(Burne-Jones, The Hand Refrains)
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press 2010)Georges Bataille, "The Cruel Practice of Art" (1949)http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/cruel_practice_of_artChristos Yannaras, Person and Eros (Holy Cross Orthodox Press 2007)
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
~ Keats
Ruskin remarked somewhere that there is really no bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. When gray and rainy weather forces me to gloomy thoughts, as it often does, I find that instead of engaging in salubrious activities, I read things that are reflective of the state of things outside my window. Such have been the hours spent this weekend. Finally, I have gotten around to reading Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I was forced to stop many times to take a breather from the relentless, yes, gloom of the work. This is not to say that I disagree with his overall thesis. Ligotti is making the not very original (as he readily admits) claim that all is not right with our existence, that being alive is not a very great nor even a good thing. Drawing heavily upon the work of the Norwegian pessimist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, Ligotti articulates quite well the knowledge that every thinking person possesses -- buried often, as it were, deep in the less readily accessible regions of the mind -- that our consciousness is a source of immense pain, and far from being an evolutionary boon, requires us to "thwart it" in order to avoid going insane. "[C]onsciousness may have facilitated our species’ survival in the hard times of prehistory, but as it became evermore acute it evolved the potential to ruin everything if not held firmly in check. Therefore, we must either outsmart consciousness or drown in its vortex of doleful factuality" (p. 19). According to Zapffe (and Ligotti) we may "thwart" consciousness in four general ways: 1) by isolation, or hiding from ourselves and others the true ruinous nature of consciousness; 2) by anchoring our lives in "metaphysical verities" (Ligotti's phrase) such as God and religion, family values, law and society, et cetera; 3) by distraction (pretty self-explanatory), i.e., by engaging in essentially meaningless activities -- "a television screen or fireworks display" -- in order to think of anything but the curse of consciousness; and finally 4) sublimation (used here in a rather specialized sense), by which Zapffe and Ligotti mean "the process by which thinkers and artistic types recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are represented in a stylized and removed manner for the purposes of edification and entertainment, forming the conspiracy of creating and consuming products that provide an escape from our suffering in the guise of a false confrontation with it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance" (p. 18). In other words, making horror beautiful, or at least sublime. I could not help thinking here of the theories of Georges Bataille, who wrote, in an essay entitled "The Cruel Practice of Art" that "if there is any truth to the idea that human life is a trap, can we think -- it's strange, but so what? -- that, since torture is 'universally offered to us as the bait,' reflecting on its fascination may enable us to discover what we are and to discover a higher world whose perspectives exceed the trap?" I find it odd that Ligotti did not mention Bataille in his book; it seems appropriate that he should. I cannot think of any aspect of life more "demoralizing and unnerving" than torture. Bataille is quite right when he states that "what we call cruelty is always that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it as soon as it is ours." Cruelty, according to Bataille, is any act that we do not have the heart to endure. Aztec sacrifice, for example, was not cruel from the perspective of the ancient Aztecs (the victim, we are sure, felt otherwise); the contemporary sadist, about to take a whip to his "victim," repeats to himself that this act is cruel -- yet in fact, owing to the desire of the masochist to be whipped, the act is not cruel but simply a rather extreme form of sexual gratification. True cruelty occurs when the subject of the cruel act is destroyed -- but then, states Bataille, one is left with "a nothingness that abolishes everything." Art cannot overcome this, for art is an act of sublimation that takes us away from the truth of our being, which is being-toward-death, and gives us in place of the mind-shattering experience of cruelty some object about which to theorize.
Ligotti's book is such an object, even though he states at the outset that his "foregone conclusion is that our positive estimate of ourselves and our lives is all in our heads. As with many propositions that shoot for loftiness ('To be or not to be'), this one may be mulled over but not usefully argued" (p. 10). Of course, if one of the aims of art is to sublimate the inherent cruelty of existence by giving us edifying works to contemplate -- in place of the nothingness that is our ultimate telos -- another aim of art -- and this is the Romantic one -- is to "[exalt] the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and [add] beauty to that which is most deformed; [to marry] exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change" (Shelley, A Defence of Poetry). The artist is not to remain passive in the face of nature's -- and humanity's -- cruelty, or to hide away from the stark reality of our nothingness; rather, the purpose of the artist, and of art, is to take this mad, sad, relentlessly sickening world and gild it in such a way that nature herself is defied, and a new reality is set up in place of the old.
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. (Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, par. 10)
This may be a fool's task, especially since very few people read for authentic escape anymore; instead, most people watch movies -- and not to be transported to better places, but to see CGI superheroes or robots battle over the very world that is slowly sapping our intellects of whatever vitality they used to possess.
But back to cruelty, which is all too real. Our digitized world has produced a generation of so-called millennials for whom a very wide and deep safety zone has been placed between their cozy spot in the world and the reality taking place beyond their screens. My recent viewing on YouTube of an ISIS "fighter" kicking open the skull of a prisoner and then beheading him caused a response for which I am grateful: I sickened, my stomach churned, and tears came to my eyes. The cigar that I had been holding fell from my trembling hand. [If one is wondering why I was watching such a video, my answer is that I am a philosopher and a cultural critic, and I must encounter the world if I am to remain, uh, intellectually viable.] Now I am not sharing this to make my readers think that I am occupying a higher level of moral sensitivity than the apes who posted comments cheering the "fighter" on, or lamenting the poor quality of the video ("the fucker's hands were in the way! I wanted to see the knife go into the muthafucker's neck!"). Yes, a genuine quote -- and there were many more in that league. I am not going to post the link. Any interested person may easily find that video, or similar ones, for him or herself. But yes, I am grateful for my response. Even though I have been able to watch such grand contributions to cinematic art as the Saw films, or Hostel, and merely cringe in bilious amusement, the fact that an authentic film of real torture and death made me recoil in genuine horror (and upon reflection, sorrow) is sufficient evidence, for me, that I am not nothing, that a moral center exists in me, and that art must do more than provide a "false confrontation" with the sickness of our world. Art must defy the sickness, and produce realms wherein "the Spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth" (as Poe put it in "Eleonora").
(Boris Vallejo, Aurora and Tithonus)
I am an atheist, though not one of the types that routinely bash religion or seek to blame all the ills of our planet on believers in what Gore Vidal memorably called "sky-god religions." As a philosopher (albeit one who has wandered quite far from the mainstream academic world during the past few years) I have sought to temper my atheism -- which could easily lead me to the type of "miserablist" intellectual stance of a thinker like Ligotti -- with a devotion to the higher emotional aspects of life: poetry, art, music -- my writing. Unfortunately, love -- which I knew once upon a time -- has been naggingly absent from my life since She left me (and I feel that perhaps She reads my work from time to time, so if I am correct in that, I hope you are ... alone and thinking of me). Anyway, intellectually I am in the camp of Sartre and others, for whom the absence of a god is an "embarrassment." It is not so much that without "Him" we lose all hope of "finding values in an intelligible heaven" (as Sartre put it in Existentialism is a Humanism) but rather that we lose the emotional foundation that makes art more than just a diversion or, if one wishes to use the psychologically loaded term, sublimation. On a very personal note -- and is not a personal essay meant for precisely this manner of confessional writing? -- my atheism has been, is, largely an act of resigning myself to the gray exterior and hollow interior of my existence. When I was in prison some years ago (for a minor, alcohol-related offense) I found solace in listening to the classical music station and reading the poetry of Keats. Although the bible sat on my bunkside table, I rarely picked it up. And now, living the life of a somewhat bohemian (that is a nearly obsolete word, isn't it?) bachelor, I can use the words of Durtal, in the decadent masterpiece Là-Bas by Huysmans, to describe (in comforting third-person) my moral, ethical, aesthetic, and practical situation:
Unmarried, without settled income ... he sometimes cursed the existence he had shaped for himself. At times, weary of attempting to coerce words to do his bidding, he threw down his pen and looked into the future. He could see nothing ahead of him but bitterness and cause for alarm, and, seeking consolation, he was forced to admit that only religion could heal, but religion demanded in return so arrant a desertion of common sense, so pusillanimous a willingness to be astonished at nothing, that he threw up his hands and begged off.
Yet he was always playing with the thought, indeed he could not escape it. For though religion was without foundation it was also without limit and promised a complete escape from earth into dizzy, unexplored altitudes. Then, too, Durtal was attracted to the Church by its intimate and ecstatic art, the splendour of its legends, and the radiant naïveté of the histories of its saints.
Indeed, religion -- especially history-saturated Roman Catholicism and the equally storied and somewhat more exotic Eastern Orthodox Church (to which I belonged, with my ex-wife, for several years) -- can function in one's life as an intensely present work of living art. While never providing answers for me, religion -- when I practiced it -- provided responses, and that was sufficient to tame my roiling thoughts and lend force to my writing. The unmediated response to the love of a woman; the joining of emotion and the critical faculty brought about by the presence of a beautiful -- and yes I'll say it, divine -- soul with whom one is unquestioningly in love; the "torment" of beauty, as described so well by the Eastern Orthodox philosopher Christos Yannaras -- in a book that my ex-wife cruelly stole from me during our divorce: cruel because my copy contained numerous marginal and interlinear notes that I will never be able to recall or recover -- entitled, rather ironically, Person and Eros -- in words worth quoting here: "Erotic 'wonder' in the presence of the uniqueness of a physical beauty is always an invitation to communion and relation, an attraction which aims at union, at the satisfaction of the existential desire [to assuage] the agonizing character of physical beauty, the torment that accompanies the aesthetic experience of beauty" (pp. 83-84). Yannaras is speaking of the overwhelming desire to possess, in a transformative ekstasis, a beauty so perfect that it causes what can only be described as unbearable ontological pain. In his book he uses the term eros in the far-reaching sense found in the Neoplatonic philosophers and Platonizing Church Fathers, i.e., "an ontological condition, experienced by the soul that has forgotten its status as divine governor of the material realm and longs for its true condition" (Edward Moore, Plotinus, § d.ii, "Love and Happiness," in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/plotinus/). This is neither poesy nor description of a dream-life; it is a reality known by anyone who has been simultaneously blessed and cursed with the inescapable condition of being in love with another person. That other person is the source of our salvation, the one with whom we will make the "about-face," as I have called the Platonic epistrophê, "resulting in an instant union of the soul with its divine principle, understood as an idealized, changeless form of contemplation" (cf. Moore, Origen of Alexandria, section 4.c, "Eternal Motion of Souls," in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/origen-of-alexandria/). I wrote those quoted lines many years ago, when I still shared my life and self with Her, and believed that the "divine principle" -- which I will now call, with rather more maturity, and, perhaps, cynicism, the combination of intense sexual desire and emotional comfort -- was found in this world when the ontic space separating persons was bridged through love, to become an ontological reality. This Heideggerian language is more than intentional; it aids my recollection of Her, for whom Heidegger was Her own bridge into the realm of philosophy, wherein She has, I believe, found a permanent home, while I remain in my little space -- I will not call it home -- "Unrespited, unpitied, unrepriev'd" ... "And what is else not to be overcome?" (these lines are from Milton, Paradise Lost, for those who need to be told).
"That is all that any career pessimist can hope for -- to put on show the horrors he has seen with his naked eye and the pain he has felt with his frail body" (Ligotti, p. 25). And how does that help the situation, mitigate the lacerations of memory? Religion, as I have discovered the hard way -- that is, through the worst of all possible intellectual wake-up calls: divine mockery (I shall explain) -- can only pull one into a society of people who have either never felt real pain, or who have wrapped themselves so tightly in the shroud of living death that pain, or memory of pain, no longer matters -- indeed, it is as though it never mattered. "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21:4 KJV). My hope, of course, was not that the former things should pass away, but that they should return, resume, so that I might be given the opportunity to undo the wrongs I committed in my youth (a relative term). As I prayed one evening with friends -- during my separation from Her; the divorce was not yet finalized -- asking, nay begging, God to touch Her heart, not even to lead Her to forgive me, but only to open the door (literally and figuratively) to me once again, so that I may put into action all that I had learned, I was told I had a phone call. It was a mutual friend -- so I thought -- telling me that if only I entered into recovery for my alcoholism, She would give our marriage another chance. Oh, how I rejoiced! My friends believed that our prayers had "worked," and that night was one of pure joy. But I found out, not long after, that the "friend" had simply felt sorry for me, and was sure (in his own mind) that She would eventually come around. So he jumped the gun, so to speak, and told me what he was certain would happen -- only it didn't. She had no intention of giving me another chance, nor even of speaking to me again. And so it remains to this day. Five years later. And my love for Her is as strong as it has ever been.
If one of the aims of art is to free one from the shackles of an unbearable existence, it is happening for me, slowly. My atheism, which took hold the moment I realized that, if God exists, He would never have permitted me that false hope, would never have allowed me to spend a night awake in blissful expectation of holding Her again, only to find out, the next morning, that it was all an ill-advised but well-meaning effort by a friend to bring me some comfort: he had never even spoken to her. No god would use one's faith against one. Sure, some told me that it was the work of the devil, in whom I had never believed anyway. So after my release from prison, I took to the bottle, and stopped thinking, for a while, about anything. Various women entered my life, only to dissolve into the morning or evening or some gray area in between. Several times the words "I love you" escaped my mouth, heard by the wrong person but meant for the one who will never be truly absent. I began reading again. Not philosophy or patristics, at least not as much as before. Today I am reading, as much as possible, the works of those who, in Sidney's words, attempt to "make the too-much-loved earth more lovely." For it is here that salvation is to be found, not in some hoped-for other realm, and certainly not in the presence of another person, not in a life shared with a beloved, however beautiful and inspiring of erotism she may be. As I write for no known audience anymore, I feel a freedom that I have not known until now. That freedom made its force felt just the other day, when I gave a lecture on personal essay writing at a local library. Mostly everyone there was yearning to communicate something about themselves, as one would expect, but there were a few -- I sensed strongly -- who were trying to reveal something to themselves. Such revelation, as James Baldwin stated so clearly in his essay on "The Creative Process," requires us to "cultivate ... the state of being alone." In the last analysis -- and I mean that literally, for I am through with analyzing that which allows me not only to live, but to flourish -- the darkest place is our own mind, our own inner self, and I suppose I'll say it, our soul. "The role of the artist," writes Baldwin, "is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that forest; so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place." In all my loneliness -- and it has nearly destroyed me over the past few years -- I have only at last come to understand that "a human dwelling place" need not be one that is shared with another person, no matter how beautiful they are. The gilding of nature, the flowering of the self, "the word stronger and more delicious than any" (Walt Whitman), the early morning rising with something to do that requires only ... my own mind and my laptop. Freedom. Religion is not necessary, nor is god, or "spirituality" (a term meaning everything and nothing); the only necessity is that I keep on seeking the one great escape that will bring me to a place where there is always good weather.
Many years ago I presented a paper entitled "Salvation and the Human Ideal: Plato, Plotinus, Origen" at Villanova University; and in the audience sat my beloved. The paper was written for Her, even though we had only been together for a few months at that point. My thesis was that the original goal of philosophy was to seek salvation through self-knowledge. Not an earth-shattering claim, I know. But what set my paper apart was my insistence on the intimate connection between intellect and emotion; that when these two are not artificially separated but entwined erotically (in the Neoplatonic sense mentioned above) we achieve a natural state of glory in the here-and-now. I was struggling, at that time (between 2000 and 2001), with the supernatural elements of religion, and felt strongly that true salvation occurs when two lovers unite, and that evil is not the absence of good (as Proclus and others argued throughout the ages) but the absence of someone to love. Religion, by placing evil on a metaphysical level, treats things like cruelty, torture, all the barbarisms of our life-world -- including, for me, the ever-present absence of Her -- as forces emanating from something beyond the world, caused ultimately by one Force that will eventually be overcome. "Such is the function of the concept of evil -- to give glamour, in both meanings of the word, to our lives. Pain, on the other hand, is an unglamorous fact of life and cannot be raised or lowered to the status of a concept, either moral or metaphysical, and compresses the distance between the condition of being and the condition of suffering" (Ligotti, p. 28). This might be true, if truth can even be invoked for the sake of such a topic as Ligotti's book covers, but for me the fact remains that I am alone, and my only salvation must come through art -- for it is the only way I know of doing what must be done -- that is, to do what a lover does (in Baldwin's words): "reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real."
(c) 2015 Edward Moore
