Dear Friends:
Merry Xmas to you all. Here's something to think about in the New Year.
One film I keep returning to–I must have seen it at least five or six times now–is Damage, by Louis Malle. The story is a kind of Greek tragedy. Jeremy Irons plays a successful British civil servant whose inner life is empty; Juliette Binoche is his son’s fiancé, with whom he gets involved immediately after they meet. By chance, his son comes to the flat where they are having a tryst, and catches them in bed. Thunderstruck, the young man backs out of the room and falls backward over the bannister, plunging several stories down the center of the apartment building to his death.
His life thus destroyed, the man retires from the world. He takes up residence in a small town in an unidentified country, perhaps Greece or Italy. Life consists of shopping, cooking, and washing up, along with spending entire days sitting in front of a blown-up photograph of the fateful triangle–himself, his son, and the girl–which is mounted on the wall. He has, in effect, constructed some sort of shrine; but to what?
The man ponders what happened to him–events that were (or seem to have been) completely out of his control. He never knew who the woman really was, and yet the attachment went way beyond sex. As a high-level bureaucrat, he experienced his life as totally meaningless. He gave TV interviews and public speeches that were perfectly turned out–he said all the right things–but in reality, he was a shell. The girl, for some unknown reason, promised to fill that void (or so he believed, on an unconscious level), and so the chemistry was instantaneous, ferocious. Now, in the aftermath of it all, the man spends his time staring at the photograph, trying to decipher what it all meant.
What makes us, he says to himself, is beyond knowing. We surrender to love because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters, not in the end. I saw her only one more time, at an airport while changing planes. She didn’t see me. She was with a man, and carrying a child in her arms. She was no different from anyone else.*
She was no different from anyone else. This realization–perhaps only momentary–means that the “shrine” was not dedicated to the woman, nor even to the love that they shared, but to love itself. But perhaps much more than that. The purpose of the shrine, the need for it, is to worship that thing that is beyond knowing, the only thing that matters in the end. So what is it?
If human life is finally a mystery, the key in the lock is not that hard to figure out: it’s the sense of a Presence larger than oneself, and beyond the grasp of the rational intellect. For hunter-gatherers, this was a presence with a small “p”: their reality was immanent, was the environment itself. (The “great spirit” of the Plains Indians was typically the wind.) With agricultural civilization and the rise of religion, the Presence became transcendent, exalted to a “vertical” reality: God. Yet this presence, or Presence–this irreducible otherness–is finally within us. In Damage, the central character projects this “divinity” onto a perfectly ordinary person, which he comes to understand only years later. Yet the photo remains on the wall, and the daily “worship” remains the central activity of his life. Love gives us some sense of the unknowable, and the unknowable–even though it arises as an interaction between the self and the outer world–is unfathomable, as is the interaction. Hence, the enormous fascination, born out of the conviction people have that the experience embodies some great truth; which it does. Yet no amount of analysis or contemplation can resolve it; it just is.
Damage can be framed in many ways. I have already referred to Greek tragedy, but we can see it through the lens of Christian allegory as well. We have a man–say, Saul of Tarsus–going through the motions of a meaningless, ritualistic life. Suddenly, he is blinded on the road to Damascus, and that vision, or apparition, redefines his reality. In so doing, it tears up the old life, lifts him on transcendent wings, and finally deposits him in a chair in front of a photograph, bathed in the light of Christ. It’s not likely that the central character of Damage, even beyond the death of his son, would ultimately have it any other way. After all, he went from No Meaning to Total Meaning–not exactly a trivial adventure. As he says to himself at the end, as he walks the streets of his new home, “I found a life that was my own.” Who of us doesn’t want that?
Of course, much of a political nature could be added at this point. Mesmerization by the cross, no less than by the swastika or the hammer and sickle (to name but a few), has caused many millions of deaths. This is just a matter of historical fact, and I don’t mean to treat it lightly. But it seems to me that it has a larger context, an anthropological one: namely, that the need to feel a part of something greater–even if immanent, as in the case of hunter-gatherers–has been with us for at least 100,000 years, when the first light of self-conscious awareness glimmered in the brain of Cro-Magnon Man. The birth of the self, in a word, may have been coincident with the desire to immerse the self, and thereby to endow it with meaning. This is the very essence of Homo sapiens sapiens, and it is not likely to leave us any time soon.
Viewed from this perspective, the “damage” of human relations, if not quite forgivable, is at least explicable. How much of our lives is driven by this archaic impulse? A good bit of it, I would guess; maybe even most of it. It is tempting to say, of course, that the solution is then fairly obvious: we have to get a “handle” on this impulse, to channel or control it in some way. This is the path (ideally, at least) of organized religion or psychoanalysis, and it is not completely in error. But it does tend to omit the central point, that of the need to experience the phenomenon–to be “taken” by life, to let life “come and get you” and make of you what it will, so that you might get washed up on the shore of some small town, staring at a picture on the wall–if that should happen to be your fate.
How many of us are willing to take that chance?
©Morris Berman, 2009
*This text does not occur in the novel by Josephine Hart, on which the film is based, but in the screenplay of the movie, by David Hare.
December 24, 2009
December 09, 2009
Be Here Now
I often wonder how many people in their sixties or seventies have had this experience: you awake one morning and realize that forty years went by in the blink of an eye. You can barely remember them; it all seems like one big blur. What stands out is the suddenness of this passage of time. One day you were a young adult, and the next day (seemingly) you are a Senior Citizen. What in the world? you ask yourself. Where was I all that time?
As Proust told us, the past can only be recaptured kinesthetically, as a somatic memory that is largely fragmentary in nature. Much of this is intertwined with desire. But since desire pursues a “moving target,” so to speak, our personal history seems like an illusion, or even a hallucination. It is for this reason that the fantasy of wanting to return to an earlier point in our lives and “do it over again,” but with our present adult consciousness intact, is a common one–the subject of a number of films, in fact.
All this has led me to think of how I might avoid repeating this feeling that I wasn’t present for most of my life. Proust’s solution to this conundrum was what he called “intermittence”–submission to the “great turning wheel of experience.” It has an obvious affinity with the Buddhist concept of awareness. But it poses certain problems. First, how can I get myself to be aware of my experience as I am having it? It seems more likely that I shall forget to remember. Second, even if I were to become successful at doing this, there is no guarantee that on my deathbed, I won’t experience the past twenty or thirty years, once again, as a blur that went by like a speeding train. Either way, life will have passed me by.
Recently, motivated by some odd form of nostalgia, I searched the Internet for my first love, the girl I dated during my sophomore year in college. Much to my surprise, I found her: she was a successful architect, living in a small town in Virginia. Ironically enough, I had worked in that very town for several years; she and I probably passed each other on the street, or sat in the same cafés together without realizing it. The picture that came up on the screen, of a woman in her early sixties, confronted me with a parallel universe, as it were: had things “worked out,” this person could have been my life. Not that I had any regrets, or sadly missed that alternative possibility; but that she had floated out of my life, only to reappear as a virtual image forty-five years later, was a weird sensation. I thought of writing her, but finally decided against it. What did we really have to say to one another, after all this time? That relationship was someone else’s life.
Truth be told, I have found my “actual” life to be not very different from my dream life. I recall one dream I had when I was thirty...I was taking a bus to a different city, ostensibly to begin a new life, and, having gotten on the bus, discovered that my luggage was sitting out on the curb. I told the driver I needed to get it before we took off, but he told me that as this was a Sunday, the rule (for some strange reason) was that I had to travel without it or not at all. While I was trying to decide what to do, I looked just behind the area where the bus driver was sitting, and noticed a large circular badge or button, made out of metal, on which the words were written, in Spanish, “Doctor of Bone Medicine Aboard.” (This was particularly odd, because at that point in my life, I knew practically no Spanish.) I told the bus driver I would stay on the bus, and leave my baggage behind; whereupon he started the engine, and the bus left the station.
When I awoke, I had the feeling that the message in Spanish was related to a then-popular tune by Simon and Garfunkel, which goes like this:
Paraphernalia
Never hides your broken bones
And I don't know why
You want to try
It's plain to see you're on your own.
Oo-ee, spare your heart
Everything put together
Sooner or later falls apart.
One thing that I felt the dream was telling me was that in order to undertake a journey of freedom, of unfolding consciousness, I had to leave my emotional “baggage” behind. The second message seemed equally clear: nobody could heal me but myself; I was the “Doctor of Bone Medicine” accompanying myself on this journey. I would mend my broken bones, and I would not use “peraphernalia” (gimmicks or substitute satisfactions) to do it. And finally, the notion that life was fleeting, impermanent. We want things to last, but they don’t.
Some years later, I ran across a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez that seemed to echo this existential reality:
I am not I.
I am this one
who walks beside me, without my seeing him
whom I sometimes see
and whom at other times I forget
who is quiet, serene, when I talk
who forgives me, gently, when I hate
who walks where I am not
who will remain standing, when I die.
Perhaps this is the “intermittence” that Proust was referring to; I’m not sure.
In any case, I find myself thinking about death a lot these days, and wondering what that will be like. Since I don’t believe in an afterlife, I imagine it as a letting go into nothingness–not a pleasant prospect. The Zen idea of being fully present in every experience doesn’t have much attraction for me, in this case, and I always admired the total honesty and simplicity of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’s last words: “I don’t want to die.” When all is said and done, none of us escapes the human condition.
Last words, of course, say a lot about the person who utters them. “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life,” said Wittgenstein, as he slipped out of consciousness and into the Great Void. I can’t imagine I’ll enjoy the same peace of mind. My guess is it will be more like, “You mean, this is it?” All those fragments–the girl I dated in college and found decades later on the Net, the dream about the “Bone Doctor,” the time I was seven years old and sat on the beach at Lake Ontario, playing in the sand with a pail and shovel–what, finally, did it all mean? Quite obviously, there is no forcing things to make sense: either they do or they don’t, and there is no guarantee that they will.
I recall, in 1973, visiting Prague (I was living in London at the time), and being politely accosted, in English, by an elderly Czech gentleman sitting on a bench on a street just off Wenceslas Square. He was wearing a suit, overcoat, and hat, and explained to me that he often hung out in the touristy sections of the city so that he might get a chance to practice his foreign language skills–French, Russian, German, English. His name–I remember it to this day–was Jan Horna, and there was something very dignified about him, very self-contained. We chatted for about half an hour, after which I asked him if I might take his photograph. He agreed, on condition that I write down his address and send him a copy of the photo; which I subsequently did. The picture captured him exactly, sitting on the bench with a look that was both wistful and questioning. I assume he is long gone by now, buried in some cemetery in Prague. I think about him from time to time, and wonder how the rest of his life turned out.
©Morris Berman, 2009
As Proust told us, the past can only be recaptured kinesthetically, as a somatic memory that is largely fragmentary in nature. Much of this is intertwined with desire. But since desire pursues a “moving target,” so to speak, our personal history seems like an illusion, or even a hallucination. It is for this reason that the fantasy of wanting to return to an earlier point in our lives and “do it over again,” but with our present adult consciousness intact, is a common one–the subject of a number of films, in fact.
All this has led me to think of how I might avoid repeating this feeling that I wasn’t present for most of my life. Proust’s solution to this conundrum was what he called “intermittence”–submission to the “great turning wheel of experience.” It has an obvious affinity with the Buddhist concept of awareness. But it poses certain problems. First, how can I get myself to be aware of my experience as I am having it? It seems more likely that I shall forget to remember. Second, even if I were to become successful at doing this, there is no guarantee that on my deathbed, I won’t experience the past twenty or thirty years, once again, as a blur that went by like a speeding train. Either way, life will have passed me by.
Recently, motivated by some odd form of nostalgia, I searched the Internet for my first love, the girl I dated during my sophomore year in college. Much to my surprise, I found her: she was a successful architect, living in a small town in Virginia. Ironically enough, I had worked in that very town for several years; she and I probably passed each other on the street, or sat in the same cafés together without realizing it. The picture that came up on the screen, of a woman in her early sixties, confronted me with a parallel universe, as it were: had things “worked out,” this person could have been my life. Not that I had any regrets, or sadly missed that alternative possibility; but that she had floated out of my life, only to reappear as a virtual image forty-five years later, was a weird sensation. I thought of writing her, but finally decided against it. What did we really have to say to one another, after all this time? That relationship was someone else’s life.
Truth be told, I have found my “actual” life to be not very different from my dream life. I recall one dream I had when I was thirty...I was taking a bus to a different city, ostensibly to begin a new life, and, having gotten on the bus, discovered that my luggage was sitting out on the curb. I told the driver I needed to get it before we took off, but he told me that as this was a Sunday, the rule (for some strange reason) was that I had to travel without it or not at all. While I was trying to decide what to do, I looked just behind the area where the bus driver was sitting, and noticed a large circular badge or button, made out of metal, on which the words were written, in Spanish, “Doctor of Bone Medicine Aboard.” (This was particularly odd, because at that point in my life, I knew practically no Spanish.) I told the bus driver I would stay on the bus, and leave my baggage behind; whereupon he started the engine, and the bus left the station.
When I awoke, I had the feeling that the message in Spanish was related to a then-popular tune by Simon and Garfunkel, which goes like this:
Paraphernalia
Never hides your broken bones
And I don't know why
You want to try
It's plain to see you're on your own.
Oo-ee, spare your heart
Everything put together
Sooner or later falls apart.
One thing that I felt the dream was telling me was that in order to undertake a journey of freedom, of unfolding consciousness, I had to leave my emotional “baggage” behind. The second message seemed equally clear: nobody could heal me but myself; I was the “Doctor of Bone Medicine” accompanying myself on this journey. I would mend my broken bones, and I would not use “peraphernalia” (gimmicks or substitute satisfactions) to do it. And finally, the notion that life was fleeting, impermanent. We want things to last, but they don’t.
Some years later, I ran across a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez that seemed to echo this existential reality:
I am not I.
I am this one
who walks beside me, without my seeing him
whom I sometimes see
and whom at other times I forget
who is quiet, serene, when I talk
who forgives me, gently, when I hate
who walks where I am not
who will remain standing, when I die.
Perhaps this is the “intermittence” that Proust was referring to; I’m not sure.
In any case, I find myself thinking about death a lot these days, and wondering what that will be like. Since I don’t believe in an afterlife, I imagine it as a letting go into nothingness–not a pleasant prospect. The Zen idea of being fully present in every experience doesn’t have much attraction for me, in this case, and I always admired the total honesty and simplicity of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’s last words: “I don’t want to die.” When all is said and done, none of us escapes the human condition.
Last words, of course, say a lot about the person who utters them. “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life,” said Wittgenstein, as he slipped out of consciousness and into the Great Void. I can’t imagine I’ll enjoy the same peace of mind. My guess is it will be more like, “You mean, this is it?” All those fragments–the girl I dated in college and found decades later on the Net, the dream about the “Bone Doctor,” the time I was seven years old and sat on the beach at Lake Ontario, playing in the sand with a pail and shovel–what, finally, did it all mean? Quite obviously, there is no forcing things to make sense: either they do or they don’t, and there is no guarantee that they will.
I recall, in 1973, visiting Prague (I was living in London at the time), and being politely accosted, in English, by an elderly Czech gentleman sitting on a bench on a street just off Wenceslas Square. He was wearing a suit, overcoat, and hat, and explained to me that he often hung out in the touristy sections of the city so that he might get a chance to practice his foreign language skills–French, Russian, German, English. His name–I remember it to this day–was Jan Horna, and there was something very dignified about him, very self-contained. We chatted for about half an hour, after which I asked him if I might take his photograph. He agreed, on condition that I write down his address and send him a copy of the photo; which I subsequently did. The picture captured him exactly, sitting on the bench with a look that was both wistful and questioning. I assume he is long gone by now, buried in some cemetery in Prague. I think about him from time to time, and wonder how the rest of his life turned out.
©Morris Berman, 2009
December 04, 2009
Audio of My Berkeley Poetry Reading, 16 Nov 09
Dear Friends:
Here 'tis; enjoy!:
http://moesbooks.com/shop/moes/091116.html
ps: a much clearer and more audible version was subsequently engineered by a friend of mine, and can be accessed at http://www.juliollosa.com/#topic=mb&sub=03
Here 'tis; enjoy!:
http://moesbooks.com/shop/moes/091116.html
ps: a much clearer and more audible version was subsequently engineered by a friend of mine, and can be accessed at http://www.juliollosa.com/#topic=mb&sub=03
November 29, 2009
The Lacuna
So let me recommend another book, this time a novel, by Barbara Kingsolver: The Lacuna. This book is an unbelievable tour de force, in a whole number of ways; and it unexpectedly turns very political at the end, darkly hinting (it seemed to me) at right-wing forces that are likely to engulf us in the course of the next decade (I hope I'm wrong). It also indicates that when such things happen, an empire is on its last legs.
However, it wasn't the politics that attracted me here; it was the prose. What a writer! Comparing her power as a novelist with my own feeble efforts in this direction, I could see what a long row I'd have to hoe, if I continue writing fiction, to come even close to this level of achievement.
At least half the novel is set in Mexico, and her genius for Mexican slang, for the nuance of the Mexican way of life, is equally impressive. The following paragraphs capture some of the things I adore about this country--things I felt from the 1st time I visited in 1979, but which I could never seem to put into words. In the hands of a master like Kingsolver, the ineffable is 'made flesh', as it were:
"In the afternoon when the sun lights the stucco buildings across the street, it's possible to count a dozen different colors of paint, all fading together on the highest parts of the wall: yellow, ochre, brick, blood, cobalt, turquoise. The national color of Mexico. And the scent of Mexico is a similar blend: jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime. Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.
"Here life is strong-scented, overpowering. Even the words. Just ordering breakfast requires some word like toronja, triplet of muscular syllables full of lust and tears, a squirt in the eye. Nothing like the effete 'grapefruit,' which does not even mean what it says."
Arriba!
However, it wasn't the politics that attracted me here; it was the prose. What a writer! Comparing her power as a novelist with my own feeble efforts in this direction, I could see what a long row I'd have to hoe, if I continue writing fiction, to come even close to this level of achievement.
At least half the novel is set in Mexico, and her genius for Mexican slang, for the nuance of the Mexican way of life, is equally impressive. The following paragraphs capture some of the things I adore about this country--things I felt from the 1st time I visited in 1979, but which I could never seem to put into words. In the hands of a master like Kingsolver, the ineffable is 'made flesh', as it were:
"In the afternoon when the sun lights the stucco buildings across the street, it's possible to count a dozen different colors of paint, all fading together on the highest parts of the wall: yellow, ochre, brick, blood, cobalt, turquoise. The national color of Mexico. And the scent of Mexico is a similar blend: jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime. Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.
"Here life is strong-scented, overpowering. Even the words. Just ordering breakfast requires some word like toronja, triplet of muscular syllables full of lust and tears, a squirt in the eye. Nothing like the effete 'grapefruit,' which does not even mean what it says."
Arriba!
November 28, 2009
Feeding the Beast
The following quotations are from ch. 3 of Chris Hedges’ most recent book, Empire of Illusion.
“The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive....The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service...come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market....Those who critique the system itself–people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader–are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.”
“The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities...A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void.”
“There has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian.... Only 8 percent of college graduates...now receive degrees in the humanities....Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduating population to 21.7 percent....Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished....[The] defense of knowledge for its own sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social questions, has been shredded and destroyed. Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers.”
“And as small, liberal arts schools have folded–at least 200 since 1990–they have been replaced with corporate, for-profit universities....The myopic and narrow vision of life as an accumulation of money and power...has become education’s dominant ideology....The flight from the humanities has become a flight from conscience.”
“Our elites...do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one....Their entire focus is numbers, profits, and personal advancement. They lack a moral and intellectual core. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships.”
“People like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves, and in the halls of Congress–while looting the country. Many of these men appear to be so morally and intellectually stunted that they are incapable of acknowledging their responsibility for our decline.”
“Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement....Our power elite has a blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched, and empowered it. But the elite cannot solve our problems. It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks and financial firms, to sustain a dead system. The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.”
“The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.”
“The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive....The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service...come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market....Those who critique the system itself–people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader–are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.”
“The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities...A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void.”
“There has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian.... Only 8 percent of college graduates...now receive degrees in the humanities....Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduating population to 21.7 percent....Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished....[The] defense of knowledge for its own sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social questions, has been shredded and destroyed. Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers.”
“And as small, liberal arts schools have folded–at least 200 since 1990–they have been replaced with corporate, for-profit universities....The myopic and narrow vision of life as an accumulation of money and power...has become education’s dominant ideology....The flight from the humanities has become a flight from conscience.”
“Our elites...do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one....Their entire focus is numbers, profits, and personal advancement. They lack a moral and intellectual core. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships.”
“People like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves, and in the halls of Congress–while looting the country. Many of these men appear to be so morally and intellectually stunted that they are incapable of acknowledging their responsibility for our decline.”
“Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement....Our power elite has a blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched, and empowered it. But the elite cannot solve our problems. It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks and financial firms, to sustain a dead system. The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.”
“The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.”
November 23, 2009
Ways of Knowing
There are a few books one encounters in the course of one’s life that prove to be transformative. In most cases, one is not expecting this. But it happens, and you know that you’ll never look at the world in quite the same way. For me, one text that was particularly life-changing was a slender volume by the classical scholar John Finley, entitled Four Stages of Greek Thought. It was as if, within its pages, I discovered what kind of writer I wanted to be; even, what kind of life I wanted to lead.
Finley distinguishes between the heroic-visionary world of the Homeric Greeks and the theoretical-rational world of their successors. There is a scene in the Iliad, he tells us, in which Hector briefly leaves the battlefield and returns to Troy, to visit his wife and infant son. Standing in front of his house, he reaches out to take the child in his arms, but the boy draws back, frightened at Hector’s helmet with its horsehair crest. Hector laughs, takes off the helmet, and puts it down; and Homer then records how the helmet sits there on the ground, all shiny and motionless, reflecting the light of the sun. The Homeric world, says Finley, is one of brilliant particulars, fixed entities that are what they are, nothing more or less. It is not an especially comforting world, he tells us, but it is at least this: absolutely clear. “Happiness, one sometimes thinks, is clarity of vision, moments when things stand clear in sharpest outline...as if revealed for the first time.” He goes on: “However intoxicating the attractions of intellect, and however essential to the structures by which we live, something in us wants also the clear signals of the senses by which alone the world is made fresh and definite.”
This is, I suppose, the world of childhood, made magical by its very realism; and there certainly is something intoxicating about it: the wind in one’s hair, the shock of a cool lake on a warm summer’s day, the dry texture of an autumn leaf. Yet Finley uses the word “intoxicating” not to refer to the world of sensual immediacy, but to that of the intellect, which has its own siren song. Once we enter the world of Socrates and Plato, and the “sunlit tangibility of the fourth century” (fine phrase, that), there is no going back. The experience of rationality, of conceptual clarity, is so overwhelming that once “infected,” the mind will settle for nothing less. When Archimedes (allegedly) cried “Eureka ” in his bathtub, his excitement was over having discovered a pattern (in this case, the law of specific gravity), not over the sensual impact of the water on his skin.
This issue of pattern is the key to the phenomenon of intellectual intoxication, and probably first occurs, in a formal sense, in the work of Plato. “Noetic” understanding, the job of the philosopher-king, moves along a vertical line, upwards toward the gods. Indeed, it is widely accepted that this vertical model is based on the shamanic or revealed knowledge of the Mystery Religions that were popular in ancient Greece. One application of it can be seen in Plato’s Republic, in the famous “parable of the cave,” in which people sit with their backs to the light and take the shadows cast on the wall for reality. Such individuals are asleep, says Plato, whereas the true philosopher, the one who is awake, turns to the light, the actual source of the perceived phenomena. What you see, then, is not what you get; real knowledge requires this type of “vertical” understanding, this digging beneath the surface. It is not for nothing that Freud compared his own analytical method to the science of archaeology. (Indeed, Heinrich Schliemann was digging up the ruins of Troy during Freud’s lifetime.) What is on the surface, for Freud, is social behavior; what lies underneath this is repressed sexuality (hence the title of one of his most famous books, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life). In the case of Marx, the surface consists of class relations; the reality, the underlying pattern, is the mode of production of a society at any given stage in its history. For Gassendi, Descartes, and Newton, gross objects were mere appearances; the reality was atomic particles. A sunset may be beautiful, but the “truth” of the situation is refracted light. And so on. Cognition of this sort can hit you with the force of a hurricane.
The alternative mode of knowing is more “horizontal”: what you see is what you get. Or as Wittgenstein once put it, “depths are on the surface.” The whole phenomenological school–I am thinking of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular–argues for direct physical experience as the key to the world (the sun gleaming off of Hector’s helmet, for example). The power of this type of understanding derives from the sheer “is-ness” of things, their pure ontology. To “know” a sunset as refracted light may be to not know it at all.
My oldest friend and I discovered, soon after we met, that we shared the same dilemma: we were torn between these two worlds. Both of them were intoxicating, in their own special way; so much so that we found it impossible to give either of them up. His solution was to create two separate, consecutive lives. Thus he spent three decades as a professional scientist, after which he retired to devote himself to photography, yoga, and jazz piano. My solution was to try to bring the two worlds together, and it cost me dearly. No university department could figure out what the hell I was doing, and typically regarded my writing as weird. In a culture severely split between mind and body, I could only be regarded as some sort of “cult figure,” at best. And really, what else could I expect? If you are going to insist that the dominant culture is ontologically crippled, it is not likely that that culture is going to stand up and cheer.
Reading Finley, in any case, provided me with a keen sense of validation, because he doesn’t end his analysis with a description of the two worlds and leave it at that. The “character of a great age,” he writes, is when the two worlds come together, and when, as a result, “meanings seem within people’s reach.” According to him, this unity found its greatest expression in Greece in the fifth century B.C., somewhere between Homer and Aristotle:
"Part of the grip on the imagination that fifth-century Athens
never ceases to hold is that these two kinds of worlds met
then, the former culminating as the latter came into being.
Aeschylus and Sophocles spoke for the older outlook that
saw things through shape; Socrates and Thucydides for the
nascent mind that saw them through idea."
It seems unlikely that we shall ever have such an age again, though who knows what the world will be like five hundred years hence. For now, at least, the integration of mind and body will probably remain a private experience: the intellect that feels, the sensuality that thinks. But ultimately, the commitment of the writer, or of anyone invested in the world of letters, the larger culture, cannot be restricted to individual experience, for solipsism is not an answer to anything. Putting meaning “within people’s reach” is finally what it is all about.
©Morris Berman, 2009
Finley distinguishes between the heroic-visionary world of the Homeric Greeks and the theoretical-rational world of their successors. There is a scene in the Iliad, he tells us, in which Hector briefly leaves the battlefield and returns to Troy, to visit his wife and infant son. Standing in front of his house, he reaches out to take the child in his arms, but the boy draws back, frightened at Hector’s helmet with its horsehair crest. Hector laughs, takes off the helmet, and puts it down; and Homer then records how the helmet sits there on the ground, all shiny and motionless, reflecting the light of the sun. The Homeric world, says Finley, is one of brilliant particulars, fixed entities that are what they are, nothing more or less. It is not an especially comforting world, he tells us, but it is at least this: absolutely clear. “Happiness, one sometimes thinks, is clarity of vision, moments when things stand clear in sharpest outline...as if revealed for the first time.” He goes on: “However intoxicating the attractions of intellect, and however essential to the structures by which we live, something in us wants also the clear signals of the senses by which alone the world is made fresh and definite.”
This is, I suppose, the world of childhood, made magical by its very realism; and there certainly is something intoxicating about it: the wind in one’s hair, the shock of a cool lake on a warm summer’s day, the dry texture of an autumn leaf. Yet Finley uses the word “intoxicating” not to refer to the world of sensual immediacy, but to that of the intellect, which has its own siren song. Once we enter the world of Socrates and Plato, and the “sunlit tangibility of the fourth century” (fine phrase, that), there is no going back. The experience of rationality, of conceptual clarity, is so overwhelming that once “infected,” the mind will settle for nothing less. When Archimedes (allegedly) cried “Eureka ” in his bathtub, his excitement was over having discovered a pattern (in this case, the law of specific gravity), not over the sensual impact of the water on his skin.
This issue of pattern is the key to the phenomenon of intellectual intoxication, and probably first occurs, in a formal sense, in the work of Plato. “Noetic” understanding, the job of the philosopher-king, moves along a vertical line, upwards toward the gods. Indeed, it is widely accepted that this vertical model is based on the shamanic or revealed knowledge of the Mystery Religions that were popular in ancient Greece. One application of it can be seen in Plato’s Republic, in the famous “parable of the cave,” in which people sit with their backs to the light and take the shadows cast on the wall for reality. Such individuals are asleep, says Plato, whereas the true philosopher, the one who is awake, turns to the light, the actual source of the perceived phenomena. What you see, then, is not what you get; real knowledge requires this type of “vertical” understanding, this digging beneath the surface. It is not for nothing that Freud compared his own analytical method to the science of archaeology. (Indeed, Heinrich Schliemann was digging up the ruins of Troy during Freud’s lifetime.) What is on the surface, for Freud, is social behavior; what lies underneath this is repressed sexuality (hence the title of one of his most famous books, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life). In the case of Marx, the surface consists of class relations; the reality, the underlying pattern, is the mode of production of a society at any given stage in its history. For Gassendi, Descartes, and Newton, gross objects were mere appearances; the reality was atomic particles. A sunset may be beautiful, but the “truth” of the situation is refracted light. And so on. Cognition of this sort can hit you with the force of a hurricane.
The alternative mode of knowing is more “horizontal”: what you see is what you get. Or as Wittgenstein once put it, “depths are on the surface.” The whole phenomenological school–I am thinking of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular–argues for direct physical experience as the key to the world (the sun gleaming off of Hector’s helmet, for example). The power of this type of understanding derives from the sheer “is-ness” of things, their pure ontology. To “know” a sunset as refracted light may be to not know it at all.
My oldest friend and I discovered, soon after we met, that we shared the same dilemma: we were torn between these two worlds. Both of them were intoxicating, in their own special way; so much so that we found it impossible to give either of them up. His solution was to create two separate, consecutive lives. Thus he spent three decades as a professional scientist, after which he retired to devote himself to photography, yoga, and jazz piano. My solution was to try to bring the two worlds together, and it cost me dearly. No university department could figure out what the hell I was doing, and typically regarded my writing as weird. In a culture severely split between mind and body, I could only be regarded as some sort of “cult figure,” at best. And really, what else could I expect? If you are going to insist that the dominant culture is ontologically crippled, it is not likely that that culture is going to stand up and cheer.
Reading Finley, in any case, provided me with a keen sense of validation, because he doesn’t end his analysis with a description of the two worlds and leave it at that. The “character of a great age,” he writes, is when the two worlds come together, and when, as a result, “meanings seem within people’s reach.” According to him, this unity found its greatest expression in Greece in the fifth century B.C., somewhere between Homer and Aristotle:
"Part of the grip on the imagination that fifth-century Athens
never ceases to hold is that these two kinds of worlds met
then, the former culminating as the latter came into being.
Aeschylus and Sophocles spoke for the older outlook that
saw things through shape; Socrates and Thucydides for the
nascent mind that saw them through idea."
It seems unlikely that we shall ever have such an age again, though who knows what the world will be like five hundred years hence. For now, at least, the integration of mind and body will probably remain a private experience: the intellect that feels, the sensuality that thinks. But ultimately, the commitment of the writer, or of anyone invested in the world of letters, the larger culture, cannot be restricted to individual experience, for solipsism is not an answer to anything. Putting meaning “within people’s reach” is finally what it is all about.
©Morris Berman, 2009
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