“I think that virtues are real. I think there are good things in the world. I think integrity is as real as a rock in a field. I think loyalty and beauty are real things. I think the world is full of virtues.
But I also think that we all have to make choices about which one of these things we are going to affirm and in which situations. And a free person is person who is able to see good things and make hard choices and thereby become and create character. I think free will and character are the same thing.” Timothy Snyder
“Wim Wenders prefaced his “Guilty Pleasures” by saying ‘I don’t feel guilty about any of this’. I’d like to echo that. One thing I object to is cultural hierarchy. To me there’s no difference in value between Beethoven and The Butthole Surfers, between Shakespeare and Mickey Spillane. If something is good, it’s good whether it’s a comic book or a ‘great novel’.” Jim Jarmusch
“I did deeply into the surface of things” Nicholas Foulkes
This blog post is meant to encompass both the months of January and February, though it was initially meant for January in particular. Sometimes - perhaps most times - the writing of a post such as these is rather more complex than not, especially if you are as committed to a basis of standards in prose style and meaning, and not limited to even these two.
January is the month created by we humans to create a sense of form to society’s interaction with the cycle of natural seasons. It is perhaps as much found (natural) as made (cultural) and each of us has unique lives that are only partially represented by the ever flattened exterior documents that the worlds of natural science and sociology create to represent us.
Alongside a cycle of seasons, which could be represented by some sort of a circle, there is a linear development through time that is something like a line - however a line that is never straight and always bent in this way or that. In Immanuel Kant’s most famous quip, “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”. (Idea for A Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim 1784, Immanuel Kant.)
This phrase was also the inspiration for an Isaiah Berlin lecture and essay, himself, while respectful of Kant (Berlin was, among so many other things, a scholar of Kant) not Kant’s biggest fan.
I take the Kant quote not only in the literal way that would say of us we are imperfect (so much evil has come from our collective presumption of perfection - even if it is some original perfection prior to some kind of fall or corruption). I take crookedness, or swerves along a line, to be also the source of our humanness in the best sense, of how we are ultimately interesting.
It is curious to me that Timothy Snyder has a hit right now with his book On Freedom, if only because his thesis is, in a way, a critique of Isaiah Berlin, in particular Berlin’s emphasis on the necessity and good of so-called negative freedom. Snyder, however, is not the first to essentially say that freedom is this holistic and integrated system as an idea and ideal and that it is misleading or worse to focus on absence of constraint as a definition of freedom. While I am certainly in agreement tight Snyder’s most bold assertion of the realities of the things in the world that he listed in the quote above, I cannot accept his thesis fully, if only because I think we need to resurrect the idea of a blank or empty space in which humans could move or create moreover, the presence or not of such a (“negative”) space is more important than prominent commentators in our current moment would have us believe. Indeed I am saying that sometimes we need to pull back from the impulse at filling in the blanks, from making explicit points and plans. And, yes I know that my wish is simply not possible in the current era, which is all about a war of competing and specific programs.
I want to suggest that there is a deep commotion between the kind of abstract ideas as these and quite specific events in any human life.
One of those events might be what we could call overarching loss. There appears to me a partial impoverishment when it comes to the discussion of specific kind of grief: I have in mind the grief that comes from the loss of an embedded familiar and beloved way of life, including environment, place and social system.
Unacknowledged or at the very least underrepresented, this kind of loss necessitates an abstract formulation as I have here if only because it is not the same as, say, a specific death of a living being or beings. There is the most complicated matter of the intractable and transparent presence of our preferences and revulsions. In my case I went from an era - one of my entire young adulthood - in which I was unusually happy with the state of my overall life, buoyed by a then recent childhood in which I had mostly positive experiences - into an era of my middle age, in which practically every aspect of life bears little resemblance to that previous era
That now defunct era was also one for which I was rigorously trained, perhaps owing to some perhaps unconscious or at least unstated belief that many or most features of the era would continue long into the future. Thus there is a double loss: not only of an entire world, one I happened to like or at least I felt to have suited me in some ways, but the loss of the uses of the fifteen plus years of training that was integral to me living in that world. Of course the engineers who created the age of the computer would knew otherwise and can be said to have been working overtime to, in some sense, “own” the future - or at least a future era which would replace the older one into which I was born.
One quite early “sign” of the revolution then underway was in 1989 or ‘90 when a trombonist acquaintance of mine was at my apartment explaining to me all about the computer. I found it all so completely boring but I did take note that this quite accomplished musician, and performing on an instrument for which there appeared no shortage of gigs (he was working all of the time as a trombonist) found his way to an obscure side hustle (not the terminology then, thank goodness, although the actual practice to which the current phrase applies was perhaps always a thing) and the hustle involved computers.
Another “sign” stays with me from the years immediately following my father’s death when I found myself sitting in his twenty-five year old apartment in lower Manhattan as a financial authority went about cleaning and scrubbing the property so that it could sold to the Internal Revenue Service. I did not know then that the elimination of a three decade base for any and all activity in New York City would be no longer - the beginning of a longer and larger “trend” in which I had to move away from the Northeast of the United States more permanently.
The grief and loss of which I attempt to gently introduce here is not the often over reported and discussed loss of a loved one or family member but the loss of living in an environment for close to forty years. It is the loss of a place and a lifestyle - in which one lives surrounded by millions of people, many of them women in the demographic of their 20s and 30s - and details of the kind found therein. For example there was the presence of a bookstore every four miles or so. And there was the presence too of at least three movie theaters offering screenings of movies from the past seventy-odd years, the four or five more playing current releases notwithstanding.
These are but parts of a world that for me is now largely lost.
Perhaps most appropriately for a new year I am going to write what will be the first in a series of experimental, written accounts of the old Analog Age into which I was born and for which I was largely trained and even you might say created. In each of these I am going to write of one distinct and discrete aspect of life. I am also going to write as if I were writing to people with no living experience of those years whatsoever In practically every way of which I am conscious those were simply better years for me personally, something I will get to and unpack in a few paragraphs. That those years were far worse for many of my peers only goes to show that we never experience our living moments in anything like a unified consensus.
Roughly from the later 1980s and until the earliest years of the Obama Era I did an enormous amount of travel. Usually these journeys were almost always punctuated by establishments, usually of small and cramped dimensions seeking lots of temporary or topical literature, usually magazines or newspapers of one kind or another. In those years I never really had the discipline or, as they would label it today, executive function, to maintain regular subscriptions.
The last and only time I had any regular subscriptions was the later 1970s into the 1980s and these were to American Film Magazine and Contemporary Keyboard. I so loved the ubiquity of these kiosks or newsstands precisely because I would simply gaze or glance at what was exposed and, consequently pick up to buy this or that copy of Daedalus or The New Republic, Dissent, or the New York Review Of Books (This last much hipper to my mind than what went by the name of New York Times Book Review and that came with the Sunday edition of that newspaper).
Although I am primarily not a visual thinker (a feature of my being and character with the farthest reaching consequences - ones that needn’t distract us in this particular context) I am from time to time haunted by recurring still images in my mental visual memory.
One of the most powerful is the almost choreographic gestures of arms reaching for newspapers in the many high end hotels in which I stayed over three decades, both internationally as well as nationally, and in most of the major cities in the U.S. Part of the reason for this image is that practically all of these hotels would have elegant and attractive ways of stacking various papers.
In Boston,for example, where I would eat brunch at the Hotel Colonnade, something I did from 1987 through 2007 or ’08, they had these wooden and ornate branches over which they would drape the Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald as well as an International Herald, this last some kind of generic and objective account of the world events of the day.
Also it occurs to me that many if not most of those arms reaching for these long, sometimes awkwardly large newspapers were female arms of various ages and sizes. Did women read more when traveling or was it mostly women who happened to be the ones traveling at the same times as myself?
I really have no idea.
There is so much about which I have no idea if only because I am not possessed of a world picture and all the predictive power that goes with a world picture. I never know that this or that is “what people are doing” even less that the peoples’ doings are possibly the case only for now and might relentlessly change with the death and birth of successful epochs.
It would be for me the most terrible thing indeed - objectively terrible by the way and not some kind of emotional choice I would be making - if I were to happen to be alive during such discontinuity. For another kind of person - one who has a world picture (however false, by the way: I suspect it might always better to have a false world picture than to have no world picture) - such discontinuity might not only be prepared for and known but fully integrated into life with something approaching satisfaction, outright happiness notwithstanding.
The most critical fact to keep in mind is that these newspapers and magazines were all part of the same epoch and its social and economic system - one predicated on the pervasive and indispensable infrastructure of discrete physical objects in space, taking up considerable volume and mass, that is before the computer and its single omnipresent screen became the dumping ground for, well, everything, except food and beverages. (You cannot, as of yet, give birth or grow or raise food and farm on a computer.)
This one simple fact of physical life - the domination of our culture by all of these discrete, little collections of paper that were meant for temporary periods of time - seems to me now to have been so significant a part of that older order that I don’t think I can really adequately evoke how utterly dissimilar it is is to simply move all of those objects over unto an electronic screen.
This is but one element that can be said to come to us from the Analog Age. Future posts might deal with others as we all as other mediums of expression and not just artistic ones.
I do not now know how I will discuss matters such as these; what I do know, however, is that it promises to be a discussion that will connect the past with the present and what seems external, even impersonal with that which is most personal.
#newspapers #magazines #reporting #journalism #1960s #1970s #1980s #1990s #philosophy #newyorktimesbookreview #villagevoice #downbeat #contemporarykeyboard #daedelus #theatlantic #time #newsweek #hotel #motel #newstand #kiosk #politics #timothysnyder #isaiahberlin #freedom
Thank you!