16.~~~~~~~~~~

There is so much to be said, so much that clamors in this brain to be said, and it is impossible to stop. I shift from envying those who can maintain a calm flow, like a river not subject to the seasons, to daring—and it takes a high-pitched state of boldness—to despise them. And that shift itself, how I long for a partner in crime who does not patronize me for that, who is as close to me as the fingers that type this. All we can ever know or have a right to know is our honesty, and how febrile, how debilitating it is. We cannot be honest for anyone else. We train in this school of shame at ourselves, cowering at our boldness as if it belonged to another who wielded fierce weapons. The discipline is not against us but for us, our necks on the chalk line, a discipline that refuses the reward of knowing we can communicate, that these words might possibly be shared. This is the private world, where we are finally allowed to love ourselves and ignore praise and condescension. A private death with no mourners. When I know I cannot allow anyone to read or hear me then I know I am at the proud center, the tree in the forest, whose falling will be for myself alone. And this alone is what I will offer to others, without apology for whatever interruption it might cause. Hearing the resonance myself is enough, but the resonance is in the air, and so strikes everyone within earshot. I cannot suffer as the creator without suffering also as witness.

All art, meaning that which lives in contempt and undisclosed fear of what seeks to understand and include it, is the willful accident in the midst of this contradiction. Artists are no elite above the common herd but are most humbled by our prosaic, incestuous need for the other, to validate, mirror, understand us, come to me Jesus, Buddha, with your embracing forgiveness and mothering. Then the childish reaction—we’ve had enough. There is no middle ground, no synthesis, no wisdom. And no neat conclusion (as in non-fiction, in theory) that can tie the whole together in a single more useful truth.  ¶ 9:01 AM 0 comments

  15.~~~~~~~~~~

What do we express to others and what do we keep hidden? It seems that our culture continually renews itself, or reproduces itself, by expanding the realm of what one is encouraged to express and contracting other expression as belonging to species that have become extinct. Of the latter, for instance, it is commonly believed that we can understand the speech of a nineteenth century minister but his categories have become obsolete and permanently useless. The former is what tends most to be noted and anticipated. Once we discover something for ourselves we give it, or validate it, by making it public. This is itself a result of historical development, a concomitant of the history of democratization and social leveling. The conjuncture can be traced back at least to the Protestant Reformation, which proclaimed every man his own priest--interpreter and confessor--at the same moment as it urged everyone’s sin to be publicly exposed to others. Similarly, one can read philosophy, from the Enlightenment on through the Romantics, Marx, Freud, the post-structuralists, as sharing in this dynamic of revealing the heretofore hidden key to understanding what appears on the surface, exposing the sins of naiveté. Truth, or at least the truth useful to a particular moment in time, is what is now widely suppressed or repressed and will someday be known. To be the holder of a truth others have yet to learn or be convinced of is an ego-motivator of vast energy, evident in daytime tv and the press as much as academic theorists.

Each time a new realm of the private is opened up there is some kind of scandal, as if all barriers have been broken and nothing is safe or sacred. But then an adjustment is made to the new situation, only to be violated once again. A common view of primitive society is that such violations are ritualized, frozen and repetitive, whereas our culture—now world culture—has broken out of ritual sacrifice and violation and can validate each successive exposure as truly new, telling us something we did not know about ourselves just at the moment we most need to know it. Then this becomes historicized, no longer disturbing truths that reveal anything to us but rather belong to the past, and the subject of study, of sympathetic treatment and an attempt to understand why they caused such a fuss. This is our version of ritualized transgression and reconciliation, creation followed by consolidation and institutionalization, a component of the overarching and still vibrant faith in progress.

There is no identity between what happens on the level of empirical social history--what one is commonly encouraged to reveal and or conceal in a family, to friends, or in a blog--and the uncovering of the secrets of society/ego/language by Freud, Marx and the post-structuralists. The former implies, as does the notion of sin, that one knows what is hidden and chooses either to reveal it or not; the hidden is easily accessible to the individual. The latter attempts to expose what is denied, repressed, covered over, by a dominant ideology, whatever is the current common-sense view of the world. This “hidden” is general for society and requires a wrenching out of common habits to be uncovered. But the two are analogous; they hinge on the familiar belief that to show more of what has been previously hidden is a transgression and a liberation, however slight or large the consequences, and might possibly begin a new chapter of personal or social existence. And this goes a long way to defining what “the new” means in our world.

I am not arguing against this ideological prejudice, only noting it as such. One might say, I take note of it to stay one step ahead not of the belief itself but of the naiveté of automatically believing it.  ¶ 8:13 AM 0 comments