| on not being an authority |
[May. 9th, 2008|10:51 am] |
I quote selectively for rhetorical impact, and of course every strand of the preceding post needs to be made more nuanced...but this would completely make certain that no one would read it.
The present disjunctures are fascinating to watch...as the weakening dollar and slowing American economy improves the U.S. global trade balance, the dollar weakens further on increased oil prices driven by the flight to commodities in lieu of unstable currency relations. This has all been shaping up for decades, but on some level it is indeed a perverse confirmation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, except that the invisible hand controls the imperfection and irrationality of markets. Millions of people get up, make variously rational and nutsoid decisions, and the results play out in ways that pull things in counterintuitive directions. |
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| chickens come home to roost, and find no refuge wherein they can perch |
[May. 8th, 2008|09:08 am] |
In the absence of my hypothetical fantasy novel that will tie it all together with a ridiculously entertaining frame tale, Kevin Phillips' Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism is about as good as it is going to get when it comes to presenting the present U.S. dilemma in terms the average reader can digest.
I've not read Phillips' earlier screeds about the coming whirlwind, but this one ties together the basics: how American negligence allowed inventive deal-assemblers to bamboozle naive bankers the world over, thereby undercutting the status of the American currency as an internationally accepted reserve, thereby further destabilizing a petroleum market that was being impacted by the imminent arrival of a permanent shortfall of capacity, thereby ensuring the collision between a need for focus on new energy sources and a need for solutions to the crisis of global warming.
And all of the crises are taking place within the human tendency to focus on one thing at a time, to be self-deluding, to shift blame whenever possible, to go for the short term solution and the self-aggrandizing interpretation...you know, all that cool stuff I've been blogging about for a couple of years, plus the topics I haven't mentioned, such as the inability to interpret new information except in terms of the old information.
Phillips doesn't hit on all of this, and he focuses on the implications for Americans of the multiple global crises to which the shortsighted deceptions of a few million urban and rural American mortgage brokers (hell, more likely a few thousand, but let's be expansive and rhetorical like good Americans) have now contributed mightily. Having read contracts written by some such mortgage brokers, I can testify that simple stupidity probably added to outright prevarication. And as someone else said once in a much more noble context, "Whoever thought we would make all this history?"
Phillips reports optimistically that of five crises he identified in 2006, the religious-fundamentalist apocalypticism seems to have receded along with the prospects in Iraq, but "No one can afford to stand down with respect to the other four sequences: the rising near-term possibility of peak oil; the inability of the big U.S. and British oil companies to do more than run in place while state-owned oil companies take charge; the converging financial triangulation of the vulnerable [U.S.] dollar, the housing bubble, and the debt and credit crisis; and the onrush of global climate dangers. A clash between energy-supply worries and climate-change fears seems nearer than ever."
Nearer? even the few weeks' lag time of publication in the twenty-first century means events outstrip prediction. It is here. |
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| Wright (the other other Wright) remains right on |
[May. 7th, 2008|09:16 am] |
"Right on" in this case being short for the idiom "right on target," a military metaphor that I now realize was appropriate for the times forty years ago and is equally so in the present moment.
Anyway.
Wallace Stevens always was essential but mostly unreadable. Charles Wright, in his self-declared old age, at least accelerates the pace of Stevens' tropes and makes them new for the twenty-first century, where they will be read, or not, but at least will be available in a readable syntax and vocabulary. He writes:
To know one's self is the final yes, of course.
The no,
However, is right behind it, and just as final.
..............
The morning is almost silent and cannot declare itself.
Therefore, I say unto it,
you are the never-boring miracle
Of sunlight and scrappy cloud,
The absence of rain when rain is absent, as it is
This morning, green with its wonderment,
Last night's hard frost a wet memory
Scattered in bits and glitzy pieces
deep in the grass. |
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| a slightly revised note on writing and reading poetry |
[May. 7th, 2008|08:58 am] |
I can't make myself write poetry anymore (although I promptly wrote some lines after claiming this), but I do sometimes read it, and through discovering the anthology The Hell With Love via the typical method of an unrelated Google search, I have found out what "conversation hearts" are (and never knew before that they had a name). The last-named book contains James Wright's infinitely precious poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," though the reviewer misquotes the final line's riposte to Rilke: it's "I have wasted my life," not "I've wasted my life." (A "conversation heart" is an American heart-shaped candy with a romance-related word or phrase imprinted on it; the anthology's title is presented in the form of four conversation hearts.)
James Wright's poem, which I have loved ever since discovering it when I was twenty, isn't really a riposte to Rainer Maria Rilke's "Torso of an Archaic Apollo" (I won't attempt to remember the correct German title), but a variation on its final-line revelation. Rilke's work of ancient art proclaims to him, "You must change your life." The works of transient harmony in Minnesota tell the poet that he has wasted his.
Wallace Stevens found such moments of revelation both in art and in the art that the imagination finds in nature, and so did whole generations of European and North and South American poets. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism.
But who wants to see it, really? I don't write much poetry because it is such a culture-specific product, so aimed at a very few people.
Nevertheless, I love Charles Wright's long poem Littlefoot, which I have just now gotten round to acquiring and reading, exactly because it combines arcane references meaningful to only a few with moments of observation and humor that are at least potentially meaningful to many.
A reference doesn't have to be arcane to be obscure, just culture- or age-specific. Wright incorporates a childhood memory from "Sixty-two years ago, the year of aluminum pennies," and of those younger than Wright is, only coin collectors and readers about World War Two on the American home front will realize immediately that 1943 is meant, although the pennies of that year weren't made of aluminum but zinc-coated steel.
This is why translations frequently come with footnotes, and a good many poems and novels in one's native language should as well.
Poets, and now bloggers, know they write for a limited audience, a far smaller one than fiction has, and even smaller than the audience for songwriter/performers. Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo wrote that his poems were intended for a very few, "not for a hundred, nor for one" (I quote from memory), and Wright writes,
...we thought we were writing for the angels
And find, after all these years
Our lines were written in black ink on the midnight sky.
Messages in the wind,
a flutter of billets-doux
From one dark heart to the next.
There are echoes there of Catullus' Latin verse, and a book title by Theodore Roethke. Even less known than "the year of aluminum pennies."
I find that LiveJournal will not let me transcribe poetry correctly unless I learn how to use something other than the tab key or space bar, but the lines without capitalization at the beginning are meant to be indented. |
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| conversation hearts: September song |
[May. 6th, 2008|10:54 am] |
Thanks to amazon.com, John Crowley, Google, and the anthology The Hell With Love, I have found out what "conversation hearts" are (and never knew before that they had a name).
The aforementioned phrase is the title of a hitherto unmentioned forthcoming novella by John Crowley from Subterranean Press, which has nothing to do with either hell or love, as far as I know, though the only arm's-length announcement of its putative late-September 2008 existence appears to be on something called Hellnotes.
Which, if you ask me, is a hell of a note. These things just creep onto amazon.com without prior notice, except for those who follow every update of Subterranean Press's website. And since I am not particularly into science fiction or genre fiction in general, I don't.
There will apparently be 1000 trade-edition hardbound copies of Conversation Hearts and 250 signed leatherbound copies, which are not offered for sale on amazon.com so those of you who are not philosophically opposed to books bound in leather may wish to get your order in early. The indefatigable anselmo_b tells me that the $45 limited edition can be ordered via the press's book description page, but not from the press's online catalog.
Now I am going back to my art historical researches on how some of the most influential images of 20th century occultist culture may have been created de novo if not indeed ex nihilo in 1909 by a British-born Brooklyn, Kingston and London artist of Jamaican descent. |
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| more meanderings re Pamela Colman Smith |
[May. 5th, 2008|01:49 pm] |
I note that Smith is absent from the The Age of Enchantment catalogue of British illustrators 1890-1930, even though that was the period in which she flourished.
She is, admittedly, not a major artist by any reasonable standard, but her sometimes derivative illustrations are counterbalanced by a personal symbology that shows up in at least some of her watercolors. And of course, the question that remains in contention is just how much guidance Waite gave her in creating the images for the number cards of the Tarot, which had seldom had images associated with them in earlier decks (the Sola Busca Tarot being one exception). Since there were fewer precursors for illustrations of the so-called Lesser Arcana than for the twenty-two cards of the Greater Arcana, the question becomes, what did Smith know and how did she know it?
In other words, did Waite have such a clear idea in mind that he hovered over Smith during the six months that she painted the original cards, or did he give general notions of the positive and negative meanings of the cards and let Smith interpret the theme visually as she chose?
There seems to be more discussion out there about this than I personally wish to pursue. There is even discussion about whether Smith's designs are in the public domain in the United States or will not become so until 2012 (an appropriate date) when the UK copyright expires on May 19.
I am more interested, right now, in how a woman of such relevance to the race-and-gender folks got marginalized right out of history. (The "Rider-Waite Tarot" deck is named after the company that published it and the conceptual creator who copyrighted it, with the artist's name associated with the "work for hire" being as usual cut out entirely.)
One could run down the list of academic subspecializations to which it seems Smith ought to be of interest, but except for such scholars as Ronald Hutton, the fact that such objects as the Rider-Waite Tarot have a history, as well as a cultural impact, appears to be regarded as inconsequential.
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| PCS (not metro) |
[May. 4th, 2008|11:52 am] |
I have taken to blogging over on counterforces.blogspot again, to which I refer the interested reader for how I came to spend a day tracking down the neglected career of Pamela Colman Smith. Okay, the short of it is that I saw her work in the "Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle" exhibition at the High Museum of Art and felt that the curator of the show had done Smith an injustice in a rather fragmentary and slighting biographical note about someone who seemed much more interesting than most of the artists of the symbolist generation, having lived in Jamaica and collected folk tales which she compiled in a published volume, then designed the cards of the A. E. Waite Tarot in 1909, then been an active feminist and a recognized illustrator and oh, lots of other things, but subsequently disappearing from view for the last 35 years of her life and dying in poverty in 1951, when her paintings and other possessions were auctioned off to pay her debts.
My counterforces entry lists the biographical page that amplifies on this (more so than the Wikipedia entry)...it requires a bit more effort to locate the best of her art, which included illustrations for Baring-Gould et al. --- her original watercolors are better than her illustrational work, but the ones included in the exhibition are not reproduced in the book associated with the show. In other words, we are overdue for a re-evaluation with numerous illustrations.
However, Melinda Boyd Parsons, who seems to be the world's sole Pamela Colman Smith scholar, is proving as invisible as Smith herself. Parsons has seemingly been working on her Smith biography for the past three decades and was last identified as teaching at the University of Memphis (prior to its 1993 name change). Now she doesn't show up in any web searches except on the Tarot-related sites that quote from her research.
A forgotten symbolist painter whose sole researcher seems to be equally elusive, and one whose work is seen by millions of people each year who have no idea that it is her work...my kind of artist, obviously.
I don't quite know why I find myself repeatedly enmeshed in the history of the Tarot these days...I left my Waite Tarot deck behind years ago because it dated from the days when I wrote a freshman independent study paper on The Waste Land and I wanted to forget those years.
Eliot didn't know anything about the Tarot either, and made up some cards that aren't in the actual deck. |
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| trying (unsuccessfully) to reform my long-winded ways |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|10:17 am] |
Arts and Letters Daily links to a Wall Street Journal review of James Cuno's Who Owns Antiquity? that touches on one of my longstanding obsessions: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120917161859146583.html
Cuno's argument—that the achievements of the ancient world are global property that ought not to be repatriated to countries making shortsighted political capital out of the objects—needs to be corrected by Kwame Anthony Appiah's much more sensible argument (in, I think, Cosmopolitanism) that the basements of the world's museums need to be emptied and shuffled around. We don't need to put all the Greek vases in Greece and the Benin bronzes and nkisi figures in their respective African countries of origin; we need to send Greece some minkisi and have the British Museum ship a couple more Greek vases to Ghana and ask the Getty to unhand a few Roman mosaics and send 'em off to some up-and-coming museum in south Asia.
( more ) |
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| succinct or not, I do not succeed in communicating |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|09:53 am] |
I wish I found comparable examples in my daily perusal of, say, the BBC news page, but the New York Times, and today its not atypical disjuncture with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, provides my sermon text again.
David Brooks baffles me. Today the AJC got round to running his not-time-sensitive column praising the beauties of medieval cosmology as a restful respite from reporting the pettiness of the campaign trail, the same day that his column published in the NYT summarized accurately a good many of the things I have been complaining that our op-ed people do not absorb, much less get right.
Yet Brooks is frequently as wrongheaded as any columnist I know of, myself included. When he remembers to correct for his own quirks and obsessions, he gets it. But most of the time, he does not.
And if he followed through on the full implications of what he clearly now believes to be true, even his politics might change, or at least his reasons for defending those politics. (Longtime readers can fill in their own cheap joke regarding Brooks' motives. Next question.)
The saga of the Reverend Mr. Wright will give raw material to many a complex analytical study in years to come...nothing short of major reconsiderations of history, social psychology, and all the tools of behavioral analysis could possibly account for the factors momentarily complicating the course of a presidential campaign. And this is being recognized already.
For now, given the need to prioritize discussions, it is enough that folks beyond the world of American politics are addressing our current global crises one at a time, while our candidates argue over whether or not the American people will be rescued from disaster by saving ten or eleven dollars a month on keeping their automobiles in operation. Assuming that prices at the pump didn't simply increase proportionately to offset the rescinded government taxes.
And I shall mostly refrain from adding my two cents' worth because when I do, it apparently is as unintelligible as this current posting most likely is. |
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| more of the same, more of the same, more of the same, for at least the next three weeks |
[Apr. 27th, 2008|06:51 pm] |
Black Swans and Kluges; I Shall Try For Once to be Succinct
Looking recently at clearance sale copies of Metaphors We Live By and The Black Swan, I realized that we have had a depressing succession of popularizing books about the various facts of the mind that I have expended tens if not hundreds of thousands of words exploring.
Each book has its own take on our habitual mistakes and why we make them again and again. Each book has its own dead hobbyhorses to flog [the colon + close parenthesis “joke” emoticon goes here], and its own mistaken overemphases, and some of their own mistakes are more damning than others.
And each book is reviewed skeptically and urbanely in the New York Times. After that, all of us, including the very writers who have made the skeptical and urbane pronouncements, proceed to go on thinking about the world in exactly the mistaken terms that the books have told us are mistaken.
Hence my elaborate jokes about “What would it take to have a very complicated message sink in? If we can’t draw you a picture, can we tell you a story that might hold your attention?”
I was not surprised to find that today’s NYT review of Kluge conforms to the pattern. The book uses an engineering metaphor (a “kluge” is an inelegant, imperfect, ramshackle mechanical solution to a specific engineering problem) to describe the evolutionary flaws in the human mind.
The reviewer points out that the author’s exploration of the metaphor leads to a slew of truisms about overcoming our inner kluge: Don’t make decisions when tired, try to think rationally, et cetera et cetera.
The other books with cutely metaphoric titles have also come down to reciting why truisms are true. We are, in fact, made that way, and one of the ways we are made is to jump to self-congratulatory conclusions such as “I knew that,” when in fact we knew no such thing and fail to distinguish why the lesson being imparted is not quite the same as the familiar maxim under which we file the new information.
As Wittgenstein said, the hardest thing is to change a course of thinking just a little. The mind’s received ideas really do work the way that cartwheel ruts did in the days of dirt tracks.
And it doesn’t seem to matter how many times columnists point out to us why the various ways of the world are in a catastrophic rut: Elizabeth Edwards’ column today on the disastrous focus of American journalism on anything but presidential candidates’ policy prescriptions being a case in point.
On the other hand, the small personal quirks that the media enlarge into perennial crises do contain valid information: It’s just that the meanings are always framed wrongly.
But even when the meanings are set forth for all to read, we will still draw the wrong conclusions from the data. ‘Cause we’re cool like that.
I could say more but
( nah…. ) |
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| an air of despair |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|12:47 pm] |
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080424/us_time/theincrediblyshrinkingdemocrats
Actually, it is the 30-second TV commercial that turns the tide, not the well-written novel, since even the best of best sellers doesn't reach that many Americans.
A non-reader of most fiction, I realized I hadn't ever read a line of any of the writers John Crowley recently announced for the Yale Visiting Writers Series. It is like admitting that one has never read a line of Giorgio Agamben or Slavoj Zizek. Not quite, since it is hard to miss reading a line of Agamben or Zizek, albeit usually the same line since most essayists crib from one another's citations.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is sitting next to the Zizek et al at Indie Coffee and Books but I would have to comb the shelves to come upon the others.
My point, as usual, is that we live in such separate mental universes that it is difficult to imagine a single artwork that would reach each one of us and give us a perspective that we now lack.
And the lack of things that I think are common knowledge is doing us in, in multiple ways. (I say this as one who lacks a lot of information that most people have, which does me in often enough.)
I have been stunned at the Democrats' lack of comprehension of the symbolic ways of American politics to which Joe Klein refers in the column for which the URL appears above. I honestly believed some of the elementary injunctions against mutually destructive behavior and unnecessary self-sabotage had been learned by hard experience.
And the failure to comprehend the theatricality of the political arena (an only seemingly mixed metaphor) will have negative consequences that far outweigh the minimal positive results of getting a few well-educated readers to perceive connections they had not heretofore acknowledged. |
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| if I can ever re-locate my own translations from Aimé Césaire.... |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|02:57 pm] |
I have for the moment taken my first-draft homage to Aimé Césaire completely out of circulation. It's easy to say what his work meant to me when I first encountered it thirty years ago...it was a first glimpse into the commonality of the fates of the insulted and injured in countries and climates dominated and looked down on by self-confidently superior cultures. It opened vistas of imagination and self-valorization previously unconsidered by me, though I later encountered writers from still other countries and languages who did similar things, and realized that Derek Walcott probably caught the spirit of between-ness best for English-language poets.
But all of us are able to wallow in what writers meant for us on a personal level, and by and large, that is of interest only to people who are already interested in us, rather than in them.
So if later considerations ever arrive, a revised post on this topic will appear. |
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| in lieu of much else |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|08:45 am] |
I suppose I should return to my odd appeal to Tim Powers (not meant seriously, no matter how well Declare imaginatively reconstructs the feel of the Cold War and the odd biography of one of the century’s most famous Soviet agents…one wouldn’t want to impose such responsibility on the other novelist who wrote a much more realistically detailed fantastic novel of the Cold War that had only one significant variance from established fact).
I suppose I ought to appeal to, say, Umberto Eco or Salman Rushdie, who may yet write the novels I have in mind without knowing that I have begged for them to be written.
Here is my typically convoluted reasoning:
Beginning in 1970 (when I wrote "A Devout Meditation for Earth Day 1970, Whereon We Also Celebrate the Birthdays of Immanuel Kant and Vladimir Lenin"), I spent my late adolescence convinced that the world was not exactly rushing toward ruin right then, but would get there nonetheless, and just a little bit before I was ready for retirement.
Paul Ehrlich’s vision of The Population Bomb was too simple and too Malthusian (see Mike Davis’ correction of this, re how really bad financial decisions lead to even worse environmental decisions). But Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect pretty well laid it out flat, circa 1975: the planet’s resources were finite, and if the resources didn’t run out thanks to technological inventiveness, then the carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s factories and the various pollutants of the world’s automobiles would do us in via atmospheric changes. And if that were resolved by a turn to…but there were, Heilbroner thought, too many reasons why the world powers would find it inconvenient to turn to much of anything that would fix all the problems.
And Doris Lessing managed to put all these realizations forth, in science-fiction-like novels that delineated our dilemmas perfectly, but that were almost totally unreadable.
Mircea Eliade’s The Forbidden Forest was a bit like Lessing’s grumpy mysticism married to Robert Musil’s philosophical musings in The Man Without Qualities. Anyone who was propelled through Eliade’s novel by the sheer curiosity as to how the mysterious happenings and beliefs of the characters would work themselves out…but few enough people could be so propelled. The ones that were, learned a great deal about the history of Europe and some of the realities of the people who lived through that history. And that was, in the end, more compelling than the strangely named room and the car that either did or did not vanish, and the beliefs of this or that character regarding their ability to step out of history, or their delusional foreknowledge about which day history would come to clobber them.
And that novel had the advantage of leaving it deeply uncertain whether anything out of the ordinary was happening at all, or whether the only mystery lay in the overheated imaginations of the characters, plus a healthy dose of odd but meaningless coincidences.
So our problem right now is that nobody is taking it upon themselves to novelize our present apocalypse. Novels like The Road fantasize a Day After, but we are in the not yet inevitable Day Before, and our major characters are more like the sleepwalkers of Hermann Broch’s novel of that title, or the differently sleepwalking characters of the Collateral Campaign in Musil’s immense epic.
So I want somebody to write a Shikasta that people will actually want to read. That is a modest enough request to make of the writerly universe.
We need a single work that will wake people up to the politics and the physics of our condition simultaneously, and something like Lessing's metaphysical allegory is one way of getting past resistance to understanding, since the entertainment level appeals to readers regardless of their beliefs about the nature of reality. But the plot and style has to render the complex facts unforgettable.
That is not typically what a novelist sets out to do, and most of those who have set out to do that have failed to produce a memorable work of art. So maybe I am asking for the impossible.
But the rhetorical exercise such as this one that is also a backhanded essay is a venerable literary form, isn't it? |
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| taking towels from the Titanic, or, questions that tend not to edification |
[Apr. 16th, 2008|09:04 am] |
I have been stuck on the greatly-overused metaphor of the Titanic for too long now, given that a year or more ago I reported on my visit to the artifacts exhibition now being toured by the Atlanta-based company that has recovered objects from the wrecked ship. I may have said at that time that while I couldn't resist the replica of a steerage coffee mug, I decided against wrapping myself for the winter in a replica of a White Star Line steerage blanket on the grounds that I felt too much like a steerage passenger on the Titanic already. The replica of a towel from the first-class Turkish bath was entirely too horrific, somewhat like the Atlanta restaurant offering a $75 menu replicating the last dinner served on the doomed liner.
Since then, I have abandoned my fragmentary poem "Towels from the Titanic" on the grounds that all my elegant metaphors of foreboding have already been borne out in reality. The elegantly usernamed sinnombre1 confesses raw terror at the visible condition of America (or actually did confess, having imitated myself and the Baltimore-dwelling Estonian by taking her posts private soon after posting them publicly). I do likewise, but withdraw only my ill-composed parables (which I may re-post once I decide they are worth posting).
Some of my characteristic convolutions come under the category of what Gautama the Enlightened called "questions that tend not to edification" (or rather, what his Victorian translators called that; probably "questions that don't do anybody any good"). You recall the Buddha's parable was about the man stuck with a poisoned arrow who refused to have it pulled out until someone could tell him all about the manufacturer of the arrow, the style of the bow that shot it, and the social standing of the archer.
In like fashion, my fascination with the biologically based structural parallels of the widely dispersed millennial movements that arose in response to famines and colonial exploitation is a a question that tends not to edification. It can be disposed of over the short term with a rude, blunt appeal to the idea that folks who get the shaft react similarly to being shafted.
And the great theoreticians from whose insights I have learned much were perfectly capable of being thick-headed when it came to practice. Ernst Bloch, whose The Principle of Hope I cite endlessly in spite of not having looked at it in years, caught considerable flak in recent years from a Scottish progressive journal, for having been an apologist for Joseph Stalin long after he should have thought better of it. Walter Benjamin continued in hopeless contradictions more out of passion for his strong-willed Latvian lover, and his muddled-up accounts of human motives still contain more wisdom than most contemporary theorists will ever manage.
Regardless, the job at hand is to get the damn arrow out. And American politicians are quarreling over whether pulling out the arrow constitutes unacceptable restriction on the noble art of archery.
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| calling all angels |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|08:17 am] |
This is a job for Tim Powers. (Or someone like him.)
I am in near despair over the inability of anyone to stretch the popular imagination (or their own) sufficiently to understand the multiple networks of causation that make things happen on this planet. I am not talking Buddhist or Hindu metaphysics: I am talking hard history and science.
The only novels that begin to stretch in this direction (I have discussed them in this blog before and will not name them again) are bad to the point of unreadability.
It could all be turned into fantasy fiction by the addition of just one non-existent explanatory element: let’s say, for starters, that human actions are determined by atmospheric pressure.
That would be enough to make a false correlation between the optimistic aggressiveness of the European colonizers at the precise moment when the arrival of El Niño-triggered droughts and massive famines facilitated their world conquests of the 1870s. It would let our novelist make up imaginary reasons for the concurrence of the global delusions of all parties that led to massive consequences for whole regions during the El Niño and La Nina events of 1896-1902. (Not all the causes were the same. But some of them were.)
Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocaustsbegins with a tedious summarizing chapter that I am happy I read later on, as usual. It is far better to see first how the collapse of social institutions in cultures the world over opened the channels through which networks of greed and delusional belief in the beneficent powers of the market rushed.
Rather than atmospheric pressure, it’s more likely the financial consequences of unusually good growing conditions (and maybe the good weather that permits crops to grow) that feeds the optimism that lets imperialists set forth with new technologies, to stomp the heathen into submission for their own good.
But fantasy novels need a simple governing fiction that allows them to set forth actually existing complex causes in the development of the plot line.
Anyway, the real point is that nobody sees that it isn’t simply imperial ambition or demographic disaster or religious fanaticism or the Oedipus complex of a dictator that sets immense historical forces in motion. The kinds of individual stress levels that Daniel Smail documents play a role in maintaining systems of domination, and the major accidents of weather allow grand schemes to play themselves out when prior social conditions are right.
Which is by way of saying that although newspaper stories sometimes try to follow the causes of our present dilemma, they hardly ever keep hold of all of them. A dozen separate stories are told as though they were taking place in isolation, which for the participants is exactly what is happening. The people affected can’t see a tenth of the forces involved. Neither can the people passing judgment on them or empathizing with them.
Thomas Pynchon could tell this story, but everyone would laugh and praise his capacity to make stuff up.
I’m fascinated by the amazingly parallel apocalyptic cults that sprang up across the world during the greatest El Niño cycle circa 1900. When the fellows with the machine guns show up at the same time all your oxen are dying, the natural tendency is to blame the latter event on the former, which sometimes is the case and sometimes is not.
But the structural parallels of the cults are more complex than a so-called vulgar materialism would allow. A fantasy novel could just line up similar historical facts, without having to contend with academic methodologists carping about lumping together causally unrelated events.
They are related, dammit; it’s just that we don’t know enough about human biology and its place in the dominant environment of the planet to understand what the real causes are. Some coincidences seem less than inexplicable, and more like uncomprehended medical symptomatologies.
I had, as so often before, sketched out the basics of this post before picking up the April 15 New York Times to find the front page littered with illustrative examples.
Even the story explaining that the Titanic probably sank because the shipbuilders couldn’t find enough skilled riveters, and skimped on iron quality because of budget, and farmed the rivet-making job out to less experienced foundries to meet deadlines, illustrates my point.
It wouldn’t just be that “cheap rivets led to the sinking of the Titanic.” The rivets were cheap because the shipbuilders were trying to meet demand (and maximize profit)s by doing too much at once; because their own capitalization only permitted so many top-quality rivets to be acquired at one time; because the price of top-quality iron was governed by available manufacturing technology and competing demands for the stuff; because available jobs and available men for training were in a particular balance; because the available potential riveters were instead going into other fields or barred from the requisite education, or whatever. (Many “whatevers.”)
In like fashion, a surprising number of passengers on the Titanic boarded the ship because they couldn’t get passage on a competing ship because trans-Atlantic crossings had been delayed due to coal shortages due to a miners’ strike.
Again, many mediocre have explored this kind of causation, to ironic ends.
But the ironclad irony of the Titanic rivets ends, if that causal hypothesis is correct, in a simple unadopted solution. The board of directors dictates in 1911 that standards come before other considerations, and one ship or the other is delayed so that high-standard rivets may be used throughout rather than saved for the likeliest points of fracture. Didn’t happen. General issues of this sort were addressed in board meetings. Adaptations to existing conditions were made.
And solutions in global history are not as simple as rivets, or o-rings and cracked tiles on a space shuttle, or wiring on a passenger jet. There are far more chains of causation.
And the op-ed page of the April 15 New York Times shows that almost none of our opinion makers understand that fact.
Calling the world’s great fantasy novelists. Stat. |
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| carpe diem (but you can look at this on another diem) |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|01:40 pm] |
bibliographic notes on the Tarot, Salman Rushdie, Erik Davis in Hollywood:
( tolle,lege ) |
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| a thing cannot be both "a" and "not-a," unless you don't really understand what an "a" is |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|12:45 pm] |
I have long insisted that the best way to pay homage to our spiritual and intellectual forebears is to imagine how they would respond to new information, and to conditions that were not part of the world in their lifetimes. (This includes pondering whether similar conditions were present in a subtly different form.)
I shall return to this, in a couple of quotations at the end. But right now I want to belabor, again, why our habitual dualism makes it so hard to get anything understood, much less accomplished. (I am not that good at “gettin’ ‘er did,” as was said in my hometown, so I settle for pondering What Is To Be Done.)
So, dualism revisited. ( either/or ) |
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| none in foliage, none in blossom: nature and history rethunked one more time |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|12:41 pm] |
One problem with our planet is that it is an immense interdependent network that is a war of all against all.
Nature is mostly an agglomeration of optimistic free-marketers, and species pursue their own self-interest confident that it will all work out, which usually it does. But every once in a (predictable) while, their policies result in the near-extermination of their own kind, and occasionally in a population crash so complete that not one set of genes is left to propagate.
This seems to be an acceptable risk under the generally accepted accounting practices of evolution. The occasional near-obliteration is almost always a near thing, and that is enough for the machinery of the film of life on the skin of this agglutination of heavy elements from the guts of long-deceased alien suns. Nature gets along with a seven-tenths-of-one-percent solution.
Profligate replication is usually enough to ensure survival of a remnant, and if not, the most successful smaller species figure out how to hunker down on a dry rock until the next rains bring the next sucker within which to carry out a self-destructive life cycle.
Complicated species are less fortunate, and just as the social Darwinists point out, every so often one of ‘em is too blind to ultimate consequences to keep itself going.
The species that meet the greatest array of challenges seem to shift their ecological niches with aplomb, and to form adaptive alliances that keep them going for tens of millennia, unless an asteroid arrives or a volcano erupts in a long-dormant stratum.
The absurd combination of contending options for survival in nature has given birth to quite a few similarly self-destructive metaphors for behavior in history, for those who believe that the doings of nature are like the doings of men, or that the doings of men ought to be like the doings of nature.
The doings of nature are always more complex, and less infinitely wise, than metaphor-making human beings are inclined to think.
Which leads logically to destructive and productive metaphors about “man” and nature, and the discussion of Venantius Fortunatus’ great hymn pange lingua gloriosi proelium that I suppressed a number of posts ago. But that is a digression, and I wish to get on, linearly, to Mike Davis’ convincing 2001 book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
This train of thought was triggered by Pico Iyer’s aforementioned book about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, of course. Late Victorian Holocausts was simply sitting on an adjacent shelf.
( continue???????????????? ) |
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| the unconscious mind may be quite continental |
[Apr. 10th, 2008|11:59 am] |
I so rarely post to Counterforces that I feel the need to announce the ultimate Counterforces type of exhibition, a survey of new art from the Finno-Ugrian autonomous regions within Russia. It is currently on exhibit in Tallinn, Estonia and further documented on my other blog. I quote from ekm.ee:
"The exhibition’s title, North by North-East: The Continental Unconscious, refers to the geographic location of the Finno-Ugrian World, but also to the fact that some territories and nations are exiled from mainstream consciousness and erased from the mental map of contemporary culture. They might even be compared to the content of the Unconscious, which Freud once famously called ‘an aboriginal population of the Mind’. The title also alludes to the pronounced interests in psychic practices among Finno-Ugrian artists and intellectuals." |
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