romanticism is an eternally returning defense mechanism against nature’s indifference/hostility that obfuscates a projected aggression on humanity’s part. nature is essentially good, purer than us, a source of salvation; beauty is not only worth suffering, but requires it, often self-induced and cascading outwards; instability walks arm-in-arm with passion and creation.
photo credit: dreamstime
but this realization does nothing to counter the experienced knowledge that Reality is often wantonly hostile, hence the natural occurrence of defensive/reactionary formations. nor does it negate romanticism’s usefulness in times of crisis.
the title of this post is a paraphrase of some of the things my mom tried expressing to me in the delirium of an extended personality-disorder-related anxiety attack that lasted all weekend. it’s none of your business what happened; she’s calmed down now, some. “pay attention, Cody, because the universe is trying to tell you things, always. words, phrases, sentences, numbers…if you notice patterns, that’s because you’re supposed to notice them.” almost parodically, I happen to be in the midst of reading Eros & Civilization, and if my mom weren’t so scattered I might have tried to rigorize her complaint about the world seeming designed to cast out as unacceptable such an outflowing of emotion. but theory and analysis don’t dissolve acute distress. far more likely that they exacerbate it.
a problem of our current situation is the primacy of information, which has led to the oversaturation of information. we are not equipped to handle the volume of data an average person consumes via the miraculous network that now dictates the terms of our lives. information chaoticizes; there’s much I find underwhelming about Byung-Chul Han’s thought, but he is right to point out that information does not help us feel grounded in the world, that information’s superabundance is responsible for the sense that concrete lived experience is disappearing.
Han, as I understand, argues that we must reacquaint ourselves with non-activity, what with neoliberalism’s demand for constant productivity leading to insidiously internalized forms of violence. this is a position I sympathize with, being myself a hyperactive workaholic who feels adrift when not absorbed in research or productive creativity (or sex). but non-activity is also a useful collaborator in the ascendency of fascism and other forms of societal brutality; Pynchon points out sloth’s reign in the years prior to the Nazi regime, and in the years prior to the Reagan administration, in his essay examining the deadly sin.
as an artist, I struggle with how to address these contemporary issues. Pynchon is my only real role model, because he implicitly acknowledges information’s chaotic nature without turning away from its proliferation. in recent years, literature has partaken in this turning away by reverting to “realism,” which, in my mind, is best exemplified by the neo-Kmart realism of the post-alt lit set. but believing it possible to return to “bare facts,” or “concrete/literal” description, belies, or maybe consciously covers up, the polyvalent nature of information; it is not possible to access the facts of existence as such, because such access always comes from a certain position, with its own blindspots and exaggerations. but I can’t just rewrite Gravity’s Rainbow.
additionally, I fear that, increasingly, information will appear free while actually being tightly controlled by the corporations whose power has been built on the accumulation of data. why should I trust Google to provide me answers to queries free of ulterior motive? why should I confide in Google which porn stars I find attractive? it’s not a problem that can be totally obviated by like, switching to Duck Duck Go or whatever either.
but, so, like, does the method of mimicking information overload through dense, research-heavy literary prose only participate in the chaoticizing of the world? no, because what makes such an endeavor art is the effort by the artist to shape the information into an aesthetic form. all art making, even in its most radical forms, is a reduction of chaos, an assertion of order in place of noise. which complicates the project of using art to assail sclerotic cultural norms complicit in the destruction of the world.
but to perform information overload requires overloading on information. and after fielding phone calls from my disturbed mother all weekend, I’m not sure how useful it is to flirt with paranoid psychosis, despite my Romantic tendencies. yet I will continue imagining, “as a joke”/”for the novel”/”metaphorically,” that I’m practicing espionage in a world where literally everyone is a double agent, where happenstance shines forth with meaning, where everything is about numbers and money and things written on paper.
The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one—intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses….The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
I’m tempted to “get back into” drugs. not in like, a problematic way—the drug I have a “problem” with I puff all the time, and I don’t like drugs with a high risk of habituation like opioids or benzos. I want to incorporate psychedelics into the program of self-derangement my █████ is a pretense for, and okay maybe “not into drugs with a high risk of habituation” isn’t totally honest, since I always wish I could handle a small amphetamine habit. of course, if I really wanted speed I could just convince a doctor I have ADD, because I probably do but I’m wary of psychiatric (over)prescription so I’ve never consulted a psychiatrist.
unfortunately I am too responsible. or maybe just too worried about appearing less than put together. this is a central struggle for me, because I am drawn to chaos and excitement but know myself well enough to realize I really crave stability and security. but problems arise when stability and security start to feel like a cage I’ve built for myself, and I begin seeking, sometimes subconsciously, ways to rattle the bars in the hope that they become unhinged.
naturally the cage is not entirely of my own making. I certainly tend to “play it safe” and would benefit from being riskier in general, but Reality stands as the border outlining experience even beyond those boundaries of habit, custom, tradition, civility, etc.
in my Romantic mode I think it the poet’s duty to determine the contours of reality by raging against its limits (I’ve been reading Rimbaud). which is to say I don’t want to “improve my mood” by “microdosing” to make me a better (ie more docile) functionary in the machine draining Eros from the surface of the earth. but I also have no illusions about drugs leading to anything like enlightenment; Deadheads who claim to have achieved satori while on acid earn nothing but eye rolls from me.
the ability to “be right” (i.e. do immediate fact checking facilitated by the tentacular and increasingly sclerotic network owned and operated by, among others, a corporation that probably should have been distrusted the first time anyone previously uninitiated saw the words “DON’T BE EVIL” tacked onto its IPO, waiting to be read in disbelief by future historians accustomed to much richer forms of irony) interferes with the writer’s wont to spread harmful, half cited, misconstrued, but otherwise aesthetically (and therefore rhetorically) persuasive disinformation
Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies. Another author suggested that the Nursery Rhyme and the book of Science Fiction might be more revolutionary than any number of tracts, pamphlets, manifestoes of the political realm.
with the present COVID surge, the library where I work, under direction from the county, isn’t allowing patrons into the building. people can pick up requests for books and movies still, but otherwise our services are all but ceased. consequently, there isn’t much to do during the day, especially after months of similar restrictions last year gave us time to do maintenance and upkeep tasks usually impeded by the need to provide customer service.
personally I’m grateful for the respite, even if things weren’t exactly bustling before. I’m stealing time to read, watch Ableton tutorials, listen to music, write. what a strange blessing to have a place to go to with a cubicle that doesn’t demand I spend all day doing something soul crushing, like sell things or actuary work, or something mind numbing, like coding. plus, at my immediate disposal is a fairly extensive library catalogue. if I want to be an ~intellectual~ and an artist, but I am loath to sell the labor and products of those activities, I couldn’t ask for a better source of income.
my comrades at this library and I, we aren’t very close. tbh I don’t get the sense that they’re very close with one another either. I transferred here from the busy downtown branch almost a year ago now, and everyone else has been here for years. but the contrast between my previous branch’s environment and this one’s is stark, in no small part because that branch is literally on Main Street, downtown, lots of foot traffic from locals and tourists in town to shop the vintage stores and amble by the beach. here we’re tucked away, way off the freeway, nestled among the suburbs surrounding the Navy base just down the street. plus, during my time at the downtown branch, I made a very good friend, a fellow artist whose perspective I’ve come to deeply appreciate, and now I only see him occasionally.
but so anyway, during the day, I don’t really talk to my comrades. they don’t really talk to each other. one guy, he has a reputation for talking people’s ear off, going on and on about his energy investments, international soccer, stock market history, but lately he’s been conspicuously reticent. seems to have lost some weight too. when I use a computer after him, there are entries in the search history like “depression at night,” “insomnia and melatonin,” “music to help relax.”
everyone seems to keep themselves busy throughout the day, but what everyone else does, I couldn’t say. they likely couldn’t guess what I’m doing either, which is fine with me. but maybe it shouldn’t be.
it’s a lovely january morning, after what felt like weeks of storm and gloom. every extra minute of daylight is as a gift from the gods, an assurance of approaching spring.
yet it remains winter.
eventually I’ll finish writing up a rundown of my 2021 reading list. this year I’m starting off with a reread of Nightwood, and this morning I opened Oswald Spengler’s seminal The Decline of the West, with the intention of alternating chapters between it and The Dawn of Everything, the new David Graeber book (with David Wengrow). the fourth Hermetic principle listed in the Kybalion of the Three Initiates, the principle of polarity, states that everything is dual, so why not study world history from both angles: conservative pessimism and anarchic irreverence.
making steady progress on music production. churning out scratch takes of drum patterns and basslines mostly. I have a lot to learn still. soon I’ll write some verses to rap over the beats I really like. I want songs that get a crowd going, rafter rattlers, singalong anthems, mosh breakdowns, deep-as-hell grooves, that sort of thing. music for hot girls to dance to. maybe some drone and noise experiments. something new, but familiar. art pop, essentially.
tomorrow the library closes to the public again, out of a much too late, and therefor too little, abundance of COVID caution. hard not to feel like there’s a concerted effort to shrink my social sphere at just the time when I need opportunities for exogamy, of both the spiritual and the physical variety. but prolly for the best, being forced into slow, deliberate change, instead of my usual incidental flailing.
writing is slow but consistent. I feel like I’m in a collect/excrete phase, jotting ideas as they come and leaving them to be sorted through later. with the start of the next month, in all its inevitability, an adjustment will be called for, with greater focus, and tighter control.
missed the new moon, so if I’m your go-to astrologer…why?
Mikhail Bakhtin wrote a book I haven’t read all of, about the literary DNA of Dostoevsky. I know about this because I read the Wikipedia page for Menippean satire, a genre of writing I’m interested both in reading and producing. instead of working from whoever’s paraphrase is offered there, I decided to read the five pages of Bakhtin’s book about the genre and craft my own paraphrases below, as guideposts.
in the Menippea, the comical and humorous are central affects, especially when contrasted with the genre’s forebear, the Socratic dialogue.
Menippean narratives demonstrate “extraordinary freedom of plot and philosophical invention.” there is little concern for historical or memoiristic accuracy, nor is there respect for received myths and legends. realism is not the genre’s purview.
as such, the fantastic and outlandish operate in the Mennipea out of devotion to philosophical interrogation: extreme, even unbelievable, situations are created so that ideas may be stretched to their limit. the fantastical plot does not embody any truth but instead provides the background against which the truth is tested. in such adventure stories or religio-mystical narratives, it is not a human character that is the locus of conflict and tension, but an idea.
the fantastical elements intermingle with a “slum naturalism.” the idea is tested not only in supernatural extremes, but in those worldly contexts that are abject, poverty-stricken, perverse or depraved: “in brothels, in the dens of thieves, in taverns, marketplaces, prisons, in the erotic orgies of secret cults.”
the Menippea raises ultimate philosophical questions. it is as though every situation the narrative enters into poses in miniature ethical and practical choices of fundamental importance, as though all scenarios and characters represent alternate approaches to these ultimate questions.
a three-planed structure of the world provides wider range for addressing these ultimate questions; Menippean satire deals in the heavenly, earthly, and, especially, the netherworldly. action is often depicted at the boundaries between these spheres, as when a man argues his soul’s case at the gates of heaven, for example.
the experimentation and fantasticality of the genre extends to nontraditional narrative points of view: observation is made from a great height, as if looking down from Olympus, or it rapidly shifts between disparate perspectives, further broadening the scope of the work.
Menippean satire attempts to give voice to abnormal, extreme psychological states, “insanity of all sorts…, split personality, unrestrained daydreaming, unusual dreams, passions bordering on madness, suicides, and so forth.” the role these play is in introducing alternate ways of being; another life, a disjunct from the Self, a multiplicity in the place of the singular Ego. indeed, the Menippea seeks to destroy the unity of a person through dialogic interrogation, often to comic effect—even if simultaneously tragic, as in Dostoevsky’s use of doubles.
equally characteristic as psychological disturbance are violations of etiquette and eccentricities. taboos are broken, inappropriate speeches given, scandals enacted. these play the same role insanity plays for the individual, but on a societal scale, that is, in suggesting alternate modes of being, by undermining the power of convention to determine behavior. utterances that profane the sacred, cut through pretense, or defy decency, are common.
juxtaposition of extremes is a favored technique of the Menippean satirist: oxymorons, abrupt shifts, pairings of unlike things, the king as slave, the noble whore.
an imagined social utopia is generally present, “in the form of dreams or journeys to unknown lands.”
Menippean satires allow for formal promiscuity, with elements of other genres (“novellas, letters, oratorical speeches, symposia”) dispersed throughout, in varying degrees of parody.
this formal promiscuity is evidence of the Menippea’s interest in establishing “a new relationship to the word as the material of literature,” descended from the work’s thoroughly dialogic nature.
of primary interest to the Menippean narrative are issues contemporary with the work’s production. Menippean satires are in this way “journalistic,” by making reference to pop cultural, historical, and political events; by mapping the emergence of social developments; by depicting new directions for mundane existence.
Bakhtin notes that the genre “was formed in an epoch when national legend was already in decay, amid the destruction of those ethical norms that constituted the ancient idea of ‘seemliness’.”
