307. Hume's Pile of Applesauce

You know, some philosophers are so damn wrong you've just got to quit being an academic and say, "This is a pile of applesauce."  And that's what I'm going to say about one of Alison Gopnik's favorite philosophers (The Atlantic, 10-15), and one of mine (once): David Hume.

The problem is The Self.  Hume says there is no such coherent thing.  There's just a bunch of perceptions and responses.  Gopnik  found that Buddha said pretty much the same thing and loved him for it, and loved connecting the two.  Postmodern French philosophers loved him for it, insofar as they can love any Anglophone philosopher.

OK, where's the applesauce?

J. D. Salinger points us to it.  Awed by the budding beauty and character of a British girl in the course of  his tearoom conversation with her (in "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor"), Salinger hears her put a standard slur on American soldiers.  "I hope that's not worthy of you," he says.  What would her slur not be worthy of?  My fourth-grade teacher hears me speaking the most awful trash on the playground, just so I can make it with some trashy kids, and says, "Roland, that's not you."  My mother, after I've verbally abused the girl downstairs, says, "That's not the Roland I know."  I blush with shame.

What I want Hume, Buddha, and all those postmodernists to tell me is this: What blushes?  What's your name for it?  Something raises expectations, something is trusted, something takes responsibility, something is embarrassed.  Even before my mother and my teachers spoke to me it was there, in me, an idea of what I was.  If it weren't why did I respond so?  Why did I blush?

Plato gave capitals to my idea of what I was. The Idea of Roland. That was abstract philosophy but it was close enough to my experience, to the words people around me used, to the words I used, in the world and inside myself, to check out.  Plato was twenty times closer to this thing my teachers saw in me and Salinger saw in the girl than Hume or Buddha or Paul de Man was.  The ordinary Medieval/Renaissance Christian, with his word "soul," was  thirty times closer.  Dante was forty times closer.  Donne sixty.  Milton a hundred.

Nobody whose time is short (not just me, friends) wants to waste any of it digging into a pile of applesauce.  We all could use a detector.  Here's one I'll pass on: any time you pick up "the destruction of the coherent Self," or any similar locution, keep going.  Life's too short.

219. The Contest Between Paintings and Wallpaper.

 

At each meal in my retirement home I face a wall that has a painting of wallpaper on it.  That's all that's in the frame.  Just a section of wallpaper.

Though it doesn't throw me into transports it does transport me: back to that train station (Post #2) where I immediately thought better of what some people were doing in a passageway when my companion told me that it was "performance art."

You can see what makes the connection between the station and the wall wall: a thing we look at is given added value through a name.  My companion said, "This is art," and so, I think, does the frame.

I argued that a painting shouldn't be given this added value.  It should earn it.  By competing fair and square with everything else offering value.  The performers in the train station are up against anything else you might see in a train station.  The stuff inside a frame is competing against anything you might see outside the frame.  Like the wallpaper.

Now what everything on the wall of a dining room is competing for is the privilege of supplying a background pleasure.  Conversation and food are the foreground pleasures.  You can find all kinds of weighty, paired terms for this division —intrinsic vs. extrinsic, essential vs. accidental, central vs. marginal — but none of them will let you reverse the privilege of the conversation and food.  They (a jazz club will tell it to you) are the trumpet and clarinet, carrying the tune; the wallpaper is just brushes on the drum.

Experience with various pleasures soon taught me, as Socrates taught me later, that for the good life pleasures have to be ranked, and proportioned, and located, foreground or background.  If you disagree I'll take you to a jazz club. 

OK, this retirement home is no jazz club, but the truth I landed on was a general one, applying everywhere.  So here I am, listening closely to my companions (don't think octogenarians aren't worth listening to), and what do I hear?  What has this painter done?  Cued the drummer to take over.  With his brush!  "Quiet, you diners, I'm showing you some art," says the frame.  I look inside.  "Ta da!"  A section of wallpaper.  Outside is inside, background is foreground, lesser is greater, and the effect on me is distraction.  I can no longer keep my mind on the conversation.

So what am I, in a comedy club?  "Hey, the wallpaper guy is here.  Thinks he can use it to test the value of painting." All right, smart-ass, test this.

I know, I'm so vain I think that song is about me, but still I can be useful. How familiar are you with the recent, and in some ways ongoing, culture wars?  Do you know that one side believed in proportion and the other side thought they believed too strongly in it?  The proportionists (also identified as traditionalists, and sometimes classicists) carefully distinguished essential from accidental, intrinsic from extrinsic, central from peripheral — and ranked the former ahead of the latter.  The anti-proportionists (identified as postmodernists) exercised less care and said, in effect, to hell with such ranking.  What traditionalists put in the center they — often playfully, just for a tweak — would put in the margin.

There you've got the retirement home dining room, foreseen by the postmodern painter.  She raises her decentering weapon, her brush, the wallpaper goes into the frame, and pow, there I am with my fork in the air.

Now I've taken enough of these shots (oh those 60s absurdists) to know that the worst thing I can do is go weighty on her.  The purpose, as with those ribbers Hemingway despised, is to get a rise out of you.  Not this time, baby.  I'll play it cool.

How do I do that?  By listening closely to the octogenarian trying to complete her promising thought.  I'll show the painter that, even though I'm internally enjoying her game, it ranks below the game we at the table are still trying to play, however well, the game of understanding life, and what's essentially good in it.  Through talk.  That's Socratic, that's classical, that's Western.  And that's what the postmodernist is turning away from — or having fun with.

100. The Higher Hokum

Hokum: "something apparently impressive or legitimate but actually untrue or insincere; pretentious nonsense." The word originated, apparently, as a combination of hocus-pocus (magic) and bunkum (nonsense). We see snake-oil salesmen. Just the word you'd invent in the American heartland. Low class.

Watch commercials and listen to political speeches now, though, and you really understand the word. We're swimming in hokum, morning and night. And the more screens technology provides us with the deeper we sink. Oh for some purer air, some higher culture, before we drown.

Higher culture, that's what I came out of the heartland gasping for in 1944, and I thought I had found it in the high poetry my teachers, college teachers, introduced me to — T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden. How great to rise above vulgarity.

But it occurs to me now that to understand "hokum" fully I ought to consider more carefully the kind of reaction I had reading one of those high poems, the famous "September 1, 1939." Auden is sitting "in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street"

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.

And I am with him, oh am I with him. A terrible thing is happening, the start of World War II, and terrible forces, which I do not understand, have been at work producing it. Auden understands so much, the general sweep, "the whole offence/ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad," and the crucial details, "what occurred at Linz," and "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev" — which is still " true of the normal heart."

I can't tell you how thrilling it was to read this in the middle of the war. I know that every poet says, "Look at me," but he also says, "Have a seat beside me," and for me to be sitting alongside Auden as the world crumbled was just, well, English-major heaven. I understood the war, maybe all wars. This was pure truth, and I sucked it in like a surfacing porpoise.

What I failed to see was how much Auden resembled the salesman who put me alongside him in the Buick commercial. Both were appealing to a passion, one to a passion to feel rich, the other to a passion to feel wise. And both appeals were illegitimate. I could never really be rich and nothing Auden told me would make me wise.

To be really wise on his subject I'd have to know just what was dishonest about that thirties decade, and what, exactly, was clever about its hopes. Auden doesn't say, and he doesn't, in a poem, have space to say. He can only signal the power to say. So trust him, and enjoy the view. Or, buy the snake oil.

Now you may say, "That's poets for you, they can only signal power," and you may say, "That's poetry-readers, they have to trust signals," but, in college, you can't ignore for long the presence of people whose words you don't have to trust, scientists. They're there for you to test, there with the goods, willing to take the time, receptive to your questions, without limit on the length of their answers. In my case I could have gone to a historian, that kind of scientist, and gotten the alternative to Auden's hokum about the thirties: painstaking analysis. I'd see the difference between being wise and having the feeling of being wise.

Obviously, hokum-detection is essential and I know that beyond scientists are philosophers, like Plato, who can equip me, through the example of Socrates, to detect hokum in nearly everything a poet produces, but I'm not willing to go into that at this point. Maybe I'm too intuitively stuck on high poetry to want to bad-mouth it any more. And I must say that the Auden case taught me something about the meaning of "high," as in "high culture."

Here's how it did that. Equipped by Plato I went back to Auden's poetry with a more sensitive hokum detector than any I'd ever had. I came to "September 1, 1939." The detector was clicking like mad: "Pretentious nonsense, pretentious nonsense." Then I discovered, on Wikipedia, that Auden was way ahead of me. He had detected so much hokum in that poem that he couldn't stand it. He called it "trash." He "loathed" it. And he refused to let it be reprinted in his 1966 collection. All while the reading public was eating it up!

Well, there's the meaning of "high" for you. One who writes "high poetry" will have a high sensitivity to hokum. His detector (for Hemingway a "shit-detector") won't keep all the hokum out but it will keep out the really bad stuff, the cheap appeals to the passions, the sentimental pull. But not just that. It will, at the highest levels, keep out the intellectually subtle appeals, the kind that make very intelligent people think they know something when they really don't.