GOOD FAITH, BAD FAITH, & GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

In the last two cen­turies, hav­ing given up God, West­ern thought posited The Indi­vid­ual as its ideal. This cen­tury, when vir­tual “life ever­last­ing” is at our fin­ger­tips, and human cloning within reach: the new ideal is arti­fi­cial immor­tal­ity, with indi­vid­u­al­ity com­ing in a close sec­ond. Unfor­tu­nately, these val­ues prove con­flict­ing when their greater impli­ca­tions are brought into view. Con­sider: who wants to be immor­tal in the world as-is, a world per­vaded with suf­fer­ing and injus­tice, i.e., a world bound up with the nec­es­sary con­se­quences of indi­vid­u­al­iza­tion? Niet­zsche: “War has always been the grand sagac­ity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too pro­found; its cura­tive power lies even in the wounds one receives.” We want to live on—in each of our cells lurks the dream of infinity–but not if this com­mits us to a life of eter­nal con­flict, eter­nal hell. Which is tan­ta­mount to say­ing: we want to live on, just not as indi­vid­u­als. We want to live on as if non-individuals—who nonethe­less retain their “sense of self.” And don’t tell me we’re mad for will­ing this: we are per­fectly capa­ble, both log­i­cally and meta­phys­i­cally, of liv­ing a double—or a triple or quadruple—life: a life in which “I” am undif­fer­en­ti­ated from the whole/cosmos, a life in which “I” am just a name on a screen, the life “I” lead in the pri­vacy of my own home, etc. In no way, then, is it irra­tional to think that we can simul­ta­ne­ously sur­ren­der and retain our indi­vid­u­al­ity. (Con­tin­ued)

The fol­low­ing is a re-worked ver­sion of my paper Ani­mal Meta­physicum: Prophecy and Abstrac­tion in a Pas­sion­less Age, which I recently pre­sented in a panel dis­cus­sion on “Nar­ra­tive and Social Move­ments.” A cou­ple of peo­ple asked me to post the updated ver­sion on this blog, so here it is– com­ments and ques­tions are wel­comed! Thanks, A (Con­tin­ued)

Upcom­ing Arts and Human­i­ties grad­u­ate con­fer­ence @ TTU, Sat­ur­day, 22 Octo­ber 2011. If you live in the region, hit us up! My paper can also be found HERE. (Con­tin­ued)

The poet puts to death an idea, an iden­tity, a form, so as to be reborn. But the poem is not merely the husk of her for­mer self, a thin sheaf of brain cells, rotting-there, life-ridden and decayed. It is the mem­ory of that undo­ing, con­tained in which is the seed of her coming-to-be. Hence the poem is not sta­tic: the vital energy that occa­sioned it, in Kant’s words, “strength­ens and repro­duces itself’ on each new read­ing. Out of every poem a new poet is born, a new poet—and a new reader. Some poems might strike us as bar­ren wombs, or mere corpses: the remains or resid­ual shell of a long-lost self. That a poem is in fact a mere corpse, how­ever, is improv­able. Until the seem­ing corpse is res­ur­rected in the mind or heart of a reader, ren­der­ing it alive, the poem can only seem dead: so far as we know its spirit, or life-force, is just away—asleep or trans­mi­grat­ing. Descended into hell….rose again…ascended. So far as we know, the mind or heart for which a poem was cre­ated (or sac­ri­ficed) sim­ply hasn’t been born yet, hasn’t com­manded the cadaver’s ascent. For, each poem requires an Other with whom to exchange vital forces. With­out such an Other, the poem’s spirit lies inde­ter­mi­nately dor­mant inside a “novel design”—waiting to be res­ur­rected, rec­og­nized. When such a reader/resurrecter is drawn into a poem, he is drawn into spirit: spirit expressed through a momen­tary arti­fice, like all of us. (Con­tin­ued)

In the pre­vi­ous two posts I argued that society’s rela­tion­ship with art is essen­tially based on use-value, and that the func­tion bestowed on art by a given social order will highly inform—but not strictly determine—individuals’ aes­thetic expe­ri­ences. At present, the social func­tion of art remains a prod­uct (how­ever tweaked) of the enlight­en­ment period or eigh­teenth cen­tury: this explain­ing the explo­sion of “def­i­n­i­tional the­o­ries for art” in the nine­teenth cen­tury, and the twen­ti­eth cen­tury artists’ attempts to reclaim art from said definitions—all the while art the­o­rists scram­bled to build new def­i­n­i­tions that could house their bas­tard chil­dren. The cycle is a vicious one: the harder artists try to break free from the­o­ret­i­cal con­straints, the harder the the­o­rists clamp down—this entire so-called “dia­logue” just per­pet­u­at­ing the machine of Rea­son, which, again, steers not just Cul­ture, but the minds and lives therein. (Con­tin­ued)

Our expe­ri­ences of nature are pri­mar­ily non-conceptual—save, per­haps, for spec­u­la­tion regard­ing nature’s ori­gins. This of course is not to say that we don’t attach con­cepts to our per­cep­tions of nat­ural objects, as I do when I see the wan­ing moon obscured by fog and sur­rounded by crys­talline stars, and think: “The moon looks so frail tonight—I feel so alone.” To think this, to make this judg­ment, I have to have a con­cept for “frailty” and for “loneliness”—not to men­tion for “moon.” These con­cepts how­ever aren’t gen­er­al­iz­able to all of my expe­ri­ences with nature—or even to all of my expe­ri­ences with the moon: tonight I might step out­side, look up at the sky to find the moon unno­tice­ably smaller, hav­ing shrunk just a hair, and think: “What a cruel, seduc­tive moon—everything pre­tends to be some­thing that it isn’t—one never illu­mines one’s whole truth—I feel so betrayed.” (Con­tin­ued)

In The Art of Cre­ation, Edward Car­pen­ter draws on the are­nas of sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy, anthro­pol­ogy and art to explore the vast sub­ject of “the self and its pow­ers.” And what sub­ject but a vast one is fit for a poet? Bet­ter, what sub­ject but a vast one is fit for human thought?

In truth, while not all are “poets” in form, we are all poets in force: each of us daily amasses and dis­charges colos­sal sums of infor­ma­tion, both tan­gi­ble and not, simul­ta­ne­ously con­jur­ing up sequences of pat­terns in our per­cep­tory, mnemonic and lin­guis­tic reg­is­ters to under­stand our expe­ri­ence of the world. It’s well known that humans con­cep­tu­al­ize via metaphor, as con­cepts are merely sym­bols for the objects, and our expe­ri­ences of the objects, that con­sti­tute “the real” (or, if you’d rather, they’re mere sym­bols for other sym­bols which are mere sym­bols for other sym­bols– never reach­ing the “thing in itself.”)

The word “poet” com­monly con­notes one who uses metaphor to express her sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of the world. As a poet, I say (or rather write) of a cer­tain sky, that it is “a volup­tuous black / swan tak­ing a bul­let the breast: bloody blos­soms / bloom­ing all at once upon a time / –lapsed pho­to­graph.” And my typ­i­cal reader responds in one of two ways: she’ll either “ooh” and “ah” and say “A sky full of fire­works is like a dark bird’s punc­tured breast—what a great anal­ogy!” or, she’ll scrunch up her nose and think to her­self (unless she’s gone to grad school, in which case she’ll heave a the­atri­cal sigh and say) “that’s not how the sky is at all—what a weak metaphor.” But in gen­eral, any­one who knows what poetry is—?— “knows” it’s ridicu­lous to judge a poem as “true” or “false”—poetry isn’t logic after all. (Con­tin­ued)

How much will I be changed, before I am changed? –Lucie Brock-Broido

Death alien­ates long before it hap­pens. That’s to say, all through life humans dream and phi­los­o­phize, have night­mares and con­ver­sa­tions, write macabre poems and seri­ous essays about human frailty, the end days, death—always asso­ci­at­ing the lat­ter with some final Farewell: to this world, our loved ones, our lives, our selves. Not coincidentally, even the per­son who believes in heaven and believes him­self en route, often still finds a the­o­log­i­cal loop­hole through which to rumi­nate over his posthu­mous iso­la­tion: he will think to him­self, how will I rec­og­nize my loved ones if they’re not in human form? Or, what does “love” mean in the absence of pain and plea­sure? And, surely it won’t feel the same… In pro­por­tion with the inten­sity of our earthly desires, any Else­where seems intol­er­a­ble, and is in any case incom­pre­hen­si­ble: how will I know where I am (and that I am) with­out my sense organs? How will I love or be loved in the absence of a tick­ing clock, and the roman­tic sense of urgency it invokes? How will I tol­er­ate an eter­nity with­out human affec­tion? Will I spend my last, my ever­last­ing day, weeping—trying to weep with­out tear ducts—to some stoic God? Will I die a sec­ond death, of heart­break? And a third, of bore­dom? (Con­tin­ued)

(inserted quotes are from Tessa Rumsey’s “Head­set” and “New World Cloud Forest”)

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Being filled to the brim but not over­flow­ing: being always already ready and always already unable to com­pletely over­flow: this is the writer’s plight, the philosopher’s and the artist’s: as is it the plight of the west­ern radical.

*

The 21^st cen­tury Amer­i­can can, in an abstract sense, “stand out­side” of social his­tory, reject its value sys­tem a pri­ori, and yet still not negate it: there’s still the “pressure”-internal, yet in accord with cul­ture– to “doc­u­ment” the unfold­ing of one’s per­sonal his­tory, one’s iden­tity or life nar­ra­tive unfold­ing in time — which is to say: the unfold­ing of the par­tic­u­lar in its con­crete real, which nei­ther con­tra­dicts nor con­forms to the social-historical.

*

The men­tal processes, emo­tions, intu­itions, obser­vances, etc– going on inside me, that are prop­erly “mine” – also in one sense belong to oth­ers. This is not to say that the Other is “enti­tled” to a piece of me, to my expres­sion, to my poem– just that I’m not exclu­sively respon­si­ble for my cre­ations: they are a prod­uct of my engag­ing, belong­ing to, walk­ing through the world. Some­times this world is het­eronomous, rid­dled with the traps and tricks of lan­guage and con­fin­ing social con­structs: whence the radical’s need to “document”—to inscribe or vomit out the details of his per­sonal his­tory, as informed or tainted by the social. Hence writ­ing the his­tory of my mental/physical/emotional/intellectual dialec­tic with the other, the social, the world– is as much cathar­sis, my own cleans­ing eman­ci­pa­tion from that his­tory and that dialec­tic as it is a “gift” to, or even an expres­sion of, that world.

*

“To have one’s cake and eat it to: to ram­ble over the earth alone while still trans­mit­ting / Thoughts and feel­ings to who­ever may be listening.”

* (Con­tin­ued)

Humans need illu­sion: Niet­zsche said it, and in 20/20 hind­sight, we might say he was stat­ing the obvi­ous. Illu­sion: the truth­ful appear­ance of non-truth, that which seems too good not to be: good, true, real, real­iz­able. A degree of deceit (faith?) is essen­tial; with­out it, all we would have is that which we are: includ­ing the lack—the nihilo, neg­a­tiv­ity, unre­quited long­ing, futile melan­choly, empty grief—that rep­re­sents what we are not: immor­tal, inher­ently moral, omnipo­tent, divine orches­tra­tors of social order, uncon­di­tional lovers, God.

It is the per­son who’s inca­pable of lying to him­self that suf­fers the cru­elest descent into the pur­ga­tory of nihilo, the hell of trans­parency, the unob­structed glare-gaze into suf­fer­ing, absur­dity, alien­ation, dis­or­der, in short: life. But we see white-gowned priests hov­er­ing like mirages, or ghosts rather, over a mon­u­ment to pri­mor­dial chaos, i.e. the synthetic-primordial, urban sprawl—and can no longer dis­tin­guish these icons from base real­ity: the smog from the decrepit waste sys­tems (the sem­i­nary, the acad­emy, etc.) of which they’re part and par­cel: alpha and omega: begin­ning and end—these con­stant reminders of our present dis-illusionment only fur­ther hin­der­ing all aspi­ra­tion toward any relief, any ideal. Reli­gion has been sui­cided by mod­ernism: Art, falling in line, has lost its luster—and at present waits on death row (or hides in the base­ment, rather, with its fin­ger on the trig­ger.) (Con­tin­ued)

TREAT ART AS YOU WOULD WANT TO BE TREATED

We return to our orig­i­nal ques­tion: how do we best relate to art so that it relates back to us in the desired way?—with a new, a grow­ing under­stand­ing of the ambi­gu­ity sur­round­ing the intu­ition with which we started our dis­cus­sion, and which accom­pa­nied and con­tin­ues to accom­pany our fer­vent quest-ioning, thus bring­ing forth through poe­sis our under­stand­ing of the ques­tion at hand. We now under­stand, or bet­ter under­stand, the oppres­sive lim­i­ta­tions to which we uncon­sciously default in our employ­ment of lan­guage and in our every­day think­ing about our selves and world: the most oppres­sive of which per­haps being our notion of iden­tity. (Con­tin­ued)

The fol­low­ing is the first install­ment of a reworked and (believe it or not) con­densed ver­sion of a pre­vi­ous post, titled Ground­work to The Most Beau­ti­ful Train­wreck in the World, where I expound the fun­da­men­tal ideas under­gird­ing most of my recent writ­ings on vir­tu­al­ity and cre­ative rad­i­cal­ism. Here I break it down into what I hope will be digestible por­tions, the remain­der of which I’ll post over the span of the next week to two. The orig­i­nal draft was writ­ten ear­lier this Spring upon com­plet­ing my under­grad­u­ate degree in phi­los­o­phy– hence new read­ers will notice a more aca­d­e­mic tone in this writ­ing than most other of my works. In some senses the essay served as an abjec­tion of aca­d­e­mic stan­dards and a segue to a space of intel­lec­tual uncon­fine­ment, free­dom, sub­jec­tiv­ity, song. As I see it, all styles and modes of cre­ation and expres­sion are at the radical’s dis­posal– “for every­thing there is a sea­son” — and it’s the rad­i­cal will’s job to intuit what’s vital to that sea­son. So with­out fur­ther ado, Pt 1: (Con­tin­ued)