Degenerate Art

"Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were narrowly traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience. The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from a conservative aesthetic taste, and partly from their determination to use culture as a propaganda tool."(Wiki) Soviet Russia employed similarly uncomplicated, 'honest', physically strong archetypes as its cultural heroes of joyful utilitarian import.

It seems to me there are obvious parralels with the penchant for superhero films and blockbusters as a whole, particularly in the English speaking West, where in such films the hero is a tool of the state- the state good by definition even if hampered by its petty 'liberal' adherence to lawful methods of control- and here often is where the powerful, clearly delineated character of the blood and soil, or uber-patriotic hero steps in to defeat the villains, who are, needless to say, unpatriotic, disobedient pariahs of absolute evil. A little shading of the characters and we supposedly are in the realms of fascinating complexity; eg a man dressed up as a kind of bat had unhappy experiences as a child. Who'd have guessed?
This while people like Kieslowski and Tarkovsky are virtually anonymous figures in the age in which they dwelt. See for example this almost literally unbelievably ignorant list of the greatest 100 films made by that bastion of critical judgement, The Times, where ET comes third, Casablanca first, Point Break and Jurassic Park grace the list, while foreign films are amost completely absent. And this from The Times' critics; not a bunch of shitkickers sending in their earnest but uneducated comments.

Whereas the Nazis made a great noise about the horrors of modernist degenerate art, a little further down the road of time and what is far more effective is simply silence regarding the existence of the more penetrative artistic emanations. As Hitler said, "How good for the governments of the world that their people don't think," and this naturally the ultimate reasoning for the dumbing down of modern culture. Why technological progress should lead to an equal and opposite regress intellectually is perhaps an illustration of the validity of one of the great scientific truths, extending fearlessly across imagined boundaries of self-containment: that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, though why this should necessarily be so here seems a more elusive proposition.

Caravaggio- St Jerome, Death of the Virgin

What especially prompts the posting of the two paintings are the folds of cloth; on the left of the St Jerome, and the drapery hanging from above in the Death of the Virgin, particularly the noumenous power and solemnity of the canopy in the latter.

The Point of Perspective & the Search for Truth

What is the reality of the point of perception from which one observes oneself within disciplines such as philosophy and psychology?
Is the fullness of the reality of a sphere comprehensible to a point within that sphere, or is this an absurd proposition, and the only way a sphere can know itself fully is existentially as a sphere?
One might argue that the point of perspective expands with knowledge, though one might as easily argue that the point contracts with 'knowledge', since knowledge amounting to the notion of the point within the sphere actually knowing itself as that sphere is an absurdity.
Thus the immeasurably more satisfying indirect, analogous, artistic forms of talking about truth that actually shake the foundations of the point of perspective, rather than the rational abstract means which serve to solidify the illusion of the point, convinced it is growing in knowledge, heading for truth, just around the corner.
The more falsely sure the point within the sphere of its intellectual knowledge, the more abominable the intellectual and ensuing practical results. Thus materialistic communism, fascism/neo-conservatism, etc and a myriad of less obviously insane insanities.
Another variation is the neurotic, where the point's self certainty is undermined, but it has no faith in the sphere within which it has its existence.

The Usurper

As we all know, the Christian religion grafted itself onto this anciently celebrated period around the Winter Solstice, chose this period as the opportune time to celebrate Jesus' birth, and so gradually effected the passing from one faith to another relatively seamlessly. Attempting to to do otherwise would be an act of cultural crudeness doomed to failure. Now we have the same process of a new faith being grafted onto an old, and in this case the orgy of consumerism at Christmas and New Year's marks the new god of human materialism. 'Human materialism' as it as nothing to do with faith in the natural world which could theoretically amount to a kind of materialism. This modern religion is specifically restricted to the materialism of human imagining and creation in the form of consumerism. So the new faith of materialism/consumerism, which is a kind of anti-faith, as it is ultimately truthless, effects a coup d'etat and usurps the celebratory season by imposing its values onto that time, with the core rituals now involving maximum consumption of consumer goods by consumers. Out with the old, in with the new.

A Good Alibi

All evil generally requires is a good alibi to become respectable.
All evil requires is a very good alibi to become virtuous.
All one needs generally do is examine the alibi to be back with naked evil.

The Birth of Man

Through use of remarkable imaginative powers, where I coalesce my being with the great psychic forces that lie hidden from the eyes of the profane, I have recently witnessed the great moment in time when we can truly be said to have become human; this moment being the formation of language by our upwardly mobile ancestors.
The scene: A cave somewhere in the Eastern Europe. Four hairy, smelly individuals; animal of strength & stupid of expression, gazing with all the rapture of dumb beasts at another being, but this one endowed with the faint but unmistakable signs of a deeper intelligence. He has a piece of flint held purposefully in his right hand, & emanates an air of somewhat hesitant pedagogical authority. He bursts forth into speech:
"First what we have to establish are the rules of grammar. Otherwise, all will be shapeless chaos & the darkness of utter nebulosity. If we want to make ourselves understood we need to have a firm & vigorous grasp on the subtle intricacies of our tools of communication. Grammar is the bedrock. Our language must be a perfect instrument for both the utilities of everyday living and the abstractions of philosophical discourse; able to probe & discern the subtlest shades of consciousness, and yet perfectly attuned to the rudimentaries of day to day living. One must not scorn the prosaic."
At this point I was called back to the concerns of this world, but, and with a feeling of pride, I quickly scribbled the lines,
"Rousseau, Rousseau.
More true than you did know."

Soul Discovery

Scientists are claiming to have located the precise location of the mythical philosophical entity known as "the soul," which they say they discovered while investigating a hitherto scantly explored region of the brain near the right ear. This discovery proves that the soul doesn't exist, said the scientists.

The Individual

"The individual is a self-sustained imaginary point oscillating between two oblivions, one of which is also imaginary."
"I find that an unsettling thought, though I haven't the faintest idea what it means."

Tolstoy & the Great Lie

He told himself that before proclaiming an unreasonable thing to be unreasonable one must first study the unreasonable thing. This was a trifling falsehood, but it led him to the great lie, in which he was now stuck fast.
Tolstoy, Resurrection

Most people are, obviously enough, less intelligent intellectually than the intellectuals who have attained some measure of public acclaim, however petty and ultimately false such figures might ultimately be. Even with ample forewarning of, for argument sake, the bigoted fascism of one such figure- perhaps even a favoured author- the individual tells himself, "Yes, but I will be fair and judge for myself." However, like the crowd in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, he is very far from being able to judge for himself, and carried away by the eloquence, or simply appearance of eloquence, of the favoured author, he comes away happily reassured that the dreadful things said of the author were unwarranted, and can continue with an easy conscience in the direction he was steering himself, wholly unaware of the great vines of lies entangling that self.

Van Gogh's Night Café & the Descent into Hell

A curious line in the Christian prayer, The Apostles Creed says of Jesus that after he "was crucified, died and was buried.
He descended into hell."
As everyone knows, life is infinitely more mysterious than imagined by all but the very few, entwined as that life inextricably is with consciousness. And without wishing to pursue the possible eschatological subtleties of that heretical sounding thought of a divine consciousness entering infernal regions, that line came to mind while looking at Van Gogh's great painting, The Night Cafe, of which Vincent wrote: I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself or commit a crime... The picture is one of the ugliest I have done."
The scene is saturated with hallucinatory menace; a place where Dostoevsky's Raskolnikovs and Stavrogins could inhabit with suitable unease. And of course this is far more than about mere 'place'. Just as elsewhere in Van Gogh's oeuvre, heaven is an extension of the individual consciousness united with the 'external' world, so is hell here a seamless extension of the individual mind.

*Though the resolution of the picture here does make it more unfocused and garish than in reality. Click to enlarge & it improves.

The Cannibal

"The artist cannibalises himself. When he has devoured everything, he perishes."
"The artist or the person?"
"Good question. Perhaps Hemingway realised there was nothing left to devour. His life had become a thing devoid of substance for the artist, and so..."

El Greco- Laocoon, The Redemptor

El Greco belongs as a metaphysician(every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories) to no known school. The most one can say, by way of classification, is that like most artists of the Baroque, he believed in the validity of ecstacy, of the non-rational, 'numinous' experiences out of which, as a raw material, the reason fashions the gods or the various attributes of God.
Aldous Huxley- 'Meditation on El Greco' from Music at Night.

Stopwatch

'The person trying to save time is trapped in "time", ie the concept of time, while the person taking his time is free of "time".'
'Yes.'

Show Business Biography Book

Irish boyband sensation Westlife have successfully commissioned literary giant Ewan McIan to write an authorised biography, charting the extrarodinary group's chart-topping career. Mr McIan said that he will, however, first have to finish his upcoming critique of the modern age and the threats to its superpowers' stability, which has involved "some really serious research."

Letting Off Steam

Sociologically bent psychologists and psycholigically bent sociologists have described war as "a relatively harmless way for homicidal lunatics to relieve what might otherwise become dangerous stores of volatile repressed energies, liable to cause harm to both themselves and those nearest and dearest to them."

Insect Controversy

A hornets nest of controversy has arisen in the branch of the flighted insect world that is the world of the butterflies, where it is claimed that the butterflies were in fact, in an earlier stage of life, the earthbound caterpillar. Reactions to the shocking claims have ranged from anger, humiliated self-laceration, mockery, and even a kind of triumphant self-satisfaction.
Without having time to delve further into the storms of debate, a lone voice or two amongst the butterflies has expressed bemusement at the furore and perceived implications of the claims of the insect's evolutionary precursor. "I don't see how it in any way changes the nature of my nature now. In what sense does it make me any less of a butterfly?"

DH Lawrence, Satire, the Social Being

Satire exists for the very purpose of killing the social being, showing him what an inferior he is and, with all his parade of social honesty, how subtly and corruptly debased. Dishonest to life, dishonest to the living universe on which he is parasitic as a louse. By ridiculing the social being, the satirist helps the true individual, the real human being, to rise to his feet again and go on with the battle. For it is always a battle and always will be.

Though I should perhaps go back in artistic chronological time to an earlier point in the essay John Galsworthy to Lawrence's idea of the social being. This relates to a recent piece on The Public Arena which is described thus: "Where vast numbers of existentially unreal people vainly endeavour through sheer weight of numbers to create one real collective entity."

What do we mean by a social being as distinct from a human being? Why can't we admit them as human beings? Why do we feel so instinctively that they are inferiors?
It is because they have lost caste as human beings, have sunk to the level of the social being, that peculiar creature that takes the place in our civilization of the slave in old civilizations...The fatal change today is the collapse from the psychology of the free human individual into the psychology of the social being, just as the fatal change in the past was a collapse from the freeman's psyche to the psyche of the slave.

Converse with the most fixed and sad emanations of this modern slave psyche, bolstered by the apparent ubiquitousness of its presence and 'reality' is naturally deeply infuriating and pointless. Lawrence says of the true individual, who has not poured his life into a false dead form that he "has at his core a certain innocence or naïveté which defies all analysis, and which you cannot bargain with, you can only deal with it in good faith from your own corresponding innocence or naïveté."
The social being is contrarily a being of compromise, unreal, cut off from the universe. As Dostoevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov: "It sometimes happens that it is precisely (the odd man) who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some flooding wind."

And so back to the satire that seeks to kill this social being. Not the individual in whom this artificiality resides, but the artificiality itself. The chances of outright success are probably pretty slim here, so even in the absence of serious hopes of absolute success, the user of the tool might as well amuse himself and for his own health pour what would otherwise become self-harming contempt into these forms of ridicule. Satire can be double-edged though, is a corrosive, and excessive immersion in the world of the social unreality works to ruin the innocence of the satirist himself; it becoming an unseemly tool of perpetual revenge poisoning the avenger.
As Nietzsche writes: "Why did you live so long in the swamp that you became a frog and a toad yourself." And the danger for the noble man is not "that he may become a good man- but that he may become an impudent one, a derider, a destroyer."

Book News

Controversy in bookland over the publication of a new St Francis biography to be called Don't Call Me Asshole- A Life of St Francis. The publishers defend the choice of title on the basis of "the surprisingly modern personality that was St Francis' personality, and would be still if he was alive now."

Meanwhile the Booker Prize is to adopt the Eurovision format of the public voting for the winner from next year, with bonus points awarded to books recommended by the major political parties. The public are asked, when choosing their book choice, to especially bear in mind the categories of Relevant to Our Times, and Chillingly Prescient.
An option reportedly given very serious consideration was the deciding of the award by means of a 100 metre dash, though this was eventually rejected on the basis of being "undemocratic".

Language in Error

A prominent linguist has declared that our use of the English language in today's world is "all wrong."
"The words and their meanings are all mixed up. What we say means something completely different than what we think it does," he lamented.

Leo Strauss, Neoconservatism, Roger Scruton

One man seen as the godfather of the neo-conservative movement, or philosophy, is the figure of Leo Strauss, of whom, for example, the British intellectual champion of the neo-cons, Roger Scruton speaks most highly, much regretting Strauss' relative obscurity on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Words can be the most slippery and fraudulent of substances, so leaving aside what 'conservatism' actually means in this neo-conservatism. The hallmark of Strauss' approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by "philosophers," who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish "populist" mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity.
In a letter to Karl Loewiththe, the Jewish Strauss wrote

The fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination(of the Weimar government).

Strauss wrote that "the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."
According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."
This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control. Strauss stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud."
Anyone familiar with the mentioned Roger Scruton, will recognise both his ardent support of Neoconservatism and particularly Strauss' thinking, and also this same call to spirituality. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton says that Conservatism [which here means neoconservatism] is 'fundamentally opposed to the ethic of social justice, to equality of station, opportunity, income and achievement.' And he is not saying this is a bad thing. All wonderfully authoritarian and reminiscent of the reasoning of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, where a manipulative elite governing world affairs using a twisted version of Christianity as a tool for their dominion over the masses, for whom they have the utmost contempt. The lifeless thinking of these people is earlier examined here in an examination of Scruton's essay, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged.

Asleep

There was a planet which through a combination of astonishing astronomical circumstances experienced a total eclipse lasting for several days. As a consequence every living thing eventually happened to be asleep at the same time, and from this sleep noone was ever to awaken. Reality needed to exist in the mind of someone and when the last exhausted mind disappeared into the calming oblivion of sleep, reality disappeared with him. There being no reality into which anyone could awaken, noone could awake.
I suppose I could have an alien visitation to the planet and with reality having a mind within which it could exist, everyone awakens- a variation on the Sleeping Beauty tale. Or ponder a collective dreamworld evolving in the minds of the sleeping populations. And perhaps within that dreamworld the given scenario could occur.

Ingres, Napoleon & the Triumphant Ego

Goya is often noted for what is claimed to be his subtle yet savagely satirical portraits of the high and mighty of the Spanish court, debated as this proposition is, but I believe the most glorious putdown within this field of painting is the following by Ingres of Napoleon, though I'm sure Ingres would be appalled at the suggestion that his image is anything but a great portrait revealing the all-conquering greatness of a very great man. Who does this man, Napoleon, in the deepest sense think he is? Certainly not the ridiculous, self-adoring figure he appears now, once removed from the abstractions of public imagining. And this is what begins to make this painting so interesting not so much psychologically as pneumatologically. Napoleon the individual fades into unimportance here. Rather the painting serves as a perhaps uniquely perfect portrait of the ego in the state of its greatest triumph. And Ingres for his guileless faithfulness, ennobling to sitter and painter, is perfect for the task at hand. He is as much a believer in the glory at hand as Napoleon.


And to admit the help of DH Lawrence from his essay, Within the Sepulchre, where he elaborates on what he calls "the false I which thinks itself supreme and infinite."
"It believes itself to have filled up the whole of the universe... It is tremendously conceited. It assumes it has reached the limit of all space and all being. It concludes that its self is fulfilled, that all consummation is achieved."

This ego, in the form of helpful little Napoleon, is the very opposite of humility. He is the most powerful man in Europe; king of the egos. But the ego is never secure. It has conquered all, and yet requires public recognition of its achievements. It cannot sit content in its own naked space, is not sufficient unto itself, and this naked space of silence is to be avoided at all cost, for here is where this ego no longer exists. Thus incidentally the emphasis on reason by the self-imagined acolytes of the materialistic universe. In 'reason' or rather language lies the continued existence of the ego-self. It is the air the ego breathes. When the layers of thought are stripped to their core, the regality of the West is found to be materialism. But this is not quite the final essence, and materialism is the clothing of the frightened, envious ego, in a state of self-sustained artificiality.

Thus the ridiculous regalia which surrounds Napoleon's physical self. King of the antheap, but remove the antheap and it is nothing. A comical, pathetic figure.

The Public Arena

Where vast numbers of existentially unreal people vainly endeavour through sheer weight of numbers to create one real collective entity.
Thus the excitement in certain circles about the Booker Prize: where a few other people read alot of contemporary novels and decide which one they like best, or think they like best, or think they should like best, and "the public" get to co-inhabit this public sphere, thus deepening the sense of their individual reality within this common public reality, which pseudo-consciousness is likewise strengthened by its accumulation of human numbers. Though one had better not investigate too seriously what the foundation stones of this commonality are.
The same goes obviously for all other manner of awards ceremonies; self-transcendence within the manufactured collective consciousness.

Lost Memory Not

There have been so many uses of the lost memory device that I have thought of writing a novel with the unusual device of the central protagonist not having lost his memory. The book seeks to discover why. Naturally one hopes this will be made into a film.