Cynicism on the Magic Mountain

"...early and repeated contacts with death give rise to a basic mind-set against the cruelties and crudities of life as it is thoughtlessly lived out in the world. Or let us say, it makes one aware of, and sensitive to its cynicism."

                                      - Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Resolute Silence: Living the Good

Ludwig Wittgenstein summed up the results of his investigation in the seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus thus: "Whatever can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

While the statement appears to support a sort of blind positivism, where only facts have meaning, and values are nonsense, to interpret Wittgenstein's statement in this manner and leave it at that is to underestimate him as a philosopher, and to deprive him of depth as a human being.

This is not a statement of a cynical positivist. Rather, this is the statement of a man who feels - who knows - that the things that are most important to human beings - pathos, telos, ethos - are beyond language and beyond reason. Wittgenstein also knew that what cannot be said can be shown - in other words, it can be lived.

And so at some point, once we've become sick with asking questions and hitting dead ends, we get on with the task of living. Living out our feeling for the fellow man, our common goal, and our human values.

...some secrets should remain as secrets because they do not have any answers, and there are questions the answers to which it is better no one knows. 

                                               - Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

Nietzsche wrote that knowledge kills the action. When we are young we think we know. As years go by, we learn that we know nothing. After a few disasters, we do what it takes to 'build new little habitats...new little hopes'.

Not knowing 'the good' can motivate us to strive towards it and to live it - carefully, silently, deliberately...resolutely.

Levels of Allegory

'[Now] there were lots of places that you couldn't just pass through like a breeze. No, there was no point in dreaming about it, in this new world where there wouldn't be anything like it anymore - in this world each step required an improbable effort and searing pain. The old days were long gone. The magical, wonderful world was long dead. It didn't exist anymore. And there was no point in whining about it for the rest of your life. You had to spit on its grave and never look back."

Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033


Growing up? Geopolitics? Origins of our species? Old love? Home? Illness? The fall?

What grave did you spit on lately?

One love...

Living in Search of God

"In summing up, then, it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion".
                - Emile Durkheim

I have recently come to a realization that I should probably change the indication of my religious views on Facebook from 'Agnostic' to 'Living towards them'. What I mean by that is that, as years go by, it is becoming more and more important to me to be (and by this I mean 'act like') a good person in the romantic, social, professional and family spheres of my life. 'The Good' is my regulative ideal, though, as is to be expected, I often fall short.

The more I approach this regulative ideal, and despite how infinitely far from it I still am, the more I also realize how, ultimately, I fall in line with the moral prescriptions of the world's oldest religions. In this sense, my efforts are indeed towards god, or a religious system of values, even if I would hesitate to call myself a 'believer' in a pedestrian discussion on the topic.


At Chapters today, I picked up a book called The Evolution of God by a former Princeton University philosophy professor Robert Wright. Wright's thesis is that: (1) gods arose as illusions; (2) the story of their evolution points to the existence of something that can meaningfully be called 'divinity'; and (3) that this illusion has, in the process of evolving, become somehow streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. (This is sort of the story of the evolution of scientific ideas, as well, isn't it?) Wright seeks to offer a positive and pragmatic answer to the question of whether modern world religions can reconcile to one another, reconcile themselves to science, and have something meaningful to offer to the human condition.

We owe each other every effort to be good towards ourselves and each other. The questions Wright asks are as good of a start to this quest as any I've heard thus far.

Blessed Are Those Who Fall

Dirge

The glories of our blood and state
   Are shadows, not substantial things,
There is no armour against fate,
  Death lays his icy hand on Kings;
     Scepter and crown,
     Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made,
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,
   And plant fresh laurels where they kill,
But their strong nerves at last must yield,
   They tame but one another still.
     Early or late,
     They stoop to fate,
And must give up the murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow,
   Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon death's purple altar now,
   See where the victor-victim bleeds,
     Your heads must come,
     To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

James Shirley, 1659

In his The Best Poems of the English Language, Harold Bloom recalls Robert Frost starting off one of his readings by reciting this poem from memory, remarking that it was his favourite poem.

I cannot but think of Richard II's hollow crown as I read Shirley. As Richard falls from grace, his humanity comes to the fore:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Being reminded that our flesh, "which walls about our life" is not impregnable, we become more appreciative of the fragile miracle that is our life. Hence also comes our sense of justice, and right and wrong. Blessed are those who fall.

When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.

                                         - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Reach, Grasp, Love

In his seminal work The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck writes:

I define love thus: the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

The definition is spot-on in its precision and simplicity. As a philosopher, I would strike out the word 'spiritual'. However, this is not because I personally disagree with the word's inclusion in Peck's definition. Rather, I would hate to see the discussion around the semantics of the word distract from the power of Peck's formulation.

From this perspective, there is no difference between self-love, sexual love, love of our family, love of our significant other, love of our planet, love of humanity...Ultimately, no matter who or what the object or activity of our concern may be, our reach ought to exceed our grasp.

If we love, or to use Heidegger's term care, we ought to push our limits in order to enable ourselves, our object, our activity, to flourish. By the same stroke, we must keep in mind Kant's universal moral dictum, and achieve all this without impeding anyone or anything else's reach and grasp:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.

Maiden Castle

George Steiner wrote of John Cowper Powys that his are "the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky". Such grandiose parallels and conjectures can often collapse under their own weight. However, I suppose that when such a conjecture originates with an individual who is apparently considered to be "among the great minds in today's literary world", I ought to be able to use it as a starting point for this humble cogitation about Powys' work without stirring up too much controversy.

John Cowper Powys

Apart from one obvious feature, namely the ratio of the length, in words and pages, of the narrative as compared to the number of events it covers, another parallel between Powys and Dostoevsky also comes to mind. Namely, this feature is their ability to bring to life characters who represent ideas and ways of life which are worlds apart (and often opposed and contradictory), and yet make them equally compelling and even sympathetic, the latter often being accomplished against all odds.

Just like the reader can be swayed either way by the pull of Ivan Karamazov's rationalism and Alyosha Karamazov's Christianity, so Powys' characters' life-forms and ideas in Maiden Castle each appear off their rockers and yet perfectly coherent, even when in complete contradiction to each other, often at the same stroke of Powys' pen.  In the words of Enoch Quirm, perhaps the looniest of Powys' bunch of characters:

You talk like a baby, lad, when you talk of this bedrock truth for which I must be prepared to offer my life, or the gods don't exist! I tell you lad, there are a thousand realities in life that aren't, and never can be, bedrock realities, and yet they're well worth pursuing.

Enoch Quirm is defending his belief that he is the incarnation of an ancient Welsh god here, and yet there is profound wisdom to his words, for in a way, one of the main messages of Powys' novel is that each of us pursues our own life illusion, which is in turn embedded in a network of interconnected and mutually affective life-illusions which I will refer to as our being-with-others.

Dud No-man is Powys' main character, and as far as I can tell from the limited reading I have done about Powys, shares some important characteristics (though he should by no means be considered identical) to the writer himself. Powys was apparently quite fond of pornography and what may be considered sadomasochistic practices, and there are suggestions that he had a 'mommy complex' not unlike his main character.

Dali's "The Great Masturbator"

At the outset of the novel, we learn that Dud is what we may call 'the great masturbator', who has spent years lamenting the death of his wife Mona, although he never consummated their marriage. After a chance meeting at a cemetery, Dud ends up purchasing a young (I suppose about half his age), tight bodied circus girl named Wizzie Ravelston from the circus performing in town, and builds an eccentric masturbatory relationship with her, while simultaneously never escaping the isolation of his hyperactive, solipsistic mind. While almost entirely impotent to connect to the individuals surrounding him in socially conventional manner, No-man is nonetheless at the same time a hyperactive intellectual and a profound (if twisted) sensualist who feels a deep connection to the humanity and nature around him:

Nothing of my real life is in these discussions, these damned gatherings! My real life's between me and nature, between me and I don't know what - something impersonal, something made up of....centuries of human life.

Teucer Wye, an apparent senile old fool who carries around two worn editions of Plato's dialogs winds up being the mouthpiece for one of the most coherent and concise summaries of Plato's teachings on soul and morality that I have encountered, and this precisely is the charm of Powys' Dorchester novels. While his approach to narrative form  is profoundly Victorian, his inclusiveness of the true richness of each individual character and the world of nature and ideas as a whole is profoundly modern. This seeming senile old fool therefore surprises us when he warns his old spinster daughter of mistaking Platonism for asceticism:

What I say is that we must free our souls from all these material things. While we're on earth our bodies must have their natural satisfaction, but this doesn't touch the soul. We're only here, imprisoned in matter, so that our souls should learn to be free. You do the senses too much honour, you think too much about them, when you deny them like this. The soul should be indifferent, aloof, free of the whole business.

Wizzie Ravelston, the young, vibrant circus artist turned No-Man's play-doll, on the other hand, plays the convincing role of a naive realist. By the same token, the passage below reveals Powys' fascination and the inspiration he found in Dorchester following his return from the United States:

She suddenly felt older than everyone she knew, even Old Funky! Her present mood of acceptance of fate, her renunciation of her work, of the horse, of her life, seemed to put her outside of all these narrow, bitter misunderstandings...The familiar Dorchester landmarks she had recently seen - the brewery, the cenotaph, the spire of All Saints, the South Walks chestnuts in their bloom - came back to her now like a row of diminishing milestones in the long perspective of the road she had to follow. All she had seen...seemed to have lodged itself in her mind like the solemn syllables of a materialized Paternoster or Hail Mary, bringing a dim voluptuous detachment from human complications.

While Steiner compares Powys to Dostoevsky, I am inclined to think T.S. Eliot, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in particular. Both writers have a modernist's insight into the curious landscapes of a modern mind and the clash between such a mind and the society and the world around them:

...and our friend fell into one of those extremely disagreeable trains of thought that come occasionally to the most egoistic among us, in which we feel ourselves, even in the presence of those nearest to us, in some misterious way, left out in the cold...

Had women the power, when they merged identities in the common femaleness, of whithering to the root of a person's life illusion about them?

...Dud's...conjuring trick was his isolation of himself as a solitary flesh-covered skeleton, 'anthropus erectus', facing the cosmos, and his obliteration of both his past and...future - that is to say of both regret and hope in his intense awareness of the present...it had...to do with the interior substance of things rather than with their transitory accidental forms, but even this definition of it was not true in a strict metaphysical sense, for what Dud had set himself for the last...twenty years to aim at was only what in some measure all men are forced to acquire under the pressure of events, namely the power to enjoy life on the barest, the most stripped, most winnowed terms, and to enjoy it in itself, as it slips away under our fingers, without a thought of past or future. 

It is one of nature's favorite tricks with a man and a woman who live together to intermit their bitterest quarrels with moments when, contrary to their own will perhaps, they find themselves as much united against the outer world as if they were the most passionate of lovers.

Any collection of human beings, however casually gathered, takes upon itself the nature of a living entity.

...and then, like a hand striking her in the face out of the invisible, the abominable loneliness of every single person in the world, the loneliness of our pain, of our despair, of our insanity, sent a shiver through her that made her feel sick and weak. 

Powys brings to life a cast of characters that spans from a great masturbator to a Platonist, a young circus-woman turned sex-doll turned libertine, a modern painter, an old-spinster feminist, a pacifist turned communist, and an eventually disillusioned incarnation of an ancient Welsh god. Their masterfully crafted idiosincracies, though often tragic, are precisely what makes one hopeful about this web of life-illusions interlocked in spacetime  that we call humanity upon reading Powys' Maiden Castle.