for emily mitchell

JM Coetzee is a terrifying writer. The most terrible thing to contemplate is man's complete reduction to a state of nature. More terrible still is the idea that human beings create the very conditions by which the only honorable thing to do is to cancel oneself, to crawl back into nature, to reduce everything to animal rhythms in the face of barbarism. Coetzee's novel, Life And Times of Michael K is about just such a reduction. The background is of war and the dissolution of human institutions. The foreground is Michael K, who strives for something so utterly simple in the face of these dissolutions that he ultimately strives to become a wraith, a thing that is barely noticed in the comings and goings of things.

Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that:

I am thus frankly pessimistic in appraising life, for it is chiefly composed of pain and the fear of death, and it seems to me that a man who has succeeded in living a day without physical suffering should consider himself pretty happy.

If there is an epigram for Coetzee's Michael K., that would be it. Michael K decides to take his mother back to her rural homeland in South Africa. There is a war. He modifies a wheel barrow to carry her. She's sick. She dies in the wheel barrow. Michael K loses all his things. He finds the rural area his mother was from. There is nothing there. He reduces himself to nothing as compensation. Coetzee writes,

The days passes and nothing happened. The sun shone, the birds skipped from bush to bush, the great silence reverberated from horizon to horizon, and K's confidence came back. He spent a whole day lying under cover watching the farmhouse, while the sun moved in an arc from left to right and the shadows moved across the stoep from right to left. . . . All was silence.

It is hard not to relate Coetzee's Michael K. to Kafka's K. Actually, they are the same man, or at least different species of the same genus. But whereas Kafka's K. drifts through a world of institutions whose meaning and purport is no longer in contact with actual human lives, Coetzee's K. is in flight from the human altogether.

In the second section of Life and Times of Michael K, Michael K ends up in a hospital where a doctor struggles to understand his situation. The impenetrability of K. haunts him, tortures his understanding. The doctor says,

This sense of gathering meaning is not something like a ray that I project to bathe this or that bed, or a robe in which I wrap this or that patient according to whim. Michaels means something and the meaning he has is not private to me. If I were, if the origin of this meaning were, no more than a lack in myself, a lack, say, of something to believe in, since we all know how difficult it is to satisfy a hunger for belief with the vision of times to come that the war, to say nothing of the camps, presents us with, if it were a mere craving for meaning that sent me to Michaels and his story, if Michaels himself were no more than what he seems to be . . . a skin-and-bones man with a crumpled lip . . . then I would have every justification for retiring to the toilets behind the jockey's changing-rooms and locking myself into the last cubicle and putting a bullet in my head.

As the doctor speaks these thoughts to himself, he imagines Michael K simply running away, running as fast as he can with nothing to say. The Doctor, in his imagination, yells after Michael K as he runs. He yells, "Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up a residence in a system without becoming a term in it."

It's a ballsy thing to do but Coetzee is making fun of meaning here. He has the audacity to scoff in the face of meaning. Look at how inadequate it is, he says, how pitiful. The origin of meaning maybe is simply a lack and a projection he seems to say. It doesn't match up to the simple reality of Michael K and his skin-and-bones and crumpled lip. It never will.

The sentences immediately following those quoted above from Milosz read thusly:

The Prince of This World is also the Prince of Lies and the Prince of Darkness. The old Iranian myths about the struggle of Darkness with Life, Ahriman against Ormazd, suit me perfectly. What, then, is light? The divine in man turning against the natural in him--in other words, intelligence dissenting from 'meaninglessness', searching for meaning, grafted onto darkness like a noble shoot onto a wild tree, growing greater and stronger only in and through man.

Michael K's response to this is devastating to the degree in which it simply slips away from the question altogether. It runs away from Milosz and the light. This is the last paragraph from Coetzee's book.

And if the old man climbed out of the cart and stretched himself (things were gathering pace now) and looked where the pump had been that the soldiers had blown up so that nothing should be left standing, and complained, saying, 'What are we going to do about water'? he, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.

- posted by morgan @ 4:37 PM

 
Ever since Herodotus and Thucydides there has been debate about the nature of historical writing. Herodotus gets credit as the Father of History, but also as the Father of Lies. The problem is one of methodology and science. For Herodotus, the distinction between tales and true accounts was a loose one. He was less interested, often, in verifying fact and removing fiction than he was in getting stories. Still, he attempted to weave those stories together in the name of understanding, understanding of people and the way they behave and have behaved in the past.

Thucydides, by contrast, was much more interested in the difference between fact and fiction. He was more concerned to establish something of a methodology for historical writing. Near the beginning of his History of The Peloponnesian War, he writes:

The absence of an element of romance in my account of what happened, may well make it less attractive to hear, but all who want to attain a clear point of view of the past, and also of like or nearly like events which, human nature being what is, will probably occur in the future-- if these people consider my work useful, I shall be content. It is written to be a possession of lasting value, not a work competing for an immediate hearing.

All of this is to preface the fact that I've been reading Robert Caro's multi-volume history of Lyndon Johnson. It is an extraordinary work and I've been trying to make some sense of why it is so good. It is, of course, roundly recognized as a masterpiece, as is Caro's earlier biography of Robert Moses. Caro's painstaking scholarship has been noted. Years, decades, go into producing each book. He becomes an absolute master of the material at hand. Indeed, he has given his life to these brilliant books. Finishing the Johnson biography is, literally, killing him.

That is what I would call the Thucydidean side of Caro's labors. He is desperate to get it right. The lengths in which he went in order to find out the details of Johnson's stolen election against Coke Stevenson, for instance, are of a man possessed with having more facts at his disposal than anyone else. These labors cannot be explained except as those of man who carries with him an exacting sense of truth. There is no question that Caro believes that history and truth are deeply related. He believes that history gives us access to truth and that the quest for truth must guide historical writing.

But that is also exactly the place where a Herodotean impulse creeps into Caro's historical venture. Like any good historian, Thucydides included, Caro understands that historical writing is some important part art. There is a kind of historical art that takes up and transforms facts and research. It is not just good writing, it isn't simply a feel for narrative. It is hard to know exactly what it is. It's a practice.

At certain points in Caro's biography you believe that you understand something about being an American that you didn't understand before. And they aren't simple things, they are as complicated as the career of Johnson himself; an idealist, pragmatist, monster, and genius all in one. But you get hold of those whisps of American identity as the story unfolds. They move out of the abstract and they become as real as the Hill country that spat Lyndon Johnson out into the world. When Caro writes about the electrification program Johnson oversaw you want to cry it is so real a transformation of human lives. When Johnson betrays Sam Rayburn you want to crawl away and die, because you know that American (human) greatness and American (human) smallness are being written and replayed here and that the consequences are our very own lives.

Anyway, it is a truly great accomplishment. And in a strange way, reading it is both an act of pleasure and an act of citizenship, as I think reading Herodotus and Thucydides were, and still are.
- posted by morgan @ 8:19 PM

 
One of the basic tenets of the school of neo-sincerity to which I belong is difficult to formulate in any rigorous way. Come to think of it, that's perfectly natural since neo-sincerity isn't inclined to formulate anything in a rigorous way. I'm reminded of Sextus Empiricus' hopelessly circular set of principals and definitions of skepticism in Phyrronian Inquiries (neo-sinceritists and Phyrronian skeptics are natural allies and sometimes in outright cahoots). The circularity and non-apodicticity were part of the point.

The same kind of loose argumentation figures in the way that neo-sinceritists are inclined to view problems of historical understanding. From certain, non-neo-sincere, kinds of perspectives, it is a constant problem as to how one can enter into the thought or understanding of another era. This kind of 'epochal' thinking views history as a series of epistemic breaks more than as anything profoundly continuous. And there are, of course, truths to this way of thinking. There is no question that the world of, say, Late Antiquity of North Africa is opaque and difficult to 'get inside of' for anyone raised in the contemporary West.

The problem, from a neo-sincere point of you, is when this difficulty is made the stepping stone for a series of theoretical constructions that propose to solve this concern by reifying it. The neo-sinceritist is inclined to say 'relax', don't get yourself in an analytical tizzy. Simply read more, immerse yourself more, and the problem will tend to dissolve of its own accord. This is because the neo-sinceritist is reasonably convinced that a kind of low level universalism without a big 'U' is so embedded, so manifest, to the actual experiences of human beings on this planet that it doesn't need to be proven through such overwrought and generally boring epistemological fireworks.

The neo-sinceritist sees communication everywhere and therefore quickly tires of the various proofs of its a priori impossibility. (For those still rapt in attention, this is the root basis of the sometimes noted alliances between neo-sinceritists and Wittgenstinians.) Meaning, to put it another way, is taken by the neo-sinceritist to be self-evidently a vast, if bumpy, continuum that stretches across time and space in no particular order. Neo-sinceritists don't get that bent out of shape wondering about how we got meaning in the first place (though, paradoxically, we're amazed and excited often by those who do). Instead, neo-sinceritists are more excited by the prospect of mucking about in the available swamps and hot houses of meaning that are already here. "Let's get to the bottom of this meaning thing once and for all" says the one kind of philosopher. "OK . . . " replies the neo-sinceritist warily "but wait, there's so more of it over in that clump of funny stuff!" and rushes off haphazardly, having already forgotten the earlier question.

All this is preface to some intriguing comments by Frank Kermode on the nature of classics and in particular Wuthering Heights. I had the opportunity, recently, to read Wuthering Heights again. Actually, I read it aloud, all in one night, as part of a rather ridiculous, in the good sense, Flux Factory project. A group of ten or so read different classics aloud, all in one room, at one sitting. In doing so, I found that I neither understood nor appreciated Wuthering Heights any more than I did the first time reading it, which was hardly at all. Maybe it was the circumstances of reading it, unusual as they were, but I don't think so.

This brings us back to Kermode, and Foucault, and epistemic epoches, and the nature of the classic. Kermode makes the following claim in his essay about Wuthering Heights.

We may accept, in some form, the view proposed by Michel Foucault, that our period discourse is controlled by certain unconscious constraints, which make it possible for us think in some ways to the exclusion of others. However subtle we may be at reconstructing the constraints of past epistèmes, we cannot ordinarily move outside the tacit system of our own; it follows that except by extraordinary acts of divination we must remain out of close touch with the probability systems that operated for the readers of the Aeneid or of Wuthering Heights. And even if one argues, as I do, that there is clearly less epistemic discontinuity than Foucault's crisis-philosophy proposes, it seems plausible enough that earlier assumptions about continuity were too naïve.

If this is true, than the neo-sinceritist must be a little more careful about those same assumptions, the ones I earlier called universal with a small 'U'. This is especially true when bumping into texts like Wuthering Heights, which, for whatever reasons, fail to yield to us the repositories of meaning that they otherwise promise. On the other hand, I take Kermode's point to be in basic agreement with the neo-sincere position. Which is to say, meaning hides along the vast spacial-temporal expanse in which it resides. There are pockets and dark spots that, though by no means inaccessible a priori, are hard to get to from whatever peaks and dales of the expanse we happen to find ourselves in the here and now. When we find those dark spots, it means that greater work is required to get to them or they are simply going to be overlooked. Maybe even with the extra labor things there will maintain a kind of dimness. The final paragraph of Kermode's essay puts all of this in a rather nice way.

For what was thought of as beyond time, as the angels, or as the majestas populi Romani, or the imperium were beyond time, inhabiting a fictive perpetuity, is now beyond time in a more human sense; it is here, frankly vernacular, and inhabiting the world where alone, we might say with Wordsworth, we find our happiness--our felicitous readings--or not at all. The language of the new Mercury may strike us as harsh after the songs of Apollo; but the work he contemplates stands there, in all its native plurality, liberated not extinguished by death, the death of writer and reader, unaffected by time yet offering itself to be read under our particular temporal disposition. 'The work proposes, man disposes.' Barthes' point depends upon our recalling that the proverb originally made God the disposer. The implication remains that the classic is an essence available to us under our dispositions, in the aspect of time. So the image of the imperial classic, beyond time, beyond vernacular corruption and change, had perhaps, after all, a measure of authenticity; all we need to do is bring it down to earth.

- posted by morgan @ 3:22 PM

 
I've decided to become Polish. This will be slightly easier for me than for some because I happen to be almost completely Polish on my mother's side. But only slightly easier. The Polishness of my Polishness never got going. The things that happen to national identities in the American experience happened to my Poles. The Polishness got filtered out over the years, a couple of generations. It is only a name now, a word that points to origins that stopped explaining things. Calling myself Polish explains almost nothing about me.

But I've decided to make it explain something. There are some names associated with this decision. One of them is Czeslaw Milosz, another is Adam Zagajewski. And what about Gombrowicz and more recently Adam Michnik? There is also Ryszard Kapuscinski. There are others; names I'm still discovering and exhuming from the 20th century. In a way, the 20th century is a Polish century. That is if history should sometimes be written by the losers. And probably it sometimes should. Not that Polish hands aren't stained with the blood of others and stigmitized by the same horrors that marked so many during that terrible century just passed. But Polish Letters, the Polish essay, is profoundly marked by that tragic sense of history that defines the Central and Eastern European mindset that watched, mostly helplessly as Nazism handed them off to the Soviets.

The Polish essay is about individual acts of resistance against the eradication of the mind. Sometimes these essays are conservative, sometimes they are grasping for something new. Sometimes they feel profoundly European, like faded scraps of parchment, testaments to a world that was destroyed by the very hands that had built it. Milosz feels that way most of the time, like a character from one of Sebald's novels, like a memory waiting to dissapear. Milosz is a million miles away, talking about his Polishness in ways that don't even completely make sense. And he is so good that he doesn't have to care. He writes:

My work for foreigners has been of a practical, even pedagogic nature--I do not believe in the possibility of communing outside a shared language, a shared history--while my work in Polish has been addressed to readers transcending a specific time and place, otherwise known as 'writing for the Muses'.

But Milosz too was an exile and he had to take his Polish with him. Polish essay writing always has some aspect of exile mentality. The Polish 20th century is about the tenuousness and transmutability of physical space. And it is about the power of mental space in the face of that fragility. Zagajewski writes about Gombrowicz:

And yet, despite all his theories, polemics, and quasi-philosophical and anthropological lectures, it is not in the sphere of ideas that we should seek his greatness, but deeper, in a more elementary realm. Through all of his disputes and debates, Gombrowicz, a restless spirit provoked by time, by modernism and recent history, expresses himself, and speaks—not straightforwardly, which is precisely what is so engaging—about himself, his adventures, his sufferings; about pain and about joy. He is like an Everyman for our time; he is our fellow, tormented not only by sickness, emigration, poverty, and loneliness, but also by ideas.

That is exile writing too. It's tormented but it has found some strength in that condition. The exile in the Polish essay isn't a victim. The Polish essay bitches and moans but then laughs about it. The Polish essay can always draw on totalitarian humor, the blackest and often most painfully humorous of humors.

I think that the exiled fragments of experience that have come down to us from the 20th century in the Polish essay are something to identify with as ruins. In these ruins are the best, if broken, parts of the human mental landscape. That is the kind of Polish I've decided to try and be.
- posted by morgan @ 8:22 PM

 
for alan koenig


America has a way of producing losers, freaks, goofballs, and maniacs who manage, never-the-less, to express truths that otherwise wouldn't get said. Perhaps its an extension of the village idiot phenomenon. It takes a village, no doubt, but it takes a warped and drug-addled mind to tell the village what is really going on.

Hunter S. Thompson was just such a mind. This is to say that he provided a service; a proposition he himself probably would not have cared much about. But he did provide a service. Someone had to express the sense in which things didn't have much sense. Someone had to be able to express insanity and breakdown with clarity and honesty.

And there is another thing that Hunter S. Thompson managed to put his finger on. Freedom. Crazy freedom, but freedom all the same. His brand of freedom was the kind that comes in the back of a broken down truck with a bottle of ether. It was a fuck you kind of freedom. It was the freedom to recognize that things are dumb and getting worse. I don't actually know if things really are dumb and getting worse. But anyone who doesn't recognize that emotion, who hasn't sometimes looked around at the world in pure disgust, is a dangerous moron. Hunter S. Thompson was engaged in a battle to the death with dangerous morons. And half the time he was in revolt against his own mind. He feared the little moron within.

The following lines from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will always be seared into a happy, if angst ridden, place in my mind:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

These are bold sentences and they are unashamed. They're as American as the road flick or Going West. But they've crossed a line into the dark side. Probably America was always corrupt. Hunter S. Thompson was the first person to take that corruption, meet it head on, and one-up it. He fed off the darkness and the luridness and the lies of American life. He sustained himself with all of that crap. He loved the fact that Nixon made him wretch. Every time Nixon debased himself and the nation with him it made Hunter S. Thompson stronger. He became powerful on American stupidity and meanness. That alone was a small miracle, a tiny, weird and utterly disturbing miracle. Sometimes you wanted America to get worse just so Hunter S. Thompson would get stronger, like a monster feeding off of downed electrical wires. He was able to take in all the wretchedness and transform it into something oddly inspiring. He was able to write:

Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done too many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived like a Prussian gambler--sweating worse than Bryant on some nights and drunker than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare . . . and these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines.

And in writing like that he won for a moment. But you can't win forever.

I guess he finally shot himself in the brain. His final insult to an absurd rationality that never added up. Probably that was inevitable but it still makes me sad. I would have thought that he had earned some peace. But I think he knew better. I think he did it his way all the way through.
- posted by morgan @ 9:00 PM