The road map to the life of the mind

“I gotta tell you, the life of the mind...there's no road map for that territory. And exploring it can be painful. The kind of pain most people don't know anything about.” Barton Fink [In which we discover Our Hero to be an insufferable prat.]

"But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

The life of the mind — there is a road map for that territory, actually, but it is wildly unreliable.

Still, I've been thinking a great deal about why I think the way I do — why I yam what I yam. I cogitate thus because I am on the other side of the age divide.

Kids These Days think about things differently than I do, but not so differently than I once did. How the heck did that happen?

I've had the “young liberal/old conservative” canard thrown at me, but I protest. Given the resources and consciousness-warping wealth of this country, I believe supplying a roof for every head and basic nutrition for every household table ought to be a given — everything after that is just detail work. That makes me a Lefty, no?

On Paul's urging, I asked the family: “Who is it that you say I am?”

“Oh, he's way-out-there Left,” said my wife.

“Nah, he's conservative,” said my daughter.

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hope to meander through some recollections of people and words that brought me to where I am, currently. But first, some longer reads that have prompted this particular direction of meditation.

“Liberalism and empiricism have parted company, and nothing has been learnt” — so says John Gray, in The Problem of Hyper-Liberalism.

Terry Eagleton — that godless, Commie Christ-nik — surveys Gray's Seven Types of Atheism with a mixture of admiration and disappointment.

“Liberalism has failed, because Liberalism has succeeded” — John Médaille suggests the obvious — Liberalism is mercantilism's vanguard stooge, knee-capping traditional ideologies to gain hegemonic control over the masses and their means — then wonders, “Why does anti-Liberalism fail, and fail always and everywhere?”

The Barton Fink illustration comes from A Tourist With A Typewriter, by Stephen Sparks.

"What Nietzsche had to strain to see, we would now have to strain to overlook."

“Everywhere language has fallen ill, and the oppression of this dreadful sickness weighs on all of human development. Language has continually had to climb up to the highest level it could reach, in order to grasp the domain of thought, and has therefore had to move as far as can be from its profound impulse simply to correspond with things as they are. Thus, in the short space of contemporary civilization its strength has been exhausted by this excessive effort. It can no longer accomplish precisely that purpose for which alone it exists: to enable suffering people to understand one another’s most basic troubles. Man is no longer recognizable in language. He can no longer give a true representation of himself. In this dimly intuited condition, language has everywhere become a power unto itself, which now grabs the people with ghostly arms and forces them to places they don’t even want to go. As soon as they try to understand one another and come to some agreement they are seized by the madness of general concepts. Man is no longer recognizable in language because language no longer corresponds to his actual troubles but only to the hollowness of those tyrannical words and general concepts. The very sounds of the words enchant them. As a consequence of this inability to make themselves known, whatever people create together carries the sign of their lack of mutual understanding. It corresponds only to the hollowness of these tyrannical words and concepts and not to man’s actual troubles. So to all its other sufferings humanity must add this new suffering: that words lead to actions which no longer correspond with feelings.” Untimely Meditations, IV, 5 — Friedrich Nietzsche

 “What Nietzsche had to strain to see, we would now have to strain to overlook” — David Cayley, 1993.

Mom's 80th

Is where I am. Stay robust, y'all.

Obligatory Hockey Post

C'mon -- you think I'm not excited?

The season for my preferred team was comically bad and mercifully short, so I have had no difficulty whatsoever reconnecting with the hockey fervour of my youth. And now that they are playing NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman's latest vanity team, the Gary Bettman Bettmanettes (aka, the Vegas Golden Knights), there is added impetus to stay up late and cheer on the Jets.

Am I giving the Commissioner -- the model for a questionable tattoo -- a bad rap? Kevin McGran takes a shot at equitable reportage.

Making The Argument

I've been sitting on my hands, avoiding it.

I'm lazy. Also nervous about being caught out -- who wants to go first in a debate? Second in a debate -- now that's a different story. You are under no obligation to build a case of your own, aside from, "It's maybe a little more complicated than you think."

Here is an example of what I'm talking about, from four years ago: Gaza And The Loss Of Civilization. Palestine, in other words -- Brian Eno's outrage; Peter Schwartz's measured, "I don't think there is any honour to go around here." If it weren't for Eno we wouldn't get Schwartz -- all via Byrne, who seems to have made this sort of exchange-and-explore his raison d'être.

Byrne's is a good model. I'm afraid I'm more familiar with Joel's experience -- protracted and passionate argument with an individual on the cusp of psychological collapse. Given the tenor of what I'm seeing on the Splinternet I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't a spreading condition.

Related: VR pioneer Jaron Lanier says, "We won, and we turned into assholes" -- over here.

More anon.

What four films define you? (No, really)

It's been a while since a generated meme captured my attention, to say nothing of my imagination, but this one did.

My wife has known me for just over a quarter-century, so I asked her which four she thought defined me.

“Just one condition,” I said. “No Star Wars, 'cos it's too obvious.”

It's mostly about the LEGO these days.

This got a rise from her. “You HAVE to say Star Wars, because there is no more obvious film than that!”

Sigh. Okay then, Star Wars it is — Film Number One (1)! And, in fact, with the latest (final?) installment of Mr. Skywalker's adventures the choice seems even more obvious. Like him, I increasingly find myself wanting nothing so much as to be left alone in a comfortable chair.

“Alright, is there a particular concert movie or band doc that defines you?”

Wow — so many greats to choose from. RUSH, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, and more recently Devin Townsend and Steven Wilson.

I squirmed uncomfortably, and said, “Actually, if there's a music doc that defines me best it is almost certainly . . .”

Film Number Two (2)!  — Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music?

Here's the truth: the first rock music I listened to was Christian Rock. Here's another confession: even though I jettisoned 99% of my Christian Rock library in the early '90s, I remained game to attend Cornerstone Festival — the Lollapalooza of Christian Rock.

I never managed it — but Vickie Hunter and Heather Whinna did. I couldn't say which one of them is agnostic and who is the atheist, but they both have such an open spirit they get attendees and acts alike to speak freely about the aesthetic and moral tensions that hamstring their enjoyment of, and attempts at, artistic expression. Watching it 14 years later, this film doesn't just define where I come from — it does a disturbingly good job of defining the current cultural moment as well. It's on YouTube.

“What is your favourite love story?”

Easy! It's . . .

Film Number Three (3) — Punch Drunk Love. For a lot of us dudes, the trick to intimacy is acknowledging the rage generated by our sense of isolation, and letting 'em both go.

“Okay, we need a writer film. Barton Fink?”

Ooo! Another obvious choice, perhaps...

I do love that film — a lot. But it doesn't “define me” (I hope!). Strangely, (and hopefully not too preciously) the writer film that just might is Stephen Soderbergh's second movie . . .

“I write by myself, for myself, in publications nobody reads.”

Film Number Four (4)! — Kafka. I think Soderbergh is, perhaps not my favourite filmmaker, but my most beloved one. He is a daring stunt man, and as with all daring jugglers, the moments I love him most are when he attempts something bold, and drops the ball. (Conversely, he tries my patience when he delivers the safe goods — Erin Brokovitch, Ocean's-By-The-Dozens, etc). In Kafka he drops the ball six ways to Sunday. It dares all, and I love it — I want to be that.

I do not tag people, but I would love to hear what four films define you (no, really). Comment or link below, svp.

"Die Drasche Maschine"

This is a photo of a primary school class in my father’s (and, eventually, my own) village, taken the year he was born — 1939. It pretty much represents the situation he grew into. A small group of kids, shepherded by a lone woman.

He has stories of getting spanked as a first-grader by the woman principal. The first spankable offense was standing on a teeter-totter to get a better view of a couple of boys in a scrap. This struck him as terribly unfair, and he complained to his parents when he got home.

All he got was a knowing smirk, and “Nah, yo — die Drasche Maschine.” And possibly a comforting pat on the back.

I don’t know if the gal pictured is the legendary “Drasche (eng. ‘Thresher’) Maschine.” The woman who bore the nickname meted out many a strapping in her decades as principal, though. It’s a remarkable anecdote, to me.

Had either of my kids come back from school with stories of getting spanked by a teacher, that person would have committed a fireable offense — an action I’d be keen to see taken. In my father’s time it wasn’t just assumed teachers had every right to corporal punishment, it was a source of wry amusement when it occurred.

And my grandparents were not of the “If you ever get the strap at school, you’ll be getting it at home, too” mindset — also common at that time. Nevertheless, the thought of a relative stranger subjecting their child to corporate punishment with some frequency didn’t seem to phase them. Kids absorbed and grew up, was the thinking.