Surface Noise: Or, How He Learned to Love the Structure More than the Tale Itself

I dunno what it is about books like Essays in Love and Me.  We don't get along too well.  The writing is smart, the prose is snappy, the composition is sound, the representations ring true.  It's even genuinely witty at times.  Yet, I hate it.  And I tried hard to like this book because of a growing optimism I have experienced since meeting my fellow reader who so recently and successfully pushed me not only to finish the book but to write about it here on DagSign (result of her wonderful post.)

Remember, later on, I have said here, early on:  Alain de Botton is a talented writer.  I just happen to think this novel is a poor exercise in Form and Content.  I admit that I disagree with how he uses Plato and Nietzsche, too, among others.  But that is beside the point.  I should be able disagree with an author's ideas and still appreciate his or her work.  Well...not when there is no other content to speak of.  Maybe not then.

Those of you who know me know my hate-on is turned-on regularly by certain kinds of authors, some of whom (but not many) write wonderful verse and prose.  I experienced a seemingly never-ending series of gag-inducing readings over my years in Denver cafes and graduate school.  But that's OK: I want everybody to write and to read and to share.  I'll give anyone a chance.  I'll always find a line, a phrase, even a word to like.  It's writing afterall.  I love it.  And I love language's democratic impulse to be freely shared.  However, the cynical intellectual elitist attitude, or pose, shared by many writers has always bummed me out.  What is it they have that they don't think I have?  What do they think they know that they believe needs so badly to be shared?  I ask this, of course, recognizing that I am often confused as one of these snobs because I freely consort with them.  I even have the nerve to call myself a writer.  Can you believe it?  (Notice how I continue to believe I am not one of them.  That's proof of my optimism, he's says as he leaves the room.) 

I have chosen to live the lifestyle.  But I have reaped my share of alienation(s) by vocally distancing myself from my colleagues with snorts of disbeliefs and even very direct "I cannot believe you think what you have to offer is any better than what anybody else has to offer" statements of disbelief.  I was not nice to many of my fellow grad students who I felt acted like children and behaved as if they deserved their leisurely lives.  They often admitted that they couldn't be bothered with things like teaching, research, and study.  (Well, not Duncan; but I have a perpetual boy-crush on him.)

I can paint you a pretty good portrait of what many 26 year-old women believe a poet should dress like--ugly scarves and turtlenecks--and speak like--husky voiced renderings of each line with an ear for her startlingly cool and quirky metaphors.  (Even she can't believe how good she is.) Or, a portrait of a young man writing what he thinks is genius prose.  This is the guy who chooses to be alone, who is smarter than you and me, and who laughs at the notion that he should represent IT in any other way.  Usually, this cynical prick and that poetess find each other after her reading, drink a bottle of wine over department gossip and sleep together sometime around three in the morning when she is drunk enough to lose prudish inhibitions about being naked around anybody other than her muse and he has shut-up long enough to appear attractive.  (OK it's bile this, but it's good to get these excesses out.)

I am a perpetual critic.  I am my own worst critic:  terrified to let go of everything I write.  I work sentences for years.  I think more out of fear of letting them go--does that even make sense--than for fear of being rejected.  I will find something to hate on.  That's my point.  That's me.  But I am tender, too.  I love to pet and be pet.  I am a closet Romantic.  I actually am a big softy.  And so to get back on track with this post.  To leave hyperbole alone:  Prelude to the post about why I almost finished Alain de Botton's Essays in Love but stopped short and finally gave up this morning is over.

All I ask of an author is to leave the gimmick alone.  In this case, I mean:  we should write responsibly or with Care about the process of writing itself.  Alain de Botton's book is a novel about being in love with the idea of love and all that is generative, regenerative, and degenerative in it.  And he chooses a discourse about social and political philosophy as well as Love to set his story.  He should have something to show me he knows how his narrative and characters work within the work he quotes.  But he doesn't do the work required.  

He says what he thinks.  Let me be clear:  the gimmick is that the narrator is the man in love.  So, shit.  He's lost in love.  He wraps up everything in clever remarks that satisfy his own POV and, in the end, his own ability to make fun of himself.  (See the novel's last two paragraphs.)  I believe that The Gimmick in fiction is a device that aids in the genre's continued path to permanent anti-intellectualism.  It also aids in displaying a quirk common in many contemporary novels: authorial laziness dressed up as innovation in form.  (Man I sound like a conservative.  But I am not.  Just a let-down lover of innovation.  After all, Novels should be novel.)

Much of mainstream Western Fiction is anti-intellectual.  I have my ideas about this, and most of my ideas focus on the market and our education industry.  But the authors don't help.  I think it's unfair to blame the readers.  Authors are to blame, for example, when they boil down complex philosophical forms and content into trite dialogues that merely summarize prior significant work.  De Botton's book, for me, is fiction's equivalent of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  Take an idea that uniquely dwells in its topic's complexity, then flatten it into something that can be stated as if it were common sense all along, then sell it as problem solved.  Apparently solved, as in the narrator's case in this book because, don't you know, he will simply fall in love all over again.  Or, don't even bother to tell the story, to illustrate the details, rather opting for hastily sketched caricatures in order to fit the structure of the artist's vision: package the caricature as the History of the Form Itself, content included.

I suppose I can be blamed for what my fellow Koreans call Eye-Shopping.  I mean the book looked good with all it promised.  What did I expect?  My standards were low:  a story, some inside theory jokes, literary references galore, and some sex.  Isn't that what a book called Essays in Love should offer?  What I got was a book that outlined an argument about Love by referring to a lot of things the author has read in lieu of actual scenes that illustrated his argument.  In other words, the book IN Love is a book without it and sold as told by a guy who may have been in love or may not have but so it goes.  

If I could eat a pint of ice cream and not feel full of ice cream, that is how I feel after reading de Botton's novel.

I feel empty of ice cream.

[By the way, this is a problem:  confusing Philosophy with Common Sense.  Common Sense is the explicit rejection of paradox.  Paradox is what Philosophy dwells in.  Common Sense is explicitly anti-Philosophical.  And Common Sense is killing much more than philosophy these days.  It's killing intellectualism in literature.  Hey Poets!  It's just not prose, you know.  You guys have Billy Collins to cope with.  Have you been reading what he's saying about Poetry!  That guy will haunt poetry for decades after he is gone because there are hundreds if not thousands of high school teachers who will use him as a weapon against all that is intellectual in verse.  Sorry Smart High School Teachers like the one I love.  But you know it's true.]

I guess it comes down to two things for me:  1) Alain de Botton's first novel is a practice in fidelity to structure (not form) over content and 2) I just don't care about the characters.  Let's ignore 2.  I mean, maybe I just don't like folks like the narrator and Chloe.  I'll focus on 1.

I will be quick.

First, the good:  I like the structure of the novel.  Funny, huh, after I trash the book itself and question de Botton's fidelity to Social and Political Philosophy as well as to The Novel, I have the nerve to say I like the way he structured the book.  Well, I do.  Each Chapter examines love in what appears to be an ever-evolving and increasingly mature vantage point on Love vis-a-vis a walk/talk through an ever-increasingly complex vantage point on human relationships, or How We See Ourselves In-the-World.  I thought to myself looking at it:  WOW, this is the shit.

He begins with Romantic Fatalism and moves out from there to trip through: Idealization, Seduction, Authenticity, Mind & Body, Marxism, False Consciousness, Liberalism, Beauty, Everyday Language, Something Called "What do you see in her?", Skepticism and Faith, et al.  It looks fun.  Looks.

In Authenticity, de Botton writes 

6. I had to find out more about Chloe, for how could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt.  But the patience and intelligence required to fathom someone else went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind.  I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press my companion into simple categories, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the subtleties of human nature.

I marked this early paragraph with a question mark.  It's clear to me now that it holds the key to my distaste for the novel.  As I continued to read, I continued to ask myself what I was supposed to think about the narrator and his relationship to "the author."  I firmly believe that Alain de Botton is not the narrator nor do I appreciate readers who knee-jerk respond to first-person narratives by associating the narrator's beliefs and personalities and actions to the author's beliefs and so on.

But this paragraph confuses me.  Here lies an authorial excuse for not describing Chloe, a woman as a reader I wished I knew more about.  The narrator-in-love is telling me why he fails at getting to know her better:  he is infatuated with her.  Ok.  I waited, though.  And de Botton never got around to telling me about Chloe.  And he couldn't.  The structure of the book proscribes Chloe's development as a character I can care about enough to understand why the narrator might move beyond infatuation to possess her to love to be with her. (It doesn't matter anyway because SPOILER, their relationship doesn't work out.)

If what de Botton calls "the care of a novelist" is, in fact, "capturing the subtleties of human nature," then de Botton fails.  His novel fails even to catch the subtleties of the philosophers he quotes.  Even if this can be seen as a nod to the readers that "even I, the author, am failing too," then I am not satisfied because the line then becomes an excuse (a plea for an excuse) not to do the work it takes to present content that attempts to cope with human nature. 

David Foster Wallace complained about the abundance of irony in contemporary fiction.  Well, I have whined about Wallace, but maybe this novel is an example of what he was railing against.  I think de Botton is terrribly ironic.  And I mean terribly as in poorly or as in sinfully.  Is it too much to say that I find his book too cheeky even?

In Skepticism and Faith, de Botton cites Friedrich Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil.  Nietzsche was looking for grand attempters.  Whether or not a judgement or an attempt in life was false or true, who is willing to make the judgment regardless?  Nietzsche writes "the falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it."  The value of an undertaking is examined then.  What does it mean to attempt to love somebody if we cannot know whether or not our assessment of our lover or the circumstances in which we fell in love are/were true or not?  I think this is what de Botton is getting at with his novel.  Well, this is all fine and good to me and, quite frankly, it intellectually pleases me.  BUT where is my friggin story author man?

Anyway, on to the next novel.  I could go on but I am teaching 800 high school kids and 40 of them are waiting for me.  I want to write about a novel that will permit me to talk about the mechanics of fiction in a way that gets into the material not simply the structure.  I really am annoyed by Essays in Love.  Annoyed because I like the author and feel let down.  sniff sniff.

(i'll proofread this later.  pardon any errors.)

Moving Right Along

The real date of post: 3/31/09

I read the book during my morning commutes, and there are times where I dogeared the page because it so uncannily describes me or Gary (via Praise goggles) or me'n'Gary. Or more simply, in the words of Homer Simpson: "It's funny because it's true."

For instance, on page 5, he says, "...we had been destined for one another. We learnt that both of us had been born at around midnight in the same month of an even-numbered year. Both of us had played clarinet and had parts in school productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot and a cavity in the same rear molar. Both of us had a habit of sneezing in bright sunlight and of drawing ketchup out of its bottle with a knife." This struck me as hilarious because every romantic I know does this "romantic fatalism" game, where they start seeing all the coincidences in their relationship. Gary and I are too practical to do that seriously, but sometimes we can't help it either: We were both in Chicago at the same time before coming to Asia. Our Korea contract dates are one day apart: 8/24 and 8/25. Our birthdays are two days apart, 7/25 and 7/27, exactly ten years apart. AD NAUSEUM.

However, we do agree that we are ready to be done with this book'n'blog--in fact, I think Gary only read half of it and skimmed the rest; his response is conspicuously ambiguous when I ask him if he's finished it. It wasn't engaging enough; in a good novel, we expect movement, at least to the point where we'd want to read it even when it's lights-out (I just wanna finish this chapter!).

In all fairness, de Botton writes "essays" with all his points numbered (1. Love blah blah 2. Love blahbity blah 3. Love lalalala), which Gary, the walking Wikipedia, says is reminiscent of some philosopher of course I forget whom already. But then, I'm entertained by people like David Sedaris, who also does the whole collection of essays thing. (Don't be a snob. He's on NPR for a reason. Don't be a snob about that either.) It's because David Sedaris doesn't write about only one imaginary lover and all her (well, his) idiosyncracies and their less-than-exciting adventures, adding his ruminations about love, and then it's page 126 and nothing has happened yet. Plus, Sedaris is simply funnier. Jesus Shaves? Youth in Asia? Come on. Hilares.

The reason that I don't expect "movement" in Sedaris's books is that each essay is what it is. As witty as de Botton can be at times, he weaves a love story into the seams of philosophical meandering; a person like me, then, wants to skip through the chapters to see what happens with the narrator and his girlfriend, only to be disappointed at the lack of buildup in their characters by the time the climax of their story hits. [WARNING: SPOILER ALERT] For example, on page 156, the male character finally makes some pointed, confrontational comments:
"It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there."
"I don't see a wall."
"That's what I mean. You're refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this."
"Than what?"
OOOH. Now we're cookin'. I can feel the tension. I can see her trying to pretend she can prolong the inevitable break-up.

Then, for the next four pages, points 7-9, he philosophizes. I DO think his points are insightful. I see what he's saying about "romantic terrorism," that once someone starts losing the power of holding the other's interest, they start to wreak havoc in ways that "betray all the signs of childish rage, a rage at one's own impotence in the face of a more powerful adversary." I have been a romantic terrorist (ask my high school boyfriend, whom I was "with" for a year after we broke up) and I have dated romantic terrorists (guys have given me crazy speeches about MY fear of commitment or MY unrealistic standards when I tell them I don't want to date them anymore). However, by page 156 as opposed to page 5, I don't feel a connection with the two characters, I am tired of his poignant rants, and I just want to know if they make it or not.

I remember my friend Thad watching "Friends"- an episode from the Ross and Rachel saga - and he was engrossed. Beguiled. His girlfriend (my cousin) and I were watching him and smirking- Thad had always been the first to say he hated "Friends" but oh-ho! Titillated with the old R and R story. When he caught us, he said, "What. Everyone loves a love story."

It's true. Everyone loves a love story. But this book of essays doesn't have much of a love story, so that the contemplative examination of love seems rather frivolous and insubstantial. It was about two people who were attracted to each other's quirks (gap between front teeth, insatiable chocolate cravings, f-ugly luggage, love for museums) and were of the same race, SES, and age range so "falling in love" seemed easy. It makes me wonder what people's emotions are really based on. What is "falling in love" really, especially if they break up and feel like they never really knew each other anyway, or the memory of the relationship grows less important with the passing of time: "Like a century that is reduced to and symbolized by a certain pope or monarch or battle, my love affair refined itself to a few iconic moments..." (199). I mean, FOR GOD'S SAKE! All that emotion spent on someone or something that was really quite shallow, transient even! The narrator goes on for chapters after the breakup about all his complexes-- but it almost seems trifling that such a shallow relationship could provoke such intoxication with sorrow.

Or maybe that IS the point.

One last thing I liked. The narrator thinks of his fading emotions and says he feels guilty: "an infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear" (198), which I thought was so painfully true at least for a weirdo like me.

The book wasn't bad. It was a quick and easy read, perfect for morning and evening commutes. It was slightly embarrassing to hold a book that declares "ESSAYS IN LOVE" but whatever. I'm in Korea, the land of lovey dovey soap operas--Why can't they be together, even though she's a famous film star and he's only a lowly writer?! If we took random passages and extracted topics to discuss, there could be many lively discussions, but reading the book... as a book? I'm glad to be done with it and move on to more exciting reads.

Nerd Love

I used to be in this band in Chicago. Eh, I was starting my late-twenties crisis. It was fun. Let me plug their myspace.

Anyway, we were in Detroit doing some shows and were in a dive bar from 10pm-1am or so on a night off. The boys were back-handed-boasting and flirting with the bartender because there was no one else, except for the girl I saw in the bathroom who didn't wash her hands. Outnumbered by boys and feeling bored, I did what I have always done when in this type of waiting-around situation. I pulled out a book from my purse. To read at a bar. While sipping on cranberry juice since I had thrown up the night before. Into my purse. Don't judge me; I washed it out.

It's purposeless to hide. I've wanted to be cool, but will forever remain nerd. I used to stealthily go about this, you know, pretending that I couldn't relate every single life circumstance to To Kill a Mockingbird, which I've read six times, or that I learned what the term "beaver" means from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Thankfully before a game of dirty charades, where I would pick from the bag "So-and-so's furry beaver" and didn't have to ask what that was--yay!). I mean, what's wrong with the fact that my travelin' bags are always too heavy 'cause of the books and that I need Isabel Allende in my life and a copy of Franny and Zooey in my back pocket?

How ironically fitting that I meet an American, that is exponentially nerdier than I am. IN KOREA?!

I realize we are being total nerdskis about the blog, and I marvel (and swoon) at how unabashedly Gary can write "So yeah friends, my girlfriend and I are totally gonna write about this book I picked out, it's called ESSAYS IN LOVE."

HAHAHAHHAHAHAA!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! Oh, Gary.

FIRST ENTRY COMING SOON. We've both done our homework. Holy crap. Nerdski English teachers.

Alain de Botton. Essays in Love. 1993.

Praise and I will be using this blog to post about the books we are reading together. We'll first read Alain de Botton's 1993 novel, Essays in Love. I have wanted to read this for a while. I am particularly interested in the author's attempt at what I have often called creative philosophy. For better or worse--and he has his share of lovers and haters--de Botton purposefully combines theory and fiction in his narratives.

This novel is my choice for our first read. Praise will pick our second book. Our rule about choosing books is simple: I must pick a book she hasn't read; she must pick a book I haven't read. That's it. No restrictions on genre. While we have a few strikingly similar tastes, we really do come at things, like reading, differently. So, there should be some fresh discussion on a DagZine blog for the first time in 3 years. I am very excited.

Essays in Love is a novel about two folks who rapidly fall in love after meeting on an airplane. It's how the author handles the description of this important event--the falling "in love"--that needs attention. De Botton receives his harshest criticism from the literati crowd which claims, if I may summarize, he turns complex philosophical topics into trite cliches. He receives his most passionate support from readers who find his work fascinating for its attempt to dwell in complex discussions about topics such as Love.

I am afraid that de Botton's best and worst criticism opens a worthless binary opposition for considering his work: Is it good or bad when a writer uses fiction to discuss complex issues usually left to a philosopher? That is a bad question. It begs so much and seeks a knee-jerk "Yes" or "No" answer. In the U.S., Fiction--the genre as well as its practitioners--is often regarded as anti-intellectual, and for good reason I suppose. English Departments worldwide are populated with lit-critters who do not read the philosophers they cite in essays and discussion; a lack of scholarly rigor in some departments is infamous and to make matters worse many people are in denial that a problem exists at all; teachers read their peers writing about other writers and cite it rather than reading complex works for themselves; the Cambridge Companion series is a replacement for actual contemporary research; anthologies are too common; Harold Bloom has become an expert in everything literary in the English language that is important; Terry Eagleton has become an expert in everything Marx & structural; ETC. I have heard some things in conferences that would make many quoted philosophers puke blood.

On the other hand, we might expand this issue slightly by stating English-speaking authors who write novels are often encouraged not to handle complex issues. It's a shame. It's a critical phenomenon I don't understand. It reminds me of the crazy insistence that we should leave philosophy to the philosophers. I would suggest, and I am hopeful that Praise agrees, such insistence is nonsense and harmful. Shouldn't we all make grand attempts? It appears de Botton is attempting to attempt.

Is de Botton's novel worthy of its subject matter? We'll see.

Below is a concise list of useful links about the author.

Google "Web" Search.

Google "Blogs" Search.

The British Council's Contemporary Writer's entry for Alain de Botton.

The Complete Review's collection of de Botton reviews (with some links to originating reviews.)

The Author's web site.

[edition note: We are reading the 2006, Picador edition. It's the edition currently available in the UK. The edition currently available in the US and in Japan is from 2008 and has different art direction.]

Sound and Inqusition

Jonathan Lethem. Gun, With Occasional Music, 1994.(2005 edition, purchased in used-book store, Mason, OH, early Spring 2008.)

From his review of Motherless Brooklyn,) Luc Sante on Lethem:

Lethem possesses all the equipment necessary to write giant postmodern slabs that will invite decades of exegesis. Instead he has chosen to pursue something that calls to mind Manny Farber's famous category: art "that termite-like...feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement." He writes what are apparently small genre novels, but ones that sustain, perfect, and destroy the givens of genre all at once.

D.H. Lawrence's "A Spirit of Place

Chapter 1 - The Spirit of the Place

WE like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books. Just childishness, on our part. The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne.

It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has babbled about children's stories.

Why ? -- Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.

The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.

There is a new feeling in the old American books, far more than there is in the modern American books, which are pretty empty of any feeling, and proud of it. There is a 'different' feeling in the old American classics. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new, a displacement. And dis- placements hurt. This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut finger. Put a rag round it.

It is a cut too. Cutting away the old emotions and conscious- ness. Don't ask what is left.

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

The old American artists were hopeless liars. But they were artists, in spite of themselves. Which is more than you can say of most living practitioners.

And you can please yourself, when you read The Scarlet Letter , whether you accept what that sugary, blue-eyed little darling of a Hawthorne has to say for himself, false as all darlings are, or whether you read the impeccable truth of his art-speech.

The curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth. Like Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing himself all the while as a little horror.

Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out . of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.

The artist usually sets out - or used to - to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never . trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Now we know our business in these studies; saving the American tale from the American artist.

Let us look at this American artist first. How did he ever get to America, to start with? Why isn't he a European still, like his father before him?

Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.

He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will Iynch me, and that's my freedom. Free ? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to Iynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

No, no, if you're so fond of the truth about Queen Victoria, try a little about yourself.

Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?

They didn't come for freedom. Or if they did, they sadly went back on themselves.

All right then, what did they come for ? For lots of reasons. Perhaps least of all in search of freedom of any sort: positive freedom, that is.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you kind something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

And after all there is a positive side to the movement. All that vast flood of human life that has flowed over the Atlantic in ships from Europe to America has not flowed over simply on a tide of revulsion from Europe and from the confinements of the European ways of life. This revulsion was, and still is, I believe, the prime motive in emigration. But there was some cause, even for the revulsion.

It seems as if at times man had a frenzy for getting away from any control of any sort. In Europe the old Christianity was the real master. The Church and the true aristocracy bore the responsibility for the working out of the Christian ideals: a little irregularly, maybe, but responsible nevertheless.

Mastery, kingship, fatherhood had their power destroyed at the time of the Renaissance.

And it was precisely at this moment that the great drift over the Atlantic started. What were men drifting away from? The old authority ot Europe? Were they breaking the bonds of authority, and escaping to a new more absolute unrestrained- ness ? Maybe. But there was more to it.

Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposi- tion to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the hrst generation.

But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery. Hence the slow, smoul- dering patience of American opposition. The slow, smouldering corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the unwilling subject, the unremitting opposition.

Whatever else you are, be masterless.

Ca Ca Caliban

Get a new master, be a new man.

Escaped slaves, we might say, people the republics of Liberia or Haiti. Liberia enough! Are we to look at America in the same way ? A vast republic of escaped slaves. When you consider the hordes from eastern Europe, you might well say it: a vast republic of escaped slaves. But one dare not say this of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the great old body of idealist Americans, the modern Americans tortured with thought. A vast republic of escaped slaves. Look out, America! And a minority of earnest, self-tortured people.

The masterless.

Ca Ca Caliban

Get a new master, be a new man.

What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new 'humanity' which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.

America has never been easy, and is not easy today. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it has been so from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is: THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy.

'We are the masterless.' That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It's a Hen-Eagle.

The Spaniards refused the post-Renaissance liberty of Europe. And the Spaniards filled most of America. The Yankees, too, refused, refused the post-Renaissance humanism of Europe. First and foremost, they hated masters. But under that, they hated the flowing ease of humour in Europe. At the bottom of the American soul was always a dark suspense, at the bottom of the Spanish-American soul the same. And this dark suspense hated and hates the old European spontaneity, watches it collapse with satisfaction.

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco w ill in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.

There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? And what if England dies ?

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when I they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obey- ing from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

But before you can do what IT likes, you must first break the spell of the old mastery, the old IT.

Perhaps at the Renaissance, when kingship and fatherhood fell, Europe drifted into a very dangerous half-truth: of liberty and equality. Perhaps the men who went to America felt this, and so repudiated the old world together. Went one better than Europe. Liberty in America has meant so far the breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfil IT. IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.

That's why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America, then; and that's why we come. Driven by IT. We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us, and decides for us. Unless, of course, we are just escaped slaves, vulgarly cocksure of our ready-made destiny. But if we are living people, in touch with the source, IT drives us and decides us. We are free only so long as we obey. When we run counter, and think we will do as we like, we just flee around like Orestes pursued by the Eumenides.

And still, when the great day begins, when Americans have at last discovered America and their own wholeness, still there will be the vast number of escaped slaves to reckon with, those who have no cocksure, ready-made destinies.

Which will win in America, the escaped slaves, or the new whole men?

The real American day hasn't begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The will of the people being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn't count for much. So, in the name of the will of the people, get rid of masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere phrase of the will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself, and try to recover your own wholeness.

So much for the conscious American motive, and for democracy over here. Democracy in America is just the tool with which the old master of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe destroyed, potentially, American demo- cracy will evaporate. America will begin.

American consciousness has so far been a false dawn. The negative ideal of democracy. But underneath, and contrary to this open ideal, the first hints and revelations of IT. IT, the American whole soul.

You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Henceforth be mastered.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Reading Wittgenstein, again, lately.

This notebook of arguments--how else can we name his "books"?--continues to fascinate me. Nevermind I am still learning how to comprehend some of the logic, I find his arguments so very significant to Writing and Literature.

It's not just seeing and knowing what I see and knowing how to say what I mean about what I think I see. It's about the space of seeing and the colloboration of creating the site/sight.

I am no fan of Bertrand Russell. Bad memories from undergraduate study, probably. I think I need to revisit Russell. I think I will.