sophisticated. These interactions you cannot explain, really. You don’t see it.”"

In my mind I see these eremites like Zosima in the Brothers Karamzov: "Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything. Seek that rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Don’t be ashamed of that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God and a great one; it is not given to many but only to the elect." Of course I may be romanticizing these good people's experience in these forest patches - I've never been there and never met any of the eremites that do.

And yet, as the author notes: "The trees’ fate is bound to ours, and our fate to theirs. And trees are nothing if not tenacious." For these Ethiopians, at least, a tree is tied inextricably to their salvation. But isn't it true that for all of us the tree is a source of life and ought to be honored as such?

Modern Times

I’ve found myself, quite unintentionally, immersed in modernism recently. I had been previously spending a lot of time on Renaissance era music and art, so I don’t have a good explanation as to how I got from there to here. But taking stock of things, I was: reading Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, listening to a strange melange of Iannis Xenakis, Holly Herndon, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and looking closely at a series of paintings by Makoto Fujimura. Pretty much the only active exception I could come up with was znamenny chant recordings. None of these works necessarily relate and I’m not sure I can explain the reason for this clustering outside of coincidence.

I think many times the term "modernism" is conflated with "contemporary" in casual use. But by "modernism" in this case I mean, first and foremost, a mode of artistic exploration that breaks with prior, established forms, be they “rules” or aesthetic norms, seeing them as having exhausted their capacity to express themselves. Of course, these also involve the introduction of new forms and rationalizations for those shifts - ways to capture meaning in a way that carries forward a fresh energy of its own (at least for a time), often with an inchoate nod to "progress". I suppose the most recent manifestation of modernism may be transhumanism, but this obsession with the form seemed to have pervaded so much of the 20th century - in painting the emergence of cubism to the obsessiveness with abstraction (which finally gave way to a resurgence of figurative painting), in literary theory the move from structuralism to post structuralism and the disintegration into deconstruction. Poetry as well: proto modernists like Emily Dickinson paved the way for not only "high modernists" like Eliot but a full range of form-experimental poets, from ee cummings to BH Fairchild. These were not always entirely positive developments - I’ll take Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue over Bitches Brew any day of the week. But then again, I’ll take Dostoevsky over Tolstoy 10 times out of 10. In some sense, we have to take these developments as they come and eventually sift the wheat from the chaff.

Which brings me back to Pessoa, one of the literary giants of the Portuguese language. His Book of Disquiet was a lifelong project, which features a series - a seemingly never ending series - of reflections by a number of "heteronym" personalities he developed. The paragraphs are often redundant and the themes seem to run on, making for a difficult book to read in long sittings. As a consequence I've been pecking away at it slowly. It becomes more difficult as time goes by for another reason: the postured aloofness to life seems sometimes fake, sometimes pretentious: more what one would expect from an 18 year old than a mature writer who has mastered his craft. And yet Pessoa himself seems at times to long for a return to immaturity: "My only regret is that I am not a child, for that would allow me to believe in my dreams and believe that I am not mad, which would allow me to distance my soul from all those who surround me."

But still, the writing at times is simply gorgeous. There's not so much beauty in what Pessoa says as in how he says it. He retains completely the form of language, but deliberately evacuates the novel of its structure. What we are left with are in some sense "micro-essays" that sometimes connect and at other times disassociate. Taken as words that invoke meaning, they are often depressing, sometimes nonsensical. Taken as words that invoke feeling - a feeling of language arranged to be something more than just words - they can be spectacular.

The tension between the words as meaning and words as expression is impossible to escape: "Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.” What does one make of this when considered as creed? Unlikely anything positive. Yet this pericope is rendered in a particularly dreamy sort of way that infects the reader when immersed in the dream-like narrative in which it is situated. It's almost inescapable.

Few novels have made me pause for such extended periods of time to ponder not so much what the author has to say but how he says it. It's like a kind of poetry rendered without a poem.

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A nod to New Directions Publishing, by the way, for making this project happen. Their edition of Disquiet I suspect will be seen as definitive for some time.

Unity and Difference

One of the themes that traveled from Greek philosophy through until the unfolding of modernity was the neoplatonic notion of "the One". A simple unity in which all "transcendentals" - beauty, truth, goodness - both originate and in some sense coalesce. In its patristic and medieval development, these transcendentals were "en-hypostasized" or made present in persons - the idea of the Trinity, where a communion of persons exist in perfect love, perfect peace and mutual self-offering: most importantly, a perfect unity in difference. All cultures have their formative myths and this particular myth made its mark on a broad swath of humanity over the centuries - though I think in ways that usually obscured its underlying meaning (unfortunately).

Now I have always identified with this comment of Dostoevsky: "I will tell you that I am a child of this century, a child of disbelief and doubt. I am that today and will remain so until the grave": sometimes more strongly than others. But myths are not about what we believe is "real" at any point in time. The meaning of these symbols I think says something for all of us today - particularly in the United States: that the essence of humanity may be best realized in a unity in difference that can only be realized through self-offering love. In political terms we are all citizens of one country and our obligation as a society is to care for each other. This much ought to be obvious - we cannot exclude one race, one economic class, one geography, one party, from mutual care. The whole point of our systems, in fact, ought to be to realize, however imperfectly, some level of that mutual care, of mutual up-building and mutual support.

That isn't happening today. Too often this we are engaged in the opposite - mutual tearing down and avoiding our responsibilities to each other. I wish there was a magic fix for this: it clearly has been a problem that has plagued our history for a long, long time. The one suggestion I can make is to find a way to reach out across boundaries with care on a day by day basis. Maybe that boundary is ethnic. Maybe it is political. Years ago I had a kind of "conversion" experience in my own life in how I saw the world after a careful re-read of Brothers Karamazov. I carry these words with me all the time now:

“At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing like it.”

It may seem like a person cannot make a difference. No individual drop of rain thinks it is responsible for the flood.