The notion that Andy Warhol’s work accounts for 17% of the modern art market is so astonishing to me that I can’t quite believe it. But when the author thinks about the reasons why, he makes a lot of sense.

The starting point for any assessment of Warhol’s legacy is his instant accessibility: nobody need ever be puzzled by a Warhol—his lavish colours, his epic simplicity and, most of all, his famous subject matter. “Andy always painted famous things,” says the artist Michael Craig-Martin, “whether it was Liz Taylor or a Coke can.”

Artists can imitate his work without knowing anything about his underlying models.

’Even children love him,’ says Gul Coskun, a Warhol specialist dealer in London. ‘They stop their parents outside my shop. His pictures are big, colourful, they are not taxing academically.’

Not being academically taxing, his works are easily appreciated and even imitated by children and adults alike; and this is what makes them so imitable by the younger generation that has made an art of external tattoos that show us their unchanging desires, hopes, and opinions rather than a deeper and opaque depth that some thinkers like Jacques Derrida believe is ephemeral in the first place. In this depthless universe, Andy Warhol reigns supreme.

Unlike my academic colleagues, I have no problem with the lack of depth in the universe. To each his own, I say. Some of us are plumbers; others (like me) are authors. But I do have a problem with the superficial level at which people stop their inquiry into to the universe. Rather than exploring the universe for differing opinions (whether you position them on the surface or underneath in the depths) that might contrast with mine of so require me to remeasure my opinion against different opinions that cannot be reconciled with my opinions without leading me to contradict myself, reason, which requires of each of us to pose our opinions and meet with other contrary opinions on it middle ground, has been eliminated from the universe. In reason’s place, each of us exists as a Leibnizian monad, each with the ability to express our opinions to the world without fear of contradiction by others.

Academic Analysis of the Warhol Universe

Andy Warhol is king of this monadic universe. And here I must side with Mr. Appleyard, who does not stop at the surface but goes looking for causes of Warhol’s behavior that leads him to the core of Warhol’s appeal. As he does this, he is able to “see” what those who are mindlessly imitating Warhol’s art apparently cannot: that Warhol’s moment “is indeed over.” This is one of the benefits of academic analysis: the academic can see what others cannot. And I agree with Mr. Appleyard that “seeing” is better than not seeing and that the use of the intellect, which increases as we age if we apply ourselves to the growth of the mind, is better than “instant intellectualism,” in which we use only our our more fluid intelligence, which fades quickly well before we reach the age of thirty and well before that if we don’t practice its use (see this article on fluid and crystallized intelligence if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

In his academic analysis, he touches on figures from AbEx—I love such terms, because they are the touchstone of insiders; see my post on mos and pomos—championed by Clement Greenberg, a man who I talked about in the section “Unlimited Postmodern Art“ in my post on Poker Tales: In the City That Never Sleeps.”

He also refers to most of the thinkers that I think of when I, who have written a book called Art in the Age of Talk Radio—not not politics, which I despise because it despised me—think of the art world, including Fredric Jameson, Arthur Danto (one of my favorites, who I refer to here in the section on “Arthur Danto’s Skepticism” and here in the section on “Power”), Heidegger, and, of course, Marcel Duchamps, who I refer to here in the section “Into the Warhol(e).” (Art in the Age of Talk Radio is scheduled to be published on March 1, 2012).

In his article, Mr. Appleyard shows the causes that allowed Andy Warhol to have become a colossus in the art world by showing how he intersected with many of the trends that have come to the fore in the more general culture. Therefore, he writes of Christopher Gaillard’s reaction to Warhol’s work:

Warhol is a global commodity now. His work is certainly supported by some key players we read about in the papers, but it’s my belief that this is much more far-reaching than that. Warhol is the most powerful contemporary-art brand that exists. I think Picasso is another, it’s about sheer, instant recognition and what comes along with it is a sense of wealth, glamour and power.

Artworld insiders praise Warhol for delivering them such a powerful message for the first time in history. Mr. Appleyard opens his piece with a testament by “Sara Friedlander, the 27-year-old head of First Open Sale at Christie’s in New York” who actually dismisses the art of the 19th century, the art of the 18th, and “the first three, four or five decades” of the 20th century on account of its being too ‘elitist.’”

More penetrating critics like Mr. Appleyard step back from such blind enthusiasm for the age they live in. They complicate issues that seem so easy on their surface that they require no further explanation by historicizing Warhol as the product of causes that can be found (but only if one is looking). From his position as critic, Mr. Appleyard views Warhol as the product of construction of artifice, which can, according to Derrida, be deconstructed on the basis that artifice does not get back to the ontology (‘realness’ in the words of more than one of my students) which underlies our experience. When one engages the artworld of Andy Warhol in Mr. Appleyard’s critical piece, we find a critic who is uneasy about the ultimate value of Warhol’s status as one who stands as the last word in art, at the end of history, and thus as an out of this world “genius.” Instead of playing along, Mr. Appleyard announces that Warhol’s moment, even at the height of his fame which has delivered 17% of the modern art market to the sale of his works, “is in fact over.”

Stepping Out of the Past

This stepping out of the arena of active ideas to point out flaws in the vision of the universe that ‘lesser’ minds take to be complete and unproblematic is the role of the critic in the world today. But like Arthur Danto, who is a very smart man and who has identified the unique aspects of the art of Andy Warhol (as well as much else), Mr. Appleyard does not have a picture of what comes next. This is a function of his taking the critical posture that says that his experience is worth more than the naïve experience of ‘lesser’ readers who have not taken the time to learn about this (and often any) subject. Mr. Appleyard’s reading of Warhol places too much emphasis on the past, while not thinking as clearly about the future. That is fair, but the fault with Mr. Appleyard’s construction of his universe is that he doesn’t see that there is any problem with his backward-looking view of the world. Like Arthur Danto, he knows that the universe of learning will flow through his critical hands and not through the hands of such ‘lesser’ (because uneducated) readers.

My problem with Mt. Appleyard’s and Mr. Danto’s position is that is not always so. I never would have encountered this if it hadn’t been for the systematic exclusion of my opinions by people who thought that they already had settled solutions to the problems that we were collectively attacking in academia. The only solution that my teachers had was to yield some of their power to me, but none of their position. I was to fall in line. But I did not because I had been raised in a different environment that raised different intellectual solutions to the same problems that Derrida and Michael Bérubé (who, though I hardly knew him when I was at the University of Illinois and who surely doesn’t remember me, gave me one of the two best piece of advice I ever got while I in graduate school) and not (I would insist because I was stupid; but then who am I to judge myself in the face of so many contrary opinions). But the only solution that my academic colleagues could offer me was to follow them or they though I must have a screw loose that they thought that a little yelling at me could fix (predictably, it did not).

The process of fixing boundaries builds the walls of the Ivory Tower between those who know and those who don’t. The question is whether those who are left outside should be excluded from conversation, as I was excluded when I was in graduate school, for a broad agreement on the outlines of knowledge into which ‘lesser’ minds must be indoctrinated before being allowed to participate. This sort of protective behavior is the sort of things that grand inquisitors levied against the birth of the new in order to keep themselves in their secure place earned through their education into the status quo.

The traditional solution to entrenched power has been to overthrow the old order for a new. This is the basis of the rise of the historical model of Petrarch and his literary contemporary, Boccaccio. The rise of Petrarch’s historical model, which he and Boccaccio were the only progenitors of in 1349, had overtaken the scholasticism that had ruled the schools since the 11th century in a historical blink of an eye, so that by the 15th century the victory of humanism was complete and by the end of the 16th century, the death of scholasticism was also complete, leaving room for the rise of modern philosophy. And to this day, scholars still think of their mission as being derived from humanism, not failed scholasticism. (see Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy).

Removing the Barriers of Entry to Understanding

I would take a different tack than that of Scruton or Mr. Appleyard, both of whom I respect. Both men have written conservative assessments of the sad state of the arts and society in general, Mr. Scruton in his Meaning Of Conservatism and Mr. Appleyard in his Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts. As far as their assessment of the past, I find both right on the mark. But I differ with them (respectfully) on their assessment of the future, or rather I should say on their lack of vision about the future of art after Warhol loses his 17% of the modern art market and art travels somewhere or to someone else.

I was a conservative in the English Department from c. 1992 to 1994. I was driven to that position by the same forces that drove Mr. Appleyard to reject the leftist notion of art in 1984. I was able to finish my doctorate by hiding in plain sight in a world in which one’s political affiliations were paramount. As such, they trumped my intellectual accomplishments. So occasionally, I’d get called into someone’s office and they would grill me (or scram at me) about my intellectual leanings. I quickly learned that no one was interested in my intellect, but I also learned that no one was interested in my politics; so I learned to offer to show up for as long as it took to demonstrate my fealty to the cause. My being eager was enough to defray any interest in following up on my political positions, so I was allowed to continue with my intellectual pursuits unimpeded by political interference. And although I couldn’t really get a fair hearing within my academic department, I was able to send out conference proposals, which got accepted (I have to this day never been rejected), and I was able to boost my reputation in the English department by having presented more papers (10 original papers in 2 years, if I’m not mistaken) than any other graduate student and more than all but a few professors.

But this convinced me by 1994 that the details of my political beliefs was not all that important, and while I enjoyed listening to Milt Rosenberg on the radio railing against the liberal left’s control of academia, I realized that he had no answers to the problem of the future of art. Politics was not for me if if didn’t lead to answer that I had to questions that I had been asking since I dropped out of school looking for answers the question of the location of Joseph Campbell‘s “word behind words” in 1981. I changed my focus away from politics to what was wrong with the art world, which was supposed to capture the whole of human experience and not just those aspects that agree with their notion of what the world should hold and which it had held in an imaginary past (for my though on conservatism, see the section “What I Did to Combat PC” in which I talk about Cochrane’s assessment of the Roman folly of building a future on Livy’s idealized past in the section in a previous post). I thought I could do better.

Rather than fomenting a revolution against Mr. Appleyard and Mr. Scruton, and putting a new regime in their place (as conservatives attempted and failed to do in the 1990s when I was in graduate school), I think we should examine the building blocks of the avant-garde itself to see if the bricks which build walls that exclude ‘lesser’ minds are in fact real or whether they are themselves unacknowledged constructions by critics who want to keep themselves in power at the expense of “others” (I’ll give myself away, here; I think that they are).

The division of labor as constituted now leaves the critic on one side of the debate—whether the critic is on the inside or the outside is a matter of one’s perspective; there is no stable position in this universe). In my post on Lana Turner, I maintained that academics had separated themselves from lesser mortals by erecting a non-deconstructable Ivory Tower, entry to which was was restricted to those of superior intellect who had PhDs. This leaves insiders like Sara Friedlander not feeling any need for any wider perspective than that bestowed upon them by their position in the world. Yielding anything to people like Mr. Appleyard, who has expressed his reservations about people like Ms. Friedlander as long ago as 1984 in his Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts would only reassert the elitism that her generation—those who have not, like Mr. Appleyard (who’s 60) and myself (49), yet reached the age of 30. After all, in the critical insider’s universe, the critic has absconded from the world of active men (who are presumably searching for equality that Ms. Friedlander seems to have found immediately without all the rigamarole of history that Mr. Appleyard brings to the problem of art). This puts Ms. Friedlander in the position of immediacy, while Mr.Appleyard is in the position of bringing useless stuff to the table that would upset her perfect and equitable world should she allow Mr. Appleyard’s position any foothold in it.

So she does to him what my professors (not all) did to me when I was in graduate school: the excluded him and his ‘elitist’ art (all art preceding Andy Warhol) in order to save her hold on equality. But by a curious effect of my having abandoned politics in the construction of my aesthetic universe, I found that both Mr. Appleyard and Ms. Friedlander competing for ownership of the common ground of metaphysics. This is so common in the universe of aesthetics that many aesthetes don’t realize that art has not always been associated with metaphysics (see the table of contents of The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (Routledge Philosophy Companions) if you don’t believe me.

From this metaphysical position—the one that I had such a difficult time with in 1981 that I decided to go it alone and drop out of college rather than submitting to professors who knew no better than I the solutions to the problem of ultimate meaning but seemed far too eager to foist partial and so unsatisfactory solutions on their students from their position of power—Ms. Friedlander is left arguing that Mr. Appleyard’s position is not immediate enough, and she is willing to declare the whole history of art dead in order to sustain the integrity of her immediate metaphysical position. Mr. Appleyard is put in the position of defending his more holistic position as being better than Ms. Friedlander ‘s partial (and surely wrong) position.

So, in the situation of aesthetics, I am left with the question of which “partial” solution I should follow here: the young fresh insider who is fighting for equality but without the insight to realize her position in a larger tradition, or the old guy who is trying to reassert his power but who leaving the world of art entirely by tying Warhol himself to a tradition of inequality (and so of oppression of minorities and other underdogs). To hear Mr. Appleyard tell it, we should take the critical position, because only then can we achieve that status laid out by two thousand years of aesthetic thought (as outlined in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics) by which art is tied to the metaphysical reality that underlies changing experience.

But, as I just noted (and have noted elsewhere and often), there is no secure foundational place from which anyone can make final judgment on art or on anything else. And this is why (I suspect) Ms. Friedlander doesn’t believe in stepping out of her private preference for Warhol to a public place in which things which we believe in our heart of hearts can be argued about. It is she who is upholding the true status of aesthetics by referring art back to the only thing we can know with any metaphysical immediacy: the contents of our minds, while Mr. Appleyard is threatening her status as a creator by insisting that she is not as smart as she thinks she is at 28. But once again, I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I agree with him. But the answer is not to travel back to the font of history, as I feel that Mr. Appleyard does in his soon to be published book, The Brain is Wider Than the Sky, which is available here but not on Amazon, US.

and try to recover the metaphysical aspect that Warhol has captured without the interference of social interaction of any kind, or severing ourselves from the active community of artist by traveling aaway from the immediate world of experience, I decided to change the terms on which we believe that aesthetic systems themselves operate in spite of 2,000+ years of aesthetic history.

The General Case for Including ‘Lesser’ Minds

Rather than giving an answer to such a knotty question as to who is right (insiders or outsiders), I would raise a question about why the division between insiders and outsiders persists in Derrida’s universe in which so much else that is constructed can be deconstructed. Why should this one division remain when all else in the public space has been eroded in favor of a private (and equal) aesthetic vision? It was to answer this question that I wrote my novel Poker Tales. In it, I began my plan to realign aesthetic systems with “partial” science rather than “totalizing” metaphysics. And despite what you’re thinking (c’mon, I know you are), my system makes a lot of sense.

The origin of my idea was conceived after I left academia as a profession but continued to teach ‘lesser’ students in community and technological colleges part time on the basis that I enjoyed it (which is just selfish) and on the more important (to me, anyway) that I felt a moral obligation to teach others the skills that I had mastered. Even though I only taught writing, I did it off an on for 20 years (I quit after having had a stroke at 42, and even then I went back for 2 years before realizing that it was too exhausting for me to keep up). And because I had such a terrible experience in grad school and because I truly do enjoy teaching, I wrote a book on the subject, which I called Writing for People Who Hate Writing: A Book for the Rest of Us in order to appeal to those people who are typically left out consideration by “experts” like Arthur Danto and Ms. Friedlander, who write my ‘lesser’ students off because their thought, which they probably think is no thought at all, doesn’t agree with what their expertise tells them they should expect the arts to tell them.

I have more faith in my ‘lesser’ students than Arthur Danto has. But I have learned to recognize that ‘lesser’ readers don’t see the value of the past in an American society that has put its emphasis on the creation of new value by the imaginative use of the mind (in the words of Steve Jobs) to “show people what they want,” because only after one invents something truly new can one profit on the difference between what one knows in depth and the weaker knowledge of those who need your services but aren’t all that interested in learning how to fix pipes, as such an exchange would take away from their profitable time working as literary critics. (see ‘Why Fido Can’t Drive’ in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing

As I said the other day, I believe that Steve Jobs has delivered us into a consumer world of selfish individual monads who are willing to express their opinions but who have no idea how to compromise with others without losing sight of their principles (Mr. Appleyard is one of the lone voices that agrees with me, here). I believe that the world could use a reconfiguration of its principles so that cooperation between competing parties will be available again in the middle domain of reason, rather than the lonely domain of absolute metaphysical self-assurance. Unfortunately, the road travels over the corpse of Arthur Danto, Steve Jobs, and, yes, even Bryan Appleyard on its way back to the lost road of metaphysics. I made my case, first in my “Why Fido Can’t Drive” in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing. I continued it in my second book, the fictional work of Poker Tales. In the latter book, I attempt to show that the walls on which the Ivory Tower are built are not as real as those on the inside think before proceeding to break them down.

I then made the case for ‘lesser’ minds in the central tale (literally the tale that comes in the middle of the book; as a student of the Middle Ages, I follow Dante’s principles of story construction, which is based in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy on which I have also written part of another scholar’s work) in the middle tale of my work of fiction, the tale I call ‘Four Parisians.’

The ‘Lesser’ Artist in the Tale of the ‘Four Parisians’

In the Tale of the ‘Four Parisians’, I start out giving an account of a scholar who lives in the town destroyed by war, Boulogne-sur-Mer (‘Boulogne by the sea’ for those of you who do not think, as Goethe seems to have, that translation ruins the meaning of an artwork). I attempt to show how important history and culture are in France, as opposed to ‘present’ France, which has been destroyed by war and has been rebuilt in the Brutalist style of architecture, a cold unfeeling style that lacked the grace and elegance one associates with French seaside villages but was instead the product of cold and calculating capitalists (I know, yuck, right?).

Not that you need to know this, since it doesn’t make any difference in your reading of the story I am telling you, but I searched for a city in France that featured the same style of architecture that was suggested to me by the Brutalist architecture of the NIU arts building (where I went to school for my Master’s Degree and in which I had some of my favorite moments in spite of the unfeeling architecture that surrounded me there) and by the Brutalist concrete walls of the last community college I worked at (where I loved teaching amidst the Brutalist architecture that surrounded me there). It turned out that Boulogne-sur-Mer fit the bill. What sealed the deal for me was the presence of Godfrey of Boulogne in the city’s history. This allowed me to have the hero of the piece, Claude Pecullier, believing that his father, Jacques Pecullier (for those of you who think, as Goethe seems to have, that names matter), was not making up his son’s heritage out of whole cloth (as I had made up Claude and Jacques). Unfortunately, it was not true; and when Jacques died interred himself in the concrete he was building the replacement city out of, the only legacy he gave to Claude was his completely fabricated history of his descent from Godfrey himself.

Once again, I am drawing on my own genealogy, which ties me back to some Danish or Anglo Saxon king or other. I don’t have the Clarkson Genealogy with me, but I like to think that it’s Harold Bloodaxe. It isn’t, but it seems as likely as the actual king they tied me to. There seems to be a mania for this sort of thing in an age that puts so much emphasis on using the past to pave the way for the future (Livy-like). So Harold Bloodaxe it is.

I apologize for getting dragged slightly off my original point. You see how easy it is to get dragged off your point if you adhere to closely to supposed history, which doesn’t matter in real history.

As a result, Claude Pecullier grows up wishing more than anything to live in the past, and he flees the rebuilt Boulogne for historical and culturally rich Paris, as people have been fleeing the provinces for the city of lights ever since the birth of the modern age friends in the modern nation.

The Lack of Irony in the Tale of the ‘Four Parisians’

The tale the ‘Four Parisians’ revolves around the upbringing and subsequent life of Claude Pecullier, who grows from his perfect childhood looking out at the sea, where he dreams of things lacking in his own life the city of his birth. I tried not to use irony in my description of Claude’s relationship with his mother or his relationship with ideas. Like Claude, I respect ideas. But unlike Jacques Pecullier, I do not believe in closing the hermeneutic circle with tales of origins, which, being false, can only further hide the truth of the world from his son Claude.

The subsequent life of Claude Pecullier is therefore built on a lie, and this means that one could deconstruct both Claude and his work if one wanted to. But if deconstructing the work of Claude Pecullier on the basis of its lack of ontology (‘realness’ in the vernacular of the lesser students that I have been teaching for 20 years) is our only option, then why would anyone ever want to? For in spite of its lack of ontology, Claude has written 14 books in 14 years, and these would have to be deconstructed, as well.

This, too, comes from my experience as an educator. I am very wary of deconstructing education on the basis of it’s not being involved in ontology (‘realness’) in spite of my student’s belief that what is not immediately apparent to them is useless makework. And this is why I am writing this article in conjunction with Bryan Appleyard’s critical piece on the art of Andy Warhol. I like Mr. Appleyard’s approach to the past; it is his lack of vision about the future that I have a problem with, and the is easily remedied with a little tweaking rather that a full-scale revolution that would make all learning about past approaches, built on relative values of habit rather than permanent features grounded in ontology (‘realness’), useless. Sometimes the things most worth learning are not immediately apparent.

In my reading, not just in Poker Tales but in general, there is always an element of imagination that comes between our mind’s construction of things and ontology. In Paris, Rousseau had decided that we had been sundered from on our ontology by mechanical construction. Rousseau’s solution to this was to go back to line ourselves with nature, ontology, for those not afflicted with lesser minds). But I believe that people like Steve Jobs, who invent things and then present them to the public through marketing that they’ve never seen before, operate on the principles of imagination, while, in my chapter on the Old-Timer’s tale of his own origins in 1972, which I entitled “Reykjavík” for reasons that Mr. Appleyard is old enough to appreciate, I note that most people who make a ton of money are not the inventors, but the marketers who have the imagination to connect people’s minds with the products they have found a need for. And this is a function of the “middle space” of my precious reason, and not of Andy Warhol’s precious metaphysical realm where, it turns out, one doesn’t need any learning at all; all one need to have is one’s own being.

America, it turns out, has been the leader in innovation in the 20th century, giving the world inventions that have driven modern era like the lightbulb, electric lines, the telephone; the production line; the automobile; the airplane; the television; the transistor; the rocket ship; the computer; and all of Steve Jobs’ innovations, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. This series of remarkable and thoroughly American is the basis of my belief that culture has traveled from Paris to America. It’s on the basis of the non-foundational structure the Claude only believes that he’s reached the end of in his approach to ‘realness’ though history, but in fact he has not. America, with its kitchy art and false marketing of things we don’t need, is even less committed to science than Claude Pecullier, mandarin literary doyen of one of the most famous schools in France, is.

Imagination in the ‘Four Parisians’

Rather than attempting to crowd out the role of imagination in the world of construction, I revel in it in my Poker Tales. This reveling in imagination also accounts for the chief difference between the two oppoents in the book: Kid of 21 who flies to Las Vegas on the day after his 21st birthday, and the Old-Timer who reprts that he has been coming to Las Vegas since 1970 or 1972 (the author is not perfectly clear on that detail). When the ‘Four Parisians’ starts, the Kid has heard what the Old-Timer has been telling him about poker being a game mastered by experts in the tale of ‘Yeller.’ He takes him to mean that the Old-Timer doubts his natural natural talent and that he should go back to school to learn more of accessible reason and not let himself become distracted by his desire to win big or die trying (an American trait if ever there was one). But the Old-Timer tells the Kid that he is mistaken, that everyone is subject to superstition, even the most famous professors. This leads him to tell the story of the ‘Four Parisians’ in which they are overconfident and are thus overtaken by as ignorant an American there ever was, a man named ‘Belcher’ Owens.

The ‘Four Parisians’ come to Las Vegas with a disdain for the lesser concern with money. They come to view Las Vegas as the destination of the worst of the worst, something I dealt with previously in my post on Neil Postman. The four Parisians travel to Las Vegas because the culture of Las Vegas is the opposite of the culture of Paris, despite the fact of their similar names as the City of Lights (this small detail argues for my way of looking at the world through the mechanism of habit taking great ideas from others rather than inventing new ideas out of the whole cloth of total revolution). And so they come to Las Vegas, not to enjoy it as it is, but to enjoy it from the safe intellectual distance of the Pop Max, a postmodern conference held in Las Vegas precisely so that scholars can laugh in the face of ideas that they hold dear as representing ontology (‘realness’), but which are present in Las Vegas only in the 50-foot cardboard statues of unreal chorus girls. From this safe intellectual distance, they come, they judge, and judging believe they have conquered.

The Joks’s on Them

The problem with this and every other hermeneutic irony is that, like everyone who comes to Las Vegas, they deign to gamble, and it is then that they meet ‘Belcher’ Owens, a man as unlike Claude Pecullier as one (or at least I, the author) can imagine. When asked about the origin of his name, ‘Belcher,’ “never wordsmith himself, demonstrated his prowess in the eructative art.” This is enough to dismiss ‘Belcher’ from serious consideration for inclusion into the in the universe of Claude Pecullier.

Now this makes for an interesting problem, because ‘Belcher’s name is actually derived from one of my favorite Shakespearean characters named Toby Belch. This observation not signaled in the text. So the question becomes whether the four Parisians, who take great pride in the fact that they know more about Shakespeare than ‘Belcher’ Owens does (he vaguely remembers Shakespeare as his father’s plumber). But would it matter if the four Parisians had had that bit of meta-irony available to them? I submit that it would not. So the more important question than whether they know this is what does it mean that the author constructs Claude Pecullier and his friends; Etwas Papier (this was from the first lesson I ever had in German from James W. Marchand, the person who I dedicated my book to; it means ‘some paper’ for those of you who are not fluent in German, but need a translator); Karl Erbrechen-Schopfer (whose name is derived from Google translator, where I put in ‘vomit creator’ and got back ‘erbrechen schopfer’), and the one American who always wanted to have the gleam of intellectual achievement and so has traded in his status as a writer for television for the status of marginally ‘respectable’ writing of the Blaireau Lentement series of books, Follower Rhymes, without that bit of knowledge that ‘Belcher’ Owens is relevant to their sense of themselves as knowers of all, or whether they have been duped by the very sense of depth and historical principle that they take so much pride in? [The answer in my book is yes. In short, they are duped by believing their own press.]

This gives us various perspectives on the literature on display here. On the one hand we have creatures who are within the text. The Kid has shown up in Las Vegas because he’s rebelling against his parents who want him to go to college and have a nice happy life as an accountant. This makes him completely uninterested in Claude Pecullier. But, through a somewhat ironic irony, Claude is lashing out against the world of order (particularly capitalist order) along the lines of Derrida, a famous man who wants to destroy the old (fictional) order to rebuild the new on firmer ontological grounds (‘realness’). So in a sense, the Kid is on the side of Claude Pecullier who is on the side of Jacques Derrida despite the fact that the Kid himself doesn’t know it.

On the other hand, the Old-Timer has more control of his situation. Unlike Pecullier within his story and Derrida without, who operate as though there is nothing outside the text (hors de texte, for those of you who believe as Goethe believes that translation is something that eliminates (not just suppresses, as Derrida holds) meaning from the text), the Old-Timer is a storyteller who hides as much meaning as he reveals in telling his stories. The various perspectives on experience make it mandatory that everyone in the book investigate their experience, not against their own individual experience or against the collective community, but against the larger world. But it exactly this that not only the Kid—who let’s face it is not as bright as he thinks he is—but also Claude Pecullier and Derrida, intellectual and critical giants in the world of France, believe.

It is for this reason of his blindness to his own blind side that Claude Pecullier fails to beat ‘Belcher’ Owens in a game where the rules are not as he thinks they ought to be. And rather than going back to the drawing board and rethinking his strategy according to the (albeit relative) rules of the game that change over time, as we see in the next tale called ‘His Last Wife,’ he decides that there is something wrong with those who play such a silly game and not with his own metaphysical and aesthetic stance of distance on issues that he brings to the poker table. This is the same strategy followed by the Old-Timer’s Soviet compatriots in the “Reykjavík“ tale, where the Old-Timer opted out of the balanced position held by the press and politicians for a more profitable strategy of finding suckers who knew less about what was going on at the poker than he did. This change in strategy changed him forever to one of the 20% of winners.

In my view (and in ‘Belcher’s) there is no metaphysical strategy involved in his world after he breaks free of balance for a world of individual freedom. ‘Belcher’ devotes himself to feeding his enormous appetite, and never realizes what an intellectual giant he is confronting. And while I myself enjoy art as recreation from the world of everyday back and forth of experience, it does not dismiss artist from looking at the world as it is by allowing them to declare themselves in control of the universe on the basis of their having taken a privileged and so non-deconstructable position of aestheticism and not of their having looked at the world as is.

At the same time, the world opens up to the Old-Timer as one of the 20% for whom the world holds possibilities of success. That is not to say that he will be guaranteed his success, for even the best starting hand in Texas Hold ‘Em has a 15% chance of losing. This throws the balance that has been at the heart of educational experience since Plato (and probably much longer than that) into disarray, as men with the wherewithal to study the world as it actually operates will be in a much better position to profit from their better knowledge of the way the world works than those who hold onto deeper ideas that depend on a false sense of balance.

This is an idea that first occurred to me after I got out of school and got my first job at the age of 33 and learned for the first time of the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of peas come from 20% of pea plants, and that 80% of land is owned by 20% of the people. This throws the entire premise on which my whole education was based into disarray. And this, again, is why ‘Belcher’ Owens can beat the poor Claude Pecullier at this “silly game.” He has a marginal advantage in his understanding of how the world actually works that Claude Pecullier lacks, despite all those years of studying the the way things have been in the past.

This construction of the universe is where I disagree with Bryan Appleyard, for it seems to me that he is working (as everyone is working on both sides of the political aisle) with the notion that nature is in some way balanced and not instead a ruthless picker of winners and losers in an unfair game that human beings nevertheless cannot stop playing just because we don’t like the rules (quitting is death). But as I said earlier, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I believe that my “art” raises questions about the path before us in the time-honored tradition of raising new points that are sticking places in an otherwise smooth status quo tradition (see my article on ‘Knowledge’ in Writing for People Who Hate Writing). Unfortunately for Mr. Appleyard, I waise my flag in precislely the area where he attempts to rest: in the metaphysical still point, which I don’t believe exists without an imaginary metaphor that stands between the mind and the “truth.”

And, to be sure, I have managed to “stay away from audiences,” as Mr. Appleyard also advises on page 14 of his Culture Club, though more because I am shy and I have not yet attempted to market my work yet than that I think it won’t be a fabulous bestseller one day.

The question I raise in my book have to do with the incompatibities of the two separate systems for looking at the same evidence. In my view of the universe, there is more than enough room for Claude Pecullier’s way of thinking. It is only from his aesthetic perspective that he is incapable of reconciling his desires to the outcome of the tale. In the end, he writes his fifteenth book—after Ovid’s final book of the Metamorphoses, if anyone’s interested (and, c’mon, you and I both know nobody is)—which, though it sold the least of all of the books that the four Parisians write, earns him the Moynton Prize, which earns him a seat on the prestigious (if you live in France) Académie française as one of the Immortels appointed by the Académie française, which is all that M. Pecullier ever really wanted in the first place. So everybody wins; ‘Belcher’ wins money, and Claude wins immortality, even if in the end the author who created him out of whole cloth (that’s me) knows that it is built on a fiction.

My Art and (a Different) Andy Or Ruptures in the Experience of the (War)hol(e)

I consider the loss of balance the price of saving intellectual endeavor from the likes of Andy Warhol, who delivers a more immediate and therefore more accessible experience that nevertheless hides a substantial part of the experience of even the wisest of us—not me, who slaved away in community and technical colleges, but people like Claude Pecullier and Jacques Derrida—from us.

My chief argument in favor of my position is derived, not from a random thought that popped into my head, but from two of the most complicated arguments available to me from graduate school: the notion of a rupture épistémologique and the notion of simulacra, derived from postmodern thought of Gaston Bachelard and Jean Baudrillard (both not uncoincidentally Frenchmen ). When I think of such things, which I do more often than I ought, I wonder that Bachelard and Baudrillard exempt themselves from the possibility that their own thought is subject to rupture.

It was when I was thinking about this problem in terms of Pareto inequality, where winners continue to win while losers continue to lose, rather than the balanced nature of things that I was taught in school, that I decided to test the assumptions when they were everywhere, not just in the “other” world of folks who get left out of the picture because they don’t agree with what everyone who matters (in the world of literary criticism) knows. When the Old-Timer says to the Kid in response to his mystified questioning of something that hasn’t occurred to him (because he’s never heard the terms before) “It doesn’t matter,” the Kid should not rest content with things because he hasn’t heard them before and so ignore them and continue on his way. Instead, he should learn to confront the world, because it might not be as he (in his too passive state) thinks it is.

And this is my answer to Bryan Appleyard. I don’t want to argue with him. I want to build on his insight with insights of my own, thus saving the world from revolutionaries who overthrow accumulated and hard-won knowledge on the basis of their historical understanding that nevertheless does not reach the bottom of the assumption pile before getting turned over by people who have not even learned what people from previous generations knew until the point (where we are now) that hard-won leaning doesn’t matter in the face of much easier because much more accessible experience. That path is the path of Steve Jobs consumers, but not of Steve Jobs the producer, who works himself and others to get a product right before he introduces if to the masses for their consumption.

I want to point out that that Mr. Appleyard’s historical position will give him insight into what is missing in the lives of others but will not give him insight into what is missing in his own life. And I want to make it clear to Mr. Appleyard (on the basis of my recent experience with some of my Facebook friends) that I do not exempt myself from not knowing all and so elevating myself above others on that basis as certain rappers do. No one in the world has complete knowledge that would allow them to control my (or his) choices, not even Derrida or Eminem.

Mr. Appleyard should seriously consider my version of Nature, in which she is not balanced but instead rewards winners as those who can overcome their dispositions of how they want her to be and instead take her as she is (as an unfair mistress against whom human beings build their equitable communities in opposition to). His failure to consider my argument will not make Nature go away or make her travel down the path in which she is balanced on the basis of our human disposition that she should be so or on the basis that so many in the past have thought so.

My 2¢.

—–

I have been thinking that the Occupy Wall Streeters are risking the pool of money that supports the system they are trying to save, since the 1% pay 40% of the taxes in this country. I told one of my friends my fear that unless we get buy-in from those who have money they will simply take their money and leave, as they have already done with jobs in a post-Cold War world in which (for the first time in history) we live in a world in which producers of value have choices of where they want to do business. He said (and I quote) “Let ‘em go.”

I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution, as it would destroy the longed-for solution. In order to avoid that, you have to take their money before casting them on the sands. That would require an executive order, since you and I both know that the Congress will pass a Constitutional amendment that would make it okay (and I hope, my friend Adam, that you wouldn’t want that).

The globalization of the American economic model makes a huge difference in our approach to our once local problems.

First, in a global economy in which everyone wants what we have, countries will increasingly realize that it is the principle of unlimited freedom to experiment that has made this country produce the telephone, the automobile, jazz, the television, the transistor, the rocket ship, and the personal computer. These inventions have made fortunes for those who were the first to market, and it has been the historical role of government to put the brakes on corporations by standing in the way of untrammeled greed. But they have tilted our economy away from our egalitarian ideals, held by the Founding Fathers on both sides of the aisle (Jefferson and Hamilton both held to egalitarian ideals) and towards the inequitable distribution of incomes. The Occupy Wall Street movement is geared towards rectifying such imbalances based in our more egalitarian nature.

That sense of balance has been maintained in the 20th century (before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) by government, who stood for equity in a world governed by selfish greed AND we were one of the few countries in the world who took seriously freedom to the extent that we enshrined it into the Constitution in the First Amendment. It was this freedom to innovate that has propelled America to the top of the societal heap, as people were content to develop useless things like Pet Rocks to sell to other people (or suckers, as we called them when I was a kid).

But at the same time, it’s important to remember that most producers fail (99%?), but a very few produce outsized incomes (like Steve Jobs’) on the basis of their unique insight into how the world actually works, as opposed to how the majority of people think it works. Rather than inventing another outsized innovation ourselves, the rest of us then invest in their companies, so all boats rise, although at different rates.

This is how America spreads its wealth to the innovators and not to the permanent political class, as happened in the Soviet Union. This is the subject of the chapter “Reykavík” in my work of Poker Tales, where I problematize American culture and attempt to solve American problems on their own terms rather than running to France, as so many academics have done (a notion that I take up in the chapter entitled “Four Parisians”). I fail, but my work stands as an invitation to try a solution based in America rather than France, which has its own problems with cultural integration but being far away such problems are not as apparent to Americans as they are to those who live within French culture itself.

This is also a huge difference that made us unique during the American century, when IN THEORY most countries were following a more democratic model of communist distribution (including my childhood hero, Jean Paul Sartre). We were developing not just a different system, but a more efficient system of distributing resources that did not get clogged up in government but circulated more freely. The byproduct of the American form of organization was the creation of unequal wealth for individuals but also of the wealth that has driven even Communist China to imitate our path to riches and to abandon their communist colleagues, the Soviets, who had seemed to all but a few to be winning right up to the moment when they capitulated.

This was, of course, another instance of the few triumphing over the many that made America great in the first place. I realize that this will make me appear as an apologist for American exceptionalism in Adam’s eyes, but I’m not advocating any such position. The world has changed, and changed drastically, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. China is taking our jobs away, because they are not bound by the rules of what Jameson called late-stage capitalism. The Chinese can raise the income of their people a lot by paying them what would be a low wage in America. So they do. That means that producers of value (including Steve Jobs, who played a key role in building our narcissistic culture in the first place) have a choice of where they want to make their products that they did not have when America was involved in the Cold War.

Both parties in the current debate are looking at the world through Cold War eyes. The conservatives are looking through the lens of having been excluded from the debate in which the baby boomer were claiming they represented everyone in the world (or at least those who mattered; this ended up giving us a culture of “beautiful people by the end of the 70s), while the conservatives have now been given a voice by Rush Limbaugh, who continues to be mocked by the old-line media. This continues the Cold War process by continuing with its old-line models long after the Cold War has ended.

The same is true of the Left, which has looked backwards to the turn of the 20th century for a Progressive model that had guided America through the Cold War. In their quest, academics (the branch of the left that I am most familiar with) have embraced a French-style deconstruction that levels out inequalities as the result of a limited scientific mind that people with “higher” consciousness (you know, the ones who do not suffer like Liu Shaoqi from false consciousness). His makes the academic left so sure that they are smarter than the idiot right that they can easily give up looking at the world for the way it actually works because they know how it works. Their only goal is to make it conform to their preconceptions. This forces the left into an “us” or “them” position that I outline in another blog post (but let’s be honest, who’d want to?).

In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, that was a great model, but history moves forward and often in unforeseen directions (again, see my post on Steve Jobs). We do not now live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt, and so the key to the future is not to take pride in our a priori belief in our knowledge of the historical past that has brought us to this moment, as both Limbaugh and Obama do, but to study the present for clues to where the market is headed and then place your bets and hope and pray that you had enough information to make the correct choice. There are no absolutely correct choices in the American cultural model, only better and worse choices. Adverting to France won’t change that, either. It will just make you an inflexible member of a society in which prizes go to the nimble.

So nothing changes in the world in which deconstructionists tell us that there is no ontology to our rhetoric and by this we can create any life we want for ourselves (and which I, as a writer who does not have to toe the party line like those samizdat authors in the Soviet Union had to, appreciate). This should tell the deconstructionists that there is something wrong with their system of belief (but once again, they baffle me and continue to launch attacks at their enemies from a firm ground that they would deny to anyone else; what is the nature of this ground, I continue to ask, except that nothing has ground, in which case why do we need to be attacking others who have as much right to their opinions as anyone else (that is, none at all)?).

In the world we live in today, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a host of other nations are competing with us for a share of pie that for all but the last decade of the 20th century we had to ourselves. That fact has put the two strains of American culture, which sat side by side throughout our history, into higher relief: capitalist inequality by which our nation got to be the richest nation in the world which other cultures still follow and our Constitution’s guarantee of liberty got to be the model for the United Nations Charter in spite of us being mocked every year, month, and day of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The change in our position from laughingstock to the leader of the free world has meant that our culture, which not only we in America but the French have had serious reservations about following ever since its founding, will be followed, while the French, masters of Europe from the Age of Charlemagne has fallen by the wayside (the exact date was June 22, 1940 when Paris officially fell to the Nazis). Rather than going back to France for old ideas, the Chinese will suffer the same fate as we in America have, as well as gaining the same rewards. We as progressive Americans need to rethink the American social compact on its own terms to take into account global competition that has opened up such a breach in our culture that had remained in an uneasy compact government and capitalism for most of our history.

Without such an insight into our true place in the world (unmediated by French and German thought) I truly fear that America could lose our richest people to an-as-yet-not-present nation that has the wherewithal to invite our most innovative (and so wealthiest) citizens with the prospect of unlimited freedom, low taxes and easy corporate culture that does not make war on its most successful members.

But so far, all I see in Occupy Wall Street is anger, albeit entirely justified anger, without a plan of action. That doesn’t mean I don’t support them; nor does it mean that they won’t get a plan of action. But it does mean that without a plan of action, their project will fail, as it has taken hold of only one of the two pillars (equality) that have made American society the envy of the world, while leaving those (capitalists) with the most liquid assets free to seek a rent-free life where they can be included in the conversation about their fate.

As I have said many times on my blog, I am not much of a follower of other people’s ends. They tend to ask more of me than I can commit to in good conscience. I prefer to follow my own ends. In preference to ends, which individual artists tend to be foisting on me, I prefer reason, which divides subjects from their metaphysical ends and places them in between two people where they can be debated. This subverts unlimited metaphysics, which operates on ends, for a limited science, which operates on middle terms in an unlimited quest for an ultimately unrealizable end; but in this exchange, I get the opportunity to learn from others’ experience without having to commit to believe in their (often ridiculous) ideas about ends. I learn from other people’s critiques of my firm ideas. Some of my ideas are good; others not so. And in a good conversation, others will learn from my (sometimes ridiculous) ideas. We will both gear ourselves to a deeper truth

This scientific appreciation is the province of fiction, which allows us to experience death over and over again in the moral calculus without having to actually die. It is the province of education, which allows us to write about things without actually having to master every instrument before becoming an expert. The transformation from realism to fiction is the key transformation that I have been writing about in my explication of Poker Tales.

Gry

I recently discovered a European band called Gry, after Gry Bagøien and FM Einheit. I love their eclectic sound. They represent what’s best about the Postmodern revolution–they are eclectic; they do not confine themselves to a single area of music–and I don’t want to take anything away from them there. But I wanted to point out some of the limitations that have caused me to rethink the ‘ends’ of postmodernism in my novel Poker Tales. In that novel, you will remember, the deep experience of Parisian is given up for a non-communal kitschy individualism. I believe that my experience ‘reading’ the ends of Gry’s music will help me to explain why I have abandoned Postmodernism as the way forward.

The first crocodile song is ‘Crocodile Princess’ by Gry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFq6hF5MKG8

The first thing I noticed is that it reflects a deeper, denser sense of the past than most people have. This is reflected by the poster’s liberal use pictures of Greta Garbo and Buster Keaton. I hope you noticed Louise Brooks‘ back at 0:29-31, as well. This augments the sense that Gry ‘has seen it all.’

This sense of a deeper, denser sense of the past is also apparent in the music, which comes back to repeat the chorus of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’

Both through lyrics and music, Gry is crying her superiority to lesser individuals, who do not have the breadth of historical experience as she does.

Ive seen it all
All through eyes
Heard it in ears
Smelled it alright.
Do do you believe you can hide?

There is no hiding from the artist’s eye, which is is interchangeable with the eye of God in traditional Christian mythology. And in case you’re not a fan of traditional Christian mythology, they broaden the context to the eclectic voyage to the other world that is a feature of all mythologies, as Gry talks to the dead:

I go under the earth
And listen to the dead people talk
They tell stories
They know it all
They tell stories of you.

This leaves the non-artist in a subordinate relationship with the artist. ‘Us’ should be more like ‘them’ are. In terms of the future, the artist holds it in his hand. The non-artist has not even caught up with the avant-garde. ‘Them’ are telling you that they are your future, and they have seen enough to know that there is no future. All that remains is for the rest of you (‘the them’s) to catch up with them (the ‘us’s), your leaders. This sets artists up as leaders of society and culture.

But there are problems with this configuration of reality. The first is that I for one I don’t believe that Gry has actually talked to the dead in reality. As far as the ‘reality’ of her situation, she’s making it up as she goes along. And that matters, not because her ducking into falsehood deconstructs the universe she has created, but because she has shifted out of ‘reality’ into the ‘fictional’ world. There she will make her stand.

Now my question–no doubt born of my being a small-d democratic American–is who is Gry to judge me and put me into a subordinate position. I am bold enough to say that I don’t think she has actually talked to the dead (and my suspicious will be redoubled if she insists that she has)? But by holding on to the notion that she has reached a deeper, denser reality than you or I have (the ‘them’s in this equation), she is vaunting herself over the rest of the world on the basis of a ‘reality’ that she doesn’t (I hope) actually believe in. What she is doing is she allows herself to deconstruct her reality (and that’s okay in my book; there is more than one way to sense things in the intellectual universe), while insisting that the ‘other’ ‘them’s cannot do the same (which is not okay).

In my opinion, Gry hasn’t seen it all. That’s not to say that her music isn’t cool (it is) or that she hasn’t made inroads into the culture (she has). My problem is with her overreaching to the ‘ends’ of experience that she has not yet reached. If you want to experience what jazz could do to a song like ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ I refer you to Sidney Bechet’s contrapuntal melody to the main melody played by Louis Armstrong in this version or to my previous post of a jazz great singing the same great song. Neither looks back fondly on a past era from the protected space of an age in which jazz has been dying (but is not even now dead), but from within the era itself.

‘Poles Apart’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A91eA_–Dq8

In ‘Poles Apart,’ Gry shows her debt to the European fashion for displacing ourselves from our individual lives to a starlight perspective in which ‘we can see it all.’ This is what she attempts to do in ‘bringing it all to you’ from ‘a planet transparent’:

I promise by the moon that we shall meet again
I bring a souvenir from planet transparent
I bring it just to you

Then she starts talking about leaving ‘the past behind us’ as she brings us into the infinite present, where she can deliver to you (the non-artist ‘them’s of the world), ‘Maya Maya Maya Maya My Maya’ (italics mine as once again I start to wonder about her exclusion of me; why do I need her and her silly transformation of the reality of earth into a foreign language (‘Maya’ means ‘the veil of illusion’ in Sanskrit) to stand as an intermediary between earth and myself. What does her knowledge of illusion bring to the table of reality except to deny reality even as she vaunts her knowledge of it before me. I am one of those who still believes in ‘reality.’; she is of of ‘us’ who denies it. We are then ‘poles apart’ until I drop my insistence on believing in reality. In my view of the world, Gry is wrong to deny reality. I would tell her in the unlikely circumstance that I ever meet her that her way is ‘Not that.’

‘Rocket’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK4yDIeaXWE

In her song, ‘Rocket,’ she is still singing about traveling away from individual life to a starlight perspective, only this time, the constricting space of the walls of her room fall away though a consideration of the ‘horizontal verti-calling movements’ of a ‘Mazzo Azul,’ a reference I think to a piece of sculpture by Francisco Matto, opening her up to a univocal direction at last from the circular universe in which she keeps coming back to her room again.

That’s a another really cool image; but I have my doubts that it reaches the bottom of the problem Gry has set for herself. Gry doesn’t seem to recognize this, as she takes off ‘Boom, boom’ on her ‘rocket to the moon’ as she ‘wishe[s] upon a star.’

I traveled light,
Traveled time,
Traveled thoughts.
I returned from the jungle
With a glas full of stars

That’s a great fantasy, but it breaks down over any insistence on her part (or mine or yours) that her ‘new’ knowledge is knowledge of anything more that her desiring mind’s wish to know more than I know. Once again, I throw cold water on her fantasy by reminding her that she’s making it all up. Wishing is not knowing. Not being able to prove to me that she has more or better knowledge than I do effaces my belief in her lyrical direction, but does not efface either her musical ability (which I find extremely appealing) not in her ability to make exceptional images (which I also find extremely appealing). I love her ability to craft images; I just cannot follow them to where she wants me to go.

‘Summer Wine’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ0XMXoFj6E

In ‘Summer Wine,’ she sums up all the reasons for my hesitation to follow her into her spider web, which I believe is a trap rather than a way out. For the first time, she is singing with someone else, a man. He begins with some familiar Western motifs:

Walked into town on silver spurs that jingle too
A song that I had only sung for just a few

That’s another cool image, but then he sings about what happens when he meets a woman in the town:

She saw my silver spurs and said lets pass some time
And I will give to you summer wine
Oh, summer wine

That sets up a conflict that only a European (like Sergio Leone) could fully appreciate. Gry starts singing about taking off his armor to ‘help me pass the time,’ as follows:

Strawberry, cherries, and an angel kissing spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I shall give to you summer wine
Oh, summer win

Well, sadly, he does, and he tells of the sad consequnces of taking a break from his previously armed virtue:

My eyes grew heavy and my lips they would not speak
I tried to get up but I could find my feet

Uh-oh, he must be thinking, but then

She reassured me with an unfamiliar line
And when she gave to me more summer wine
Oh, summer wine

What is her summer wine made of, you might be asking (well, I was asking)? She tells us:

Strawberry, cherries, and an angel kissing spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things

She then invites her prey–for that is what he must be in this song–to

Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I shall give to you summer wine
Oh, summer wine

Now, I have been working on my next book, which is a non-fiction book about Redcrosse’s journey in Book I of The Faerie Queene (I know; how cool am I?) and this is exactly what happens to Redcrosse, who takes his armor off and lays with Fidessa (whose name means faith but who in fact is not faithful). The problem with Redcrosse is that he’s using his eyes to ‘view’ her body (as Gry uses her eyes in ‘Princess Crocodile’ to ‘see it all’) but he doesn’t ‘listen’ to the broader context of the echoes of his behavior in the wider world. He is too focused on himself.

This is his problem: he has given up the whole experience of life for a narrow experience that does not keep in mind all the dangers that await him in the world. Not thinking he has anything to fear, he takes off his armor and reassures her even as he falls victim to her wiles. This is akin to the power of words to fix meaning in a universe of changing meanings. It is an image derived from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, where Philosophy offers a similar image of the harvest frozen in an ekphrasis of the harvest right before the scythe hits it and it is felled. This is an image of a perpetual heaven. She offers her heaven in the sky as the equivalent; follow her back to her heaven above time and all will be well. Boethius, who must die to achieve this consolation isn’t so sure. He refuses to take her at her word, but questions her from the perspective of a man who lives within time.

The same fate befalls our modern day cowboy; he, too, is robbed of his armor (having read the Redcrosse episode only this morning, I have to think that he is lucky that he wasn’t robbed of more).

When I woke up the sun was shinning in my eyes
My silver spurs were gone, my head felt twice it size
She took my silver spurs-the dollar and the dime
And left me cravein for summer wine
Oh, summer wine

Gry repeats her admonition to be careful when believing anything she has to say. She could be making it all up.

Strawberry, cherries, and an angel kissing spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I shall give to you summer wine
Oh, summer wine

So I don’t believe her ‘ends,’ even though I love rare ability to turn a phrase and a melody, and on account of her musical range, which fall in between me and her ends, for it is here in the middle space of reason where she and I can have a conversation, that I cannot have on my own without her. Nevertheless, I must go armed when I meet her and her siren songs.

Movie Death

I was thinking about this because last year I watched 150 Westerns for a future project. I was thinking about the difference between the reality of death and its depiction in my favorite western, Once Upon a Time in the West.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86-K8BJlh9M

As you can see, there are a lot of guns in this film. They go off regularly. And when they go off, people die. Now, in real life, death is the ultimate end of experience. Once it befalls you, you’re snuffed out. You’ve gone off to join the choir invisible. You are no more, etc.

But the western has a different take on death. Yes, people die. But they also are not dead. They come back in another movie to get killed again. This is what differentiates art from life. No one comes back from being killed in real life (except if you believe in the miracle of Jesus Christ, but that is a matter of faith because you weren’t there). In art, we can experience the impact of a person’s death without actually experiencing death itself.

This give the depiction of death in the movies a different meaning than it has for us in real life. In the movies, we are following a hero on his path to his final destination. Those who get shot or blasted or wounded or maimed of crippled or mutilated in any way are simply the necessary casualties of the process of culling the weak from the strong. Those who survive the ordeal to the end are heroes.

And this is why American movies are so unbelievably violent. Just as in Yeat’s ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ the artists who perform their tragic play are secretly gay. An artist like Quentin Tarantino is also gay. He knows that his art of violence will not destroy the whole world in a holocaust of death, but only cleanse the world of his carefully-selected targets of his moral ire. The gimp people in Pulp Fiction. Hitler and the rest in his Inglourious Basterds. The hero is destined to live to the end, and in his life he will exemplify a moral truth. The villains are killed and killed justly.

This moral calculus exemplifies the approach taken to death by art and artists.

Thoughts on Moral Calculus of Movie Death

In the moral calculus, even the horrific death of a child serves a larger moral purpose, as here in one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, where Frank (played by a blue-eyed Henry Fonda) comes out of the bushes, having killed a whole family. A young boy walks out of the house, sees his dead family, grips some water over his heart, and looks quizzically at the villain. Henry/Frank smiles at the young innocent for a moment, and we believe there is a shred of humanity in him…until one of his henchmen asks him ‘What are we going to do with this one, Frank?’ His smile goes away after he has been named, but it comes back to his blue-eyed face again before…well, I’ll let the film speak for itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy52xEUsrvU

So the Kid is dead, and that’s okay, because his death serves a purpose. It set the moral boundaries of Henry/Frank. He is evil.

Sources of and Obstacles to the Moral Calculus

In the heroic configuration of the universe, the art of Sergio Leone follows the thought of Rousseau, who believed that nature had created all things equal, and it was the work of artifice that had distorted things from their natural balance through the unequal division of wealth and property. All we have to do to restore balance is to go to war with the people who are for protecting their individual property at the expense of the collective.

But this is only true if Rousseau was correct about his initial premise that nature is indeed equitable in the distribution of his gifts. But there is a competing position, that of Pareto, who says that the gifts of nature are bunched up among the upper 20% who have 80% of all Italian land. Pareto wanted to redistribute the land more equitably, and the Italians (elected?) the fascist dictator Mussolini to redistribute wealth more equitably according to the ‘natural’ principles laid out by Rousseau.

However, this may have put Mussolini on the wrong side of equation. The question was whether Pareto’s observations or Rousseau’s observation about the world was correct. Both cannot be exclusively true, although both could be partially true.

I tend to side with Pareto over Rousseau on the equation of the intentions of nature because of an observation that Pareto himself makes about the lowly pea plant. 20% of pea plants yield 80% of the pea crop. This is nature’s way of sorting out winners and losers in the battle for survival in a hostile universe. Those who flower most have the most offspring; those who flower least die.

This puts people like Mussolini at a disadvantage, because they are convinced that nature wants to distribute her resources equitably and it is within the power of human being to do so. All he had to do was to object to the capitalist pigs who had taken so many of the resources of civilization for themselves. He and his squadristi went to war with nature under the mistaken impression that they were restoring nature to its rightful place at the center of Italian nationalism.

But if Mussolini was wrong in his estimation of nature, then he would be fighting against the tide of nature. He would have to keep ramping up his perceived enemies in order to maintain discipline at home. ‘It’s the evil Americans or the evil capitalists who are working against our fairer system,’ he might have said. ‘Direct your anger towards them.’ This, in fact, is what happened. Eventually he broke faith with his people by siding with Hitler, who was also a fascist and who also ended up as the poster child for EVIL that artists like Tarantino could rally their troops around in a good old-fashioned blood romp.

Mussolini and Hitler were wrong about what nature wanted. In the struggle for power in the 20th century world, Mussolini lost out to the better prepared allies, not because they sent in troops to take 100 or more scalps from 100 or more Germans, but because the Americans had a better system of survival in a competitive world. That is no to say that because America won the last war that we are a unique or in any way exceptional civilization. But it does mean that on a relative scale that we were better than or enemies, whose eyes bit of more than their stomachs could digest. After the fall the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Soviet communism itself in 1991, the Chinese were wise enough to have learned the lesson that the world had changed; capitalism was the way forward.

And it doesn’t mean that because the Germans lost the war that they are evil. Some were, but the majority of Germans had bought into a false premise. That is why it’s so important to check your reasoning, not against your own very secure premises, but against wider nature, and why it’s important that you be as close to right as you can be. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, you must make allowances for being wrong, for no one is ever completely right about what nature wants. No one is absolutely right. He who makes less mistakes in an environment in which everyone is making mistakes is the winner. That is how I explain America’s victory over the Axis and not on account of any sort of permanent advantage. We were more right about our view of the universe than older thinkers like Marx, Lenin, Malatesta, or Mussolini.
Wikipedia references for each

My Fictional Universe in Relation to the Thought of Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken

It is in the realm of human nature to follow nature, but between ‘the truth’ of nature comes a veil of fiction. It is our response to the veil of fiction that defines our relationship to nature.

Think of an atom. We cannot see it, but we can imagine it nevertheless. We use analogies when we do. My analogy is of the solar system, as is (I’m guessing by using my imagination; I could be wrong) yours. So between our analogy of an atom and its ‘reality’ comes imagination. My beef with those who believe that they are in possession of ‘the truth’ is not that they haven’t grasped the truth of nature but that they make no allowances for the ‘fiction’ which comes in the form of analogies about ‘the truth.’

When Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are discussing their possession of ‘the truth,’ both are correct. But both are using a different set of analogies about the universe they are observing. It is therefore not the possession of ‘the truth’ that matters but the possession of the correct analogy that matters. And this is why people like Limbaugh, who believes that Darwin is one of the two worst thinkers of all time, beat out smarter men like Franken or Michael Moore. Limbaugh has a much better sense of market forces than Moore, who wants to redistribute wealth equally to all, or Franken, who is rich enough that he doesn’t mind paying more taxes for (to my mind very inefficient) services.

No one in the debate between conservatives and liberals is wholly right. The question of who is more right in regards to the specific issue of money becomes very clear. Rush Limbaugh signed a contract for $400 million dollars, while Air America went broke. This is not in spite of but because of Air America’s hosts’ reliance on truth. (I could not find a story on Google News about Franken having laughed at Limbaugh’s shilling for products on his show, but I remember it distinctly), but because Limbaugh is more comfortable with what he has to do to find and maintain an audience. Franken is more skittish.

My point is not to reduce all value to monetary terms. My point is that, simply because Al Franken has rejected monetary value doesn’t mean that he has correctly determined the correct value of money and monetary value in the world. Money matters more than Al Franken thinks it does. His business is supported by it, and he should give it its proper due. On the other hand, money matters rather less than Limbaugh, who occasionally talks about his fabulous wealth and ability to travel on his private jet to any location in the world, thinks. He still got addicted to pain killers precisely because money is not the central ingredient in your happiness.

Rush is more right on that subject than Al Franken, who ‘still thinks of himself as a comedian’ and who fled from advertising to a less capitalistic model of the truth. Unlike NPR, which forces people to pay for a service that they may or may not use, Air America relies on a model of goodwill participation of those (20%?) of those who really listen, rather than the broad reach of Limbaugh into the marketplace. Limbaugh must be entertaining if his listeners are not going to be turned off when he goes to commercial.

My point is that Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, and Joni Mitchell are looking to pierce the veil of fiction to get to the truth. Insofar as they are searching for the truth, I can follow them. But insofar as they reach ‘the truth’ by tearing away the veil of fiction, I always ask myself (in my imagination since I don’t have access to them personally) whether they really believe the things they are saying. (The reader will be relieved to know that no one answers).

Back to the Moral Calculus

The moral calculus of the Western demands that we give ourselves up to believing what we are seeing on screen and succumb to the fictional portrayal of events. Actors who die are not really dead, anymore than poets who travel to a separate world out of time have not really traveled to a separate world out of time. The veil of fiction prevails in our quest for ‘the truth,’ and those who believe too much go from being (perhaps callous) observers of artwork (like me) to true believers, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And no one wants that, so it’s important that we don’t forget the veil of fiction that lies between our analogous minds and the world ‘as it is.’

Directors in the 60s and early 70s thought that they were experiencing for the first time ‘in all of Christian minstrelsy‘ the revelation of ‘the truth,’ which had been hidden the parents of the Pepsi Generation only by their parent’s reliance of traditions which could be thrown off once someone realized that we don’t have to follow the path that our parents took. This tradition itself has a long tail, going back to the Enlightenment and even father back to Plato. But, immediately (10 years, which is immediately in historical terms) filmmakers like Louis Male realized that their picture of the universe was not all it was cracked up to be. Gustav Björnstrand starts talking about leaving the planet for a (completely fictional) planet where everything’s going to be put right again. (Hmm, I ask myself; should I follow him there?)

The Role of Art in a World of Violence

Art in the modern world is like the films of Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah. They value only heroes; other can be dispensed with (with relish) if they do not serve the ultimate purpose of art. Peckinpah believes his own press. He is one of the chosen people who is also on the outside looking into a (completely fictional) world of the now-fading West. He is still willing to do those things that other (middle class bourgeois men) are unwilling to do. He seeks the few other heroes, and dispenses with those who are not worthy.

This has its roots in Rousseau and Nietzsche, who also thought that the only thing standing in their way was the loss of a more beautiful past in which money and monetary value had less of a role and to which only the hero could return. But it turns out that this configuration of life divides the hero from other men in an (at least) 20/80 divide. This makes me question whether Rousseau was correct in his initial view of nature’s equitable balance, or whether or Nietzsche was correct in traveling outward to the ‘ends’ of experience to be among the supermen.

The cost of such an error in our estimation of the role of nature is immense in a country in which men based their whole philosophy on Jefferson’s declaration that we are guaranteed ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ by the social contract. This causes Americans to judge things on the basis of how close or far we are from the natural ideal. But, if Pareto was correct in his estimation of nature as picking winners and losers, then those who democratize too much, as I am inclined to do, are fighting against nature, not aligning ourselves with a long forgotten nature that only a select few of us can access.

The problem with this view of the world are legion. The chief problem with the heroic view of the world is that it denies the humanity of all for the select few who know the truth. But it turns out that ‘the truth’ is unknowable as it is, and in the hands of a Peckinpah it is based on a fairly unreasonable view of the world as it is.

As fiction, I love Peckinpah’s universe. As an account of ‘fact,’ I have to wonder about the man who actually believes what Peckinpah is writing. I don’t actually believe that Peckinpah believed what he was writing. But I also think that he wanted to bring his vision of the idealized view of the past to life. This is my problem with the work of purveyors of heroic literature in general: they look at the universe, decide something’s missing, and continue to pursue it anyway.

Two Perspectives on Reality of Your Death

The reality our situation is very very different from its portrayal in the movies. In reality, nature may in fact kill us all, but we rage against the dying of the light, because each of us thinks of ourselves as infinitely valuable in the universe. We hold the metaphysical key to life, and when we are snuffed out, our metaphysical worldview is snuffed out completely and permanently. We do not therefore put any monetary value on our lives. They are infinitely valuable to us; their loss means loss of everything.

This is the basis of Kant’s categorical imperative, which says ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ This is a foundational principle in the Jeffersonian secular Enlightenment universe, but it an optative wish, not an enforceable law. Moreover, it ignores the reality of experience, which is that others are not compelled by the wishes of the bourgeois, law-biding, middle class followers of the categorical imperative. Heroes don’t follow man made laws; they follow a higher law, and they are (always) validated because they are (always) right.

When it to the perspective that others take on our lives, we must allow for them to place a value on our lives. We can enforce through law the proscription against murder, but some men will decide that the $10 dollars in our wallet is more important than the cost of letting us live. So they shoot us, robbing us of our most valuable asset (our very life) over something so mean as an Alexander Hamilton. By ignoring the value aspect of life and retreating back to the stars where the earth can be viewed serenely, liberals like Al Franken and Michael Moore are ignoring some significant features of the world as it is. But when we travel back down from our adventure in the skies (or worse don’t even broaden our experience through space travel to imaginary places that exist only in the mind) we need to understand why the perspective of Rush Limbaugh, which places too much emphasis on wealth, is not entirely correct, either.

My Take on Fiction

The solution is not in fact to withdraw from the world to a higher perspective, but to educate yourself against the possibilities of being murdered by wrong-minded gunslingers who rely on an unacknowledged fiction. This requires a different sort of fiction than the heroic blood romps of a Tarantino, Leone, or Peckinpah or the work of Rousseau or Nietzsche. I have read and have enjoyed the works of these and many authors in the modern vein, but enjoyment is not all in the universe of knowledge; one hopes that the famous authors who know more than we know what they are talking about and are not people like the other Birkin who stands in for Hermione’s own lack of knowledge and then declares that the world can only be perfected if every human is killed. That’s the sort of thinking that led (though on a smaller scale) to the Holocaust.

This is what I was trying to accomplish in my fiction, which focuses, not on the hero who is guaranteed from the beginning of the tale to make it to the end unharmed but who must separate himself from the collective society, but on the kid who dies in the middle of Leone’s film. That kid must have a sense that his life is infinitely valuable, and that is why he stands frozen before Frank/Henry shoots him dead. But the kid is holding a bottle of water to his chest. That may be valuable to sustain life, but it has no economic value (scroll down to ‘The Meaning of Value‘ on this page). Frank has a gun and gets to call the shots in the universe of exchange.

My Kid is not at the end of a poker game. Instead, he’s in the middle of the game and is constantly trying to orient himself correctly to the larger poker world. However, he has dropped out of school, and this foretells (for the careful reader) all of his failings.

Within the poker world, my Kid must educate himself as closely as possible to the possibilities for the cards that he holds (whose value he knows) and his opponent’s cards (whose value he doesn’t), rather than relying on hero’s journey alone in the wilderness. This is the medieval universe of The Wanderer as well as the heroic journey of Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch and Leone’s fairy tale Once Upon a Time in the West. It may well be the price of participation in the world available to the few, but I would much prefer the middle and unheroic world of family, friends, and society available to the many.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9H6MdcNFsg

When I got into academia, I couldn’t stop thinking that the whole exercise of looking for deep meanings in literature was not without its compensating comedic moments. In the case of Monty Python, it was Pablo Casals plunging 400 feet into a bucket of boiling fat. In graduate school, it was a “real” professor who told me what literary criticism was “really” about. See the introduction to my forthcoming book on my life after academia.

That is not to say that Monty Pythonites could not be serious about literature. Terry Jones wrote Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery and one of my favorite Chaucer books, Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, which I will cite in my exposition of ‘The Knight’s Tale.’ I, too, have done my share of serious critical work, but Poker Tales is more in line with the fabliaux tales in Chaucer’s masterpiece.

Anyway, here’s the original Tchaikovsky for you humorless purists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFaq9kTlcaY

For the rest of you, buy my book.

I was no exception. But unlike Jane Smiley, who turned to the novel to refresh her shaken sense of humanity that had she had once found in quiet hours of reading, I had a far darker experience.

Ms. Smiley’s sense of literature comes from her having been raised in an environment of Modernism. Her title to her book which she wrote after 9/11 comes from Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ a poem which represented the modern way of looking at the universe after the ‘traditional’ way of reading a poem had failed. Williams, like Joyce and Eliot, had fragmented the universe into bits and had looked at it from its various perspectives in order to recreate a whole perspective on the world.

The Modernist position was to displace our attachment from the one sanctioned position in the world in order to gain a greater position whereby one could look at the world from various positions. Such a multi-perspetival approach, for Williams, Eliot, and Joyce, was held in place by the solid individual at the heart of perception. Life presented itself to the viewer as a series of disconnected events. The individual poet could reassemble what life put in front of him by seeing underneath a series of disconnected events to the deeper archetypal meaning that those events held for the careful observer.

It was to the failure of this approach that my first work of fiction was supposed to address itself. It is why I addressed myself to Steven Pressfield and Bernard Malamud in my introduction. I have nothing against their approach to art. As I say in the introduction, I admire the work of both authors very much. It’s just that it doesn’t accord with all the evidence that I had experienced in my life. And in accordance with the metaphysical approach to art, I wanted to fill in their experience with my own experience.

I had already had the experience of deconstruction to guide me away from my firm commitment to thoroughly modern approach to literature, as its skepticism cut deeply into my belief that anyone ever really had true insight into events. But unlike the postmodern opening up of literature to multiple perspectives, I was skeptical that even with a 100 perspectives we could never obtain ‘the truth.’ The problem I always had with deconstruction was that it didn’t propose final answers (indeed, it couldn’t advocate anything but the continuation of and endless chain of words that never settled on a final answer) but it set itself up as the touchstone of belonging and not belonging. I had slipped through the cracks as someone could not get heard on either side of the (seemingly) firm divides into which art had been divided. My only choice was to rethink the firm divide itself.

And this is what I was hoping to accomplish in my book of Poker Tales. In the course of my rethinking literature itself, so I decided to rewrite literature in my image. I started out with The Canterbury Tales. I will travel to Shakespeare and Dante (and others) after that.

Lessons in Reading

‘Lessons in Reading’ may be interpreted as one of the two most anti-academic bits of my work (the other is the tale of the ‘Four Parisians’). I maintain that my perspective is not anti-academic, but appears so to those who commit to one particular (and extremely popular) theory of reading. This is the widespread belief that people who know more are better off than people who know less. I challenge this in my chapter on the ‘Lessons of Reading’ a poker hand.

Poker is a game of incomplete information that nevertheless yields a definite winner in every hand. The indefinite nature of the reader’s knowledge of the hands that have been dealt, in my opinion, reflects our lives as readers of our experience. The more you know, the better off you will be. But this is only true if you have correctly read the world correctly.

Now many academics (not all) take the position that nature at it is in itself is unavailable and that the human mind always interferes with our perception if the world the way it is. This means that there is no one correct interpretation of events. This has fiven rise to various philosophical systems to deal with that fact (systems like phenomenology and hermeneutics). I have no problem with that. There are many approaches to the truth. But when they attempt to level various interpretations of the science they encounter, I have a problem with that. Some opinions are better than others.

Here’s why. I take the example of two cultural responses to the scientific phenomenon of an earthquake. The first response to the phenomenon is made by an expert medicine man who believes that the ground is rumbling on account of the River God George. And he should know, as he has been studying the workings of the god for 75 years. He knows how to pick out the best virgins to fling into the volcano when things start to shake.

His response is objectively worse off than my 13 year old when it comes to knowing what it actually going under the earth. This is because my 13 year old has a better sense of the science that underlies appearances. Appearances are fleeting. The science of the world is real, but, like the orbit of Pluto, may be undiscovered for most of human history. But when they are discovered, it makes sense to grasp onto the best explanation, rather than the traditional explanation, no matter how much time your village elders have put into their errant education.

This enforces on human beings a course of scanning the skies to be on the lookout for the next big unforeseen event.

Being Right

Being right is more important in a Pareto universe, and if you want to succeed in a competitive universe, you need to reflect the universe as accurately as possible. In this environment, academics have retreated from competition to a place where they can feel as though they are pursuing themselves alone and not base money.

That is their right. They want to allow everyone in the universe to have equal dignity, and dignity is not the source of monetary value. This is why (I suppose; I can’t really read the academic mindset on these issues) why one of my Medtextl colleagues was arguing with me about the equal value of learning Chinese (with its 40,000 characters) and English (with its 26 characters) after I had proposed that Chinese had no future without reform of its alphabet to compete with the much simpler alphabetic structure of English. Sure, I grant that both languages produce readers, but one produces readers at a faster rate than the other and the efficiency of one language over the other means that over time one language will produce more readers in a universe in which men have free will.

There are other forms of value in the universe than money values, and I for one think that those who pursue only money are fools. But not competing in a competitive universe doesn’t allow you to back away behind ivory curtains and announce that you’re better than those who do compete. In my view, those who back away forfeit their right to participate in competition. Such absolute walls as academics build in their quest to rise to the level of the absolute are only as good as the current knowledge allows. As soon as new knowledge appears, the boundaries of metaphysics change.

This causes some to be on the forefront of change (in the avant-garde) and some to be left behind. But the universe is evolving, and no one knows for sure where it’s going. The best we can hope for is to bet, and as my parents told me, betting means risk. Standing back and looking at the whole of history and declaring one’s confidence in one’s predictions based on past behavior will continue into the future.

After 9/11, I thought that academia needed reform from its principles of granting equality to all. It was a good idea in its day, but others had come along with better ideas. Neither of these competing ideas captures the essence of ‘the truth.’ They are imaginative reconstructions of the truth based on the available evidence. And one idea has won out over the other. But new ideas which fit the evidence even better will come along. They always do. At that point, the confidence of our leaders, which look so solid and secure, will look feeble.

Academics and those trained in academia want to allow maximum freedom to participate in the modern world, and so they have weakened the badges of belonging to any position (except their own) and found salvation in the dream of a community of men pursuing communal ideals. Those who actually believe in things like America, personal religion, or provincial pursuits like country music are to be shunned. It was this that I thought needed reforming when I sat down to write my book.

Once again, I want to make myself clear here. It is not that I don’t like academic readings. I do. My objection to their reading is that they are overconfident in their ends. This comes from my experience in graduate school, where (as I say here) my fellow teachers were “culling their students,” looking for those who agreed with their initial positions. That position has some serious weaknesses, the chief of which is that I don’t think it is enough to weaken the bonds of community in order to pursue a new, revolutionary community based on principles of weaker participation in institutions and more on ‘the truth’ which has been hidden by ‘them.’

And, yes, I recognize that too much investment in institutions is a bad thing. But this is true of all institutions, not just the ones we don’t like. Academics are struggling to save their institutions against a tide of troubles. They have won the battle with conservatives over tenure, but tenure keeps slipping away. They have won the battle with the religious right, and yet the number of people who believe in religion has increased. In my opinion (but who am I?) it is time to take a good look at the institution of academia itself, not to destroy it, but to shore up its seemingly perpetual weaknesses.

My Attack on Heroic Reading

This has led me by commodious vicus of recirculation back to the world of literature, where certain authors (and great authors) have approached literature from a ‘heroic’ perspective. One of the foremost authors of this approach to literature is, of course, Joseph Campbell. It is an approach taken to literature by people like Steven Pressfield and Bernard Malamud. But is also, as I’ve said on this blog before, a system that displaces one from one’s individual life to a starlight perspective, far away from the world of our actual lives into a fictional world where our dreams come true.

And this has some (I would say serious) consequences for our lives as readers. If we believe (as I was taught when I went away to school) that fiction captures ‘the truth,’ then the first and necessary move in our lives as ‘true’ readers is to abandon our individual lives for a more stable reading from the perspective of the stars, because those men and women who remain attached to their individual lives are supposed to be attached to their individual desires. It is only by flying from individual desires that humanity could be saved. This is why Hermione flees herself for the comforts of the other Birkin in Lawrence’s Women in Love. He knows what she only hopes to know.

And yet she is caught up in a problem of her own making when she does this, because the other Birkin doesn’t know. And in giving herself up for knowledge that is not forthcoming, she has given up herself.

The same thing is true of the starlight perspective. There were no ‘real’ gods in that space. There is no ‘truth.’ All is illusion there.

This was something that, although I was an uneducated fool when I first went to college, made me retreat from my teacher’s invitation to follow them into the stars as the way to the ‘truth.’ It was why I had such a hard time digesting the literature of Hermione in Lawrence’s Women in Love. It was why dropped out of college. I wanted to fulfill the promise that my teachers had made but could not fulfill.

Star Wars

Over time, I have come to appreciate just how much fiction is implied in my teachers’ quest for ‘the truth.’ I will use the most famous work of modern fiction, George Lucas’ Joseph Campbell-inspired Star Wars to make my point.

Star Wars is a wonderful set of films (I mean this to be taken without irony), but at their center is a vaguely-defines ‘force’ that hold everything together. This is a perfectly acceptable device in fiction, one that make terror films possible. Characters are divided between those who believe and those who don’t in whatever ridiculous creature the creator of the fictional mythology believe in. Those who don’t react to such improbable devices are killed, while those who do react are rewarded by being allowed to live.

This device is one of the main reasons I have never liked horror as a genre. I don’t believe in monsters (I’m too rational for that or ghosts), but I still get scared by hockey-mask-covered-faced men stalking and killing young adolescent teens right after (sometimes during) their first sexual experience. This is because I don’t believe the whole framework of the surrounding myth, but I am still captured in my seat while the slaughter of teens continues. It is this jarring disconnect between the creator’s intentions and my experience that breaks the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for any human being to react to a work of fiction as its author intends us to. I react to heroic works of fiction with a sense of philosophical calm, but not with the emotive reaction being called out of my by the author. That reaction annoys me in the horror genre.

Now I am married to a woman who loves horror flicks, and so I know enough to respect them and the hold they have on the human imagination. I myself just can’t get used to the suspension of disbelief required of me in the grand guignol.

This was true of my experience with Lucas’ Star Wars. The problem with me in the 70s and 80s was that I was looking for ‘truth’ beneath the fiction. But when I had dropped out of college and left my parent’s house, I got a job at that same Eden’s Theater where I used to sneak in in high school. It was the summer when Lucas had produced his third film in the Star Wars trilogy. It has a long run, and I saw it over 100 times during the course of the summer.

One of my friends believed that he had access to the ‘force’ and could use his powers to affect physical events. I was skeptical. Okay, I was more than skeptical; I openly mocked him. A lot. We remained friends due to the fact that he thought I was an idiot who didn’t believe in the power of ‘the force,’ and so he took me under his wing and tried to feed me his valuable information that I could have access to if I would only drop my reluctance to believe in ‘the force.’ I, for my part, could never get over his actual belief in something so foolish as ‘the force.’ As an act of fiction, it was fine. As an act of reality it was really stupid.

My friend, though he was my friend, was living in a dream. I had no desire to follow him into his madness. This has been a consistent pattern in my life. I attempt to ground my works of fiction in fact, but people come to me believing things that are so obviously fictional constructs that I turn away. I want ‘real’ facts,’ not delusions. This offends many people, but they don’t listen to my objections. They simply assume that I have not heard the latest evangel, and all they have to do is to guide me into their perfect worldview. At no point is there any sense that they could be wrong.

I continue to think that they are wrong. And here’s a hint the Mary’s and Jeanne’s who want to convince me of their positions. If you want to convince me that you’re right, engage with me. Don’t turn away from me towards students who agree with your initial conclusions. It might work on the weakest students, but it doesn’t work on me.

So when I wanted to write a work of fiction on my own, I decided that I wanted to write something better than Lucas’ delusional masterpiece (which I acknowledge as a fictional masterpiece, but not as representing anything like the ‘truth’ that we encounter when we encounter the world as it is). I wanted my fictional world to be a free-floating story which doesn’t ground itself in any sort of delusion that could be taken for a fact. Rather than looking at fiction as a guide to fact, I gave up and decided to highlight the illusion of fiction in fiction. The poker table was the perfect place to set such a story.

My Story

In my story I have the Kid, who has some cards in his hand. Suddenly, one of his heroes, Pally Cornhouse, shows up in the room. The Kid is gaga over the appearance of one of his heroes, and he gushes over him. This appeals to the hero, and he offers to stay and watch the Kid play a hand.

After the hand is over, he guesses the exact hand he had. This causes the Kid to gush even more over the brilliance of Pally Cornhouse, which in turn turns into an invitation to come up to play in the big game upstairs.

The Kid is about to go, when the Old-Timer warns him about his proposed course of action. Poker players want to take your money, he says, so you’d better be careful before you go to play with the master. The Old-Timer then replays the hand from the perspective of his seat at the poker table. It is different being at the table than it is being an observer. He, the Old-Timer, had reason to be more cautious than Pally Cornhouse was, because he was actually playing for keeps. This involves him in loosing his range of hands to include more hands than Pally Cornhouse had allowed.

As such, I think that holding your judgment until you have gathered as much evidence as possible is better than taking a chance and betting that your guess is correct. If you’re right, you could be a genius, but betting on genius is not always the best policy. At the poker table, you’re better off being cautious about your reading and right than laying your chips on the table on a hunch and being wrong.

This bring the Kid to reconsider his initial plan, and he decides to say with the Old-Timer.

Questions My Readers Should Want Answers To Before Proceeding

There are several questions that the course of action that the Kid takes here, all of which a careful poker would want answers to before acting.

Is the Old-Timer right when he dispels the ‘magic’ of Pally, telling him that he’s seen him guess wrong often enough? Probably . Was he right not to go with Pally? Probably. Can he know for sure? Probably not. Has he assessed the Old-Timer’s poker skill correctly? That is the question that remains after he has made his decision.

Even those answers we can have answers to are only tentative. Unfortunately, the final answers to these questions are not available in the abstract space of the observer of action. The course of action must be lived through to know its results for sure. Until then, all is merely speculation. But between the play and the end (when everyone can count up their winnings or lament their losses), play continues. Ends are not the only things that are important in the game of poker. In fact, the science of the poker hand is far more important in evaluating a poker hand.

This leads the Old-Timer to portray a distinction between observers and players. The players within that game have real money at stake, while the observers don’t have as much to lose by guessing after the fact.

This is a distinction between the critic and the reader. Critics are necessary, but they don’t play. Instead, they stand by and observe and direct the behavior of others. This gives them power and control over others, but theirs is a completely separate experience from the cello player who must confront the natural limits of his own talents at some point. The experience of following one’s bliss comes from correctly assessing one’s natural talents and not by thinking that all talents are accessible to us on account of our mere existence. I think we have all seen enough of America Idol to know how that usually works out and just how rare is the true talent that can navigate the treacherous course of following one’s dreams.

—-

In the beginning of the book, the Kid has just landed in Las Vegas. He is giddy as he directs the cab driver to take him to the Mirage Hotel, his favorite hotel in the city he’s been dreaming about all his life. The hotel has captured his imagination ever since he saw it in his favorite movie, Rounders.

On entering the lobby, he is struck by its vastness. But he is also a little disappointed in the shabbiness of the art works he finds there. He fixates on one statue of three Chinamen. He cannot decide what it means, determining that its lack of determinative meaning is on account of its being a work of kitsch. So he walks away. That is where the story ends. Not much to think about, but this is where the story behind the story begins.

I Fixate on Art

I was reading Julian Baggani and Peter Fosi’s The Ethics Toolkit: A Compendium of Ethical Concepts and Methods the other day—I know; how cool am I?—and I was struck by the fact that the first subject in Part I: The Grounds of Ethics is a section on ‘Aesthetics.’ They take the notion of aesthetics as containing the ‘ground’ of ethical thought very seriously, not giving any other example than Plato’s Ion (3) for dismissing the domain of art from qualification as the ultimate moral arbiter.

As a former graduate student in an English department, this seems absurd to me. Ion doesn’t dismiss art as the domain of moral behavior. It shifts the domain of virtue from a nonentity like Ion—scholars have not been able to identify an Ion who fits the profile, and this leads many (including yours truly) to believe that the never was any actual person named Ion—to Socrates. Ion has an inflated sense of himself but no sense of why he wins the poetic prizes of which he boasts. Socrates, on the other hand, can give reasons for why Ion behaves the way he does. It is a matter of having ‘art’ at his (Socrates’) disposal, rather than having Ion’s completely innate natural sense by which he can perform Homer but cannot explain how he performs.

Therefore, as I say in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, my students can be led, as Socrates leads Ion, to the conclusion that Socrates knows what he is talking about, while Ion has no idea about why he acts the way he does. This is because Socrates has tied art to metaphysics, where he, Plato, and every English major (except me) at the University of Illinois in the early 90s held the ‘ground’ of humanity to reside.

But when I ask my students to comment on Socrates’ actual knowledge—he tells Ion that he (Ion) is an empty cipher who channels the work of the gods through himself but adds nothing to it himself—they all agree that Socrates, though in some way that they are not exactly sure of is wise, is full of s**t when it comes to explaining the actual source of all art. This is because they don’t believe in such foolish things as Socrates does (pagan gods, golden chains, people named Ion, etc.)

So my question is why so many in the English department were so convinced that they had found the answer in art if art was so distant from what we actually believe? My academic colleagues agreed with Socrates and Plato, because (I think) Plato guarantees that followers of Socrates have answers that elude ‘lesser’ men (and women if there are any in his ancient Greek world). But Plato’s answer comes from an act of sleight of hand, shifting from the limited individual—who no one in ancient Greece thought had any answers to anything; individuals were like Ion, unenlightened idiots—to the realm of a ‘guaranteed’ symbol which Socrates had access to through his special ‘demon, but which none of my students (and for that matter Aristotle, who called Plato’s Theory of Form a ‘poetic metaphor’ in one of the first acts of good sense shown in ancient philosophy) could not believe in.

I and all of my students side with Aristotle on the matter of Plato’s relying on ‘poetic metaphor.’ The academics sided with Plato. They were wise; the rest of us were stupid idiots.

Of course, I begged to differ (but who am I?). I wrote my dissertation on the influence of Aristotle (rather the usual Plato) on allegory in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance (again, how cool am I?). And my agreement with Aristotle was not enough (as I thought in the naïve youth of a graduate student) to guarantee that Aristotle has an answer to where the ‘ground’ of humanity resides (he doesn’t). He thought it resided in ‘nature,’ who he deified. But, as Plato was kind enough to point out, Aristotle, too, had a problem. It was possible that she was no more than a figment of Aristotle’s imagination. So Plato’s works were elevated and Aristotle’s work sat in the forgotten basement of Neleus of Scepsis for two hundred years before being sold to Apellicon of Teos, who brought them back to Athens in the 1st century AD.

Aristotle’s charge that the works of Plato were nothing more than “poetic metaphors” makes for an interesting problem of where, if not in this world (as Aristotle says) or in some vaguely defined ‘otherworld’ (as Aristotle said Plato believed), the aesthetic realm exists. But positing something and proving its existence or non-existence, as Aristotle and Plato had attempted to do, was no longer necessary in the academic community of 1996. It was posited as proved, even without any definitive proof as to where is exists or any need for further discussion. It could be ‘real’ or it could be an illusion of the mind. The question of ‘where’ is beside the point. It is the what, the existence of the aesthetic, that endures through the destruction of the ontological or epistemological value through the permanent and lasting domain of metaphysics, that matters.

When I was in academia, I was invited to either accept or reject the aesthetic’s fundamental existence. When I rejected it, the academic community rejected me. Their only defense was to insist that I was foolish, and that if I would only come around to their way of thinking I could be granted access to the ‘truth.’ Until that point, I was an outsider, a foolish student who (unlike Socrates) didn’t know enough to know what he didn’t know.

This is the problem that Plato had recognized with his own metaphysical systems. There is no way to prove that you are right. Nevertheless, the problem with aesthetic systems is that they rely on Plato’s alignment with metaphysics. This holds true whether we are relying on the aesthetics of Plato, on the 18th century Enlightenment system of Alexander Pope, on 19th century system of Shelley, or on the 20th century system of James Joyce. All these systems hold that aesthetic system is to found our knowledge on metaphysical truths, rather than scientific systems, which change. And this is why Baggani and Fosi have made aesthetics the basis of their chapter of ‘The Grounds of Ethics.’

Aristotle’s Microscope Invoked

The fact of the matter is that these things only make sense if we have the sense not to delve too deeply into them. The fact of the matter is that if we focus our attention too deeply on the exact nature of our ideas, they deconstruct (they fall apart for the non-academics among you). This was my point in my post on Aristotle’s microscope.

My argument was never with the fact of deconstruction, but on the response of academics to this phenomenon. They thought that the proper position of aesthetics was aligned with metaphysics, and not with science. Metaphysics has the unique position of setting unchanging goals to philosophical inquiry. Science, on the other hand, changes through time. So they rejected science and latched onto metaphysics. This aligns them with the leaders of society (the philosopher kings for those of you familiar with Plato’s Republic). But at the same time, science continues to operate within the world of time, so that whenever science turns its attention to something, the metaphysician must back away to a higher ground in order to secure himself from the depredations of science.

My standard model for this is the advance of science from Plato’s demon, to medieval mysticism, to Galileo’s theory of mechanical motion, to Descartes’ coordinate geometry, to the thought of Newton (which eliminated once and for all the need to posit Socrates’ demon), to Darwin’s fluid nature of species (which even Newton thought were fixed), to the complete relativism of Einstein (in which nothing is fixed except in relation to something else).

I make my case in ‘Why Fido Can’t Drive’ in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing.

My point about this is that, as soon as we change our scientific perspective on the universe, our metaphysics changes as well. This is why my students, who live in the post-Einstein world, don’t believe in the science of Socrates but do believe that Socrates “in some inexplicable way” is a better thinker than Ion. My job as a teacher is to point out that my students are right to doubt Socrates and to point out the reasons why they are right, which escape them. This involves me first having to dismiss the science of Socrates. But unlike Plato, I do not go to the level on which things make perfect sense. That could be, as Aristotle says, a “poetic metaphor.” I feel that my obligation is to drive my students to ‘the truth.’

This involves me with science, rather than a satisfying sense that I or my students can think whatever we want, however ridiculous. They have that right, of course, but I feel that it is my obligation to get them to agree that they don’t know what they are talking about and that their profession of optimism, while infinitely nobler than skepticism that I encountered in graduate school, must be tempered with the caution that comes from knowledge that at any point they could be wrong.

In the current environment of art, that’s okay. We expect artist to be a little bit weird and idiosyncratic (I mean that in a good way); but in the environment of business, which thrives, not on equality but on competition, if you are wrong, someone else who’s right will take all your business and you will end up working for them. That is why I subtitled my Writing for People Who Hate Writing ‘A Book for the Rest of Us.’ I still recognize the importance of equality as the foundation of ethics, but I wanted to address the needs of mathematicians, doctors, engineers, and businessmen, who need to get a leg up on their competition or who just didn’t want to be embarrassed when their boss asked them to write a report that was to be distributed to the company. Such chores require knowing more than your audience or your competition. It does not, however, amount to knowing everything. No one knows everything.

Unlimited Postmodern Art

Art has always had a component of thinkers who were interested in the metaphysics of art, but they have usually put limits on the metaphysics of art. For instance Eliot and Joyce had some of the most powerful aesthetic systems ever invented, but they managed to exclude “mere” commerce from inclusion in the art world.

Their worldview was perpetuated by a whole host of thinkers in a whole bunch of fields, until cracks started appearing in their once crackless façade. This was largely the work of Andy Warhol, who came along and decided that the reproductive qualities of art, which Modern critics like Clement Greenberg had derided as kitsch, were perfectly acceptable as art. His ‘reproduction of the faces of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse-Tung have made him the hero of the ‘in-crowd’ ever since.

I would say that the ‘verboten’ (‘forbidden’ for those of you who do not speak German) becomes ‘boten’ in Warhol’s universe And this involves changing the rules of art. Warhol’s model relies on stepping out of the commercial universe along the lines of Duchamp, who put a toilet in a Dada art show and dared anyone to call it not-art. In doing so, he put the art world in a bind. Art was supposed to be representative of all, and yet some things were left out of the ‘whole.’ If someone attempted to dismiss his toilet from their art show, which the Society of Independent Artists tried to do with Duchamp’s Fountain, then the world of art would be diminished.

With new rules, there was an explosion of new art on Warhol’s model, but a lot of it was bad art. For instance, here is a piece of art called ‘Andy Warhol eats a hamburger’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk

As you can probably see, it’s a film of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger. And you can probably also see, it’s also easy to imitate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9wYAabPvQU

And because it is so easy to imitate, it can be fun to watch someone imitating Warhol’s original eating of a hamburger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBYGzDjkuoI

This process of duplication reproduces art to infinity, which they say is supposed to be the point of art. But in fact it doesn’t save art from being exceptionally boring. Did you watch Warhol’s art piece all the way to the end? Neither did I. Art has become a delight to those on the inside; for the rest of us, it’s a chore.

Who Gets To Call It Art?

So who gets to call it art in a universe in which only a few really care for the stretches that must be made for a things of so little aesthetic value? (See my post on Lana Turner collapsing and search for Henry Geldzahler for my explanation of this phenomenon). The answer is not far to seek: it is the bold and daring artist who is willing to do something ‘new,’ no matter how dull the rest of us may find their work.

In such an environment, the walls put up by artists are just more proof to the ‘believers’ that the ‘non-believers’ are fools. The only solution is to come join them in their protected enclave (the Ivory Tower I think is the name for it these days). Anything else will guarantee your position as an outsider. As an outsider, no one has to listen to you.

So postmodernism has become a game of follow the leader. The way to gain entry is to allow that Andy Warhol was an artist who decontextualized art from its position as a created object, like a toilet which could be determined by its causal structure by material cause (the purpose for which it was conceived by its maker) but has been recontextualized for the metaphysical cause, which lays outside of connection to material things of any kind. Only after decontexualization could it be put in a sanitized museum and displayed as art (qua art for those of you who read Latin).

In such an environment, Andy Warhol was not (‘NOT!’) a man who got rich producing lots of art by deceiving others! I mean this. This is the same charge that Socrates levels at Ion at the end of that dialog, by the way; Ion, being a man of little character, decides he does not want to be thought of as a deceiver and so he chooses the other thing that wiser Socrates has put before him. But, as any one of my Freshman students can tell you, that doesn’t change the fact that Andy Warhol Socrates is full of s**t. Facts is facts.

This distinction of decontextualization, meanwhile, makes it imperative that art lower itself to hithertofor unheard depths of depravity. It used to be enough to burn a flag or two. But that soon became so prosaic that artists had to go deeper, and we got Piss Christ. That, too, got imitated with a slight difference in the work of art recently purchased ‘A Fire in My Belly.’ More recently, we have had people creating ‘art works’ about killing a living president.

Stepping Back

My reason for stepping back from this sort of art is not that we don’t have the right to express ourselves like this. We do. And it’s not I don’t enjoy the art that comes from the impulse to offend. I do. I really do.

My stepping back from this sort of art is based on my belief that the value proposition of art has gotten way out of hand with its original intent. Postmodern art was supposed to be (or at least I was foolish enough to believe people when they told me that it was intended to be) available to everyone. It was supposed to be democratic. But lately, art has been for rich art collectors, who go about in their nests of ‘in people’ talking about how ‘out people’ who live in Chicago’s south suburbs, for instance, are all idiots and fools.

The moneyed environment in which fine at travels has made it difficult for even those museum curators like Frank O’Hara and Henry Geldzahler to be able to afford to purchase it.

This situation is even more extreme than the one which I experienced in the move from an open and more democratic world of art of the 1960s (of which I still approve) away from the closed intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s (of which I do not). By the late 70s, the ‘art is for everyone’ appeal had given way to the Studio 54 model, in which a few beautiful people were let in to the club, while the non-beautiful people (like me) were left out in the cold. I was among those who rebelled.

Having gotten into academia on the promise that it was democratic, I left academia, having chosen not to play with people who prejudge me without listening to what I have to say. I’ve gotten used to this, but I still do not like it. I probably never will, since it flies in the face of my American objection to snobbery of any sort.

Because of my American objection to snobbery of any sort, I don’t begrudge the out-sized influence of Andy Warhol, whose IQ may not have been all that high. I like him for what he is. But I also agree with the art critic Robert Hughes, the author of The Shock of the New, who I recently saw on television mocking the untutored gall of non-famous art critics who, simply by decree, can declare their own personal favorite painting a masterpiece, and who could say no? Robert Hughes thought he could, but then who is Robert Hughes (I mean, apart from an internationally recognized art critic who has spent years studying good and bad art and learning to differentiate between the two).

This puts Hughes, in my humble opinion, in the camp of ‘us, the knowing.’ Hence, I expect him to dismiss me and my work of art, Poker Tales, as little more than a bit of trash which could only appeal to ‘them, the unknowing.’

Science and Limits of Art in My Work

But my plan goes deeper than that. Poker Tales is an attempt to forgo snobbery of few those on the inside of Danto’s artworld, whose appeal is at least partly built on exclusionary principles. Once again, the ignorant are exuded by ‘those who get to call it art,’ but now those who get to own art have shifted from true aesthetes like Geldzahler to the super rich.

In a universe in which art is no longer democratic, my reasonably-priced Poker Tales appeals—or is supposed to appeal; who can say what actually will sell?—to people who are not concerned with snobby games like chess (see my dissertation on the chapter I call ‘Reykjavík’), but who like to play the ordinary and vastly-increasing-in-its-popularity game of poker. Poker is a game for every man, not just for snobs who like to build deconstructable walls and who hide behind them as though they are permanent and give them rights to judge that the uneducated ‘masses’ don’t have, on account of their not having any (or enough) education.

Yeats Vision of Poetry

But that is not to say that there are not some nuggets of deep value in the book. The first comes when he’s in the lobby of the Mirage and he sees a statue of three Chinamen. He decides it doesn’t mean anything and walks away. But art is deeper than he suspects.

I draw on a work of poetry to make my point here. The work of W. B. Yeats’ ‘Lapis Lazuli’ makes the point that hysterical women—isn’t it always hysterical women in Yeats?—are complaining about poets being gay (I can hear you snickering in the back; he means in the happy sense). These hysterical women are upset, because if something isn’t done, the town will be flattened by bombs.

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

That sounds bad. But Yeats objects that artists have always been gay (*snicker*). They perform their tragedies, of course, but gaiety (stop laughing in the back) transforms all that dread.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

So the question becomes one of perspective. Should, Yeats asks, the hysterical women react to the tragedy, or should they react to the cathartic effect of art, which transforms all that dread. He himself reacts with a humor born of his mystical vision that he has a higher purpose.

In my opinion, the scholars who reacted to me with such horror were like the hysterical women who reacted with such disdain to the actors who strutted the stage with such happy aplomb. My art work is supposed to be like the counterweight of humor, which transforms all that dread.

Of course, in Yeats, the exchange of tragedy for humor also comes with the aesthetic, metaphysical view, which Baggani and Fosi associate with the ground of aesthetics. In the metaphysical perspective, we are launched out of the world of time and into an eternal world of imagination. But this is exactly what I didn’t like in the modern world of art. It gathers us up and takes us to a world outside of time and which, unlike this world, is thought to be ‘in some way’ more permanent and real than the real.

But, on closer inspection, the whole thing deconstructs. The barriers to entry (for those of you who have a business education), and the walls of the Ivory Tower (for those of you charged with teaching the youts) are not real for those of us who have had the good fortune to have been raised in America, and not in Plato’s ancient Greece, and to have studied and taken seriously Aristotle’s notion that the whole ‘other world,’ to which Plato points us, could just be a myth. I believe I’ve made this point on my blog before this, as well.

My silly book has a serious point to it, after all.

Three Chinamen in the Desert

I make it for the first time in the art work that ‘the Kid’ stares at for a moment through the imported desert palms. It is, he thinks, a statue of three chinamen playing lutes. Well, what do you know, but those 3 chinamen are derived from Lapis Lazuli’:

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Now I return to the question I asked in the section of Comedy or Tragedy in this post: should he know this. My answer as a critic is yes, he should know this. But, as I also asked in my previous post, does he know this?, and the answer is a definitive ‘No.’

In my opinion (but then who am I?), it is what a man does after he has encountered something ‘new’ in the universe that matters. In this case, the Kid places his experience at the service of men who know more than he himself does, because he doesn’t know enough himself:

This was the sort of kitsch that his professors had warned him against in college when they had pointed him towards “authenticity” of experience in assessing artwork.

And yet, it is in turning away from his experience to the experience of ‘others,’ who know more than he himself does, he turns away from his ‘authentic’ experience of art in the actual world to a false position built up by an academic dreamer. The experience of others is only valid when it contains verifiable truths, and not something that may be a fictional construction of his or ‘others’ mind. Nothing in the academic’s position does not result from the position that only he has access to the truth that escapes ‘lesser’ men.

But—and this is really important if you want to understand my program here—it doesn’t matter. I have given up the search for ends of experience that obsessed the mos and pomos when I was in grad school.

That is why my work deals with the open world of science, which my academic colleagues turn away from, and not the gradually-contracting-to-a-select-few-rich-people-who-are-fabulously-wealthy world of metaphysical inquiry.

No one who is worth their scientific salt ever declared the search for the final answer to a scientific question permanently over for ever. Science is about middles, not ends. Like the scientific world I model my fictional world on, my world operates on abstractions—people with names like ‘the Kid’ and ‘the Old-Timer—and on actual individuals with individualizing names.

Lesson Learned

The lesson I learned at great expense of both time and effort in graduate school is that there is no foundation beneath the truth. But it is not from their understanding that there is no truth that the standing of the intellectuals comes. It is in their greater knowledge than others have of the mechanisms of art. And this extends to everything. People who know more are better off than those who know less in every field. So find your bliss and follow that, because without that, your life may not be perfect, but it will be bleaker than it has to be.

But, having been out of the ivory tower for 15 years, I am firmly committed to the Pareto model in which nature rewards some much (much, much, much) more than others. And nature operates within time, which means that you can think you’ve found an answer, but in a competitive environment, you’re only as good as the last story you’ve told. If someone comes along with a better idea than you’ve got, than the natural inequity will quickly rob you of your comfortable position which you might just have been foolish enough to believe was natural (the lesson of business is that if you think so, then too bad for you).

Art in ‘The City That Never Sleeps’

Art in the ‘city that never sleeps’ can stay awake, just like the never-sleeping, eternal art of Yeats. But in fact, the world is diurnal (shifting back and forth from day to night and back again), and individual’s need to sleep or they will go insane or die (or both). By neglecting sleep for the eternal ‘action’ of the city, the Kid betrays his actual life for a fantasy that, were he ever to actually achieve it, would kill him in short order.

By this, I want to highlight the difference between the way our minds would like the world to be (eternal, without death) and the way the world actually is. The Kid comes to Vegas hoping to have his fantasy come to life and feels at last that he’s arrived at ‘the center of the universe.’

Art, in a competitive environment is supposed to obscure. It is supposed to make the participant feel as though he is at the center of the universe. But if anyone believes it, as the Kid seems to believe it, they could be a sucker.

Likewise, my art work is not supposed to give anyone who reads it a comfortable solution to the problem of art in which art reduces all works to a comfortable equity that is missing from the world in general and which, Joni Mitchell and Rush Limbaugh like, we should restore by traveling backwards to a past whose natural equity we have lost. That is more than foolish; it is wrong, no matter how many people think so. It is wrong because it relies on a fiction, told by people who have lost the ability to compete and who erect easily deconstructable barriers to entry. Such barriers only hold as long as there is no competition. The economic world is driven by the 20% who learn the sometimes hard lessons of competition. If you think that have risen above the need to compete, you’re probably making the same mistake as Yeats, who though a great poet (the greatest) is one of the 80%.

It is with this in mind that I survey the worlds of politics and business and place myself above such petty (and tragic) pursuits. My message is delivered through a bunch of silly tales, but the underlying message is serious, at least as far as my art is concerned.

And this is why the Kid is wrong to turn away from the work of art in the garden. It’s not that he could know the poem behind it (he probably can’t). It’s that in turning away he relies on his firm knowledge of things he has no right knowing. His ‘authentic’ art, he is relying on others whose universe is founded on a false bottom.

In this, I imitate Yeats’ three Chinamen when one of them asks ‘for mournful melodies,’ and I with ‘Accomplished fingers begin to play.’ When I do play my notes in my silly book, I hope your eyes will be like the three Chinamen:

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

(*chortle* Quiet in the back! *laughter continues* Fade to black)

For this chapter, I wanted to give you the whole ‘Introduction’ as a freebie, as well. You can view it by clicking here.

—–

A Bit of Biography

My novel is about art in relation to experience. It is not autobiographical. Indeed, I think that there is too much biography in modern fiction by serious writers. Writers write about what they know, and that usually turns out to be about their lives as writers. It gets boring after a while. My book is supposed to play on that convention by starting out with a bit of autobiography before traveling outward into an increasingly fictionally-constructed world that plays with the conventions of a ‘nature-bound truth.’ This is in line with my notion, expressed several time in several different ways on my blog (as here, but search my blog for nature for more instances) for my belief that there is something wrong with the construction of the universe on ‘natural’ grounds.

That said, the bit of biography which I start out with is true. On August 1st 2004, I got up to get another cup of coffee and had a stroke instead. I was 42 years old. So now I can’t work anymore, and after a lot of therapy (learning to walk again; learning to speak, things like that), I thought I would start a publishing company and write books. I’ve written six books so far. Of those, I’ve published two so far with another two on the way this year (the other two are crap and won’t see the light of day).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was in intensive care ward for a week, in the hospital for another week, and another five in rehab after that. My wife was afraid even to let me read (they were still assessing the damage to my brain), until I begged her to bring me my book on Cicero, which I halfway through at the time. I was messed up. I couldn’t talk at all for a short while and couldn’t remember what I was saying before I reached the end of a sentence for about a year.

Now, having a stroke is a terrible thing, kids, so don’t try this at home; but though I couldn’t access my short term memory on account of a large swath of my brain having been killed, my long term memory was fine. I could remember a lot of stuff about my years as a PhD student, and one of those things was that someone had once said that aphasia was the key to postmodern mind (I think it was here). How lucky was I, because I now had it!

But, since I couldn’t talk to anybody—I was like I imagine Lou Gehrig was like at the end of his life—I watched poker on television instead. And, being a former grad student, I soon connected the dots between reading a book and reading a poker hand. In both start you out with a blank. Then you start reading, after which you know more. Then you learn more still. But the thing about reading books and reading poker hands is that you can never know everything. That is what makes reading fun for those who enjoy it, as well as making it hell for those who don’t.

But I love to read, so I drew a correlation between my English class—which, if you were in that class, I want you to know that I still feel terrible I had left in the middle of a summer semester after suffering my stroke—and poker. I thought that in both poker and English, though you can’t know everything, the more you know, the better you will do on a test.

And that is the basis of my book. No one knows everything, but the more you know, the better off you will be at the poker table, as well as in life.

Character Modeling

I took an example from one of my students and made him my main character. He was a kid who was sitting in a community college classroom, not because he was interested in what I was telling him (he wasn’t), but because he was biding his time waiting for something else to happen. There are a lot of students in college like this.

These students were among my favorites, because I always thought that there was hope for outsiders. I had failed out of school at 19, and I understood them better than many (not all) of my academic colleagues. So after dropped out of academia (the second time) after getting my PhD in English, I continued teaching part time at local community colleges and technical schools. I love academia as part time work, though I’m not cut out for full-time work in the professoriate.

Anyway, back to my student. I came to find out that he played poker all the time. He was hoping to earn enough money playing poker to go to Vegas and enter the World Series. So I modeled my character, who I named only with the generic name ‘the Kid,’ after him.

Research on ‘The Problem of Fiction’ in Poker Literature

Now, having thought of my premise of having a young kid traveling Las Vegas as soon as he is of legal age, I wanted to find out if anyone had written on this subject before. And what I found shocked me. The shelves of bookstore poker sections are filled with books that have been written by people who have experienced the real life ups and downs of poker life for themselves. They are bold and daring enough to do what the reader cannot face him or herself.

This is common in sports literature, so I drew on the works of some of my favorite sports authors, Steven Pressfield, who wrote one of my favorite sports novels, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Bernard Malamud, who wrote The Natural, to contrast their work with my own. In those works, some distance is required between the reader and the hero, because most men will never master either game (I talk about this aspect of disappointed dreams in the chapter ‘Interlude with an Actor’). But, as I say in the introduction about this vicarious nature-based model,

That vicarious model has its place, I suppose, but I found it odd that when poker is portrayed in fiction that it should travel so close to nature; for, unlike golf and unlike baseball, playing poker has less to do with what’s on the table than any other game in the world.

Joel Relihan’s Universe

I wanted to do something that had grown out of my own experience. Unfortunately, that was something that had to do with my experience in grad school.

When I was hiding in plain sight if graduate school, I worked with Joel Relihan with whom I have written a chapter in this book. His view of literature was close to mine. He was working on his Ancient Menippean Satire at the time. Relihan’s reading of the obscure genre of Menippean satire had an enormous influence on my development as an author. In Menippean fiction, the possibility of certain knowledge was always undermined in some way. Always.

This is important point for me. I don’t want to limit the role of art in the world, but the lessons of Menippean satire seem to be that art is always limited, and that is through liminal characters that we come to understand just how true that is. When Reason descends from her tower in the The Roman de la Rose to lecture the Lover on how he should give up his foolish quest for love and follow her, we are not to grasp on to her; we should examine her for errors that she does not see for herself. This is quite unlike the modern (or postmodern) scholar who thinks that it is by traveling to the margins (‘thinking outside the box’ for those of you who have not been trained in academic but in business lingo) that we achieve a more perfect perspective.

As Relihan points out, Menippean satire relies on multiple perspectives on experience and in particular undermines the exchange of a lower perspective for a higher. In the ‘natural’ perspective on life, used by my academic colleagues to justify their ascendancy over other, lesser men and women, I had hit upon something that people think is solid that was actually not. In going back to nature—as both Joni Mitchell and Rush Limbaugh do—I feel that both have made a mistake. I wanted to rise above their limited perspectives to attain a whole perspective that had escaped both of these seminal thinkers.

The world of nature closes experience in the guise of opening it up. In that way, it is like Joseph Campbell’s starlight perspective on symbol:

“When you see the Earth from space, you don’t see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come; this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.”

You can have it all, as long as you are willing to abandon your individual perspective, including your most deeply held beliefs, for a ‘higher’ perspective. Those of my academic colleagues who believed that what they were doing was solidly grounded believed that what everyone else in the world was doing (especially those who had been deluded by religion) was built on a false base. They were, as Marx said of them, operating under ‘false consciousness.’

The Marxists among my academic colleagues (and not all were) believed that Hegel was wrong in his Phenomenology of Spirit, where he imagined that he was approaching the ‘thing in itself’ in attempting to gain objective knowledge of the ‘Spirit.’ My academic colleagues, trained in the ‘true’ science of Marx, thought that they were restoring the true nature of experience by flipping over the ‘Spirit’ of Hegel and finding the ‘true’ drivers of human behavior in the more solid ground of economics.

Living in the Land of Opportunity and Freedom

But I live in America, the land of freedom and opportunity. And I didn’t particularly like the notion that only a few knew ‘the (Marxist) truth,’ while everyone else were a pack of deluded idiots. I had been misunderstood far too often for me to believe what they were saying about me, that there was something wrong with my perspective and not theirs (the academics, I mean).

I do not insist that I am right, but I want people to listen to me before dismissing me as an idiot. But, of course, everyone wants that, even (especially) idiots. We have to make choices in our lives about who is worth listening to and who is…well, an idiot.

I made my case that I am not in fact an idiot about this when I dissected Neil Postman’s assertion about America being a land of fools who had abandoned reason for a world of ungrounded symbol (in fact I wrote this as I was finishing Poker Tales). I went back to Postman in my post about his ridiculous and timid approach to knowledge and computers (which I wrote as I was beginning my revision of Poker Tales). My point in turning to him in the introduction was to contrast my approach with his. His is the perspective I associate with academic confidence. They are looking beneath the surface of experience for deeper and more ‘true’ meanings grounded in something ‘real.’ By their own account, they have failed. This has left them with a profound skepticism on which they hang their hat as the symbol of belonging to the select few.

I profoundly disagree, not only about their view that they are among the select few who know something that the rest of us are ignorant of, but also in their general skepticism, which I wrote my dissertation in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to combat (I make my case, which every teacher should read, here). In returning to fiction after 15 years in the wilderness of business, I hope to be better able to make my case again.

The Basis of My Fiction

My fiction is not built on any solid foundation. I am the poet of the superficial surface who has come along after the search for a solid foundation for that deeper ground has failed to produce any more permanent result (as predicted by Relihan).

My ‘Introduction’ then turns to some of the works that I base my own fiction on. They are works that undermine confidence in looking for certain truth beneath experience. The first of these is Hermann Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. I will deal with his work when I get to the tale of ‘Pecos Ernie’ on Day Three, so I won’t talk about that book until then. But I will point out the riverboat on which Pecos Ernie sets up shop is called the Séance (from the French for ‘meeting,’ but in Enflish it refers to a (usually fraudulent) meeting with spirits when applied to mystical ascent). This is deliberately in contrast with Melville’s riverboat, which is named Fidele (Faith). Underneath Melville’s fiction is the sense that there is an underlying Christian faith that ultimately will serve as the ground of his faith.

There is no such faith underlying my novel. And I want to clear as a bell here. Though not particularly religions myself, I have nothing against the exercise of faith. I am married to a church-going lady and I am happy to have my kids enrolled in a Catholic grammar school. I will make that point more clearly in the centerpiece of the novel, the tale of the ‘Four Parisians.’ My point is that there is a certain amount of faith involved in anyone’s decision to believe anything. But, according to St. Augustine, there is an irreconcilable break between our human reason and our faith. We cannot use our reason to ascend the heights of heaven (as Campbell attempts to do). Doing so only gets us father away from our individual lives in exchange for a starry night that may not reveal deeper truths but may be an invitation to pure madness without giving the offered gift of a more solid ground.

In my novel, faith is not the construction on which poker hands are evaluated. To substitute faith (Fidele) for the real source of knowledge is to delude yourself and to operate under a delusion (Séance). On the other hand, fleeing faith for the surer comforts of reason is equally delusional.

The second major acknowledged source for my book is P. G. Wodehouse’s Golf Without Tears (see my first posting on Wodehouse here). I will get back to this when I get to Day Two, where I have two chapters on the role of women. I based my two stories about women on his story ‘The Heel of Achilles,’ in which I imitate Wodehouse’s playfulness with the heroic model by which Campbell resolves the picture of the universe. Wodehouse hits on the one weakness in the hero of Campbell’s heroic model.

In Wodehouse’s story, the author describes a businessman who is the master of his own domain (not like that!). He masters business with ease, and so he decides to take up golf, which he also masters with an unbelievable and totally unrealistic ease, as well. But ‘The Heel of Achilles’ comes when his wives show up and throw his game into confusion.

Modern and Medieval Feminism

The reason I chose this to most people obscure work of literature is that it feeds into my general experience with a long line of literature going back to The Canterbury Tales (from which I derive the title of my own book Poker Tales. Get it?). In ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ Chaucer cites the phrase Mulier est hominis confusio (‘woman is man’s ruin”). In Chaucer’s comical work, the appearance of women in a man’s world is both an obstacle to perfect knowledge and a guide to more satisfying and complete knowledge at the same time.

I will deal with the implications of that phrase when I deal with the last of the Day Two chapters, which deal with the legacy of the legacy of the ‘modern’ discovery of this ancient idea in Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s telling and retelling of the ‘Tale of Griselda,’ which I continue in the marriage of another Walter to another Griselda.

This caused me a lot of grief when I was thinking about how I was going to market my book. As I’ve said many times, I was cowed by my academic experience. In particular, feminism has taken the tact that it is anti-authoritarian. Whereas men are authoritarian figures, women work under the surface, as it were. They work their wiles on men from positions that lack authority.

While I completely support this position, it was at the heart of my experience as a Nazi (in my rhetoric professor’s mind). I, who outlined my thoughts in advance, was trying to gain to stricter control over my environment in an environment where no one could gain complete control. She was attempting to loosen my iron grip on my students. She was wrong about what I was doing and why, but when I went into explain my position to her, she could see no more than that she was flexible and that I was not. My unwillingness to bend my position into alignment with hers served only as further proof that I was wrong. That’s how it was for the entire time I was in graduate school (though there were a few blessed exceptions). I was posited as a male authoritarian (usually a Nazi) who had to be put in his place in a world in which women were gaining new and previously unheard of power.

I actually had no problem with that. I have never been interested in the feminist grab after power, which according to Lord Acton corrupts people. They could have it, as far as I was concerned. I was looking for something else in my engagement with art. But the fact that no one could see anything other than a grasp for control using a thoroughly discredited conservatism continues to rankle me. I became a convenient bad guy. No one had to listen to my arguments; they knew on the basis of my making them that I was wrong. So they invoked me whenever they needed a paper tiger to knock down, and if I tried to defend my (then only partially-understood views) they would silence me. No one wanted to hear from such a backwards thinking thinker as me.

In any case, (no doubt on account of my medieval training) I have always tended to ascribe this anti-traditional position to Ovid, who said such things 2,000 years ago in opposition to the authoritarian poet Virgil and who is listed here as #8 on my all time favorite books of all time.

When it came time for me to write my own literature, I wanted to follow Ovid in my approach, drawing on my deep knowledge of literature but doing it in a way that was deceptively easy to follow. After all, I was hoping to sell my book to the mass of uninterested community college students, not a precious few academics. And I wanted my book to read like a work of a moment, much like The Canterbury Tales, which, between a serious beginning and a serious end comes a baldly comical middle in which things get blowed up real good. That’s my sort of movie book.

Comedy of Tragedy?

This leads me to my last point: is it comedy or tragedy? Well, in my opinion the book is pure comedy. For a sample, read the other free chapter for my comic explanation of love in Las Vegas, “‘Knuckles’ and ‘the Louse’”, and you’ll see what I mean.

But that perspective comes from your perspective as a reader who stands outside the book. From within the book, the experience of my main character (known as ‘the Kid’ on the basis of my having used Wodehouse’s abstract allegorical story in which a young man who is never named comes into a golf club and listens to stories told him by ‘The Oldest Member’; that, too, sprang from experience writing on allegory in my dissertation) who shows up at a club and listens to stories told by an ‘Old-Timer’ is far more tragic.

I make that point in the final paragraph by citing a Malamud quote about life: “Life responds to one’s moves with comic counterinventions.” But I don’t actually cite it. So my question about my own work is whether I expect my reader to understand that that is what I am citing. And as a writer who wants to have his work read critically, my answer is ‘yes, my reader should know the full range of my knowledge.’

But a better question for you my reader is whether you do you know it? And the answer to that is ‘Probably not.’ (Okay, who am I kidding; it’s ‘No.’) The difference between our actual knowledge of our situation in the world, even of ourselves and the contents of our own minds, is cast in doubt by the difference between ‘knowledge that we should know’ and the actual and far more limited knowledge that we do in fact possess.

That’s why people rely on critics telling them things they don’t know rather than deciding that what they don’t know won’t hurt them and adhering to their own limited experience as the judge of all. And that is why I am writing this series of interpretive articles on my silly book. I didn’t want to actually make people who read my light work of fiction struggle with the mountain of knowledge that I have built my picture of the universe out of. It would completely ruin the effect that I am aiming at, which is more like the Renaissance doctrine of sprezzatura (hiding your work behind an easy facade).

But be careful about following me too deeply into the rabbit hole of knowledge in my critical articles which I will continue to post once a week on my blog for free until I am done. Next week in my essay on ‘In the City That Never Sleeps,’ I will explore my belief that too much knowledge is a bad thing anyway (yes, I actually believe this). If you get too serious about knowledge, you will miss its comic aspect.

That would be the greatest tragedy of all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUOZRRU_Dyg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J16lInLZRms

It has to do with the lyrics, which are about dreaming of another world:

When dreaming I’m guided to another world
Time and time again

Okay, that’s fine. My thought about this is the lines “Time and time again” make it sound like time’s forward (horizontal) progress is exchanged for a dream world, which exists on a vertical plane.

And then, Creed doesn’t want to wake up. Instead, Creed fights to stay asleep because of a ‘hunger’ to escape the actual world of life as we live it:

At sunrise I fight to stay asleep
‘Cause I don’t want to leave the comfort of this place
‘Cause there’s a hunger, a longing to escape
From the life I live when I’m awake
So let’s go there
Let’s make our escape
Come on, let’s go there
Let’s ask can we stay?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want the escape into my dreams. I want to actually accomplish my dreams in reality. Because anybody can dream of doing things. But doing stuff is significantly more difficult. So Creed, it seems to me, is dreaming things that cannot come true in reality.

Now, I recognize that Creed has accomplished a rare feat in the pop music world. According to Wikipedia, the band had “seven consecutive chart-topping hits on rock radio.” Not bad.

So what does Creed want aside from chart-topping success? They want it all. The whole tomato. The whole basket of tomatoes. Or perhaps the whole truckload of tomatoes. Or even the whole national tomatoes crop. Or even the world’s supply of tomatoes.

I joke. In fact, they’re not interested in tomatoes at all. Tomatoes are a metaphor for what Creed wants. And as a metaphor, Creed would give up the scientific content of their metaphor (the vehicle we called it if college) for the tenor. Vehicles aren’t important. Creed wants to be taken up to the tenor of Heaven, “where blind men see” (and what do the blind see in Creed’s dreams? ‘golden streets,’ of course):

Can you take me Higher?
To a place where blind men see
Can you take me Higher?
To a place with golden streets

This sounds slightly ridiculous to me if Creed is talking about something real. But if Creed is thinking about the poetic tradition, then Creed’s dreams make sense. Creed is referencing Yeat’s Sailing to Byzantium. I have talked about this poem before, and it is the poem that my favorite movie of the decade takes its name (No Country for Old Men). It is one of my favorite poems of all time (though, to be fair, I have a lot of favorite poems).

The poem starts with the immortal lines:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Yeats was distinguishing the young and foolish lives lived by the young with the the old men:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;

Therefore, Yeats will exchange the world of time for a world which doesn’t age. In his mind, this means sailing to Byzantium, where the ordinary world of real birds singing in trees is exchanged for a ‘sacred city’ where death is stopped and old men can live forever:

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

That sounds great. Of course, if Creed is taking Yeats’ poem as their own and not acknowledging their debt, it does lessen the impact of their telling me about their dreams. It is not Creed’s dream at all. Instead, it is a stolen dream from a greater poet. But, of course, that poet is relying on other poets than himself. He is traveling to Byzantium. It’s almost as if no one individual person can hold such a dream together in him or herself.

I suspect that Creed (and perhaps Yeats himself) has not thought of all the implications of what they are saying. But I’m notr sure. Perhaps they have and they just don’t care. In any case, Creed now adopts this as their creed as they skip from this bad and fallen world in which they have had so much of what we who inhabit the world of time think of as success to the better next:

Although I would like our world to change
It helps me to appreciate
Those nights and those dreams

And Creed has declared that…well I’ll let Creed tell you what they think:

But, my friend, I’d sacrifice all those nights
If I could make the Earth and my dreams the same

Nice! They want to make their life on earth coincide with the world they dream about (you know, the one with golden streets and seeing blind men). The problem that occurs (to me) is that the coincidence is impossible. As a metaphor, it is fine. As reality, it is, well, unrealistic. But that is not what Creed thinks. They think the only difference is that people are not loving each other enough. They even say this:

The only difference is
To let love replace all our hate

After Creed has declared their belief—a belief that I hope you don’t hold in the scientific world in which you and I live—Creed asks to be allowed to stay there:

So let’s go there
Let’s make our escape
Come on, let’s go there
Let’s ask can we stay?

Then they start repeating the chorus (as if that will help). After this repetition of their utterly unrealistic dream, Creed feels that they alive for the very first time. And Creed feels strong enough feel it is in their power to ask again. Only from the perspective of (Where? Heaven? the poet’s corner? Where?) wherever they are can they ask for such things:

Up high I feel like I’m alive for the very first time
Set up high I’m strong enough to take these dreams
And make them mine

This is, in my experience in graduate school, is an instance of the elusiveness of the individual experience, which has been displaced from the center of experience as a foundation on which all other things in our lives are built (something a priori) to something that Creed is questing after after the fact (something a posteriori). They can only find it in their dreams but not in their real lives.

What’s more, this, if I am not mistaken, is not a state of life at all but is a state akin to death. (Help me out here, readers). This, too, has a long tradition in the world of literature and literary experience, but is utterly unrealistic in the world of science (you know, the one where you and I live). Shouldn’t we explore the reality if Creed’s dream if in fact it is an invitation to death and not to life life at all? I think so. (But who am I?)

But then, like Yeats, Creed doesn’t really believe what Creed is saying. The metaphor is entirely detached from the scientific content of the vehicle. They use the world of life to transcend life, just as Yeats does at the end of his poem:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Creed repeats the chorus again, this time twice just to make sure God (or if not God, whoever Creed thinks makes Creed’s utterly ridiculous dreams real) is listening. The sad fact is that God (or whoever) is not listening. Creed must live in the world with all their monetary success, rare accomplishments, and gorgeous women huddling around them when the dream is over. Damn, their life sucks.

I’m not complaining about Creed’s lyrics. Creed can say anything they want about their experience. And I will listen to them, because lyrics don’t matter all that much to me. I’m all about the rhythm and the beat. And I think the world at large agrees with me (but I would be willing to admit that the world at large doesn’t agree with me at all if someone wanted to argue with me here).

But what I am saying is that because lyrics don’t mean that much to me (and possibly to the public at large) that the lyrics don’t reflect the reality of what we believe and how we act. No one really wants to be a golden bird sitting on a drowsy emperor’s shoulder outside of time singing lyrics to put him to sleep. (Help me out here, dear readers. Do they?) That’s like death, isn’t it? Doesn’t such a move outside time leave a lot of life behind, including the youthful romps and careless sexual encounters with bikini clad women that are so integral a part of modern American culture? More importantly, doesn’t such a move outside of time integrate experience at the cost of falsifying reality? And isn’t it better to face even the reality of an imperfect existence than it is to live in a dream world in which your life is integrated but which you can never encounter in reality? I think so.

Marx is a man who integrates the individual’s experience outside of time and who believes because he has transcended time that time has been defeated and so he doesn’t need to worry about time. Man Ray is a Modern artist who forgoes the world of time for the world of spacial rearrangement of objects in subjective space. I like both Marx and Man Ray as thinkers, but they are both operating on an intellectual construct that has been challenged in poetry by Frank O’Hara in his ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed‘ and by Louise Brooks in the conduct of her life.

I prefer to take the whole view of life, and this includes views of life that don’t integrate very well with the intellectual view of life. I prefer to life in an imperfect world and encounter the obstacles that life holds in the way to activating my dreams, which I hold in my mind only in potential. Dreams are easy; life is hard.

This is my serious point in my otherwise silly book (Poker Tales). There I try to represent and reflect the actual practices of people who dream in the world. This is restricted in my book to people who dream about winning a poker game, but I think we can generalize to humanity from the dreams of a individual poker player. Anyway, that was my goal in writing the book. We’ll see just how successful I have been. But that is not up to me (the individual author). It’s up to you, my readers.