The great nineteenth-century violinist and composer Henri Vieuxtemps took less than two weeks to learn Beethoven's deeply personal D major violin concerto (opus 61). The performance by Jennifer Koh at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY (July 19, 2015) is painful evidence, for me, that Romanticism is cold in the ground. Koh remarked in a pre-concert interview that she had to walk away from the concerto for six years, in order to purge herself (I suppose) of the accrued influences of the ages. Would that she had not! Her lack of vibrato, slides, and position changes, and other expressive devices of the great Romantics and their heirs, up to and including Perlman, Shaham, and even Kremer, were absent or barely audible. I recall with immense pleasure hearing, as a child, a recording played for me by my grandfather, of Grumiaux singing -- not just playing! -- this astounding piece of music. One can only imagine how Vieuxtemps must have opened the piece: silvery lines slinking like enchanted serpents through the Arcadian lushness of the orchestra. Oh well. Jennifer Koh might as well have been a computer, spitting out the data pumped into her by some unimaginative programmer. It is sad, because I adore this concerto, and I recall the days of yore when I attempted -- and failed -- to perform it myself. It is no easy task to sing Beethoven's notes. Yet here we are, in a day and age in which lovely women with little talent gain attention for simply looking fine on the concert platform, damn the performance. A notable exception, of course, is Julia Fischer: beautiful but overwhelmingly gifted with the voice of the ages. Listen, if you'd like to recover from Koh's languid performance, to this fine example of the decaying Romantic art. We need a necromancer, a true master of the black arts, to raise Classical music once again to the demanding, sensual, and even subversive artform that it once was, and should be. I regret wasting the better part of my Sunday evening listening to Koh drag her tender heels through one of the most verdant soundscapes of the repertoire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N15_3_TP7ISunday, July 19, 2015
Friday, July 17, 2015
Something Deeply Personal, but not Maudlin (I think)
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
~ Sylvia Plath
Nobody likes a sob story, so I shall try not to torment my reader with sobbing, moaning, or whimpering. Yet here is something indicative of the United States of Armed-Buzz-Cutted-Uniformed-Officer-Worshipping-Nonthinkers. To get deeply personal, I am in treatment for bipolar disorder and alcoholism; I have been for some time. After my divorce (2010) I made two (obviously) unsuccessful suicide attempts, swam into the deepest ocean of booze I could find, had unprotected sex (thank whatever maker-critter that exists that I am not dying of something slow and creeping), and picked fights with guys much bigger and more agile than I. But I continued to read, write, and even lecture. Through it all, my ex-wife never once dropped me a line to ask about the piece of phosphorescent detritus that my life has become. So be it. However, one bright day, as I sat in my favorite spot by the lake, guzzling from a bottle of cheap gin and reading Keats, I finally decided to put a stop to the decline -- I called the Alcoholics Anonymous hotline and entered a rehabilitation clinic. That was back in 2013. Sure, there have been relapses since then, but for the most part I have remained sober. Yet under the miscropscopic and, yes, well-meaning care of the psychiatric professionals who treated me, it came to light that I am bipolar. Anyone who doesn't know what that means, well, google it. But the short version is this: I get happy and energetic for a day or two, and then I fall into a deep pit of despair and I want to die. So I am on medication and I go to therapy every week; I attend support groups and even -- despite my atheism -- go to A.A. meetings and say the Serenity Prayer with all the other depserate men and women who are taking it one miserable day at a time. I continue to write and have recently done a pretty fun lecture on Hemingway and a few other greats, near-greats, and ingrates of the literary world of the not-too-distant past. Anyway ...
A few days ago I had a notably horrible day. I awoke from a vivid dream of my ex-wife: a love-making scene that lingered after waking -- I could still smell her shampoo and taste her daffodil flesh. The dark corridor of my building was filled with the scent of pot smoke, and someone was arguing in an adjacent apartment. I walked outside, lit a cigar, and felt like every motion was an exercise not merely in futility but in cosmic mockery. I felt as though my very existence was an affront to everything that flourishes under the sun. I called my psychiatrist and went in for a very long session. We talked at great length, and she encouraged me to attend a performance of the student orchestra at the local university, which I did -- after asking a woman old enough to be my mother to go with me (but that is an ongoing drama with little bearing on this account). It was a nice time: Mozart's 14th symphony, rather languid but pleasing. When I returned home, I drank a few beers, took a few klonopin, and went to sleep. The days meandered: I read a new Clive Barker book, nothing deep, and listened to a lot of Art Blakey and even some Sun Ra. And now for the kicker ...
Just a short while ago, as I was finishing my dinner, a knock came at my door, and when I opened it I was shocked to see two burly armed police officers and a petite, unthreatening woman staring me down. She was a representative of the clinic where I go for my psychiatric treatment, there to check up on me (fair enough). But what bothered me was the two grim-faced officers, hands on weapons, staring at me like I was a criminal. So Edward being Edward, I asked them if they were planning to shoot me in the back. They didn't answer, so I said, "Oh, you won't shoot me, I'm not black." Again, no response, just threatening stares. After assuring the woman that I was not planning to harm myself or anyone else, I demanded that they leave my apartment. They did not immediately did so, as they should have by law. Instead, they made me wait while the woman called her "supervisor" to report the outcome of the visit. Shortly thereafter -- after the armed goons looked around my private residence -- they left.
Is this the United States I am living in? Apparently, one cannot have a mental illness without trigger-happy conformists showing up at one's door whenever they feel like it. In case you haven't figured it out, I despise cops. Anyone who wants to walk about armed and have the power to incarcerate one's fellow citizens should not be permitted to do so. Only the truly caring, altruistic ones among us ... Oh wait, where the fuck are they?
So here I am, in early middle age, looking down a barrel of hopelessness. I have no woman in my life, no real friends, no career any longer ... Shit, I don't even have a cat (landlord won't let me). Why do I write, and care. I picked up a book about Pope Francis today, planning to review it. But who will care? I'd like to say "fuck it" and stop at the liquor store before it closes (I have about an hour). Someone said that every writer writes for some one special person. I write for my ex-wife. She was the goddess who painted the world with the ever-shifting colors of her diverse, fascinating mind ... and tantalized me with the liquid silk of her clothes and the delicate arches of her feet, that made the ground grow rigid at her touch, as I still do -- albeit an imaginary touch.
BY ROBERT HERRICK
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!
The Ruin (Part I.)
Anglo-Saxon Poem (ca. 750 C.E.)
Translation © 2015 Edward Moore
[Allegory is a neglected art nowadays. Chester, England, and the memory of She Who is Dearest saturates these lines: only part of the surviving fragmentary poem, which I plan to translate in full in the coming weeks, is plastered here today. -- E.M.]
Well-wrought were these walls, ruined by fate
Once proud work of giants pulled down
Now without roof, nothing remains
But pock-marked bricks, broken and strewn about
To tell of the great age when mighty men
Consigned now to the crusty ground
Made these monuments -- Alas! they are
Gripped by the unforgiving earth
Upon which now walks another race,
Until the long count of years
Overwhelms them too.
Many lives of men this wall outlasted
Battle-stained and storm-wracked
Withstood the onslaught of glory-seekers
But now it bows to the ground.
Monday, July 13, 2015
"Whoa there, palsy-walsy ... Mama spank."
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs [Project Gutenberg EBook 2004 #6852]
After the years of drinking, the months of pill-popping, the weeks of crying out like a finger-nail-biting brat at my psychiatrist's office, and the days of singing Marley's "Redemption Songs" in the shower (with aid of a fine drug called Lithium), I have at last begun to enjoy Bobby Timmons again. His pattern-finding piano style, which is like a reconnaisance of musical possibilities with a faulty set of binoculars, is suited to that which I can only call the soul's lament: too tired and sick of the sun to do more than recline in the shadows and murmur -- eloquently to oneself. This is of great importance to me, for sound is the only power capable of scrambling the all-too-organized onslaught of memories that has become increasingly vocal in my dreams.
She was much more than pretty. ... She was smiling, a subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought.
She wasn't hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane ...
Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle ... If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from a parapet of a sky-scraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. [my emphasis]
In the novella, Faye gives both Tod and Homer a chance to become fervent worshippers of disinterested female beauty. As I have written elsewhere (in my piece on Anglo-Saxon heroics), the decline of manly notions of self-sacrifice as heroism (exemplified in poems like "The Battle of Maldon," the Finnsburh fragment, and, of course, Beowulf) and the rise (so to speak) of chivalry as the noble licking of the female shoe (exemplified in the works of the great troubadors) made it possible for a man to really know himself sexually.
Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. (Madame Venus, in Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 10)
Actually, I did not write this explicitly in the piece on Anglo-Saxon heroics, but I'm writing it now. To be overwhelmed by a woman -- in all the gasping, pleading, writhing, breathless ways possible -- is, for me, the height of sexual experience and the utmost expression of my love for the one who entices, torments in exquisite fashion, and ultimately fulfills me -- by releasing me. I mean, of course, the release of orgasm, which only has meaning when the eyes of the cummer meet those of the one making it happen. I look up, out of the world, only held to sanity by the embrace of the one into whom I pour myself.
I am not sure what to make of The Day of the Locust. I only know that Faye stood out, for me, as a proto-dominatrix for whom the torment she inflicted upon her worshippers (and I consider Tod to have been a more deeply afflicted fane-builder than Homer) amounted to a trifle. For she only sought fame as an actress, to be loved by the faceless crowd. Her desire was the type that no single person can fulfill, and so she was inaccessible -- by accident of temperament, not by conscious design. My ex-wife sought, not fame, but a type of success that was peculiar to her: a carefully maintained and organized exertion of her abilities in a finite sphere (if that makes even a subatom of sense). In this, I had no effect, no influence, no staying-power -- once she achieved her goal, it was on to the next thing. Sex was a matter of desire meeting opportunity. For me, it was a world to be explored with no waystations prepared in advance. In music, one might compare Bobby Timmons at his unbuttoned best with the nearly neurotic tight-laced perfectionist mouldings of Steely Dan. There is perfection and grace in both, but the soul (and I am getting increasingly comfortable using that word again) lavishes itself upon itself most primally in the former, and finds itself a carven glazed monument in the latter.
* * * * *
She was, indeed, much more than pretty. That is a word that has become nearly obsolete, at least among the younger set. It is too cute and ... small. Which is precisley what it means: small, dainty, cuddly, easy to control. A pretty woman is a woman who is on one's level, who doesn't demand much in the way of intellectual investment -- she may not be easy sexually, but she is easy to talk to. Pretty much. My ex-wife demanded much in the way of talk; she had deep notions and her ideas, if not well-developed, were certainly large entities scratching frantically at the door of logos. Speaking with her was a welcome challenge; and as the conversation increased, so did my desire.
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. (Bill Evans, "Improvisation in Jazz," liner notes to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue [1959])
The excitement of the moment, when "direct deed is the most meaningful reflection" (ibid.), produces a space in which we may adjust the temperature to our liking. A mixing of metaphors here, but it makes sense. Think of the power resident in a single word from the one you love: productive of peace, elation, comfort, and the stress of response -- all in one elaborate yet tantalizingly simple moment. It is like the call in music ... the opening provided by the bassist, whose thunder, upon receding, gives the violin a chance to soar mightily into a realm of once repressed, now expressed, memories. Music does that to a soul -- there it is again -- music takes nous into a realm of instant communication, in which "I don't know" is not an option. Music demands a response, and a call in return. The beauty of the woman to whom one replies musically is not prettiness times ten, it is awesome Beauty. The sublime.
"And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her" (Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 119). Such is the metaphor of the one who has found his perfect match, only to be aware -- in a manner so painful as to defy words -- "that the end was in sight even before she did. All he could do to prevent its coming was to increase his servility and his generosity. He waited on her hand and foot" (West, The Day of the Locust, p. 143). Any man who has ever been in this position knows it does not work. It annoys the goddess, and the whipping and the kissing ceases. Role-play is the closest one can ever come to the experience of loving a woman from below, from beneath her exquisite feet, while gazing into her incomparable eyes. Speech does not occur here, and so the tearing of the ever-so-delicate parchment is not a danger. Yet the comforting absence of speech, the pure anticipation of what may or may not occur -- Will she permit an orgasm? Will she make me pass out beneath her latex-clad bottom? -- these wonders are safe possibilities. No matter what she does or does not do, when the role-playing session is over, she remains my beloved. Yet the time comes -- not for all, but for me -- when the fun is over and the the fear is not the luxurious fear of the tightening of the plastic bag over my head as she brings me to climax, but the very real fear of knowing that she has contacted attorneys, and my days of hearing her voice and kissing her with all the love a mind-body composite can bear to feel without going mad are over. Forever.
I remember the glory of seeing her so long ago, in her bathrobe, gloriously barefoot, smiling the placid smile of one who has something so special planned that it must be concealed beneath the subterfuge of a bedtime gesture: a night of placing my tongue in places that produce the most mellifluous moans ...
The Day of the Locust is a book about the loss of a goddess who never had a chance to be genuinely adored and worshipped, for both Tod and Homer were uncreative souls, incapable of knowing that Faye's wall of apparent unobtainability was in fact a result of "boredom and disappointment" -- for a powerful woman despises uncreative men.
"Yes--you have awakened my dearest dream," I cried. "It has slept long enough."
"And this is?" She put her hand on my neck.
I was seized with a sweet intoxication under the influence of this warm little hand and of her regard, which, tenderly searching, fell upon me through her half-closed lids.
"To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship." (Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 48)
And this most creative man got his wish -- for a while, for it eventually turned into a hell. But one must experience the fullness of female dominance before undertanding that it forces a man to appreciate what made the troubadors tick, what made poets like Byron cherish in verse the all-too-rare gift of unconditonal love, or which made Wyatt write, in a different vein, "But all is turned now through my gentleness / Into a strange fashion of forsaking." One never knows if one's love is truly returned, if the light behind the beloved's eyes is burning within or simply a reflection of one's own. The only truth, really, the truth that can be experienced without question, is that of plain old forsaking. When I fell upon my knees, kissed the hem of her bathrobe -- much later in our marriage -- and watched as she turned away in disgust, I knew with a certainty unknown before: I was despised. Not for lack of creativity but for my addiction to the bottle.
She whipped so hard that the blood flowed, and that, at last, notwithstanding my heroic spirit, I cried and wept and begged for mercy. She then had me untied, but I had to get down on my knees and thank her for the punishment and kiss her hand. (Venus in Furs, p. 42)
All is metaphor here (well, not entirely), but I never did get a chance to kiss her hand. I was utterly forsaken.
* * * * *
I am writing this piecemeal, after a bout of blackout drunkenness and a trip to the hospital for detox. It is 4:30 AM and I am drinking black coffee by the potfull and writing in spite of myself. I realized in the hospital that if all were to end, it would be like this:
"One step further," [Marilynn] commanded. "Now kneel down, and kiss my foot."
She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it. (Venus in Furs, p. 99)
Yes, I was and am a fool -- but not an uncreative one. I did not, like the silly Tod in West's tale, run madly into a crowd who possessed no "mental equipment for leisure" (p. 178). But leisure is not what the supersensualist wants. The lovely Lisa [she was / is a woman from Philadelphia whom I "dated" for a bit after my wife left me; Lisa was, perhaps still is, a sexual acrobat with ever-open legs] enjoyed the leisure of free sex: experimental episodes with bondage equipment was not her thing, but she did give me several handjobs that made me scream so loudly that the neighbors complained -- so I guess I can't complain. One day, as "punishment" for forgetting to buy her bourbon, she made me remove the shoes she'd been wearing that hot summer day and kiss her feet.
What does this have to do with anything? Not a fucking thing, except that I am sober and suffering from insomnia and need to ejaculate some words. I am listening to the Stones, Exile on Main Street, and none of it makes a damned bit of sense. I look at the unsmoked cigar sitting on my desk and wonder why I am still alive.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
The Lonely Bachelor Attempts to Gild Nature
(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
Friday, June 19, 2015
Rubato, Vibrato, and Primordiality
Some hefty thoughts on a light-hearted topic: violin music and writing
© 2015 Edward Moore
I recently had the rare privilege of spending an afternoon discussing the art of the personal essay with several accomplished writers practicing in various genres, ranging from the novel, to the short story, poetry, and spiritual memoir. My main reason for proposing and conducting that little symposium was to prove to myself that the personal essay -- an august genre that seem to me to be fading or, rather, dispersing into the realm of tweetable textese effusions -- is still among us, even if it is mostly residing in desk drawers or on unaccessed sections of hard drives. One of my hobbies (it seem that term is rarely used anymore) is to seek out intelligent editorials, regardless of the positions being espoused, since I am a great lover of language and take delight in verbal virtuosity. Many years ago, when I was working on my doctorate, I used to take frequent breaks to check out commentary on Slate, for example -- Christopher Hitchens being my favorite contributor -- or Eric Alterman's Altercation weblog. The writing was always energetic and often gave the impression of having been executed in great haste, with devil-may-care abandon. Indeed, I would imagine Hitchens or Alterman walking away from their computer, after posting an especially incendiary piece, in dismay over a word or sentence or an entire paragraph that they wished they could "unsend" (if only such a button existed!). How many times have I -- all of us! -- felt the regret and even the knotted stomach after writing something for the masses that was out of line with our public image! Consistency, that "hobgoblin of little minds," in Emerson's ever-apt phrase, is what makes, if not a poor thinker, certainly a poor essayist. The daring excursion into new territory, the dangerous flirtation with the hydra of devil's advocacy -- heart-pounding challenges to the intellectual structure that protects us from the open fields of insanity or absurdity -- is what makes writing exciting, and more than just a production to be downloaded, scrolled through, and forgotten. It is what raises mere typing to the status of art. This notion of mine was discussed in the aforementioned symposium, and the analogy with music was brought up, by Yours Truly.
Many, many years ago -- before the dissertation, that milestone which brought on post-Ph.D.-partum depression (with which I still struggle) -- I was a budding young violinist, spending several hours a day carefully sawing my way through a second movement of a Mozart concerto, and later, planting the seeds of carpal tunnel syndrome with Paganini's 24 Caprices or the diabolically seductive D minor concerto of Sibelius. When I began to play publicly, the relatively easy pieces from the Baroque and early Classical periods satisfied me, to an extent; but with the backup of a good pianist or, later, with members of the string quartet for which I served as second violinist, a safety net (to use an old cliché) was in place, of sorts. Granted, one could screw up, but unless the error was glaring, the pianist or the other members with whom one was performing could play over the glitch rather easily, so that only an expert or a really well-attuned layperson would notice. The "fun" really began when I played solo -- i.e., unaccompanied -- pieces, like a Paganini caprice, or the "Last Rose of Summer" variations by Ernst, or one of the Ysaÿe sonatas, et cetera; for it was then that I became aware of the hobgoblin of consistency. Was I going to do my best to play each note exactly as it appeared on the page (following the fingering and bowing suggestions of Ševčik or Galamian)? Or was I going to engage in that wonderfully liberating practice known as rubato? This works quite well, as I discovered, with a rather tedious piece such as the second Caprice of Paganini, or, for a more recondite example, Ernst's D major Concertino, which easily lulls one into passivity if those seemingly interminable scales of thirds and sixths aren't rubato-ized. Even in the grandest piece of the violin repertoire, the sacred Solo Sonatas and Partitas of J. S. Bach, some embellishment injects an authentic periodicity and contemporary excitement to these immortal works, as Isabelle Faust has demonstrated so well in her recent recordings.
In the liner notes to her 2013 recording of pieces by one of Paganini's finest successors, Pablo de Saraste, Julia Fischer (pictured right) explains why the distinction between artistically serious works and virtuoso showpieces is often a spurious one. The effect of music is not either / or -- that is, there should be no effort to separate "highbrow" intellectual music from "lowbrow" emotional music; the profound Reformation Symphony by Mahler versus Wieniawski's Légende, for example. And in an earlier interview [http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/201010/11702/] discussing her recording of Paganini's 24 Caprices, Fischer states that she "approached them as I would a Mozart concerto." Taken by themselves, the pieces are indeed inviting of flashy playing, and a performer who prides himself on his ability to do a fine job dazzling an audience with, say, number 9, must -- if he is to take in, and communicate, the full scope of Paganini's accomplishment -- view the Caprices as a single work, or "cycle," as Julia Fischer puts it. "When you play [the 24 Caprices] in a cycle you have to pay much more attention to the musical differences of the caprices -- the audience shouldn't be bored after a few caprices and think it's all the same. If you just play, for example, 13 today and, let's say, 19 next week, it doesn't matter if the atmosphere is very similar. In the cycle, you have to find the differences." Indeed, differences. Not similarities or consistency. An effective essayist (to return to the topic that introduced the musical sidebar) will not compose pieces that are predictable. In a rather ironic statement, given the overall predictability of his opinions, the philosopher Nietzsche wrote that "The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind" (Daybreak § 573). ["Nietzsche needed persons, not masks, for his philosophy," wrote Thomas Ligotti, in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2007), p. 31. This is a most telling remark, and one needs to read Ligotti's book carefully to unpack it.] Music is, of course, a nondiscursive artform -- i.e., it is not concerned with language and the expression of communicable or iterable (to use a postmodern term) meaning. Rather, music strikes something in us -- I was about to say a chord -- that is primal, and which precedes such intelligible noetic constructs as the concept, the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, et cetera -- though music does function in a sort of logical manner, following rules that are more honored in the breach than the observance. When Julia Fischer speaks of the "differences" that make the 24 Caprices a "cycle" rather than just a collection of showpieces, she is referring, I think, to the artist's ability to don as many masks as possible, in order to gain a desired effect. Nietzsche also wrote that "the will to a system is a lack of integrity" (Twilight of the Idols I.26), and while donning masks may seem like a lack of integrity, I think that, given the unthinking blandness of so much commercial music -- and entertainment in all genres that attempt to pass as art -- the ability to don a mask while remaining artistically vibrant is to keep the life-force flowing in those areas of human expression where the person -- a unique, unrepeatable entity (ancient Greek, hupostasis) -- is still sufficiently protean to be interesting. T. S. Eliot remarked, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) that "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Indeed, as I write this I am listening to various performances by Julia Fischer on YouTube -- each one a new prosôpon placed upon her inimitable hupostasis; at the moment, Tschaikovsky's violin concerto. How different she is here, in the rather lugubrious transition to the ebullient final movement, from her light-hearted prancing in Paganini's La Campanella!
Poetry, it seems, is the closest linguistic artform to music, for obvious reasons. The rules are there, and a poet who is able, at the right moment, to bend or break the rules for the sake of personal expression, gains notoriety. Ezra Pound, I think, is a poet who came as close to being a musician of the word as it is possible to be. The reason for this, I believe, was his devotion to the art of translation: taking an existing work and from that raw material, that hulê (to again use an ancient Greek philosophical term), producing an entirely new work, albeit one which rests upon an hupokeimenon (another Greco-Roman, or more accurately patristic, philosophical term) or substratum from which one can only depart so far before the work degenerates into self-serving grandiosity. Pound's Canto I, a very loose translation of a Renaissance translation of part of Homer's Odyssey (the descent to Hades), displays the manner in which Pound's mastery of the rhythm -- if not all the grammatical niceties -- of Anglo-Saxon poetry enabled him to make free-flowing (rubato-ized) music out of this ancient substrate.
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Translating in order to produce an effect -- an effect that the translator has already felt, through his or her experience of the work -- is what every fine poet or musician does. A performance of a composed piece of music is a translation; and success is measured by the performer / translator's ability to produce both admiration and a sort of misgiving in the listener or reader. I have often that felt the most successful performances -- whether they be essays, poems, novels, or interpretations of a musical piece -- are the ones that unsettle me in some ineffable way. To be taken beyond language, conception, cogency, into the realm of the primal, is to experience beauty emerging from the roiling darkness as the inspiration of the artist clarifies the prima materia. Now perhaps I am getting too philosophical about something that is supposed to liberate consciousness from the trammels of structure and stricture. But one would have to be sufficiently philisitinized, I believe, not to sense that something is seriously wrong with the artistic world of twenty-first century America. Agendas rule the day, and pure art -- Was there ever such a thing? I think so (topic for another effusion) -- has become utilized for socio-political purposes. Ezra Pound was perhaps writing "nonsense" (as his biographer Humphrey Carpenter stated) when he made the following statement about music (in his introduction to his 1911 translations of Cavalcanti):
Rhythm is perhaps the most primal thing known to us ... music is ... pure rhythm, rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation of rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these various rhythms.
But I think, on the primal level, we respond to rhythms in speech in a most powerful way -- which is why poetry was the first form of written communication. Easily memorizable, onomatopoeic, and susceptible to virtually infinite variations. Quite like music. And like vibrato on a violin ... when our pitch is a tad off, that wonderful shaking of the wrist permits the minor correction that only a bona fide expert would recognize as a pitch adjustment.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
The Art of the Personal Essay
A Two-Part Seminar on Essay Writing with
Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D.
at the
Sayreville Public Library
June 18 and 25, 2015
http://www.sayrevillelibrary.org/
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.
~ E. B. White
One writes out of one thing only -- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
~ James Baldwin
The English word essay derives from the French essai, meaning "attempt" (from the verb essayer, "to try"). The self-obsessed, and utterly brilliant, sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne called his collection of writings on numerous topics -- ranging from friendship, to cannibalism, and just about everything in between -- essais, and so we usually call a short piece devoted to a single topic which the writer is attempting to explain, an essay. However, an essay may be quite long, even book-length. Jacques Derrida's groundbreaking work Of Grammatology, for example -- which ushered in the deconstructionist movement in literary and cultural theory -- was called an essay. My entire career as a writer has been devoted to the composition of essays, some book-length and highly technical (my works on Origen of Alexandria and Plato's Academy, for example), others shorter and more accessible, on topics of personal interest, such as favorite authors, music, artworks, or -- less often -- political and social concerns. There are two types of essays: the formal, a carefully constructed defense of a position, concept, or idea (a doctoral dissertation or a master's thesis are examples of a formal essay), and the informal or personal essay, which can be as long or as short as the writer wishes, and on any topic or topics under the sun. There are no strict rules for the personal essay -- and therein lies the difficulty; freedom can lead to extravagance, sloppiness, logorrhea (diarrhea of the pen, or keyboard). For the personal essay is rather like the guitar -- it is easy to play a guitar poorly, difficult to play one well. But when one plays well, it can be an extraordinary experience. Just recall Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen at their best. A personal essay, when written poorly, might be rambling, or confused and confusing, or simply boring. When written well, it can have a profound effect on the reader, and bring lasting satisfaction to the writer.
The most difficult part of the personal essay is choosing a topic -- or at least it should be. Just because an event or experience or idea is important or interesting or profound to you, does not necessarily mean it will be so for your reader. My first trip to Providence, RI -- the birthplace and lifelong home of my favorite author, H. P. Lovecraft -- when I was nineteen, was a deeply moving experience for me, one of the milestones of my career as a writer, thinker, and -- without sounding too dramatic, I hope -- as a person. To simply write a chronicle of the events that occurred during that visit would be, I fear, to bore my reader -- which is why I have never done so. I could easily write of the John Hay Library, where I held Lovecraft's manuscripts (with the appropriate protective gloves on my eager hands) and flirted with the pretty librarian; where I strolled up the nearly vertical streets of Stamper's Hill, stopping before the various pre-Revolutionary homes that served as the loci of events in his tales; where, at sunset, I sat across the river and watched the sun set aflame the dome of the Christian Science church, which crowns the hill "as London is crowned by St. Paul's." Indeed, I could go into detail about my youthful and futile efforts to write like Lovecraft and how, after that visit, I came into my own, as it were, and decided that -- for all my love of belles lettres and the "dark side of life," as someone put it to me -- my mind is attuned to philosophy, and so here I am, philosophizing to you about essay writing. So, topics. Simply put, if you have to sit and wrack your brain for a topic, you are not ready to write a personal essay. If, however, you have sufficient interests, things you love, like, despise, or wish to change, et cetera -- in short, if you are a thinking human being -- you have the ability to write a personal essay. Some of my recent essays include book reviews, reflections on Manichaeism, a discussion of free speech and terrorism, and a little panegyric on the duos of John Coltrane and Paul Quinichette. Some of these have been published on my blog, The Aristocrat, where I am my own editor and anything goes. Yet I desire readers -- and I have quite a few of them, thankfully -- so I do my best to keep my essays entertaining, and to avoid self-indulgence (I think), which is the temptation of many writers, Yours Truly especially. Hemingway, James Baldwin, and other fine masters of the craft, advised writers to write from personal experience. That is all well and good, for some topics. But it is also fun to go out on a limb, and write of things of which you are not quite sure, to question out loud, as it were, to send your immature ideas out into the world and see if they can hold their own against the numerous linguistic predators lurking in the dark corners of social media. We are fortunate, I think, to live in the digital age, in which any piece of writing we feel like typing can be sent to hundreds of thousands of people instantly, and perhaps get tweeted, go viral, and cause our in-boxes to fill up with praise mail or hate mail or, sometimes -- and it's no big deal (so I tell myself) -- no mail at all.
So what is the difference between a personal essay and a memoir? In an ideal world, an utopian realm in which truth is always told (or written), the only difference would be the extent of topics covered: a memoir would cover the writer's entire life up to the point of writing, with no poetic license taken, nothing omitted, nothing embellished; a personal essay would focus on a single topic or perhaps a few inter-related topics, again with truth-telling the primary concern. However, we do not live in an ideal world. And the first and arguably the greatest memoir ever written, the Confessions of St. Augustine, is filled with pious embellishments, exaggerations, and not a few omissions (though it is easy to read between the lines, in places). Augustine's concern in his memoir was, of course, with himself -- and his goal in writing, to use the poet e. e. cumming's words, was to spill his bright illimitable soul. And in so doing he gave the Western world its first introduction to the inner life of a person. A millennia later, Montaigne allowed his bright, if not illimitable, intellect to shine forth as he ranged over numerous topics, attempting definitive explanations or elucidations of all, yet more often than not simply stopping short, leaving the continuing exploration to the reader. This is the personal essay par excellence, a conversation between the reader and his or her unknown audience -- a linguistic act demanding attention and, if the reader is so inclined, a response. Shakespeare knew the essays of Montaigne, in English translation, and we would not be amiss to call the Bard's inimitable Sonnets personal essays in verse. The subject of the personal essay, then, is not so much the events of the writer's life -- an essay is not necessarily an episode in an autobiography, although it can be! -- as the writer's response to ideas or emotions arising from or provoked by life-events. Indeed, consider Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, for example:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
A personal essay is akin to a caprice in music, i.e., a piece in which the composer allows him or herself free reign, for the sake of experimentation or simply for showing off. One might be familiar with Paganini's 24 Caprices for solo violin. These pieces were written by that outrageous fellow (it was said that he sold his soul to the devil in return for his mastery of the violin) for one purpose: to dazzle the listener with virtuoso fireworks -- and to bedevil the performer with finger-twisting scales and nearly impossible leaps and twirls of the bow. In composing a personal essay, similarly, one may use one's facility with language to show off in grand euphuistic style, to haul even the most mundane topic to the auroral empyrean wherein Tithonus himself will open his eyes wide in juvenescent wonder. In the Hawthorne essay that we are about to read, old Nathaniel takes something as literally yawn-inducing as insomnia and gives us, as we shall soon see, quite a memorable little performance. Here is Hawthorne's "The Haunted Mind": http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html.
Now, just for fun -- instructive fun -- we are going to listen to Hemingway read his piece, "In Harry's Bar in Venice" (recording on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE04BmNmgAI ).
He was rather intoxicated, or pleasantly buzzed, when he recited this. A truly fine example of Hemingway's personal essay style is A Moveable Feast, actually a collection of inter-related essays forming a more or less cohesive narrative. Let us take a moment to read chapter 12, "Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit":
http://charlyawad.com/images/books/A%20Moveable%20Feast%20-%20Ernest%20Hemingway.pdf
Persuade or Convince?
The topic that one chooses for a personal essay need not be one that requires an argument for or against an idea or concept; in other words, you might not have to convince your reader of anything. However, to make the essay interesting, it is a good idea to at least introduce an idea that requires a bit of persuasion. Intelligent people enjoy having their preconceived notions -- or even their deeply held convictions -- challenged. I certainly do. Even if I am not persuaded or convinced (more on that distinction in a moment) I enjoy taking the intellectual ride with the writer. In Hawthorne's essay, he is not making any earth-shattering claims, rather, he is simply taking the reader on a little excursion into his night-world, which he finds valuable for moral and spiritual reasons. For my part, since first reading that essay, many years ago, I have had a different attitude towards insomnia; now, when I wake up in the wee hours, I think of Hawthorne's words, and I reflect on mortality and the purpose and value of life. Or I take a sleeping pill. But either way, Hawthorne's essay has been proven successful -- for I have not forgotten it; its idea has remained in my mind. That is not to say I have come to hold his views on the afterlife; I remain an atheist and a materialist. He would have had to write a very different essay to convince me of an afterlife and a glorious home on high.
The distinction between persuading and convincing: In ancient Greece, in the Classical era, the philosopher Socrates found himself at odds with the great Sophists, i.e., teachers of disputation who specialized in winning arguments by using beautiful language to persuade their listeners of the rightness of their positions. According to Socrates, and his brilliant student Plato, truth is one and indivisible, and can be communicated through accurate language, simple and accessible for all. The Sophists, however, were not concerned with truth; rather, their only concern was with winning arguments. They were the great lawyers of the age, and highly influential. Socrates, in his simple speech, which consisted almost entirely of questions, made the Sophists sound rather silly, as he gradually, through adroit questioning, poked holes in their elaborately constructed arguments. [Let us pause here to review Plato's dialogue Euthyphro: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html] In essay writing, one may of course take the tack of the Sophists, and meander in zig-zag fashion, treating truth as something culturally determined. That is what the philosopher Nietzsche did. One of his famous sayings is: "There are no truths, only interpretations." I would add that while I do not believe in absolute, universal Truth (with a capital 'T') I do believe in personal truths -- and a fine, even a great, essay will communicate some personal truth. I think that Emerson comes closest to doing this, even though his style is rather slippery and aphoristic. Yet when one reflects upon his rather feverishly expressed words, one gets a sense of truth-saying that increases with each reading of his piece. He wrote many more essays besides Self-Reliance, and he is well worth the effort of careful study. [See the full text of Self-Reliance: http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] In fact, the late Harold Bloom (with whom I was fortunate enough to have studied back in my days at NYU, so long ago) made the characteristically hyperbolical statement that "Emerson is God." What he meant, I think, is that Emerson is a writer's writer, not merely a model, but rather a writer to study over and over again for inspiration -- and to me, the Emersonian well (to indulge in a silly pun) is well-nigh inexhaustible. So a personal essay, at its best, is more akin to the linguistic pyrotechnics of the ancient Sophists, for when we sit down to spill our bright illimitable souls we are not attempting to communicate universal truth(s); rather, we are only trying to -- at best -- persuade our readers that we are on to something, and to hopefully invite them to think and / or read about our idea(s) at greater length. If we are aiming to convince, however, we had best sit down to compose a rigorously argued treatise like the Summa Theologia of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Commentary on Romans by Martin Luther, or the Principia Mathematica of Betrand Russell. While these works are monuments of the human intellect, I doubt that many people have them on their bedside tables, or downloaded on their tablets. A well-worn copy of Emerson, however, may easily be found in the home of many a thinking person.
First, Second, or Third Person?
In a 1994 interview, the underread, if not underrated, writer of literary dark fantasy, Thomas Ligotti, recommended first-person narration for its ability to render all effects -- emotional, aesthetic, even intellectual (a rarity!) -- immediate and aesthetically promising. Ligotti mocked the third-person style, in which the writer gives us what amounts to stage directions. For example, "Tom jabbed a thumb over his right shoulder and said 'Scram!'" Or "Tammy stood at the water cooler wondering if Brandon would approach and say 'Hi'." Ligotti likened this style's effect upon the reader to listening to a radio station that plays one bad song after another. This is not to discount completely the third-person style; Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage, or Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, are two examples of the third-person being not only effective but necessary for the impact of the tale. Joyce Carol Oates's recent novel Carthage, however, commits numerous sins to which a writer is tempted when she or he uses third-person. In my recent review essay, "On Unreadable Writing," I take aim at Oates and others who waste our time with telling rather than showing. This distinction is especially important in personal essay writing. I shall quote briefly from that article (published in my blog, The Aristocrat: www.antiplebeian.blogspot.com):
The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing.
Now essay writing is its own artform; even though it has many affinities with the short story and even the novel -- e.g., conjuring of atmosphere, immediacy, a tripartite structure that tends toward a conclusion and even, in the best essays, builds suspense -- a personal essay is just that, personal, and while it must show itself to the reader as an artform, it is crucial that the writer avoid artifice. I do not like being pulled aside by a loquacious person, saying to me, in tremulous voice, Listen to this! I've got to tell you something! You're not gonna believe it! Or, even worse, being a member of a captive audience where said loquacious person is holding forth. I am sure many of you, at some point, have been at a dinner party or other social gathering, in the presence of someone who wants to to tell a story, a personal anecdote. This person usually begins by making some mysterious remarks, in the hope that someone will ask them to continue. Of course, if no one asks, this person will invariably begin the anecdote anyway, much to the annoyance of the captive audience. We have all been in such situations. A very poor essay teller (I will not call him a writer), E. B. White (my apologies to anyone here who enjoys his work -- and I admit to enjoying Charlotte's Web as a child) has the habit, in his essays, of pulling at his reader's wrist, as it were, and insisting that the reader follow him on whatever excursion he has planned. It is amazing to me that anyone follows him. I certainly cannot. But I will quote, as an example of what not to do, the opening of his very long and ironically titled essay, "The Years of Wonder":
Russia's foolish suggestion that a dam be thrown [one does not "throw" a dam, one builds one] across the Bering Strait brings back happy memories of that body of water and of certain youthful schemes and follies of my own. I passed through the Strait and on into the Arctic many years ago, searching for a longer route to where I didn't want to be [if this were being told to me at a dinner party, I'd reach for more wine at this point]. I was also in search of walrus [hearty gulp of wine here]. A dam, I am sure, would have been an annoyance.
Such is the opening paragraph. The reader, of course, has the luxury of closing the book; our hypothetical captive dinner party attendee has no choice but to find out why the dam would have been an annoyance and why, in the name of all that is reverent, the author was seeking out walrus. So does anyone find this captivating? Would you read on? Why?
Before discussing the relative merits or demerits of White's effusion, allow me to place it alongside a much better (in my humble opinion) opening paragraph by James Baldwin, from his essay, "Every Good-bye Ain't Gone":
I am writing this note just 29 years after my first departure from America. It was raining -- naturally. My mother had come downstairs, and stood silently, arms folded, on the stoop. My baby sister was upstairs, weeping. I got into the cab, waved, and drove away.
That's it. Why should we care? Baldwin is showing (not telling) us a scene that has played out numerous times, in all times and all ages, in all countries ... The terse style is reminiscent of Hemingway (this essay was written in 1977, long after Baldwin had established his style) ... Nothing is really special about this opening paragraph. So why read on? Only two questions arise, and they are not earth-shattering: Why is he leaving America again? And why is it "naturally" raining? What does that mean? This is not enough upon which to build an essay -- but it is enough to nudge one gently to the next sentence, which is, "It may be impossible for anyone to tell the truth about his past." Now we are moving along. We have a mystery here. A possible confession of something kept secret for twenty-nine years. I had no problem reading on. But what about E. B. White? What follows his inane opening paragraph? He writes: "I was rather young to be so far north [What does age have to do with longitude and latitude?], but there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place." More inanity. White is writing not to us, but at us, and using a cutesy mode of reminiscence that makes me picture him in a rocking chair, sipping an iced tea and gazing out over a garden in need of weeding. It is a warm, comfortable day, we have nowhere to go, so we might as well indulge the old man and let him ramble -- assuming, of course, we are in a kind mood. Baldwin, by contrast, is in earnest, grim-faced, speaking with gravity, wasting no words. He is not trying to sell us anything, nor is he attempting to buy our time with nice language. He has something to show us, and he is taking us there. That is good writing.
So, what of the second-person mode used by Hawthorne? It is not easy to pull off, frankly, which is why it is rarely used. It takes more than a fine writer to recognize when the subject matter calls for second-person. The opening to "The Haunted Mind" (the title itself is sufficient to pull one in!) involves the reader immediately in an experience that we all have had: "What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself after starting from midnight slumber!" It is worth noting that a mundane topic, or the description or discussion of an experience that we all have had -- many times -- is cast in a new light when it is placed on the page (or on the screen). "In every work of genius," wrote Emerson, "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Indeed, Hawthorne rendered back to us an experience so common -- waking in the middle of the night, thoughts flowing hither and yon -- that we rarely, if ever, give it much thought -- unless, of course, we've experience a nightmare of rare power. What Hawthorne is describing in his little essay is what Wordsworth called "emotion recollected in tranquillity."
You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.
The adjective "gloomy," repeated here, does not accurately describe the feeling of the moment, of waking on a frozen night, alone in the dark with thoughts of mortality -- one's own and others -- roiling in one's brain; the gloom will settle later, when one is awake in the clear light of day, and the tempestuous night-thoughts a distant, but still effective, memory. The power of the second-person style is more than evident here.
Even more rarely do we find the third-person used in personal essays. The intellectual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was written effectively in the third-person, but that work is not an essay -- although the section "The Virgin and the Dynamo" has often been extracted and presented in anthologies as a personal essay. This is not to say that one cannot 'get personal' in the third-person. In my own academic work -- wherein one is expected to be as objective as possible, and the third-person is the rule -- I have attempted many times to give a first-person flavor to my third-person account. Here is an example from a long article on Maximus the Confessor that I wrote for an academic conference back in 2003:
We have seen how the final goal of salvation, for Maximus, is the transformation of the soul into a receptacle of God involving the substitution of the human ego with the divine presence. Indeed, as Maximus clearly states, in salvation "only God shines forth through the body and soul when their natural features are transcended in overwhelming glory." Such a statement implies that the redeemed soul is stripped of its nature and of any defining characteristics qualifying it as a distinct, autonomous being, a person.
I am barely an inch away from first-person here, and am only adhering to the academic standard for the sake of conformity (something of which Emerson would not approve!). I, of course, disapprove of Maximus' position, as my choice of words makes clear. This paper later went on to appear as a crucial chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was published as a book in 2005, and is still selling rather well today (for a recondite philosophical tome). I credit that minor success to the flirtation with first-person narration that I undertook throughout that work, and several others. In writing personal essays, of course, I always use first-person.