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.

From TED: “Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can—and should—be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.”

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

Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite things, period, and I’m proud to edit it, when I can. Congratulations to everyone who’s written, edited, viewed, or even heard of AO. You’ve all earned the award (a “Southie,” perhaps?).

FYI, apparently, South By Southwest is the new Burning Man. (Both have godawful oogly websites.)

[Of course, both of these media circuses pale in comparison to a good ole fashioned Wicker Man.]

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).

Stephen Davies rocks the house in “Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization.” And earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

The official version, for those disinclined to watch a bangin, dryly funny lecture about modernity without a heads-up:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of ‘Western Civilization’ - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

This post is tagged as “Adventure” because the future will be an adventure. We hope.

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.