During the first stages of the relationship there is a great temptation, both in marriage and in marriage-like free love, to let oneself be completely absorbed by the other, to send the last reserves of the soul after those of the body, to lose oneself to the other without reservation. Yet, in most cases, this abandon probably threatens the future of the relationship seriously. Only those individuals can give themselves wholly without danger who cannot wholly give themselves, because their wealth consists in a continuous development in which every abandon is at once followed by new treasures. Such individuals have an inexhaustible reservoir of latent psychological possessions, and hence can no more reveal and give them away at one stroke than a tree can give away next year’s fruits with those of the season. But other individuals are different. With every flight of feeling, with every unconditional abandonment, with every revelation of heir inner life, they make inroads (as it were) into their capital, because they lack the mainspring of ever renewed psychic affluence which can neither be exhaustively revealed nor be separated from the ego. In these cases, the spouses have a good chance of coming to face one another with empty hands; and the Dionysian bliss of giving may leave behind it an impoverishment which, unjustly, but no less bitterly for that, belies in retrospect even past abandons and their happiness.
We are, after all, made in such a way that we need not only a certain proportion of truth and error as the basis of our lives, but also a certain proportion of distinctness and indistinctness in the image of our life-elements. The other individual must give us not only gifts we may accept, but the possibility of our giving him–hopes, idealizations, hidden beauties, attractions of which not even he is conscious. But the place where we deposit all this, which we produce, but produce for him is the indistinct horizon of his personality, the interstitial realm, in which faith replaces knowledge. But it must be strongly emphasized that this is, by no means, only a matter of illusions and optimistic or amorous self-deceptions, but that portions even of the persons closest to us must be offered us in the form of indistinctness and unclarity, in order for their attractiveness to keep on the same high level.
Simmel, The Secret and the Secret Society
Waggish
David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.
Page 83 of 148
Some good responses on my post on Gene Wolfe below. Just to be clear, I find plenty to mull over in Wolfe’s books, particularly with regard to his political and religious attitudes. What makes him so vexing is that I find his work substantively disappointing and yet cannot dismiss him. But I maintain that there’s an attitude brought to the work that makes the books less than they could be, and indeed, what I think Wolfe wants them to be. Some quotes:
LM: All this “showing” in “V.R.T.” is made intriguingly ambiguous by the confusion about who “Marsch” really is.
Wolfe: In the end, of course, it’s important that the reader not be confused about this, although part of the fun is supposed to be figuring out what’s happened. I leave a number of clues as to who the narrator actually is. For example, both V.R.T. and the narrator are shown to be very poor shots, whereas Marsch is a very good shot, and there’s other hints like that. If you hire a shape changer as a guide, there’s a definite possibility that he’s going to change into your shape at some point. Which is what happens.
JJ: The Soldier of Arete is even more than
Soldier of the Mist a bit
hard to follow in terms of his plot. And I remember, in fact I
remember when it came out Orson Scott Card really complained that
(it was in Analog or Astounding; one of those magazines) he had a
review that said “Nobody reads Gene Wolfe with more care and
affection than I do but I can’t figure out what this book is about.”
What is wrong with this author? Does that kind of complaint
bother you or do you feel as if you wish you could leave more clues
or do you feel: Hey, read the book and look at it again and you
will find the answers.Wolfe: I try not to leave a clue more than once. It bothers me a lot
when it is left more than once in somebody else’s book. If you told
me once that the hero is left handed, I have registered it or at
least I hope I have registered it or whatever this may be and if
you told me five times then I feel that you are writing to somebody
that is a lot dumber than I am. So I try and leave my clues once
and generally try and leave all the clues that I think the reader
is going to require, sometimes more than they require because you
don’t generally find situations in which you have exactly as much
information as you need to solve the thing. If it is solvable at
all you probably have more. If you have only a very few items then
it probably isn’t solvable with the information that you have. What
you need to do in a real life situation is to go out and get more
clues. If you know anything about actual police work very little of
it consists of reasoning from clues and the great majority or it
consists of finding more clues. Because when you have found enough
then you have got, you have very little difficulty in understanding
what they mean.
This talk of clues and confusion makes me suspect that yes, Wolfe does expect the reader to figure it out, and that the lacunae in his work are not meant to sustain indeterminacy, but to provide a framework for the reader to explore in search of answers. And since I am not the sort of person who remembers that a character is left-handed two hundred pages later, I find it frustrating, for example, that it would greatly aid my understanding of the book to realize that two characters with different names are actually one and the same by virtue of their handedness. This is just not what I read fiction for.
I did not consider this a problem in “V.R.T.,” where the crucial narrative trick is fairly obvious once you know what to look for. And, as Wolfe says, discovering this trick is necessary to understand the story. But by The Book of the New Sun, the elisions have multiplied beyond what I can manage, and I cannot convince myself that I can ignore them.
Now, I can enjoy Ulysses and draw much from it without knowing whether or not Bloom gives a condom to Alec Bannon at the impenetrable end of chapter 14. Unlike Joyce, Wolfe stakes so much of his book on these sorts of narrative obscurities that (a) in the absence of their resolution, the book does not reveal itself sufficiently, and (b) Wolfe subordinates thematic and conceptual integrity to the mere challenge of these games. Many people are content to enjoy the ride and pass over these issues, and Wolfe deserves the attention they give him, but this is not enough for Wolfe to satisfy his books’ ambitions.
[Special thanks to Spurious for articulating some of these issues better than I could. He brings up the even more perplexing subject of the correspondence or lack thereof to Christian deity and eschatology, then concludes that the book is sane. I agree, but I prefer a different phrasing. Wolfe was an industrial engineer by training and profession, and as with much science-fiction, a particular sort of engineer’s attitude goes into the functional and architectural construction of his work, and these attitudes are reflected in the methodologies of Severian and Silk. Like many of his characters, Wolfe’s books are machines, and it is only when looking for the animating spirit that one runs into trouble with them.]
I never thought I’d get the chance to see Partch’s Delusion of the Fury. The Japan Society’s production is the first since the premiere almost 40 years ago, and I get the feeling there’s not going to be another one anytime soon, since Partch wrote for his own unwieldy instruments and the requirements he placed on performers were rather strenuous. (Partch’s recommendation that his instruments be wheeled around on the stage during the performance, adding to their “corporeality,” was dropped in this production.) So I consider myself blessed to have the experience of getting some idea of what Partch had in mind, even if his full intentions were probably unrealizable. Partch was something of a magpie in stealing bits and pieces from other cultures–gamelan here, gagaku there–but the synthesis is so intensely personal as to be an unrecognizable miscegenation. His vaunted excursions into microtones are only a small part of Partch’s outre gestalt.
It’s because of the private nature of the work that I can’t easily assess my own reaction to it difficult. Partch may have thought that he was tapping into some universal mythos and music, but I have to say that at least in that regard, he failed. All of his work, and Delusion is perhaps the most fully realized work but not any more or less accessible than the others, springs from his willfully cultivated outsider status and mostly solitary development of his own musical theories and dogma. Partch was far from untrained, but he was not a social man, and it seems that estrangement came to him naturally, particularly from “The Establishment” and high culture in general. There are a number of other American composers that fall into this category, and they rank among the best the country has produced: Conlon Nancarrow, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varese (not actually American, but tried his damnedest to be), Sun Ra, Lou Harrison, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton. All of them resisted (and continue to resist) easy assimilation into a larger historical context, and many actively tried to divorce themselves from being associated with any larger movement. (I do not think it’s a coincidence that many of them, including Partch, also happened to be queer, but that’s all I’m prepared to say on that subject. See also Percy Grainger, who ironically was too establishment to make the list.) Partch, himself quite the curmudgeon, extended this autonomy to the very instruments themselves, ensuring himself an even greater degree of personal control over performance. The resultant effect, no doubt intentional, is that there is more work to be done to get inside the corpus of these composers than those who exist closer to the mainstream horizon of recent times.
So here’s the plot, in Partch’s words:
It is an olden time, but neither a precise time nor a precise place. The “Exordium” is an overture, and invocation, the beginning of a ritualistic web. Act I, on the recurrent theme of Noh plays, is a music-theater portrayal of release from the wheel of life and death. It opens with a pilgrim in search of a particular shrine, where he may do penance for murder. The murdered man appears as a ghost, sees first the assassin, then his young son looking for a vision of his father’s face. Spurred to resentment by his son’s presence, he lives again through the ordeal of death, but at the end — with the supplication “Pray for me!” — he finds reconciliation.
There is nowhere, from the beginning of the “Exordium” to the end of Act II, a complete cessation of music. The “Sanctus” ties Acts I and II together; it is the Epilogue to the one, the Prologue to the other. Act II involves a reconciliation with life. A young vagabond is cooking a meal over a fire in rocks when an old woman approaches, searching for a lost kid. She finds the kid, but — due to a misunderstanding caused by the hobo’s deafness — a dispute ensues. Villagers gather and, during a violent dance, fore the quarreling couple to appear before the justice of the peace, who is both deaf and nearsighted.
Following the judge’s sentence, the Chorus sings in unison, “Oh, how did we ever get by without justice?” and a voice offstage reverts to the supplication at the end of Act I.
The near-total lack of narration and speech (partly for copyright reasons, apparently) does not make it easy to understand what is going on without the accompanying program notes, and the partial doubling of the actors in the main roles in the two parts is more puzzling than anything else. To the extent that Delusion reaches for universality, it is to a totality of musical performance. Watching it, I could only feel that narrative and thematic drive had been subordinated to the physical performance of music (and dance) itself, which struggled under the heavy responsibility of evoking those very traits. There’s a hint of this in Partch’s own description of his aesthetics:
The work that I have been doing these many years parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found sound-magic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he involved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.
Where one might expect narrative, there is only raw experience and ritual, which I gather Partch intended to place in a prior and more fundamental place than what constitutes modern storytelling. The Residents, hugely influenced by Partch, drew upon this aspect in their own early work, particularly in the nonsense narrative of Not Available and the instrumental “narratives” of Eskimo and above all “Six Things to a Cycle” (off of Fingerprince), which is so Partch-like as to constitute a tribute. The plot: “Man, represented as a primitive humanoid, is consumed by his self-created environment only to be replaced by a new creature, still primitive, still faulty, but destined to rule the world just as poorly.” Its (entire) lyrics?
Chew chew GUM chew GUM GUM chew chew
Chew chew GUM chew GUM GUM chew chew
Chew chew GUM chew GUM GUM chew chew
[Smack Smack Smack]
So yeah, I think that says it all.
But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economic textbooks. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality of the opponent proposals – protectionism on one hand, and Marxian socialism on the other. Yet these doctrines are both characterised, not only or chiefly by their infringing the general presumption in favour of laissez-faire, but by mere logical fallacy. Both are examples of poor thinking, of inability to analyse a process and follow it out to its conclusion. The arguments against them, though reinforced by the principle of laissez-faire, do not strictly require it. Of the two, protectionism is at least plausible, and the forces making for its popularity are nothing to wonder at. But Marxian socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion – how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men and, through them, the events of history. At any rate, the obvious scientific deficiencies of these two schools greatly contributed to the prestige and authority of nineteenth-century laissez-faire.
Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from time to time, laissez-faire has been founded. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.
We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation,” namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion.
John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926)
He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
‘And all its mystery,’ he said,
‘Is clear as day to me!’He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
‘A fact so dread,’ he faintly said,
‘Extinguishes all hope!’Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Song
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