That was a cool response to my post. Thanks.
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I find that interesting. For me, it is almost the opposite: art has always been a deeply personal spiritual experience.
And this does not necessarily mean the best in a person. Its source can be dirt, shame, failure. But I would not call it a collision of voices. For me, it is more like a personal dialogue with God, fate, or nothingness.
Can you tell me in what way it is spiritual?
The problem with humanity is that we are, as a species, too successful, too adaptive, too self-aware. The flip-side irony is that just as we are, we are weak, vulnerable, compared to other animals. Perhaps this is why we evolved the capacity for symbolic language.
Without symbolic language, there would be no technology, without technology, no science. Without science no discovery of fossil fuels, no internal combustion engine.And so it goes. With our technologies we can live now almost anywhere on the planet, and because of that there are now too many of us. In the past when we over-used resources we often had somewhere else to go―now we have nowhere else to go. Not to the planets, except in our dreams.
As to understanding the “end of the runway”, we all know that we will die as individuals, and that humanity as a species will inevitably be extinct. We just don’t, and can’t know when either of these events will eventuate. Given this uncertainty and our language enable self-reflective natures, this situation we find ourselves in breeds a profound underlying sense of insecurity.
So, it is not possible to really know the “end of the runway”.
We don’t need syntheses to be ourselves. We cannot help being whatever it is that we are. The ability to identify ourselves through time (in the pre-conceptual sense) comes thanks to biology―it is organic through and through. The self-reflective conceptually shaped identification of ourselves is a linguistic ability parasitic on being able to thematize the sense of continuity that biological memory and language combined make possible. We don’t need to forgive ourselves for anything, unless we feel that we have transgressed some social more or law or other and are suffering feelings of guilt on that account.
This may apply to some individuals, but I think it is far too much of a psychological generalization. We seek to preserve ourselves, to be sure―“unchanged” is a step too far. As I see it the idea of the will (to survive and thrive) mostly originates with Spinoza’s “conatus”, and is taken up in different ways by Schopenhauer (as a metaphysical postulate) and Nietzsche (as a virtue, an affirmation―something to celebrate and aspire to).
What I had in mind was our inability to act in a self-preservative way at the level of the species. Other humans are our genetic rivals. Nepotism is the religion of our blood.
The economic incentive structure also rewards sacrificing the distant future for the near future. As individuals we may know better, but as players we are trapped in a game with its own mad logic.
Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it. There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
…
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
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Interesting blog. I’m not convinced everyone does hate the current system, though, Those who are comfortable can be comfortable in their complacency. Add to that the kinds of people who succeed in the corporate system and the nerdy tech-bros for whom it seems life is a video game they are determined to win, add to that the tribalism, the paranoia about other cultures that seems to be culturally inevitable and the ensuing impossibility of coordination and it doesn’t seem that hard to understand how we got to where we are.
I do see the system as a kind of juggernaut, and as you say, not an agent at all. I think there is a sense in which agency is an illusion, and the illusion of individual agency, that we are already masters of our own destinies, gets in the way of any possible coordinated action.
Listening to the recital of the poem "Moloch’ reminded me that many years ago I wrote a poem, with Ginsberg’s “Howl” in mind which touches on similar themes. I’ll post it in the ‘Art showcase’ thread rather than cluttering up this thread.
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This is a poem I wrote many years ago thinking about Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. I post it here because Ginsberg came up in the discussion and I was reminded of this poem.
JUGGERNAUT: THE RHETORIC OF INTOXICATION
Daunted by nakedness, neutralized superheroes rattling chains,
shuddering in illuminated backyards struggling inside with oily creatures of the deep,
pouring forth ambiguous narratives of dour lands of solitude and hidden angels,
ecstatic visions in the midnight winter country town darkness.
lounging at ease absorbed with tasks of self-investigation; words flowing like lava,
and raining ash over narcotic, trembling corporeal machinery; an indifferent wind
blowing over seraphim, seafarers and love enacted in public parks.
That which roars out of the tomb of angels cut down and beaten unto death
by the one eyed dollars that swim like sperm in the golden bowl of plenitude
and extrude the silver threads that weave industry on that juggernaut loom
engineering the insatiate fires sustaining the midnight candle;
generations of humanity passing out upholding the torch of consciousness.
That which snatches dreams away, undresses them and plunges them naked in the icy
lake of observation. secret anti-heroes, who abolish solipsism without
trying, locked up lonely in iron dreams, sharing apartments with beasts and leeches
and walking through forests with boots full of blood.
That which dreams of snow on the ocean,
Of ghostly shipping ports and disused drydocks in the desert,
Of rainforest riverbanks in the city under floodlights and eternal days of enlightened ecstasis.
That which dives in dream to the muddy bottoms of rivers searching for pushcarts and surfaces,
gasping, under bridges, and whiles away endless hours in
city lofts, meditating, and breathing softly in the darkness. That which was hypochondriac,
believing itself under bacterial siege, and black boxes of anachronistic theology.
That which scribbled incantations in fluorescent ink; obscenities on the ceilings of bedrooms,
That which rises in the late morning and cooks rotten animals for breakfast,
dreaming of the pure kingdom and growing old with tin whiskers, watching insects caught alive
on the pest strip struggling in their innocent slow death,
That which suffocated holy love under meat, and called
for a universal ballot and smashed alarm clocks while all the loyal supporters fell to work.
That which hears the endless growling of the seasons and the rattle of the steel battalions
in the soup kitchens or the crying in the loneliest streets, amidst putrefying
rubbish, shattered glass and giant gusts of foundational steam.
That which roars down the highways, searching for the incarnation of solitude
Anticipating the magical; brooding, lonesome for heroes, entering hopeful cathedrals
praying for salvation and large breasts and fairy lights then and now
and finds minds failing in the gloom
The years have removed the criminal charm from reality,
in those shining heads of ebony and gold, heads
of overcoming and celebration, remains a desire to cultivate a habit.
That which rode shotgun on the fast dark train hurtling heedlessly
towards daisy chain or grave, demanding trials of sanity on the crumbling steps
waiting for an instant lobotomy to be insulated in the concrete void, racked
with amnesia, wearing a symbolic wig and drowning in catatonia, guilty blood flowing
symbolically from nose, mouth, eyes, ears and fingers, repenting,
surrendering to the curse of the grey warders who administer mildewed halls
crying out to the moon, tormented by the suffering of midnight spirits prostrate
and helpless upon the cold, granite bench of solitude- far from dream-realms of selfless love
And winter forcing the invocation of mothers, to finally elicit some repose.
Those of sensations learned out of the book and watching people from tenement windows,
waiting for that fantastic first telephone call; and thinking it would never come,
like a lone hanger in the closet, standing empty, waiting for the departed coat to return or
new one to turn up, and barely staying afloat in the primordial animal stew of time.
That which dwells in cold twilight alleys obsessed with gnosis, a dream
always before the eyes, and recovering these dark hallucinations
that have formed incarnate tears in the fabric of
personality, that which forms images that are juxtaposed with empty clothes;
That which bagged archangels, joined elemental spirits and made ready
for perilous reincarnations. That which dashed through tragic set pieces
That which recreates the syntax that calmly measures all tentative steps and stands
lame and speechless, having found intelligence and shaking with guilt.
That which confesses the inability to dance to the rhythm set by naked and fearless leaders,
That which was a half-hearted maniac with a hairy bum aspiring to wed a pure, insane angel;
dreaming of putting down roots that may grow only after death; that which believes it will
duly rise reincarnate after the spirit blows to the four winds
Whose tortured naked mind flies free with a cry that would surely saturate the airwaves
and shake the sleeping cities if it only could find voice .
That which lay stifled; it will be the mute requiem of a life
made and mutilated by language, by a two thousand year cultural feast; tin-plated hearts
will be beaten and electric thoughts escape from cloven skulls.
Holding onto a concrete sphincter, until it turns to cold ashes in the mouth,
the streets are overflowing with garbage, lonely dogs and rapidly disappearing currency,
muffled sounds of screaming children; a distant evocation;
confinements in dark frigid basements,
In hard tenements or under stairways destitute children are sobbing in armies, homeless
elderly silently weeping, dying lonely in public parks. The loveless want to hear the proper
judgements of humanity, to forsake this unintelligible confinement in the heartless
penitentiary, this parliament of misery where even the architecture is outraged,
Crushed beneath a vast slab of conflict, administered by impotent stunned reptiles whose pure
minds and hearts are unimpeachable mechanisms of probity, whose life blood is the slimy
mucous at the bottom of the public purse, whose fingers explore a thousand avenues, whose
breath and voice and action are like stains decorating nationalistic murals on the crumbling
sarcophagus of history, whose blind eyes stare from windows at rows of skyscrapers lining the
streets, dotting the habitat of administration; forests of well-lit uninhabitable mansions.
Despite dark accusing voices the underground workers of industry still dawdle and murmur
and stumble through the tedious days and insomniac nights, releasing poisonous vapours,
endlessly delivering land fill and soothing dreams of possession to legions of the dispossessed.
Billowing chimneys and stark transceivers punctuate their assigned territories, a perfect love
built on endless toil, forcing oil and precious stones from the mother
That which is forced to give and not receive, whose wealth means nothing until it’s in the bank,
whose fate is to be fingered mercilessly, whose light is swallowed by the darkness of machine
tenements and mute suburbs, waiting on the captains of industry to mount the spectral
campaign that will save and liberate all peoples and nations, captains who flaunt their invincible
insanity, who fuck all possibility itself with their lifeless monomaniac cocks breaking the back of
the dumb earth, buried beneath endless concrete pavements, firing the forests in an orgy of
celebratory masturbation to elevate the stone city to Heaven, transfigured into the city of god
Transcending the native river of life, forced from domiciles, that which makes its farewells
in the beginning and at the end greets its kindred in the dark,
under the pretext of ignorance;
wishing to eliminate solitude, that entered the electronic kaleidoscope streets, imitated the
ghosts of its forebears, committed murders without lifting a finger or ever holding a weapon.
That which feasted like a sea of maggots on the senses,
drank the many nectars of oblivion,
threw the helpless urchins onto the highways of the juggernaut,
That which pours from the empty into the void,
Attempts to force harmony from a string-less guitar,
that which locked the gods in an armed jailhouse,
lurched like an army of sleepwalkers across the darkness
mouthing accusations against the wise
that which illuminates the dream experience and dissolves the non-existent boundaries.
That which emerged savage and still dripping from the ocean and started down the highway;
tumbled out of junked and broken cars and fell idiotically all over the rainy street,
fell asleep exhausted, woke in a cold sweat, as sobriety returned and yearned for safe haven
in the mediocrity of the civilized night.
Oh shit, I posted it in the wrong thread…O well, I’ll leave it here now.
Let me share a killer passage from Tropic of Cancer.
Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the listless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this, forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.
…
When I think of Stavrogin for example, I think of some divine monster standing on a high place and flinging to us his torn bowels. In The Possessed the earth quakes: it is not the catastrophe that befalls the imaginative individual, but a cataclysm in which a large portion of humanity is buried, wiped out for ever. Stavrogin was Dostoievski and Dostoievski was the sum of all those contradictions which either paralyze a man or lead him to the heights. There was no world too low for him to enter, no place too high for him to fear to ascend. He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to the stars. It is a pity that we shall never again have the opportunity to see a man placed at the very core of mystery and, by his flashes, illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness.
After I read this, I had to read The Possessed, and Stavrogin is indeed a collision of voices, but those voices include God, fate, and nothingness.
Bakhtin was also especially impressed by Dostoevsky.
Commentators dispute about just how large those views are-that is, about the degree to which Bakhtin’s unsystematic system is religious or metaphysical. To me it seems clearly to rest on a vision of the world as essentially a collectivity of subjects who are themselves social in essence, not individuals in any usual sense of the word; to this degree it is definitely incompatible with all but the subtlest of materialisms. His “God-term” — though he does not rely on religious language — is something like “sympathetic understanding” or “comprehensive vision,” and his way of talking about it is always in terms of the “multi-voicedness” or “multi-centeredness” of the world as we experience it. We come into consciousness speaking a language already permeated with many voices — a social, not a private language. From the beginning, we are “polyglot,” already in process of mastering a variety of social dialects derived from parents, clan, class, religion, country. We grow in consciousness by taking in more voices as “authoritatively persuasive” and then by learning which to accept as “internally persuasive.” Finally we achieve, if we are lucky, a kind of individuality, but it is never a private or autonomous individuality in the western sense; except when we maim ourselves arbitrarily to monologue, we always speak a chorus of languages. Anyone who has not been maimed by some imposed “ideology in the narrow sense,” anyone who is not an “ideologue,” respects the fact that each of us is a “we,” not an “I.”
…
Polyphony, the miracle of our “dialogical” lives together, is thus both a fact of life and, in its higher reaches, a value to be pursued endlessly. It will be obvious to any literary historian that literary works have tended not to do justice to our dialogical natures in this sense. Just as in our individual lives we are tempted to close out voices prematurely, in order to keep things simple and to dominate the world, authors have generally experienced an irresistible temptation to impose monological unities upon their works… Bakhtin puts the point another way. Human existence, created as it is in many languages, presents two opposing tendencies. There is a “centrifugal” force dispersing us outward into an ever greater variety of “voices,” outward into a seeming chaos that presumably only a God could encompass. And there are various “centripetal” forces preserving us from overwhelming fluidity and variety.
…
It is in Dostoevsky and in Dostoevsky alone that Bakhtin finds the polyphonic ideal realized. The greatest of all contrapuntalists genuinely surrenders to his characters and allows them to speak in ways other than his own. Heroes are no longer diminished to the dominating consciousness of the author; secondary characters are no longer encompassed by and diminished to their usefulness to heroes — or to the author. Characters are, in short, respected as full subjects, shown as “consciousnesses” that can never be fully defined or exhausted, rather than as objects fully known, once and for all, in their roles — and then discarded as expendable.
…
A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.
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Lots of great lines, so I thought I’d pick out a favorite. This captures our duality.
I’ll add a poem I wrote decades ago, but I remembered it recently, while driving by some crows.
A rook’s delight
is in its pride
screams at the light
unsatisfied !
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I also love this final line. It reminds me of Spengler. The civilized is the sanitized and the standardized. I’d be a fool to want what’s good in mediocrity thrown away. But I’d be already dead if part of me didn’t want something unsafe and bright.
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Nice passage from Miller…now I must read The Possessed, one of the few Dostoevsky works I haven’t yet. Also I have a couple of Bakhtin books on the shelves, so I’ll drag those out too…
Nice…haiku like…many crows where I live…
Well said and I agree completely.
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The Possessed is wicked. Slow start, but worth it !
Glad you have Bakhtin around. Of course I just discovered him recently by chance. Basically he seriously helped me “locate” what I object to as the pretense of philosophers to “own” the language. And also the tendency to yank out pieces of speech from their crucial context.
I like Derrida, but Bakhtin is refreshingly anti-precious. It’s curious who becomes famous and why. Figures get picked up to play little roles in the culture war, primarily functioning as symbols.
Crows are great. I need to spend some more time with biology. I find myself absorbed by videos about honey badgers. Or recently one about dragonflies as incredible predators with insane sets of eyes and hyper-quick computation of intersection paths to nab mosquitos.
On the poem, I find it comical to make the crow bitchy, to translate the caw as “unsatified.” Very vaguely unsastified. But maybe like Seinfeld is unsatisfied (yet quite happy to be so).
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This reminds me of Gnosticism: a group of the chosen who still remember the real world and feel that they are trapped by an evil demiurge. I personally do not sympathize with the Gnostics, but something like this does make sense.
Philosophy, from the very beginning, already oscillated between Plato’s world of ideas and recollection, and Aristotle’s strict, logical form, where everything was derived from what is evident. Mathematics, by the way, is arranged in a similar way. Most mathematicians believe in a separate world of ideas, although formally everything is built up from what is evident.
I think that such a world, or a timeless network of initiates, does exist. They communicate through winks — through art, philosophy, or fragments of phrases, such as Žižek’s “I am a monster.”
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Hence my long term, yet intermittent, sometimes ecstatic and sometimes frightening, experimentation with psychedelics.
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I agree. I would, however, allow for some blurriness and variation. The same-enough insight or gnosis is “remembered” again and again.
Zooming out, we have philosophy that stokes alienation and mystification, and an opposite philosophy that makes one’s own singular existence more emphatically real and central.
For me it’s not that anti-alienation philosophy (my preference) is crudely egoistic. It’s more like “your little life is immediately a piece of the raging world itself.” There is no bubble or picture or gap. I take Heidegger’s notion of authenticity to be simply a formal indication. Not a pattern designed by Heidegger as guru for little fanboys to try and conform to. Quite the reverse. And close to Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
The “gnosis” would involve, in this context, not some finite proposition but a vivid sense of the reality of one’s own existence. Contrast this with all the philosophy that calls experience an illusion or a byproduct of some external and alienated “reality.”
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There is a tension here that I cannot fully resolve.
On the one hand, a human being is never simply “by himself.” He is always part of biology, education, society, history, media, language, and so on — what one could call the raging ocean.
On the other hand, a human being is also fundamentally alone. In some sense, he carries out the basis of his existence in relation to what could be called the divine, or at least something greater than the empirical self.
For example, I sometimes have the sense that I, as a person, am much more stupid than some of my thoughts. And I do not want to reduce this to a Deleuzian rhizome, or to schizoanalytic wandering through a network. The strange thing is that these insights appear frighteningly systematic, while I myself am certainly not the creator of any system.
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I totally agree. The human being is fundamentally social and yet potentially very alone, especially if that human being explores paths and possibilities that most human beings avoid.
On some of those paths, something numinous can be discovered, and its “radiance” is “transpersonal.” It is experienced with a validity that transcends the human being who stumbles on to it.
In a certain sense, the fragile finite human being has its essence beyond and outside of itself. Part of this is the language that speaks us, but of course I also mean something more obscure, something that is not just automatically there like a chair in the living room.
It’s more like a dormant potential that may or may not be activated.
I can’t help but think of Jung and Campbell here. What deep codes do we inherit ? These codes may live mostly unexpressed and undetected. “Systematic” suggests a coherence. The insights are not awkward fragments but instead glow with a rich unity. A psychologist might hypothesize that this is exactly their function — empowerment through a total vision and the provision of a coherent heroic role. Tying this back to the OP, I personally connect this kind of insight to an affirmation of the evil side of “God” or “reality.” One is no longer a white knight but more like a gray witness.
I am coming to the conclusion that there is no point in orienting this toward psychology, religion, science, culture, or any particular teachings such as Jung’s. They may help as a compass, but they are never an exact explanation.
Here cause and effect are reversed — as if Jung is not trying to describe personal transpersonal experience, but all possible experience is already included in Jung.
This is something like attempts to define the soul, God, or the meaning of life. That would be absurd, because definitions move from the more general to the particular, and there is nothing above the meaning of life, God, or the soul.
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I basically agree with your critique of the psychological approach. The full force of a sign like “God” is beyond psychology.
To me Bakhtin is relevant here. It very much matters where these signs are being spoken. Their meaning is between the speakers, not trapped in the words themselves. I take you to mean something genuine and intense by the signs, and so I respect your objection to any psychologizing. Jung’s “psychology” is just more myth. But what is myth ? An infinite concept.
Again I quote Paul De Man, hoping you’ll see why.
When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it. But since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. What they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but literature reappearing like the hydra’s head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing ‘the nothingness of human matters’.
“Literature” is “myth” is a dangerously open concept.
The word myth comes from Ancient Greek μῦθος (mȳthos),[11] meaning ‘speech’, ‘narrative’, or ‘fiction’.
Speech ! Myth is speech. But what is speech ? A stupid question, and yet speech is fundamental. And I don’t want to reduce it to signs. Signs have their life in speech, between individuals who are otherwise terribly alone at times.