Sublimity vs. Delight

One of the characters in the previously mentioned A Mixture of Frailties is the self-proclaimed chameleon of belief, Sir Benedict Domdaniel. The knighted conductor, originally of Jewish descent, apparently adopts whatever passion is required by his art, but his earliest soliloquies in the book suggest that he in fact an unabashed Nietzschean, who scorns the union daughter’s distrust of wealth and sees all the world divided between Eros and Thanatos (those who are for life and those who are against it). And so he provides me with a more succinct summary of Nietzsche’s take on music than I have yet to find in the latter’s writings:

That’s what music used to be for, you know—to capture the beauty and delight that people found in life. But then the Romantics came along and turned it all upside down; they made music a way of churning up emotions in people that they hadn’t felt before. Music ceased to be a distilment of life and became, for a lot of people, a substitute for life—a substitute for a sea-voyage, or the ecstasies of sainthood, or being raped by a cannibal king, or even for an hour with a psychoanalyst or a good movement of the bowels. And a whole class of people arose who thought themselves music-lovers, but who were really sensation-lovers.

The difficulty of discerning between distilling the beauty of life (Nietzsche speaks of idealization, but it seems to be the same idea as Domdaniel’s distillation) and creating effect or sensation is apparent in Davies’ work itself. He probably thinks he is telling quite the Nietzschean tale, but as I suggest below, it seems often like a romance.

What this all means for how I listen to music, I’m not sure yet, but I mean to find out. I have Nietzsche and Wagner’s entire correspondence sitting on my desk and A Tribe Called Quest and The Cocteau Twins on my iPod. I want to find what these things have to do with one another.

Of artists, archetypes, and wealthy benefactors

I am reading Robertson Davies again. Every time one of his novels appears in a used book store I can’t help but buy it. I have already purchased several copies of The Rebel Angels, only to give them away and buy more – a practice which has been long modeled to me by my sister, and seems to be one of my most active forms of proselytizing (dwarfed only by the need to give much-too-carefully-crafted mixed CDs even when they’re not entirely wanted).

It’s A Mixture of Frailties this time, which rounds out Davies’ first trilogy with a move from small town southern Ontario to his later much-beloved European world of the arts, a world which has likely never existed. This seems to me the problem with Davies. He writes what I have on occasion affectionately called “academic smut”. He excites his quasi-educated, partially-cultured reader with fantastical romps in which all the characters have in depth knowledge of Rabelais, Jung, and the lesser known operas, and in which all young women of some talent have enlightening affairs with their mentors. Christianity is come upon in great paintings and great music, and morality is something like the noble virtues of the Renaissance, or maybe even the Greeks who they attempted to model. This humanism is far from the democratic humanism which it has become, but the kind that demands individual greatness, and voracity for soaking in the greatness of ages past. It leaves me with a rather feverish desire to enter such a world, to commit myself to some work of genius and to all the characters I would meet along the way.

Of course, as with all smut, the desires Davies instills don’t correspond to any reality. Reality is filled with fewer artists and quaint small town folk, and many more bureaucrats. Reality requires a lot more patience. As filled as his books might be with some real insight on the development of character, the hard work never seems particularly like hard work and the existential struggles seem more romantic than actually agonizing. I love reading Davies for all these reasons, but I am suspect of this love.

Incidentally, I know someone who seems to me very much a character out of a Robertson Davies novel. Originally from a small Canadian town, he is full of stories of the illustrious personages he has known, from vaguely lascivious encounters with Oxford spinsters to the time he baptized several Huguenot children in a remote city in Switzerland. He personally knows the Archbishop of Canterbury, likes to carry on long conversations about gin and sherry, and still wears cuff links. He has spent the last eight years studying the drunkenness of Noah. I once spoke of my love for Robertson Davies in his presence and he grimaced; it seems he has no liking at all for Davies’ novels, and I find this rather telling. Those closest to the world Davies inhabited see only a heavy-handedness in his opinions: there is no subtlety here. Davies embraces the plain speech that his most well-loved character preaches (Dunstan Ramsay of the Deptford Trilogy), which, though a very affective sort of storytelling, makes it difficult to enjoy his works if one really truly disagrees with him. And those who have had any taste of the reality of these matters must undoubtedly disagree with him at some point because, as I strongly suspect, there is very little reality in the particulars of his stories. These are fairytales, or perhaps fables, for they contain the plainest morals I’ve encountered in novels of late. (Davies' conflation of religion and art, which intrigues me but is likely much too simplistic, is also part of the problem for the man I'm speaking of, and it's something I would love to write more about at some point.)

So whether fairytale or grad school harlequin romance, I’m not sure, but the flush on my cheeks won’t propel me to the hard work of genius. Finally this flush only engenders the voracity for more Davies.

Meet My Advisor

During a seminar:

Student - "What if we take God out of the equation?"
PTK - "What if we take the equation out of God?"

And that, my friends, might as well be a summary of all of Kroeker's thought.

iamundernodisguise

Erich Heller on Wittgenstein:

He could not but have contempt for philosophers who "did" philosophy and, having done it, thought of other things: money, lists of publications, academic advancements, university intrigues, love affairs, or the Athenaeum - and thought of these things in a manner which showed even more clearly than the products of their philosophical thought that they had philosophized with much less than their whole person.

The sight of a thought that was detachable from a man filled him with loathing.

Kenneth Parcell:

Strawberries! My...real...name...is Dick Whitman!

The Guts of Good Taste

One cannot really advance an argument about taste. I think most of my generation is at least vaguely appalled by any attempt to take inventory, according to some predetermined standard, of those things which are in good taste. When my choir conductor called last year’s overhaul of CBC Radio 2 a struggle between high culture and low culture (Bach=high culture, 3 minute pop songs=low culture), he – and most of his ‘flock’ – was confident in locating good taste on one side of that divide. Establishing such an a priori divide at all seems to me to be in bad taste.

One cannot really establish criterion for beauty. I have long known this. Beauty, like Christ’s Lordship, must be its own argument. Of course, this does not mean we should shut up about beauty (or Christ). It just means that our claims about beauty have no ground to stand on but our own taste. This is a Nietzschean claim, but it – along with Nietzsche’s thought more generally – should not reduce us to some sort of relativism. Not everyone has good taste! Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but not everyone has an eye to behold it, and no one can always behold it. Taste is necessarily discriminating. Beauty may be resilient, and may be encountered where we least expect it, but it is not everywhere. Even an argument advancing aesthetic relativism becomes something of a theory of beauty, a criterion that obscures the actual encounter of beauty in some ‘places’ and not others.

A claim about the beautiful is therefore a risky business. One might be wrong. And it’s not as if we can simply find that principle or standard that will ensure our rightness. In judgments of taste, we risk ourselves. I could admire my conductor’s guts, his dedication to Mendelssohn in the face of CanCon and the simple strum of the acoustic guitar (Lobgesang is, after all, frighteningly good), but the problem is that for him there is no risk. His defence of Mendelssohn is a self-preservational claim, something resembling a political platform more than a confessional declaration.

I think I’m going to stick with Nietzsche for awhile. The academic world is one primarily interested in protecting itself with argument, and yet Nietzsche’s works are very respectable objects of study. Too many of these studies still are interested in protecting the academy from Zarathustra’s injunctions by dissecting him rather than wrestling with him (or dancing with him, as we might rather say), but I really do think there may still be room enough to keep him alive and, well, kicking, to allow oneself to be wounded (and blessed) by his demands on us. His demand, finally, is that we have courage enough to make claims about good taste because it is in good taste to make these risky claims. So let us be honest and brave enough to stammer “This is my good; this I love.” This is my good; this I love.

Gravely read the stones

Kierkegaard on cemetery plots:

Death does not say, "There is no difference whatever"; it says, "There you can see what the difference was: half a foot." [...] Thus in death life returns to childlike simplicity. In childhood the big difference was also that one person had a tree, a flower, a stone. (Works of Love, Series 2, IX)

Truthsome Television

I watch a lot of television. Streaming online video has only perpetuated a much older habit fostered initially by MuchMusic and the first years of the WB. As such an admission suggests, I have some pretty shitty taste, and a lot of the television I've watched in the last while has been particularly terrible. I have resolved (not for the first time, of course) to give up prime time soap operas. They're like Old Dutch barbecue chips: they taste awful but I keep eating them anyway (next time you find yourself in the potato chip aisle, you would be wise to heed this warning). So, I no longer waste my time (I don't generally believe in such a thing as wasted time, but network television may be a notable exception) on the scripted, two-dimensional lives of Private Practice, or on the Roman theatre of Gossip Girl. I briefly took up other rather more interesting though perhaps no more worthwhile hobbies (Firefly fanfiction, anyone?).

And then came Mad Men, which quickly took me back from text to the talkies. The show's creator and writer, Matt Weiner, is one hell of a psychologist, not the Violet Turner "let's all find closure" variety, but in the sense that Dostoyevsky is a hell of a psychologist. The characters are so true it hurts. There is no closure, there are no wistful soliloquoys on what it all means, just a bunch of people stuck in the stories they tell themselves and each other. Too many of the reviews I've read try to make this a show about alcoholism and sexism and anti-Semitism etc. , but the truly tragic character - the deplorable Pete Campbell - is not the one who is markedly more sexist, more alcoholic, more anti-Semitic, but the one who believes the stories he tells himself a little too much. He's not a self-styled bad boy. In fact, he's unnervingly earnest: he earnestly believes that he is entitled to more, that his adulteries are justified, that his talents are the greatest. His communication - with his friends, with his wife - must follow the script of these stories.

The reviews mostly get it wrong again when it comes to our anti-hero, Don Draper. "All men want to be him, all women want to be with him." "A ladies man." If this was his appeal, I might as well turn back to Seely Booth or Derek Shephard. But Don Draper is the man who doesn't justify himself. He can sit down to a lunch of two dozen oysters and nearly as many martinis, or share a joint with a couple of beatnics after work; he can woo his wife, his mistress, or the bright Jewish business woman, and none of these "guises" are guises at all. These aren't games he plays at - seduce the girl, climb the corporate ladder, tarry with the kids in the Village - they're just things he does with the people he knows, with the people who know him. And yes, I think they do know him, despite his reticence. He seems mysterious not because he hides the truth, but because people don't know what to make of someone who doesn't account for himself. For all of his pretty pitches, he strikes me as remarkably honest; he has the sort of honesty that has nothing to do with talking about yourself a lot, and is quite often hampered by it.

But another review called Draper a total bastard. That one might be right, too.

Well, I've gone and tried to give an account of why I like the show and probably been painfully dishonest in the process. I mean, I haven't even finished the first season. I won't try to justify my actions.