It’s bizarro-spring, here in New York. Cold crud weather, and almost May. I wonder. What is it about the darkness of a cloudy sky that terrifies us?

What is it about the ecotones between darkness and light—the syzygy of light bursting into darkness, of darkness sliming down over light—that can be both beautiful (awe-full) and absolutely dread?

We can see a frightful ecotone in every cloud (fluffy and light, but shadowing out the sun), and writers have for a long time captured different moments of cloud-dread.

Art critic and endearing madman John Ruskin was the most famous cumulophobic. He thought a mysterious “plague wind” was a sure sign that humanity is doomed:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunderstorm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.

—John Ruskin, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.”

More on Ruskin’s plaguesome clouds from Joel Segal.

From Cabinet.

Other great writers are more or less blunt about the doom, melancholy, and generally emo nature of clouds—all generally in contrast to the storybook associations of clouds with purity, innocence, and lightness.

Lampedusa mentions clouds after a long, bizarre scene of political discourse. The clouds block the sun. Obscuring God, future. Progress, metaphorically, is on hold—a mere trickle forward:

Day had just dawned: the little light that managed to pass through quilted clouds was held up once more by the immemorial filth on the windows.

—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), 1958.

Woolf uses clouds as a gate into dream—positive, progressive dream. But this passage comes during World War I, during the death of the protagonist, the agony of the family. The dream is a temporary respite, an illusion. The reality is the obverse of the cloud-shadow, the disturbance (frog, pebble) ever-ready to splash into the pool, shatter the mirror (the mind):

In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote form the known domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

And, extending cloud to air, we have the earlier notion of limitless freedom (a fluffy, unending march of clouds, a cloudless sunny day of unforgivably honest blue) as a trap, a plane on which to always be in-view, to always be caged, forever under the moon’s eye, without ground, falling:

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality…

—Virginia Woolf, “An Unfinished Novel.”

Gass is more blunt:

…the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty…

—William Gass, On Being Blue, from that famous thundering-magnificent opening litany of blues—azures, royals, sadnesses, seedies, stockings, Prussians, Russians, bruises, forgettings, and, as here, absentness, emptiness, the Modern.

I’ve quoted Gass at greater length before; this passage is such an unreal mixture of precision (clouds do have shaded slopes) and surprising, breath-robbing melancholy. The increasing absentness. Of God. The empty silver throne. (”Emptiness has such a warm subtle sting… Heaven ain’t something someone else can give.” —Eyedea & Abilities, “Paradise.”)

So clouds block us from the Creator, remove us from the natural play of planets and suns. They are a kind of white-gray chaos, a litter of un-form across a plane we feel should be whole and formal, complete.:

And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood—the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.

Of course, writing chaos is not a chaotic process. Expression of un-form requires immaculate form. There is no one better than Aira, whom I’ve also quoted before, before the clouds. The “clouds” sound out a one-two dance-step hoof-hoof cadencing. They track chaos through chaos, and a pattern emerges. Form from un-form. A midnight pattern, obscuring a high noon. Or a streak of off-white on a sliver-moon night. Syzygy and ecotone, imperfect and thus more fascinating to have the clouds there but not completely of one type. Even better to take the patterns of clouds and remove them from the sky:

Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once. Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun. And shafts of rain thrust into little yellow clouds, agates enveloped in moss, pink hawthorn.

—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter.

Finally we arrive at the simple-lush prose of rancher-writer Verlyn Klinkenborg. He gets a dang Honourable Badge Of Merit because he writes boldly and artfully and simply and naturally. His cows come alive. (They were never not alive. I just didn’t feel much about cows until I read Verlyn Klinkenborg—and then Lydia Davis, in Electric.) Cloudy Klinkenwords, translating the pattern of the clouds into/onto birds:

What I see from the train should really be called a heronry, a village of well-built heron nests high in the trees. In winter, they stand out against the sky like dense clouds or puffs of dark smoke caught in the uppermost branches.

—Verilyn Klinkenborg, “Heronry,” The New York Times, 5 January, 2009.

And finally-finally—eliding the clouds themselves, because in his Wyoming the plains have stolen the clouds’ job, have skinned the clouds and wear their patterned drabness, setting out from the horizon; turning the birds back into darkness; the cows into symbolic darkness (here the light that stands out against mere “gloom,” ecotone); giving color heaviness and momentum; capturing this tectonic intermediate-ness of dawn, the beauty of that lack of grounding, lack of depth-of-field—the spark of my investigation, Klinkenborg’s “Out of Darkness,” from a recent Times:

When the sun finally rises, this will be a gray day, a great slab of flint laid across the plains. But the sun is still an hour off, and the snow is salting down just east of Riverton, Wyo. My eyes are straining for sight in the void out there, looking to see what emerges first from the darkness. The answer is the blackest objects — the old tires that ranchers sometimes place beside their cattle guards and the cattle themselves, black Angus stirring in a creek bottom. The cattle look as though they were bred black just so humans could find them easily in the gloom.

But mostly there are ravens, moving in singles and mated pairs, not so much gliding as fighting off the stiff north wind. They know the lights of this highway well, and I see them hopping into the ditches or flaring upward on the wind just out of my path as I hurtle by. To say the light is rising is to overspeak. I can just discern the seam between earth and sky…

The gray ahead broadens and seems to grow heavier, as if there could be no getting out from under it. And slowly color begins to emerge, what color there is… Out here on the plains, pressed beneath the sky, they seem to be blushing furiously but only by contrast with the immensity of the drabness that surrounds them. It is a mood, I know, the wan hour of morning that makes their beauty feel so hidden, so lost.

A friend at work sent me the Sam Harris talk, and I sent it to a friend I used to live with by the name of Luke Rodgers. Luke is a philosopher, and if you enjoy his thoughts on Harris, I encourage you to explore his blog, everything flows.

I sent Harris’s talk to Luke in part because I wanted to confirm my own biases: I agree with some of Harris’s thoughts, yet others annoy me. Luke’s reply is as thought-provoking as Harris’s lecture. Check out this off-the-cuff philosophizing:

First, the fact/value distinction is old, but also has been under attack at least since 1805 (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). There are many good reasons for believing that this distinction is not rigid, but there are also good reasons for, in some cases, not abolishing it altogether, I think.

Harris claimed that the moral core of every religion is ultimately about conscious experience. I think this may be deeply wrong, and that the opposite is probably true. Certainly Kant’s philosophy specifically eschews this approach, and it seems to me that Judeo-Christian morality, conceived of as a law issuing from without, is also exactly contrary to Harris’ conception.

The question of suffering may be a good one, and some philosophers in the 20th century sought to locate this question at or near the centre of ethics (Derrida does something like this in some places). There does seem to be a “fact of the matter” here, so I think Harris is at least partially right that science can contribute to this debate.

Even though he went out of his way to try to avoid coming across as racist/imperialist, the contention that “conferences like this” are only conceivable in certain parts of the world, as though that is evidence of some moral or developmental superiority, is utterly hypocritical and arrogant, insofar as conferences like TED are, at least within the parameters of the current global economic system, only conceivable on the basis of incredible inequality and suffering in other worlds. That is to say, it can only exist in the USA because it cannot exist in so many other countries.

The overall reductionism, this century to the brain, last century to psychology/genetics, the previous century to phrenology, is a stupidity that many Western philosophers and scientists have been trading in since the early modern period. I doubt we will stop making it any time soon, though anyone who is acquainted with the history of modern philosophy (as Harris obviously is not) would be less likely to make this blunder. Harris reveals the ultimate contradiction himself when, in the Q&A period he admits that brain states cannot be reliably interpreted without reference to the larger context. That is to say, things are not reducible to the brain, that is to say his basic thesis is inherently misguided.

The question of “how humans flourish” is totally abstract, and cannot be determined outside of particular contexts. It is incapable of a universal answer. Harris’ talk about “valleys and peaks” on the moral landscape, while not absurd, here functions merely as a screen for his actual thesis of convergence which, along with the utopian idea that borders between nation-states are already disappearing (plausible) and will eventually vanish (incredible), is an old liberal myth.

The notion that “certain opinions [on morality] must be excluded” and that an objective domain of expertise on how to achieve human flourishing will emerge strikes me not only as vastly improbable, but also extremely dystopian and proto-totalitarian.

So, in sum, “yes” to weakening the fact/value dichotomy and being open the possibility that science will *inform* moral debates, but a resounding “no” to the notion that moral debates will constitute a domain of experimental science, and also “no” to the naive brain reductionism.

§

With regard to the veiling and honour-killing &c., yes, I agree. In that sense, I am ethnocentric in the sense argued by Richard Rorty (one of my favourite pragmatist philosophers), which I see as the least contradictory and most sophisticated way of avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and absolutism. I believe (though perhaps in a less jingoistic way than Rorty did) in the superiority of democracy and (certain aspects of) the individualist/liberal and secular traditions, though I also believe that I have no ultimately foundational, or non-question-begging ways of supporting those beliefs (i.e. I don’t think it’s grounded in objective reason, or anything like that).

As to brain science, yes it is indeed gaining serious weight, and it’s hard to see what will replace it and supersede it, though something probably will in the next 100 years, at least in terms of what we consider to be the science best suited for understanding human nature. On the other hand, it is still seriously deficient in many ways (deficiencies which, I think, scientists are sometimes better able to recognize than the breathless philosopher sycophants), e.g., it’s explanatory language is still at a very early stage and relatively crude, it has basically no idea how many anti-depressants work, etc.

If you can find the essay by Alisdair MacIntyre called “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” it’s a good read on this topic

Also, with regard to genetics, I expect there are still some huge surprises in store for us which are potentially game-changing. For example, until recently we thought that a large amount of DNA was “junk,” i.e., didn’t code for any proteins, and I think we’re just now beginning to figure out what that junk DNA is for.

There is some research going on right now that shows how Lamarck was right in certain ways, that is to say that sometimes a genotype can actually be modified on the fly in response to certain environmental conditions in a way that makes the change heritable.

But yes, genetics may be approaching a level of maturity comparable to physics; i.e., we may find that in 100, 200 years, certain beliefs we have now about genetics are still held true—a situation I would say is fairly plausible, barring societal collapse.

An interesting book on this topic is The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, in which he develops a sophisticated way of looking at the extent to which different things may be considered “socially constructed.”

My man Verlyn Klinkenborg is all, “books will endure not (just) because they look and feel beautiful, but because they don’t offer distractions—no pop-ups, games, Flash modules, interactive doohickeys and gewgaws. ‘They do nothing.’” And, as usual, I’m all, “Dog, Verlyn is my dog. He’s right.”

People tend to a) think in dichotomies and b) set up the wrong dichotomies. I’ve often overheard subway readers muttering to one another about Kindles and Nooks, books and newspapers. They see a war between tactile and visual, old and new, elegant and multitaskable. What they should see is a play of information-filtration. Who’s filtering your media, and how? Nowadays, we mostly filter our own experience with books and news. We look up what we want on Google or Amazon and read it, buy it, or rent it. TV is on demand. NetFlix has brought the movies to our computers, to our whims.

But Google sorts what we filter. (We don’t flip through hundreds of screens to find what we want, most of the time.) There are two layers here. There’s a layer of basic, molecular, robotically sorted metachoice, then a conscious level of filtration. Given options [A-Z], we pick… whatever. (*I pick Z.)

That said, yes, the (immediate) future of the book is secure for a number of reasons. At the same time, not opposed in a dichotomy, but progressing plurally alongside book-ness, we have the Library of Congress saving our tweets for posterity. So books remain, and now so do our tweets. The once-solid becomes ephemeral, but does not disappear. The ephemeral becomes, not solid, but permanent…

As an addendum, I suggest all future-readers who dig poetry sign up for Knopf’s free Poem-a-Day emails. Check out “Mirror” by Mark Strand for a taste.

Patricia Cohen reports in “Next Big Thing” that literary criticism and psychology have merged, via technology, to form a hybrid science by which scholars are learning more about more about how we make memories, and what we think as we read.

Literature, then, may be headed toward a technological singularity along with the rest of human enterprise. Drat. Here I thought we’d be smoking meerschaum pipes and perusing cracked yellow tomes, even as the robohumans zoomed past us on their iFlyingWhales, listening to their crazy post-technocrunk…

Turns out instead we’ll be scanning our students’ brains and watching the screen flash green as they struggle through the texts we assign. This could be fun.

In today’s email edition of the New York Times, the teaser to Maureen Dowd’s “Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?” reads:

The Catholic Church, which gave up its credibility for Lent, can’t hide behind smoke and mystique as it faces a cascade of child sexual abuse cases.

I’m no Dowd fanboy, but the Lent line made me laugh out loud. I’ve heard of people giving up beer for Lent—or French fries, talking shit about other people—all manner of inventive sins-petite.

But the idea of the Church giving up its final spasmodic grip on authority—waffling on the issue of sexual abuse, even at the level of the Vicar of Christ himself—is just too funny considering Easter is nigh, and the bunnies and Impressionistic eggs are out in force, awaiting the returning smile of zombie Jesus in his world-ending second incarnation (like those bosses in the Final Fantasy games who morph into harder bosses as soon as you think you’ve beat them).

Really, this Pope news is sad-funny—like a burned-down last match next to an unlighted cigarette. I wonder what Ross Douthat would make of it. Have we naughty Americans syncretized away the Holy Mother Church’s authority (as a meme, as a matrix for creating societies and viewing our world)? Or has the Church done the damning work quite on its own?

But the problem with the Church isn’t lack of pluralism. Plenty of priests are well aware what year it is and what sort of world (pluralist, global) they live in. The problem is image control. The meme has gone wild. It’s too big to fail, and too big to control, and too big to rope back into the corral. The fact is, press releases from the horse’s mouth matter. The Pope matters.

For him to have hemmed and hawed on clear-cut child abuse… I’ll leave my assessment to a rude paraphrase of amateur powermonger and professional asshole Winston Churchill:

“I may be drunk, sir. But you’re an idiot. And tomorrow I’ll be sober.”

We already explored how Douthat thinks we Americans have synthesized our religions into meaninglessness, over-complicating the beautiful austerity of the monks and dervishes, giving up tradition for a syncretic post-reality that makes him shiver-n-shake. Now let’s talk politics.

In “Hollywood’s Political Fictions,” Douthat gets all hot and bothered about the state of America’s ability to represent itself viz-a-viz its 54th state (Iraq—after P.R., the Philippines, and Japan) on the silver screen.

Douthat insists we Americans reduce the complexities of war into easy-to-resolve dichotomies, good/bad, us/them, &c. This is precisely the opposite of his accusation re: religion. We complicate that; we simplify war. We (heterogeneous we) just can’t win.

“Americans believe in evil, but we’re uncomfortable with tragedy,” sayeth Uncle Ross. I think that’s reverse-true, meaning, colloquially, bullshit. I think Americans are perhaps more unused to tragedy than people living in non-empires, sure. We’ve had an unfairly sweet run, this past century.

I think some Americans are perhaps more apt to equate “the enemy” in a given situate with “evil,” but I hardly think we’ve all given up on nuances, gray areas, and, well, post-structuralism. (I realize most people don’t think, “Gee, I’m such a dope-ass post-structuralist!” But they do try to imagine the “other” side, even if they end up endorsing some patriotic nonsense. The attempt to juggle multiple language games, multiple centers of “truth” at once requires no particular schoolin’, just a certain openness of mind.)

The fact is, Americans know that there aren’t easy solutions in this life. That’s why we work hard at changing things (usually fucking them up, granted). That’s our gift and burden. We’re all too aware that the world is not simple, and that our actions have consequences. We just often mis-predict those consequences.

And even if many Americans were duped, for a time, into allowing Bush 2 to propagate wars based on the myth of easy solutions, this hardly means all or even most of us are still enamored with a simplistic, good-evil view of the current wars.

President Obama, for example, was never for the war, and now that he has to prosecute it, does anyone, even Ross Douthat, think he’s doing it simply or with a simplistic mentality? Has Obama reduced the conflict into a matter of good versus evil? (Whether you think Obama should pull out of Iraq immediately or not doesn’t matter. What does is his ability to see the conflict as nuanced, difficult, and non-Douthatian.)

Our collective non-simplicity is important to value, whether or not you agree with Douthat that the Matt Damon thriller Green Zone “refuses to stare real tragedy in the face.” Do I think, based on interviews, his other work, and Green Zone, that Damon is a smart dude who has realistic views about the American empire and its agenda in the Middle East? Sure. But does it really matter who Matt Damon is? Naw.

What matters is that I know there is no “simple” “good” or “evil” in the world. There are tyrants, sure. There are shitty situations, psychopaths, liars (Hussein, Bush…), plutocrats, oligarchs, oil men, bomb manufacturers, those who would gladly revise history (the leaders of Iran and Israel), and good ole-fashioned dumbasses. There are, as far I can tell, no vampires, no Doctor Dooms. Conversely, there are no classical heroes, only women and men who struggle to live and let live. Philosophies grow and mutate and die or are absorbed, all without strict goods and evils, without Meka-Hitlers or Jason Bournes.

Do I care whether or not Douthat enjoyed Green Zone? Naw. But I do mind that a syndicated columnist so brutally assaults reality, so often. Douthat claims “the narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare.” There was a good nation, a brutal dictator, a cause for war (WMDs), and (he reiterates) a brutal dictator, “in his labyrinth.”

The minotaur of the labyrinth is a great archetype of pure evil, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the urban-Gothic Tekkon Kinkreet. References to the labyrinth only too clearly betray Douthat’s essential problem: He’s protesting too much. Who’s the one reducing the complexities of war to a glib chunk of art? Douthat, invoker of the tyrant-as-minotaur, invoker of Big Willie S. and his clean, classical arcs (and unclean, human characters—and positively nucleic inherent moral struggles).

For all his easy-to-pick-apart bluster, Douthat does attend to one aspect of polemic that I admire—language. He calls for less poison and more “radical sympathy“—post-structural sympathy, sympathy with all the parties in a conflict, not just the Marines—and I wholehearted agree with him. I just think Matt Damon, for all his popular ninja-inspired gun-banging silver-screen antics, is more likely to create a new sympathy than Douthat, who is (perhaps like the author) trapped in a realm of addictive symbolism, a reduced realm, full of fire and the leavings of past epics.

It’s hard to get the news from poems (Green Zone is not, Douthat’s right, a good way to learn about the real conflict in Iraq; it’s a movie; it’s entertainment, big business). It’s harder still, for anyone with a poet’s brain (and liver) to eschew symbol and give up his minotaurs and five-act arcs.

I agree we should not comfort ourselves with “portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.” Nor should we lambast Hollywood for not living up to the legacy of Kant. Let Matt Damon blow shit up, and let Obama and his crack team of technocrat do-gooders help Iraq pull itself out of the last decade, brick by brick, street by street, symbol by symbol. In the future, I’d like to see Iraq’s version of Green Zone.

Back to how songs function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Here’s a rare modern rock song (not by Radiohead) whose lyrics are interesting to read on the screen or page—a dark pop meditation called “Amplify,” by Arpline, an impeccable indie outfit with a talent for exacting restraint and mesmeric refrains.

The progression of images in “Amplify” kills me, it’s so effective. The words build formally, setting up a pattern—”brace”/”amplify,” talking about talking/silence—that recalls Postmodern Russian poetry, wherein repetition of key words creates a terrible (”awe-inducing”) tension as you read. The words overdefine a space (they seem to say here, “sure, yeah, whatever, let’s talk about us, again”) then define it out of existence (obscure it, through overpresentation, repetition), only to allow it come back, newly sincere, passed through the fire of irony and come out the other end. The last refrain powerfully drives home the newly sincere “amplify”/”silence” dichotomy.

The theme of the song is at once simple and expansive, captured by a simple technique in a short span of words (as with André 3000’s shorter-than-average verse), employing a simple but effective structure.

Contrast the focus on one emotion in this song to how Bobby Dylan iterates out all the possibilities for the Kid to encounter and fall victim to, all the Kid’s upheavals and losses. Here, the speaker/writer has so little to say to the listener, the ex-beloved, that he must stutter out his few rhetorical questions and his one admonition (”brace yourself to hear the opposite of what you want to hear—you want to hear anything, and I offer only silence”).

The overall effect coheres into one tension, one see-saw. Prepare for nothing. Fight nihilism with a blank mind. Give up desire. It’s apophatic (all I can say is that I have nothing to say to you—which effectively says more than I can say), quasi-Japanese, and metaphorically elegant; “desire = heat” is about as far out as we venture into the deep-end of the pool of symbol; yet the effect—again flat with what comes before and after (silence, the real world, the listener’s inexorable thoughts about her own desires)—is chilling:

How can I be wrong
saying how I feel—
I feel about the world—
the feelings you want to hear?
I carry what I can for you,
leave the rest aside…
I feel the lightness of its loss.
I feel the heat that it displays.

Taking time to hear
your complaints.
Can’t say no—
How can i say no?
The terrible heat
of your desire
is burning me,
is deafening…

Brace, brace…
brace yourself for silence.
Brace, brace…
brace yourself for silence—

That you ask me to,
ask me to—
amplify, amplify—
That you ask me to—
brace yourself for silence
if you want me to—amplify

Brace, brace, brace, brace—
Amplify.

For more on post-Postmodern sincerity (the “Protomodern,” post-carnival), see my man Mikhail Epstein, who should be in a rock band (metal), if he isn’t already:

• Epstein on quotationalism—moving through repetitions of emotions, the words of others, until a new sincere, newly-new space is created.
• Epstein on the new sincerity—what happens after Postmodernism.

I wrote this jam for my current literature class and offer it up in the spirit of sharing*. (*The spirit animal of sharing, FYI, is the eastern screech owl.) I’ll follow up with a few thoughts on Postmodernism. But for now—let’s munch on some Mod:

For most historians, modernity begins in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Enlightenment. Modernism (notice the “-ism”) comes at the end of the nineteenth century, with Pound in poetry, Joyce and Woolf (and the earlier Kleist) in prose, and Manet, Matisse, and Picasso in painting.

But Modernism is not some hi-falutin “school of art.”  It’s a shift in thought.  The “crisis of the Modern” hits home after transdiscursive (discourse-inventing, meaning way-of-making-knowledge-inventing) thinkers such as Freud, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Eliot, and Bergson, collectively question our basis for making knowledge (from the past) and of representing Being (which cannot be represented). They are skeptics. They cause a collective shift in thought—a shift from which we have never recovered.

By the outbreak of the Great War, Modernist thought suddenly finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities” (Plato, the bible, science as understood by Bacon and Newton, biology a la Curvier), but in human experience—the succession of moments—the imprint of moments lived, sensations felt, memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

But this focus on the individual and her thoughts shares little in common with the willful Romanticism of the nineteenth century: In just decades, the idea of the unconscious comes to play a huge role in art, as does the Marxist idea that the course of your life is largely determined by class. Darwin’s observations concerning biology’s fatalism (natural selection) completes the trifecta. The Romantic notion of the totally free human is gone, replaced by a mixture of the individual (which is fragmentary, reaching to define self, to ground self in knowledge that she must construct) and the massively social (because the Utopias conceived in the nineteenth century are finally being acted out).

Siggy Vicious

Further, lived moments do not exist purely as affects in the heroic human brain (as per the intense emotions of the Romantics), but as medialized, technologically-distributed information. Signs. With Modernism and a shift away from the Enlightenment’s insistence on a rational, discoverable world (with Bohrs and Einstein, and with Joyce, and with Picasso and the Dadaists), we see the prefiguration of the current age, Postmodernism, and the current condition of thought: a vast chain of signs—shared, created, effaced, mutated, and judged via media (social networking, calls on phones, TV, emails, texts, books, ads)—stored and changed via the still-mysterious alchemy of the (biologic) brain.

The center of knowledge is no longer (only) the past, no longer authority, but the immediate, centerless, distributed, individually-experienced present. We agree upon certain canons because they are expedient (allow for the manufacture of iPods and cars…), but we constantly threaten them in order that they should not lead us into the pre-Modern error of supposing there is a Truth or Perfection to be empirically “detected” by humans somehow, even, especially in art. It simply isn’t possible. Michelangelo isn’t perfect. Science is incomplete and will continue to be. Science, with the uncertainty principle and the discovery that the best contemporary models for the universe (string theories, leading to brane theories) can’t be tested empirically, ever. (To see the universe at its absolute level, we require a particle collider the size of the universe…)

Knowledge is part of the experience of being human, and humans are not computers. We are highly sensitive animals who write poetry and scamper and go crazy. Knowledge is not separate from poetry and scampering. Though we know quite a lot within a certain framework (science—the Enlightenment), there is much, mainly our own consciousnesses, that we cannot “know” or that we have yet, at least as a global culture, to find a framework for.

Knowledge itself, with the smashing of the atom (going back to relativity’s rise in the late 1800s) and the smashing of the rational mind (Freud and Mach, in the late 1800s), is merely a convention. (I know I’m biting Foucault here; knowledge is what is made by power. Psychoanalysis opens a knowledge to control sexuality; post-seventeenth-century prison systems open a new knowledge of “reform” and “discipline” to control the population.)

And there’s more. The fact that I can formulate the above sentence means we are living in postmodernity. “Post-” here implies less “after” than “aware of.” I could say we live in paramodernity (”beside modernity”), since we can examine it at our leisure, using its tools (technology, psychology, modern biology, economics and history after Marx).

But that’s another essay. The point of this one izzz: Modernist thought finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities,” but in human experience—the succession of moments lived—sensations felt, of memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

And I’m out!

Deal w/it:

From this skyscraper,
all the bustling streets converge
towards the spring sea

—Richard Wright

In “Mass-Market Epiphany,” professional lowest-common-denominator Ross Douthat shakes in fear because we Americans synthesize our religions, consider our mystical options, and generally enjoy our grand Jeu—the play of the Transcendent across a broad, globe-spanning, history-informed matrix of signs, rituals, faces, styles of dress, chants, worship-centers, and sacral texts.

It is true. We have been from the first a lovely patchwork of agnostics, Deists, Puritans, satanists, hippies, materialists, born-agains, Methodists, Quakers, Muslims, Buddhists, and so on, and so forth.

It is true. William James gave us our own meta-genius of religion (the genius of the study of religious geniuses), so we’ve always had options, a book of faiths from which to choose.

And then we invented Anton LaVey and televangelism; and I don’t care where he was born, we invented John Lennon, too, that ur-syncretic mentality and shaggy humanist-expressionistic chutzpah (see: Melville, Whitman, the Beats).

And then we took the internet from a Brit and made it what it is (mostly a font of Japanese pr0n), and the new religion of hyperconnectivity is as ours as it is anyone’s (though I suppose that obscures the grace of the rhizome, to speak of the nationality of it).

So, Ross, why are you so scared of the power of American adaption and adaptation? Why are the deaths of the old traditions and the births of new ones—deaths and births which are forever in process, but particularly, increasingly so since Nietzsche and World War I and globalism—anything to fear?

Douthat’s are the same old conservative anxieties that have always plagued us. Times are changing too quickly! We’ve traded in religion for new-fangled séances and snakeoils, and wires and tubes! Here’s Douthat waxing at his most lyrical:

Without them [severe, ole-skool religious practices], too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

I actually quite like his take on the promise of the shattering power of the Divine, the Mysterium’s ability to transcend our ability to even contemplate it, to put it in any box. But I disagree that the loss of ye old religions in any way diminishes man’s ability to experience this shattering.

The fact is, the Divine is never familiar except to those who experience it, and then it is unique, in each case. It has never been transferable via tradition; these traditions have never engendered true revelations, hence the constant defections from them, culminating in modernity. It is ridiculous to write of America as being more or less affected than other nation’s by the world’s gyring out of a dark age of cathedrals and sharia law.

If anything, America is simply more heterogeneously affected, because to be “American” is to be any number of such a wide range of types and sub-types—each of which may transmit the revolutionary and the impossible in different ways, with different signs, while still feeling the touch of the same unnameable Transcendent.

More expandable than Douthat’s thesis (”Americans = ‘losing’ religious feelings) is any thesis that looks at how the Divine strikes us, in the era of the hypertubez. The future saints may already preach on Facebook (shudder).

In any event, I look forward to abler writers’ analyses of the machines of religion as they mutate forward through history, ever new, ever the same (hierarchically organized to make money and control populations; individually mind-blowing, as experienced by individuals, within their own matrices of signs).

Some literary techniques are easy to abuse. I hate to admit that the portmanteau is one of these (thanks, Snickers). While still one of my favorite all-time ways to get bizzy with words, portmanteauing has become a central facet of our experience as consumers and internet-era digesters of signs. We are asked to constantly hybridize language. We are verbal garbage disposals.

We cannot escape this technique, and so its art becomes mundane craft; its essence as witty relief from the normal is distilled into punnery. We are, we feel, ultimately the victims of portmanterrorism:

Would it make a difference to say we suffered
from affluenza in those days? Could we blame
Reaganomics, advertainment, the turducken
and televangelism we swallowed by the sporkful,
all that brunch and Jazzercise, Frappuccinos
we guzzled on the Seatac tarmac, sexcellent
celebutantes we ogled with camcorders while
our imagineers simulcast the administrivia
of our alarmaggedon across the glocal village?

—”Portmanterrorism,” Nick Lantz,
from The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, 2010.

Lantz’s poem goes on and is as nigh-unreadable as it is spot-on. Props to Junio for bringing this dopeness to my attention

In other news, this site offers a very simple guide to literary wildlife such as the portmanteau. Just text, no shenanigans.

Back to how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Consider this pre-hip hop jam by the unsane Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman:

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine,
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government,
The man in the trench coat,
Badge out, laid off,
Says he’s got a bad cough,
Wants to get it paid off—
Look out kid,
It’s somethin you did—
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again—
You better duck down the alley way,
Lookin for a new friend,
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills,
You only got ten—

[Two more verses...]

Ah get born, keep warm,
Short pants, romance, learn to dance,
Get dressed, get blessed,
Try to be a success,
Please her, please him, buy gifts,
Don’t steal, don’t lift—
Twenty years of schoolin
And they put you on the day shift—
Look out kid,
They keep it all hid—
Better jump down a manhole,
Light yourself a candle,
Don’t wear sandals,
Try to avoid the scandals,
Don’t wanna be a bum,
You better chew gum—
The pump don’t work
Cause the vandals took the handles…

Here, the line breaks hardly matter, and the rhyme and meter are so irregular that it’s hard to say in what way they matter (though they certainly do).

Reading the song on the page or screen, I come away with a general sing-song-iness, and I am dazed, battered into accepting the stream of signs. It’s a very medial song, prefiguring McCarthy: The poor Kid gets told a dozen things by a dozen interlopers, none of whom has his interests at heart. The world consumes him, even taking the fucking handles off the pump. (And what does the pump pump? Water? Gas? I’ve always wondered.)

The next song I’d like to explicate is Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” which deserves a vast, vast space.

Today, right now, I suggest writers of songs consider how their words are read, even as an exercise, and readers of words begin to read aloud, breath to breath, sign to sign, feeling the ideas glued to the instruments’ sounds separate and present themselves, one by one, in time.

The news is generally frightening. I learned a few days ago that, in the Lone Star State, one Debra Medina is fighting to become the Republican candidate for governor. Her platform is staunchly conservative, and she’s so bat-shit crazy that even Glenn Beck isn’t amused. Quoth the New York Times:

Ms. Medina also appeals to state’s rights advocates who long to shift power from Washington to state legislatures. A leitmotif in her speeches is the idea that the federal government has usurped power from the states and that Texas should be able to nullify federal laws and regulations it deems unconstitutional. Her first target would be the Environmental Protection Agency, she says.

“We will tell the E.P.A., ‘You have no authority here,’ ” she told the Fort Bend County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

Thanks, Debbie. I can picture the freedom now: Those goodfernuthin E.P.A. pansies will quake as they’re forced by the noble Texas rangers to unlock Emperor Obama’s hidden oil-filled mega-caves off the coast of Corpus Cristi!

(Then they’ll have to free the animals, sending the august turtles-o-th’-sea to their native breaker islands, the ones used by our proud military to broadcast sub rosa numbers stations, thus preventing the start of Secret World War IV.) [Lol.]

In other news, liberals continue to drift farther from liberty. In the same Times that gives us that lovely snippet about the E.P.A., we have Paul Krugman shouting:

…The real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

Firstly, shouldn’t we capitalize “Euromess?” I have a hunch that “Amerimess” (shudder at the fugliness) would get the cap. Or is this a reference to the currency, the euro (€); in which case, why doesn’t Krugman write “euro mess” or “euro-mess?”

Secondly, what the fuck? The problem with Europe is “elitism?” Sayeth an elite, in a country whose numero uno problema is that most of the country thinks there’s a problem with elitism (and intellectualism, and Darwinism, and most any -ism, even the ones that work pretty dern well) and is thus resistant to reform of any kind?

I mean, a) is this true? Did Jozef-the-Plombier, the average European citizen, really let himself get “duped” into supporting a strong currency? And, even if this is true, b) is the lesson that we Americans should learn from Greece’s financial woes that we should never, ever “trust the elites?”

The problem is probably semantic. I think the word “elite” is skunked (along with “postmodern,” to name just one), meaning it’s so often debated, so hotly, that no one even knows what it means any more. It’s a word everyone runs from and accuses everyone else of running into.

I wonder who these Euro-elites are, for example. Do they represent a powerful, self-interested business class that actually exists? On one level, I’m sure Krugman knows his economics and knows what and who helped fuel poor Hellas’ rapid decline.

But, simply by calling these avaricious policy makers “elites,” Krugman muddles an already complex issue. Thanks to that word, they become the same bogeymen feared in America (slick-talking Obama-analogs, the intellectuals against whom Palin bravely speaks, when she’s not distracted by the reminders scribbled on her hand). [Double lol.]

The problem with the idea that “elites” can’t be trusted is that they in fact can be. George Washington was an elite, in terms of class, money, education, military decoration, political ambition and achievement, and hair-style (mega-wig).

Even hardcore Marxists must admit that not all silver-spooned, Hahvahd-educated elites are wrong all the time. In the postmodern world, ideas are judged pragmatically (usually by professional hard-ass and British person Simon Cromwell, an online vote, or some combination of those two).

Of course, just to make the world wend round weirder, David Brooks posted an essay today arguing that we should trust the elites, though Brooks can’t resist telling us that the elites of the Olden Days were luckier and happier, and that our cold, autistic world is through.

If only the problems of the failing hyperintellecutal micromanagerial nouveau oligarchs here were simply their lack of empathy and their reliance on Blackberries—and not, say, their lack of Empire, their lack of money, &c. Then we really could have elected an Obama and known that our Obama would use his oligarchy’s surplus of cash and emotional equity and military trust around the world to affect positive change.

Instead, we lose the EPA (no need for the hilarious supernumerary periods) and find more bogeymen, everywhere we look: It is our leaders’ elitism that dooms them, their lack of empathy—anything but their stupidity and hubris, their playing out a cycle on a stage that has seen the cycle played before.