Their own version of existence under the crushing weight of mass.

I have been working on this essay, for a while. It´s about the novel Herzog, by Saul Bellow.

Many have been lifted from the idiocy of village life, that is true; and we thank our forces of accumulation. But many, like this Herzog, are lost. Suffocated. Frightened and confused. Even Newsweek tells us that there is too many, too much and nothing new can come about. How might I keep up the burden of self-hood despite the excess of everything. Who I am among this mass? Where does a feeble voices fit, among this group, these thinkers, possessors of every wisdom, alive and dead, among this great authority, indiscriminate, teeming, swollen, vast. I am completely lost.

Click on, to read more.

Looking Up at the Stars

This is another short story. It's a bit more careful than the last one, and I'm pleased with the results.

Instead, for four months, I was a voyeur to humanity: I would watch during waking hours the people that passed through the street, wondering what they knew and I did not, hoping to see a beating human heart, or waiting for her shadow to emerge into visibility. The light from the sun defined her form as she walked.

The .pdf is here.

Added June 10, 2007: Here's a recording of Neruda reading his poem Inclinado en Las Tardes (translated version). The rest of his Veinte Poemas de Amor is also recorded, so that's good.

Caramoor

This is the second draft of a short story that I wrote a while back. I am a bit displeased with the results, but I've invested too much for a total overhaul. How true with life!

The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incans who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.

Read "Caramoor" here. (html)

Parting

"If you have to go away," she said, "is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?...Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?"
"I don't like to leave anything," the man said. "I don't like to leave things behind."

- Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

I'm graduating from High School, leaving what I know, and an expanse of opportunity is born. When something is born, must something too die? Must the forest burn, for flowers to grow? Yes in 1532 in Cajamarca, yes in 1917 in St. Petersburg, and maybe here too. If it is not dying, then maybe I'll kill it, with shaking and clumsy hands, because it is just easier during the crisis of change, the ecstasy of change, to leave nothing at all behind.

Though this might take me a little time.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

-- W. H. Auden

In my relationships, it seems, I almost always care for the other person in the way that he or she cares for me. Hate him, he hates me back; Love her, she loves me back. This is the symmetry of emotion. And in it, I suspect, lies one of the keys to making friends, engendering enemies and connecting with others: give the emotion that you expect in return.

Love and Theft

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." – T.S. Eliot

We tend to judge a person not by what he is conflicted over, but by what he takes for granted. His identity constitutes the set of core values that he assumes are impregnable. In our society, one of these core values, like the law of gravity or the color of the afternoon sky, is the concept of “property.” Like our lives and our liberty, our property is unalienable; it is the American belief that anything worth having can be bought, with time or money or both.

“Intellectual property,” like all property, assumes ownership. It is the struggle to claim our ideas as our own. We want each pieces of our “intellectual property,” the painting or the story or the scientific discovery, to be like our capitalist enterprises: autonomous and fiercely competitive; in America the individual reins supreme. We want the artist to be the Napoleon, conquering us with his uniqueness, dominated us with his intellectual empire, built with his own sweat and blood.

However, human thought is a commonwealth, not a marketplace. Thoughts cannot be like property because they cannot exist alone. One cannot define a word without other words: If you want the word “house,” then you need the word “wood” and then “tree” and then “forest” and then “land” and then you need the whole “earth.” You can only have one word with other words. Likewise, you can only have one idea in relation to other ideas: If you want to understand "love" then you need to have a meaningful understanding of "feelings" then "emotions" then "thoughts" and then on and on, through hundreds of concepts already developed in the mind, waiting to pounce. We can only have words with other words; we can only have ideas with other ideas.

We cannot own entirely our ideas because all thoughts are commentaries on the past, on what we already know. In writing a paragraph, the writer is synthesizing hundreds of years of thought, thousands of gallons of spilled ink on paper, millions of thinkers, with his own temperament and ideas. He is building on the edifice of his intellectual past. All photographs or paintings or stories, in this way, are plagiarism of reality – they steal, in the capitalistic understanding of the word, from a world we already understand. The thinker is not constructing an empire; he is placing one brick on top of the ever-growing wall of human thought; he is polishing or building or resurfacing or deconstructing a reality we already know. Human thought develops on the nexus between the past and mind. Restricting this interface – copyrighting our ideas – is the destruction of this human cultural and intellectual commonwealth. It is undemocratic because it hurts the artistic inspiration of the many, for the profit of the few.

Sure, there are pioneer achievements that reformulate the very frames we have to look at our world (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon might be one; the theory of relativity might be another), but these are starting lines, not the finishing lines. For the most part, insight does not reformulate our frames, like these pioneer achievements. It is just rearticulates what we already know. When we nod in approval, charmed by a nonce witticism, it is not because we have gained knowledge, but because we have gained a new tool to evaluate old knowledge. We nod because we are engaging in a dialogue with our past. Martin Heidegger called this process of reworking the obvious to create truth “enframing.” The Dadaist movement of the twentieth century was sustained on this belief, that art was a recontextualizing of common understandings. André Breton’s said that beauty is the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

If this is true, then the method for intellectual breakthrough involves the systematic examination of the obvious. And developing that organized method for thinking is your challenge as a sentient being. Good luck.

Hemingway and Morrison

There will indeed be some blog-specific writing on this site quite soon, so do check back. Until then, here are two essays I recently wrote.

Concept of the "Home" in Beloved by Toni Morrison

Unlike the thousands of immigrants who have traveled to America to forge for themselves a new home, imported Africans were forced into America as property. They were stripped from a livable past and shackled into a foreign, unlivable future. The story of the American slave is thus the story of the African’s search for a home in a hateful land.

The Human Connection in For Whom the Bell Tolls

There is something mildly perverse about love at first sight. In one glance, the whole of human experience must be felt. In one glance, the lovers must see parts of themselves unfulfilled, fragments of their future that must be righted, bits of their world that need to be completed. First-sight love – extolled by poets as an emotional apotheosis, denounced by cynics as rubbish, idealized by teenage girls with bubblegum mouths and cordless phones as an expectation – depends, in this way, on the utter destruction of time. It depends on life lived in the instantaneity of “now.”
...
Sexual embracement – needed for the survival of the species and the regeneration of the individual – thus, is ultimately universal, and, lying on nature’s simultaneous birthplace and cemetery, the forest floor, Robert and Maria unite with all species of all time when they make love.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Here are some excerpts from an essay I wrote -- penned? -- about The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. I thought it was a wonderful book and I very much enjoyed thinking about it and writing about it.

However, to the unfortunate soul who's reading this -- yes, you -- who has logged onto this blog, expecting bikini pictures or "friends lists" or a rant against the bush administration, finding instead an unfortunate post about "excerpts" from an "essay," I have only a bit of advice: log off with nary a perfunctory glance nor a disgusted moan. Do not read this essay. You have only your sanity to lose. Why do I post it then, if not for the reader? Is it sheer egoism? Is it some sort of masturbatory arrogance? If you've read any post from this site, any at all, you'll have no trouble answering these questions.

First published in an 1890 addition of the literary journal Lippincott’s Magazine, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, was received with a furor of unrest and disapproval. The book seemed to confirm the public’s most sordid suspicions of Wilde’s notorious dandyism: its blistering paradoxes, blithe praises of selfish hedonism and its homoerotic undercurrents all appeared just too immoral to a Victorian age still stuffy and self-righteous. However, rather than bemoan the disapprobation, Wilde accepted it as but verification of the book’s overriding theme; the disapproval confirmed for him his fundamental distaste of the naïve society he inhabited, an age prone to discuss beauty in terms of morality, as good or wicked, godly or satanic. Perhaps disgusted by the simpletons who could not read beyond the story’s clinquant prose and scandalous epigrams, Wilde added to the second book-addition of the novel a preface noting that “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.”

However, more than a rebuff to critics, the assertions that books have no moral undercurrents and that “all art is quite useless” can be accepted as a lens through which to understand Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy about the role of the artist in society. He believed that art was intended to be nothing but abstract and imaginative – not a means for life or death or guidance. Characterizing how his work had been at the onset of the novel, Basil Hallward, the tragic painter who worshiped the beauty of a fallen man, captured Wilde’s concepts of aesthetic beauty, “And it had all been what art should be – unconscious, ideal, and remote” (119). Importantly, before he had become entranced by, captive to, the beauty of the novel’s protagonist, Dorian Gray, Basil had created art from within himself, made only to be beautiful. In his portrait of Dorian, Basil betrays Oscar Wilde’s belief that there is no morality in beauty and that art is to “conceal the artist.” Thus, borne out of idolatry, the portrait, changing to the tune of its model’s decaying soul, functions to explore the consequences of an aesthetic philosophy about the uselessness of art that is violated by both its painter and model...

If Dorian is the incarnation of this “new mode of style” whereby reality is art and art is morality, then his corruption represents the failure of this ideal. And the putrefaction of the man in the painting serves to belie the moral worth that Basil ascribed to this new understanding of painting that “without intending” exposes all the “artistic idolatry” (28) of beauty....The portrait therefore functions to represent the first consequence of Wilde aesthetic philosophy: that art cannot be life. The novel confuses the boundaries of life and art. Dorian, like a piece of artwork, never ages, always remaining beautiful and hollow. The portrait, contrastingly, becomes like life and must suffer from the gyrating, ostentatious decay of Dorian’s soul...

Lord Henry’s philosophy, like Wilde’s, was of a process of intense self-discovery through pleasure. Dorian, however, wildly perverts these intentions. Rather than treating aesthetics as a means for gratifying and shaping his identity, he slays his identity to gratify his pleasure...The New Hedonist is a master of his own desires. Dorian is a slave to them.

Here's the link for the entire essay.

Cameron's Culture

I wrote a short story about suburban adolescence.

He is not a kid, but he is not a grown-up either. And in this no-man’s-land between the innocence of childhood and the dreariness of adulthood, right off Route 35, is Cameron’s Deli, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Read it and tell me what you think.

Added:

The Lewisboro Ledger's take on the story.

"Where some of the pieces could have been racy, most of the presenters censored themselves. Max Novendstern’s story Cameron’s Culture was punctuated by occasional uses of the word “obscenity” to fill in for less acceptable words.

Many of the works were autobiographical or personal, such as Molly Chambers’ essay, titled My Favorite Place in the World. Others, like Max’s story, were more fanciful" [Emphasis added].

Crime and Punishment

Here are some thoughts on Crime and Punishment, my new favorite book.

The destruction of human life resonates on a deeply personal level. Despite utilitarian principles of aggregate happiness, the heart refuses to believe that a person is a dispensable commodity, to be weighed on scale or quantified with arithmetic. Cannibalism, infanticide, or like practices have been stigmatized as egregious or inhumane by nearly all societies throughout all of history because they violate the deep, bedrock commonness of humanity. They violate human brotherhood.

The interconnectedness of mankind depends on a certain faith in the invisible hand of social morality. It depends on a willingness to guide one’s logic with emotion. Those who value the progress and survival of mankind in a world of shifty relativism and capitalistic initiative ought to take seriously Dostoevsky’s warning about moral bankruptcy. If these impulses towards fraternity and love are cauterized, then man is left with nothing but empty dogma and soulless calculus. Though aimed at 19th century Russian thought, the novel’s challenges are still relevant to humans at the dawn of the 21st century, neither gods nor beasts.

Read the essay.

Death and Other Dreary Self-Realizations

I like to believe that death isn’t inevitable after all, that I can grab at my fate from the bottom through goodness and prayer and faith. Without this delusion, where would I be? Where would any of us be? Would I have the will to wake up in the morning, to do good things, to respect my math teachers, to brush my teeth and cry for the wounded and poor? If I weren't tyrranized by the fear of my own death and insulated from the acceptance of it, would I be gloomy and fatalist, or would I be liberated?

According to be me, self-ordained pre-emminent existential scholar, Othello, The Stranger and Slaughterhouse-Five answer this question by tracing the maturation of the human consciousness from fabricating control – measuring out fate in precise quantities, carefully planning its progression and systematically altering its composition – to accepting death, to filling the void when delusions fall to the wayside.

The epiphanic moment – the fulcrum on which existential though revolves – is the acceptance of death.

It is said that no man can take seriously the possibility of his own death. Perhaps, he cannot accept death because cannot understand nothingness and he is fantastically frighten of that which he cannot understand. Perhaps, he cannot accept death because it disposes of carcases indiscriminately, inevitably, and the virtue he so meticulously ascribes to actions – his precise categorization of immorality and morality, of good and bad, of wicked and pure – is no longer relevant in the cold soil six feat beneath the surface. As an ultimate fate of all individuals, death is an ultimate equalizer. Those empty inevitable moments of silence are shared by both great and small, strong and weak, businessmen and drunkards. Perhaps he cannot accept death because, in accepting the inescapable, he must accept that he has no control over his fate, no role in his final destination and no purpose in his existence.

It is said that to cure himself of his loneliness and fright, he dreams up fairy-tales of powerful wizards and ghosts that give great cosmic significance to his actions. They tell him that all his actions are premises in a grand metaphysical conclusion, that his life is measured on a scale and his soul is judged with the legal wisdom of Solomon. When there is a lovely destination like this, like a rolling stone down a sloping hill, actions lead to reactions, premises lead to conclusions, badness to redemption and goodness to salvation. Life has a purpose.

It is said that man fetishizes on control because in fact he has none, that he obsesses over logic and virtue and worldly importance because in fact, there is little of it. He is terrified of his own death, the irrevocable tropism of all life towards decline, decay and destruction, so he exalts his life to a realm relevance because he is just too scared not to. What if this familiar narrative of fear, faith and hope were not inevitable? What would life without a destination mean?

Progressing from the premise that death is inevitable, the argument continues that life is meaningless. Do intervening actions really matter when they all lead to the same desination?

This theme is resoundingly reinforced through the contemplation of justice. Justice systems depend on logicality and causality; when God is rejected, death is accepted and purpose is strew in the wastebasket, then actions are nothing but singular absurdities strung together with time. All three books are trials in the courtroom of the absurd, where meaning does not matter and evidence is irrelevant.

Othello's ACT III progresses as a carnival courtroom, where Desdemona's guilt is substantiated through ephemeral symbol and obscure implication, and her defense only exacerbates the evidence against her in a crime she in fact did not commit: “Othello: The handkerchief! / Desdemona: I pray, talk me of Cassio / Othello: The handkerchief!” (159). Desdemona's nonsensical conviction underscores the senselessness of all actions.

Slaughterhouse-Five, at its core, is too a statement about justice. The constant barrage of imbecilic judgments, ironic deaths and absurd conclusions hints at a broader chaotic universe with no meaning, where death is all encompassing and nondiscriminant. The survival of a gangly, ill-equipped and untrained misfit who desperately wants nothing more than to die – in world where moral men and women who love life more than they love each other are unrelentingly annihilated without rhyme or reason – indicates a grand purposelessness to life and arbitrariness to death. “Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested and shot for plundering. He was tried and shot” (274). After a bombing of epic magnitudes, killing almost as many people as both atomic bombs put together, destroying almost everything and scaring the world into empty destitution, the trial, conviction and execution of a school teacher who took nothing but a teapot, is so broad an indictment of logicality and fairness that it calls into question any purpose in life whatsoever. To Vonnegut, “Poo-tee-weet?” is just about the most intelligent question to posit in the face of such inexplicable destruction. Billy Pilgrim, faced with these realities, has conclusively decided that no, there is no purpose.

When Meursault is on trial, the prosecutor asks, “'Why did you pause between the first and the second shot?'” (67). The question is impossible because the lawyer is attempting to impose his own system of logical analysis on a man who has rejected purpose or motivation or logic in any action. He is attempting to distill reason from absurdity. The question is impossible because, as the three books argue, there is no purpose in life and there is no justice in death.

Maybe the acceptance of death is not morbid, but liberating.

To Vonnegut's iconic antihero Billy Pigram, the antidote in a world of subjective truth and arbitrary morality, in a world defined as chaotic and absurd, ultimately barreling towards its own self-wrought destruction, is the simple appreciation of existence. The liberation mankind will achieve when he frees himself form the fear of death is tantamount to the escapement of the prisoner in Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Bound by the linearity of time, “All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation” (147). Like Plato's cave dwellers, humans see only shadows dancing on the walls, or dots at the end a twenty-foot pipe. It is only when we free ourselves from fixation on time can we appreciate the eternal beauty of the moment. Nietzsche famously wrote about the eternal reoccurrence of time:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

The belief by Nietzsche, a father of existential thought, that the fundamental motivation of life should be the acceptance of death and the timeless and infinite visitation of the happiness and sadness of life, is wonderfully encapsulated in the advice administered by the Billy alien captors, “'That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they try hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good one” (150). Perhaps, in a world with no purpose other than death and no meaning beyond destruction, man does not need fairy-tales, grain alcohol and cable T.V. to succor the emptiness of his soul. No, he need only to heed the wisdom of the Tralfmadorians, to enjoying that which is good and relive that which is beautiful.

Essay Excerpts: Being There

Mock Trial season has just come to a disappointing end, so hopefully a little normalcy can be restored to my frightfully trivial life. Rest assured faithful reader(s), a thoughtful (though admittedly biased) discourse on contemporary politics will soon return to TheLiberalConviction.com! In the meantime, start cookin' your electrical bananas and mixin' your psychedelic love potions: here's some of my essay on Jerzy Kosinski's iconoclastic novel Being There, where reality is a little less real, and life is just a state of mind:

Chance, the novel’s existential antihero, is a simple man of simple intent. He tends to a garden from within mansion walls he has never set foot beyond and he watches television to learn of a society he has no interest in inhabiting. He has no family, no true name, and indeed no intellect by which to protest his servility. He is a prisoner ignorant of his chains. He is a man without a self.

However, like the plants within his garden, Chance is firmly rooted in existence. Awareness of eventual annihilation is an ever-present fact of human life; it motivates actions and limits intentions – it shapes life absolutely. However, Chance has no conception of his own self and thus is blissfully unaware of his own imminent destruction. Instead, like a plant, he grows from within himself, unphased by his own precarious position within the inevitable cogs of the universe, yet warmly content with his place in the garden. “Plants were like people; they need care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully. Yet plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself; there is no mirror in which the plant can recognize its face; no plant can do anything intentionally: it cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream” (3-4). Kosinski contends that life is merely a distinction manufactured from within the mind; that in the fundamental perspective of the universe, the death of one man is merely the birth of another, and so turns the cycle of life. Like a garden, life provides for death, and in turn that death facilitates and nourishes new life: “And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden’s surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing” (5). Life is merely a mental state in which man decides that he owns his self. Chance, unaware of his self, lives and dies in peace: “A breeze fell upon the foliage and nestled under the cover of its moist leaves. Not a thought lifted itself from Chance’s brain. Peace filled his chest” (140).

Thus, “being there” is the state of human existence where a man stands as a man. Chance dissociates from the solipsistic life of self-contemplation, yet rejects an understanding of the world around him; instead, he peacefully wanders without directions, occupying a realm of sincere existence. “What was particularly nice about the garden was that, at any moment, standing in the narrow paths or amidst the bushes and trees, Chance could start to wander, never knowing whether he was going forward or backward, unsure whether he was ahead of or behind his pervious steps. All that mattered was moving in his own time, like the growing plants” (4).

When Chance is exposed to the world, he unknowingly begins to embody the philosophic duality between corporal reality and mental reality; in effect, he simultaneously is two opposite reflections on the universe. Chance, the man, lives within himself, but has never existed. His counterpart, Chauncey Gardiner, the image, from the moment he enters the world to the moment he dies, exists in everyone’s mind, but has never lived. The irony in strikingly apparent: Chance lives a pure and unadulterated life, while Chauncey simultaneous occupies an abstract false reality. He is both a stunning example of life rooted in existence and a disheartening embodiment of life constructed through image. Before appearing on television, the schism is examined, “What part of himself would he leave behind when he finished the program? Would there be two Chances after the show: one Chance who watched TV and another who appeared on it?” (61).

Chauncey, unlike Chance, is an image constructed by society’s boundless hopes and desires, existing only in the fleeting but passionate realm of the mind, personifying society’s exalted expectations, and reflecting its aggrandized interpretation of its own form. In short, society sees Chauncey with an expectation of itself; it loves Chauncey only as much as it loves itself.

Read the rest of the essay. It's worth it.