Study means to me not to learn material but to pay close attention, to derive meaning, more precisely to expand what might only be a hint of relevance to me into a real relationship. It is to dig deep at a spot vaguely marked, to follow a path I can barely make out through heavy brush or a wind-swept desert. It is a hunt with no prey, no final figure in my sights, just the erotic excitement to keep going. I see nothing heroic in it. It makes the world (others) useful to my understanding, acknowledging separation so as to include and be included.
Given this understanding I could say I have been studying for more than fifty years, ever since as an early teenager I pored over the printed sermons of my thoughtful minister for wisdom. That thread of study is still present when each morning I pick up the path of whatever reading material currently engages me. What am I looking for? Any answer to that would reduce this search to the scientific and school version of study: knowledge, the truth, solutions to questions, whatever can be assessed. Rather for me the activity is like tightening and playing on the cord that is stretched between myself and the world, my inwardness and its only apparent outwardness. As I appear to be studying the other the other wants to study me. I peer through the eyes of the other into myself. As in scientific study I seek out only relevant materials, yet relevance intuited personally, only barely communicable to a community of scholars, Paul Goodman’s lost dream. What I call back-to-back reading of two ostensibly divergent writers forces them into the room together for a discussion they might never have; I am the tertium quid who does not belong. Why it is these two and not others is both accidental and intuitive; I am there to find out how they both could exist in the world and to find out how I can.
History, the context of no context (trenchant title of George S. Trow), has been my primary access road. I am accidentally here and not there. When I was sixteen I imbibed the notion that we could not understand the present, that is, confirm it, without knowing where it came from. For the most part I shoved into the bushes the too-familiar modern period, which seemed to begin with the French Revolution, and sought out what came before, whatever linked me with the murky origins of the human. I read those 19th century writers who were surveying and embodying the transformation of the West--Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky—but not the modern period itself, which I considered trivial, derivative. I fed on the gap, and stretched my legs over it. At times I was seduced into the present, for instance by politics in the late-sixties, but in the end found my home elsewhere. I did this without thinking much about my motivation or the shape this trajectory would take over my lifetime.
Twenty years ago I re-entered the 19th century, but then also modernism and some contemporary thought. I hungered for the present. In the past four years I’ve caught up further in my study, now reading almost exclusively books written in and about the present. I feel current, without being swept away by the currents because of that long period of living in the glorious gap, which made me less than totally responsible for the present. I no longer consider, nor need to consider the world as trivial; it is the book I am reading with fascination.
I can see how I am and am not this world. I am not this world partly because my past context, the forties through the seventies, seems now almost as alien to the world today as the middle ages was to me when I studied it. The desire to be wholly modern, which Rimbaud challenged us with, is now a thing of the past. A world I witnessed being destroyed, and which I lamented in my youth even as I championed its destruction as a Marxist, is now unambiguously gone. I pick my way through the rubble.
It has been difficult for me to validate my mode of study for myself because of the preponderance of the scientific/informational model, which requires the anonymity of the researcher. But that’s no different from what I dealt with in my academic years. It assumes a shape to my needs which starts with the universal, and not my particularity (Kierkegaard said something like this in his critique of the scientific, and of Hegel). Theoretically, what I come to from study is expected to be assimilable to the great mass of knowledge already acquired, either reinforcing it or critiquing it, and if the latter then it must be subject to counter-critique on the same terms. This is a kind of terror, that the truth we find for ourselves must bow to this universal, the province of experts who know better than I ever could, since I have not studied for this purpose. The scorn for solipsism is the threat; silence is often the only response one can make: “you’re the boss, it's your world, not mine”.
It is similar with playing music. I have put the advertisement for the professional musician on my sandwich board, since a music musician just doesn’t cut it, and these two are in conflict. In the effort to make my music available I shifted from purely a love of playing and offering it to others to a view from the outside, to be seen as talented, potentially valued by others. A huge maw opens that must be fed continually and to the exclusion of any attention to one’s own need; that is the sacrifice of the contemporary Artist. We devote ourselves to feeding a voracious alligator, who will take our own arm off if we don’t keep throwing it food. We become part of the production line in the slaughterhouse (see the movie “Food Inc.” and you’ll see us), and the job of the artist is to work out what is needed by that great Other, what will feed It. Whatever that is, we cannot halt its hunger. We think it is our hunger that is operating, but it is not; our hunger has gone off in a corner to die, and we may never know it. In fact, many are now being trained from the outset (and wasn't this the complaint about complacent youth in the fifties) to orient towards that Other and use their talents to find out what to feed it; they never imagine what they could do if they turned their backs on it. The Artist is seduced into thinking that he/she should create something unassimilable, but that is the very thing the voracious maw is looking for. At best the Artist converts, translates what they need, their individuality and eros, into what others can use. The Artist is noted to be the expert at doing this.
This diatribe may seem like a diversion but it is not. I turn my study away from the assimilable data/conclusion/critique model towards that hunger that I would not allow to die, and feed that instead. Of course, I have to accept the paradox that, as I have often said, I wish to make this turn available, and in so doing must face self-ridicule (which I unfortunately put into the mouths of others). I resurrect the fool, not the fool-comedian, who is today’s model of one begging for attention, but the fool-irrelevant. Someone characterized me thirty years ago as three-prong jack in a two-prong world (back when electrical codes were changing), as if the world did not accommodate me then but eventually would. The fact that it hasn't is both hard to take and, in the end, ok. Not tremendous, not “well then, you’re a true individual, a free spirit, etc.”, but just bearable, the way things are. Nothing special, as the Buddhist would say; "I'm ok with it".
