Category: Literary Matters

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place. 

In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence.  That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered.  The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.

Kerouac October Quotation #3: This World, the Palpable Thought of God

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

 

Kerouac to Whalen on Buddhism

It's October again, Kerouac month at MavPhil.  Perhaps I will post a quotation a day throughout this wonderful month that always passes too quickly — as if bent on proving the vain and visionary nature of phenomenal existence.

Jack Kerouac finished Some of the Dharma on 15 March 1956.  The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.  By 1959, Kerouac was moving away from Buddhism.  On 10 June 1959 he wrote to Philip Whalen:

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

The Two Kinds of People and the Manifold Uses of Blogging

I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs and the fuckees, and you gonna have to decide which side you gonna be on." This morning I found the thought expressed with a bit more elegance by Giacomo Leopardi (1798- 1837) in his Pensieri:

The human race, from the individual on up, is split into two camps: the bullies and the bullied. Neither law nor force of any kind, nor advancement in civilization and philosophy, can prevent men now or in the future from belonging to one of these two camps. So, he who can choose, must choose. Although not everyone is able, nor is the choice always available. (Pensieri [Thoughts], tr. Di Piero, Louisiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69)

Am I endorsing the alternative?  No. I am merely presenting it for your consideration.

My posts are not all of the same type. Some are just notes to myself, records of what I am reading and thinking about. Others are meant to draw the reader's attention to this or that for his edification or delectation. Some carefully argue a thesis I believe to be true. Others merely assert a thesis I believe to be true. Some are sloppy and impressionistic. In others, the rigor mentis approaches rigor mortis.

Some posts are aphoristic. But don't assume that an aphorism cannot have deep and rigorous and systematic thought at its origin. Some posts are polemical. There are people who do not occupy the space of reasons so that attempting to engage them in that space is a fool's errand. They are in need of defeat or perhaps therapy, not rational persuasion. The verbal equivalent of a blow to the head or a kick in the ass will do them more good than a patient setting-forth of reasons beyond their comprehension.

The uses of blogging are manifold.

On Hitchens and Death

I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose.  He looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him.  But his trademark intellectual incandescence appeared undiminished.  'Brilliant' is a word I don't toss around lightly, but Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go.  Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.

In the teeth of death the man remains intransigent in his unbelief.  And why not?  He lived in unbelief and so it is only fitting that he should die in it as well.  He lived for this life alone; it is fitting that he should die without hope. As I read him, God and the soul were never Jamesian live options.  To cop out now as debility and death approach must appear to him to be utterly contemptible, a grasping for straws, a fooling himself into a palliative illusion to ease the horror of annihilation.

For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitch substitutes literary immortality.  "As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, 'Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.'" (Here) But to the clearheaded, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion.  Only a few read Hitch now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten.  This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few.  And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.

To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism: Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt. "A book is a mirror:  if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out."  Most readers are more apish than apostolic.

To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object count as living on?

The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride.  Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer.  Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself.  Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence.  Otherworldly light simply can't get through.  One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens.  A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an overinflated balloon.

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego.  The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing.  And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another.  "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven."  But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control.  It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself.  The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole.  What we fear when we fear death is not  so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego.  That is the true horror and evil of death.  And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Have you read Philip Larkin's Aubade?

What would Hitch lose by believing?  Of course, he can't bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could.  Would he lose 'the truth'?  But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter.  People only think they do. Well, suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation.  Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value?  Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system? 

If materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred.  If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it?

Stefan Zweig on Caissa’s Allure

Zweig An old Hindu proverb has it that chess is an ocean in which a gnat may drink and an elephant bathe. Similarly pelagic is the literature of the game. Some of it is of high literary merit. An example follows for your delectation.

Stefan Zweig, "The Royal Game" in The Royal Game and Other Stories, tr. Jill Sutcliffe (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983), p. 8:

I knew well enough from my own experience the mysterious attraction of 'the royal game,' that game among games devised by man, which rises majestically above every tyranny of chance, which grants its victor's laurels only to a great intellect, or rather, to a particular form of mental ability. But are we not already guilty of an insulting limitation in calling chess a game? Isn't it also a science, an art, hovering between these two categories as Muhammad's coffin hovered between heaven and earth? Isn't it a unique bond between every pair of opponents, ancient and yet eternally new; mechanical in its framework and yet only functioning through use of the imagination, confined in geometrically fixed space and at the same released from confinement by its permutations; continuously evolving yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance, and nevertheless demonstrably more durable in its true nature and existence than any books or creative works? Isn't it the only game that belongs to all people and all times? And who knows whether God put it on earth to kill boredom, to sharpen the wits or to lift the spirits? Where is its beginning and where its end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try it; and yet it requires, within those unchanging small squares, the production of a special series of master, not comparable to any other kind, men who have a singular gift for chess, geniuses of a particular kind, in whom vision, patience and technique function in just as precise divisions as they do in mathematicians, poets and musicians, only on different levels and in different conjunctions.

On Writing for Money

From an NYT interview with Christopher Hitchens on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Hitch-22:

Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

The fool in excelsis, I suppose, would be he who not only writes what cannot sell, but uses his own blood for ink.  I am thinking of Nietzsche whose posthumous birth was due in no small measure to the  auto-vivisection which supplied the fluid which powered his pen.

Writing as Religion

Here is quotation by way of an addendum to my last post.  John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, Addison-Wesley, 1994, p. 227:

What the writers I care most about do is to take fiction as the single most important thing in life after life itself — life itself being both their raw material and the object of their celebration. They do it not for ego but simply to make something singularly beautiful. Fiction is their religion and comfort: when they are depressed they go not to church or psychoanalysis but to Salinger or Joyce, early Malamud, parts of Faulkner, Tolstoy, or the Bible as book.

There are all sorts of false gods.

Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta

"Here is Rhodes, jump here."  From Aesop's Fables #209, "The Boastful Athlete."  A man who had been off in foreign lands, returns home.  He brags of his exploits.  He claims that in Rhodes he made a long jump the likes of which had never been seen.  A skeptical bystander calls him on his boast:  Here's your Rhodes, jump here!

The moral?  Put your money where your mouth is.  Don't talk about it, do it!

This post is a stub.  Perhaps an erudite classicist such as Mike Gilleland could complete it.  He would have to do at least the following:  dig up all the ancient sources in Greek and Latin; trace the saying in Erasmus and Goethe; comment on Hegel's variation on the saying in the Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts, explaining why he has saltus for salta; find and comment on Marx's comment on Hegel's employment of the saying.

Finally, if Alan Rhoda were to rename his cleverly titled weblog Alanyzer — and I'm not saying he should — he might consider Hic Rhoda, Hic Salta.  He is a very tall man; I'm 6' 1'' and had to look up to see his face when I met him in Las Vegas some years back.  To jump over him would be quite a feat.

On Reading Philosophers For the Beauty of Their Prose

To read a philosopher for the beauty of his prose alone is like ordering a delicacy in a world-class restaurant for its wonderful aroma and artful presentation — but then not eating it.

I had that thought one morning while re-reading for the fifth time William James' magisterial essay, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. So rich in thought, and yet so distracting in its beauty the prose in which the thoughts are couched. James and a few other philosophers are great writers — Schopenhauer and Santayana come to mind — but the thought's the thing.

I’m Telling You All I Know

The Website of Novelist, Short Story Writer & Poet William Michaelian.  A search for writing about Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel brought me to this site.  Couldn't find a copy in Border's the other day.  Moving from the Rs to the Ws, I noted the resurgence of Ayn Rand: several of her titles in new editions were prominently displayed.  I had the thought that, as long as there are adolescents, there will be no lack of readers of Nietzsche, Rand, and Kerouac.  Every generation discovers them anew and finds something to relate to before moving on to the better and the truer.

At first in the bookstore I drew a blank: couldn't remember the name of the author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.  So I asked a matronly lady who worked that section and who looked intelligent.  She had never heard of these titles.  People nowadays don't know jackshit.  But I feel too good this Sunday afternoon to start in on a rant, having acquitted myself nobly and without screw-up this morning in a 5 K trail race.

Aphorisms Good and Bad

These, by Nicolas Gomez Davila, tr. Michael Gilleland, are good:

With God there are only individuals. (I, 16)

Continue reading “Aphorisms Good and Bad”