349. Chatter, Vital Chatter

Rebecca Mead, of the New Yorker, right about so many things, is wrong about the importance of chatter in a relationship.  She thinks it's fluff, weightless.  Talk about "school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the Bush Administration" (8-11-03) couldn't possibly be what Milton was referring to when he made "a meet and happy conversation" the "chiefest and noblest end of marriage."

I didn't realize just how wrong she was until the other day I ran into this poem, "The Guitarist Tunes Up," by Frances Cornford.

With what attentive courtesy he bent

Over his instrument;

Not as a lordly conqueror who could

Command both wire and wood,

But as a man with a loved woman might

Inquiring with delight

What slight essential things she had to say

Before they started, he and she, to play.

That one word "essential," after "slight."  Essential to their love, to the ecstasy they will play their way into, essential to their relationship.  There it is, the whole refutation of Mead, a refuting the way poets refute, a brain-shaking combination, with a power no academic's argument, whatever it's length, will ever reach. 

I would have heard "talk about the follies of the Bush administration" as fluff when I was a high-theorizing graduate student.  That was before I really listened to King Lear.   Stripped of the big kingship things, standing with Cordelia as she asks to confront the sisters who will imprison them, he stops her:

No, no, no, no!  Come let's away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage....

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too —

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out —

And take upon's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies, and we'll wear out,

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

There's day-to-day life together!  The essential in the slight.  In this passage what invitations there are to superimpose the other — Lear bending over Cordelia with "attentive courtesy," his pleasure in their kind of play, their "singing i' th' cage" coming through as well-tuned guitar music.   In Cornford what invitations to expansion.  See, as Mead does, the connection with Milton, and realize that marital back-and-forth is exactly what Milton was talking about, and you can see the lovers' play going on, with children, into larger play, with more variations, more personalities, more to play with.  A well-tuned family.

One can understand why 95% of our literature, and maybe 99% of our movies, appeal to our interest in the exotic ­— what's outside our daily experience.  Getting excited  about what's inside, the introtic, say, is so difficult.  You really have to crank up your imagination.  All while resisting the exotic's force of attraction.

Are you in doubt about that force?  Look at what Roget gives as synonyms for "exotic": alluring, colorful, fascinating, enticing, unfamiliar, romantic, glamorous.  Even better look at the antonyms:  boring, uninteresting, standard, usual, dull, common, familiar, normal, regular, ordinary.  Think what it must take to overcome that!

Exotic things are essential to those whose imaginations are not yet strong enough to penetrate the fluff, to get to what's in play, the love, and yes the conflict, the competition.  Managed and played with.  The love.

The disproportionate lure of the outside to youth is understandable.  There, and possibly really there, is the New York stage, or an ambassadorship, or a Nobel prize, or the Great American Novel.  You have to live a while, and not get a Nobel, to know what Lear is talking about.  Also now there are new chemicals for our sensors, new kinks in the sex chain, all there for the exciting exploration our affluence allows, all alluring, fascinating, unfamiliar, and enticing, none standard, normal, regular, ordinary, or dull.

It's not a competition, though, where we can go all-out either way.  I favor the inside game but I have to back the youth who might, just might, playing outside, write the Great American Novel.  On the other hand there's what Lear opens up for us: the chance to become God's spies into the mystery of things.  That can't be boring, uninteresting, standard, or dull.  Not if you're spying on human beings. 

There's a problem with our word "exploration."  It nearly always means to us "movement into the outside, the unfamiliar."  It seldom means "digging deeper into the inside, the familiar."  What the lover is doing when he inquires into the slight essential things the loved woman has to say.  What parents in the well-tuned family do, and the children learn to do.  Attending to the slight things that reveal a spouse's character, or a child's capacities.  There's no other word for that than "exploration," and no other suggestion it can make than "exciting."  Any dullness has to be in the observer.

Is that the inside game's highest promise, the nobility, a chance to see into the mystery of things?  A blaze of light, Truth on a mountaintop?  I don't want to deny any possibility that might give the inside game an advantage over the outside game, but I can't claim it. 

I can, though, give advice on a bet.  If the winner is going to be the one on top at the end put your money on the inside players.  Shakespeare has given me a vision.  I see Lear and Cordelia, inside those prison walls, gabbing away, wearing out "packs and sects of great ones." I see our two, Cornford's two, bouncing their ball back and forth, wearing out packs and sects of romantic questers.  On and on.  When those on the outside are worn out those imaginative ones on the inside will still be fresh.

348. A Big Mistake

I see that the "theme of the day" for the second day of the Democratic Convention will be "Mothers of the Movement," with "the mothers of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and more, all men and women who died in police custody or as a result of police actions" speaking. 

That's such a mistake.  It's the voters in the middle or wavering on the other side you should be going for, Democrats; this will only intensify the feelings of the voters you already have.  And it might well lose you the waverers on the Republican side.  There's nobody to speak for the policemen killed.  Do you think that Trump won't notice that and take advantage of it?  "See, what did I tell you?  You're left out.  I'm your man.  Come on and help me take America back.  You can't bail out now."

I can hear it now.  And you're setting him up for it.  Please correct this, maybe by inserting something honoring the policemen, as quickly as you can.

         

347. Flash to Hillary from the Great Adviser in the Sky

Once again I, a little academic blogger with, at this fraught American moment a larger following in Russia than in the U.S., get this missive from the Great Political Adviser in the Sky to pass on to Hillary Clinton.  Maybe he (or she) is worried about future conflict.  Anyway, I'll pass it on, as instructed.

You've got to trust me now more than ever, Hillary.  Play it right.  Move to the center, the way Bill did.  You've already got every vote to the left of you so forget satisfying the Sanders people.  Go for the shaky Trump people, who are going to get shakier and shakier.  That guy's not going to wear well.  Even at the convention I could see the glow on the faces dim as his speech went beyond an hour. 

Give blacks and Latinos due attention, but no more, nothing to make the Republican whites think you're not entirely on their side.  Even if they feel hurt the minorities are going to mark for you rather than Trump.  His wild words have bound them, and will bind them to you, no matter what you do.

And speaking of words, modulate yours.  You have a strident voice, Hillary, and from the next room you can sometimes almost sound like Trump.  Cool it.  Don't be tempted by the pictures of you as a fighter ready to take on Trump in the ring, as on the New Yorker cover.  Forget the followers cheering, "Go girl, give it to him, blow for blow," however sweet that would be in your ears.  No, leave that to your subordinates, or your sympathetic pundits.  Your speech should be as close to Margaret Thatcher's as you can make it.

You want contrast with Trump, presidential contrast.  Maybe you shouldn't even mention his name.  Just tear down, in that scholarly Obama way, everything he stands for.  Surely you have writers who know how to do this, skewer without ever being caught with the skewer. 

I know you'll be sorely tested.  Trump will say terrible things about you.  There will be moments when you'll barely be able to contain yourself.  For help in those moments I'll offer this brain-reminder, this axiom-com-mantra given me by a lawyer in my town and employed by me ever since when oh-such-biting answers to a Trump type rise in my brain: "Never get in a pissing contest with a skunk."

Your failure would be a national disaster.  Your ultimate prize, a Congress with both houses behind you, would be a national blessing.  Every unhypnotized American is behind you.  So go girl, go presidential girl!

346. How Trump Turned White Eggheads into Black Rappers

"Egghead" is, leaving out its derogatory coloring, a word for "a person who is highly academic or studious" and that person is "often a professor or the protégé of a professor."  

If "egghead" fit me and my colleagues who taught English Composition it meant keeping your writing unified and coherent and choosing specific words over vague words.  In argumentative compositions it emphatically meant avoiding violations of logic.  If anything like a Donald Trump speech appeared before us it would have gotten a flat F.

Now it appears that many of our white male protégés and even a few of our colleagues are telling pollsters, by word or, more likely, by anonymously clicking a button, that they intend to vote for Donald Trump.

It's the great unexplainable of our academic lives, and nobody inside or outside of academia has been much help.  In the public forums I follow there are plenty of explanations for the less-educated men's behavior but none, zero, for the well-educated men's.

When you're hard up for explanations you explore the outer reaches and, spurred on by polls showing Trump gaining ground, I have thought harder and harder about what it might be in me and my colleagues that would allow an entry by somebody like Trump.  And the only thing I found is almost too outré to report: hatred of self-contradiction, the archetypical fault of the bad mind all teachers, but especially Composition and logic teachers, are trying to turn into the good mind.

"Impossible!" you say.  I do too.  Who is more full of contradictions than Donald Trump?  You'd have to find a pretty objectionable case to compete with his case.

To accept the one I found you'll have to accept, I'm afraid, my explanation of the action of Drew Faust, president of Harvard, in denying scholarships and team captaincies to any student (she was obviously pointing at men) who joined a single-sex club: that it was a blow in the war between the sexes (Post 340) in which she held all the moral weapons.  She and her fellows in the enlightened world were right every time they spoke about patriarchy.  A white man had about as much power in moral suasion as a bare-fisted pagan had in combat with a Roman soldier.  Indeed, what women ruled at that point amounted to a moral empire.

I see frustration, and internal pressure building up.  Testosterone maybe.  And a man can't stand up and argue it away.  Not in a public arena where every spectator understands moral power, and knows who has it.  Furthermore, if he's an academic he's already got his reason, three-quarters on the side of the feminists, keeping the lid on.  Yet he's still a male and can't help feeling those defeats as blows, lashes on a poor pagan's back.  With not a cry from him.

Finally, the salt in the wound, he senses that Drew Faust knows her power and her position atop a moral and intellectual empire.  She's just doing this to rub in her sex's victory.

 But that, too, had to go without complaint in a Christian culture, where there's no credible objection to the kind of power she is employing, the power of the persecuted, the weak, the long-victimized.  Who can object to power when it's used to hold a Christian to his obligation to love?  There can't even be internal objection.  

Except that objection to contradiction.  And when the cause of contradiction, that core fault of the bad mind, is love, a passion, it represents (oh Milton) exactly what would take all mankind (in Adam) down: the victory of the passions over the reason.  This kind of moral correctness is simply uncontrolled love.  It's sentimentality, emotion without intelligence.

And where did the eggheads see this contradiction?  In those employing Drew Faust's kind of power and working next to her, in race relations.  They were rebuking white men for language they freely accepted coming from black men.  The N-word for blacks, the B-word for women, outrageous in a white mouth, was OK in a black mouth.  "I ain't fucking with you, you bitch" lets the rapper, because his race is the victimized race, go on to greater success while, in the middle of paragraphs of hedging and contextualizing, "there are issues of intrinsic differences of aptitude" [between men and women in science and engineering], gets the white man removed from his position (as president of Harvard, and Faust's predecessor — the justice of which removal I'm not questioning here).

The egghead has been living with these burrs in his underwear, correctness burrs, this last one the worst, for years now.  And he hasn't been able to cry out.  Then he sees a place that's not public and where frustration and outrage don't have to be suppressed, a polling booth.  There he will, as the surveys show, fill in the circle for Donald Trump.  He will be saying to Drew Faust, who's name is to him now legion,

I ain't fuckin' with you

You little, you little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you

I got a million trillion things I'd rather fuckin' do

Than to be fuckin' with you.

345. "Bang Gang" Insouciance

What Stephen Holden finds remarkable about this movie showing teenagers doing group sex is its "shrugging attitude."  I notice that "Bang Gang" is French and I can see the shrug.  How many times in Paris, witnessing another incomprehensible street scene, have I seen the shoulders go up.  C'est la mani. Here, I suppose, C'est la jeunesse.

Our world leaders in insouciance they are, and I turn to them gratefully, especially when in doubt about my cool.  Should I show curiosity about that man in high heels?  Ah, there at the corner table, les épaules going up.  I'm as grateful as I was in Milan, seeing a gentiluomo cutting his spaghetti.

The opposite of "insouciance" would be "souciance" I suppose, but we don't have the word.  I could have used it when I tried to think of people opposite to the gang-bang shruggers.  Certainly my father would qualify.  I remember his being asked once to serve as a chaperone for a high-school weenie-roast.  My mother said he spent the whole evening chasing kids out of the woods and back to the campfire.  He was souciant.

It's a coinage to be pleased with.  You know it fills a gap in your vocabulary when you keep finding new fits for it.  I think of the boyfriend of the babysitter who thought my dad could be a chaperone.  He failed to use a condom (on some other weenie-roast, I suppose) and got her pregnant.  He was under-souciant.  Then he got souciant in their search for the baby after she, in her period of disgrace and despair, had given it up for birth-adoption, and they were finally married.  Then the long period you'd have to call "post-insouciance."  Not a shrug anywhere, even among observers.

The more you observe the world the more sockets you find the word fitting into.  WCTU people standing watch at saloon doors were super-souciant.  LGBT people detecting micro-aggressions are hyper-souciant.  Those fearing the uncool of super- or hyper-  become crypto-.  Contemporary professors with a weakness for Victorian values — or Platonic love, or Doric discipline — have to be crypto-souciant.

There was nothing crypto about my father, chasing couples out of the woods, and there is nothing crypto about my other opposite to the French shruggers, NYT columnist David Brooks, telling his readers to start talking as if people had souls.

That's a cry in another ballpark.  Maybe in another age.  Yet what's on the field is the same.  Say you're at a post-movie table in Cannes and the person next to you, Brooks, says, "You know, if public life were truly infused with the sense that people have souls, we would comfortably tell [young people] that sex is a fusion of loving souls and not just a physical act" (NYT 6-7-16).  What are your shoulders doing?  Where are the épaules of those around you?  What about Holden, whose cool in front of the sex scenes was itself pretty Gallic?  Can you even form a picture?

One thing our sense of incongruity shows is that Holden must be right in calling the insouciance of the movie's group-sex treatment "distinctively contemporary."  A few years ago in France the souciance of existentialists kept shoulders down.  "You are what you choose, and every choice counts."  So choose carefully.  You're constructing your essence. 

In the contemporary world, then, Sartre becomes one of the voices from the conservative past, where relations with Christians become more congenial.  If Sartre and Brooks, silenced at the table, meet in the washroom they'll make perfect sense to each other.   "The soul can be elevated and degraded at every second, even when you’re alone not hurting anybody," says Brooks.  "I hear existence constructing essence," says Sartre. "I'm with you."

Treating life as a series of choices, and seeing a choice in every moment, with nothing lost, is about as deeply souciant as you can get.  You're down there with St. Augustine ("Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow") and the saints who saw the crisis in every moment.  Not to mention the followers of Socrates, whose entire business was care of the soul.

Those are pretty heavy hitters, and if we can stay in the same ballpark I think they will win.  The thought momentarily cheers me, a longtime souciance fan, but then I think of what victory here might mean.  The end of insouciance?  Will I like that?

"Well," comes the voice of Socrates, "do you like the New York Times?  Would you like to remove the Arts section from it?  It's full of insouciance.  Hardly any in the Editorial section.  Will you be a one-section man?  Is that the good life?"

Oi, he's got me.  The very pieces that inspired this blog post, Holden's and Brooks's, appeared in the same issue!  Giving me pleasure, keeping me alive.  Giving me as good a life as I'm capable of.

344. There Goes the Gas out of "Populist"

We all know what a "populist" is, right?  Somebody who engages in revolts against elite establishments.  That's something to respect.

Then comes the morning after British populists have voted to get Britain out of the EU.  The pound is plunging, stock prices around the world are falling, and the world economy faces what a Bloomberg editor I know called "nuclear winter."

And there on the BBC (via Tara John, Time) is a dismayed Brexit voter: “I did not think that was going to happen, I didn’t think my vote was going to matter too much because I thought we were just going to remain."  And on Twitter, many like him: "Lol starting to regret my vote."  "Urm I think I kinda regret my vote, I had no real reason to pick what I did!!."  "I personally voted leave believing these lies and I regret it more than anything, I feel genuinely robbed of my vote."

And there was Stephen Collinson on CNN asking if British voters in revolt could be joined by American voters in revolt, as Donald Trump was asking them to.  Voters identified by the same word, "populist."

It's a day to redefine that word.  Except that the day comes in a year when calling a spade a spade reduces the number of your dinner invitations.  And in a place, a democracy, that must preserve respect for the common man.  So let's just say that "populist" means "a voter insufficiently supplied with clues."

343. Foucault on a Mountain

A letter:

I'll tell you, buddy, those are the last climbers I'll ever accept from that college.  Every traverse they've got to stop and talk it over with each other.  Thompson Steep, two of them with their heads together, looking at me, mumble mumble domination mumble mumble paternalism mumble mumble, ism, ism.

Cooper Spine it's worse.  Mumble, mumble, privileged status structure mumble mumble hegemonic masculinity mumble mumble. 

When they get to "the master gaze" at Jones Ledge I turn on them.  "Stop right here," I say.  "I know your trouble and it needs to be cleared up.  Start with that rock Alissa's foot is on.  It's a real rock.  Part of mountain reality.  And don't look off at the mountain-tops when I use the word 'reality,' Steven.  I'm not talking about what there's no foundation for, a world independent of our constructions.  I'm talking only about what we've got to take into account when we climb a mountain. Rocks that look like that will, according to my experience — and I will, regardless of any power I have, call this 'knowledge' — sometimes give way under you, in which case you will be left dangling on your rope or, if your companions have not believed me about fastening their picks, in a heap in the scrabble down below, along with the rest of us."  My gaze was on Alissa's foot.  It may have been an imperial gaze or a male gaze but it was a necessary gaze, since my failure to assess her foot's position could have kept us from getting to the top of the mountain, or back home, rather than down in the scrabble.

I was starting way back but I thought that while I was at it I might as well establish the essentials (woops, another hot word) — well, show them the foundational beliefs (oh my god, worse).  OK, what mountain-climbers postulate.  The simplest metaphysics in the world, as you and I know: that there's something unconstructed out there that keeps us from getting what we want just by willing it.  However we describe it we must conform our will to it.

I don't know whether it was really there or not but I see doubt in Steven's face.  "What do you mean must?"  So I take the opportunity to explain logical necessity (yes, I actually  used those words, "logical" and "necessity").  "Wanting the end entails wanting the means.  If you want the summit you want the steps toward it."

I left it to them to figure out the consequences of this for the other big word they had been using, "power."  Like that wanting the steps entails wanting knowledge of the steps, which, if you don't have it, requires a grant of power to the one you go to for help, me here but elsewhere any teacher.  The power (or "authority") to speak to you in the imperative voice: "Put your foot here, not there."

I did take the opportunity to point out that the tone of that imperative, or any other accidents of its utterance — the race, the gender, the history, the bourgeois origins, all extra-mountain power relationships — was, however lamentable, irrelevant to their goal, getting their live bodies to the summit.  Their goal, not mine.  We teachers at the clinic don't have a goal until students give us one.  "Long's Peak?  Check.  Here's how."

So all their suffering, all my insufferable exercise of authority, all their onerous obedience, all docility in their bodies, followed from their grant of power, which followed from their own desire.  They were doing this to themselves; they were their own oppressors.

I thought that given time to think (there's plenty of it on a mountain; so much is just plodding) they'd work out these consequences, but when we got to the next ledge only about half of them had.  And they are all such arguers there's no way they could stay out of a big one with the other half.  They tried to keep their voices down but I did hear the crusher that ended it:  "Better our bodies inscribed by him than by those sharp f---ing rocks down there!" That was Carla, and I thought she had them all convinced.

I even thought they'd had the mountain-flash we all wait for:  climbing is choices and choices are trade-offs.  Decide that all goals are mountains, all putting of means to ends is climbing, that climbing is 95% of life, and very few need to go to India.

But not so.  Though the Real Worlders (I'll call them) had won the argument, and nobody on the other side could refute them, a few were still putting their feet on rotten rock.  Deliberately.  Defiantly.

How could they be defying reason?  Why would educated people no longer listen to reason?  As the last plod went on I grew more excited.  Why, why, God tell me, why are they acting this way?   "And why are men in the upper-class suburbs of New York, dense with college graduates, pressing the button for Donald Trump?" suddenly came a voice from the mist.  "Why do rational men ever behave irrationally?" came an echoing voice, and another, and another.  We had reached the heights of the eternal mysteries.

Note for colleagues further out of touch than I am: In being guided by the French philosopher Michel Foucault the group above is special, but not extremely special.  By 2007 Foucault was the most often cited author in the humanities (Thomson Reuters), so influential that, according to one of his followers (Jared Silverman) his "concepts have permeated modern scholarship in such widespread ways that we can easily say of him what the poet W.H. Auden (1979) once said of Freud: that he is 'no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.'"

If you know him only as one of those postmodernists who took down objectivity and the unitary self you need at least to check the Wikipedia entry, which will tell you that "Foucault's discussions on power and discourse have inspired many critical theorists, who believe that Foucault's analysis of power structures could aid the struggle against inequality. They claim that through discourse analysis, hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated."  Obviously you need to know more (or possibly you don't need to know more) than I can supply here.  However, a few of his widely quoted statements might help a little, at least with the mountain story:

Power is everywhere.  

Truth is...produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its regime of truth.

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.