“Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” by T. S. Eliot

“Notes” is far more than it implies, as Eliot has two overarching themes.  The first is that religion and culture are inseparable, and the second is the relationship between regional, national, and world cultures. Eliot believes that a world culture is the only basis of peace, but probably impossible because of the lack of a world religion.  His definition of a healthy culture seems to be a shared system of beliefs that allow both mutual understanding and vibrant disagreement at the same time. This is not unlike the great theological debates of the High Middle Ages, Christianity’s most confident time, when Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Albert the Great, and other philosophers flowered.

He wrote these “Notes” in the 1940s, with Nazis fresh in memory and in the shadow of Stalinist Russia. Sometimes he seems elitist and dated, other times full of timeless wisdom, and always writing very well. His chapter on education is presented almost as an afterthought but has actually held up the best over the years.  His appendix on the poetic nature of the English language and the mutual influences European cultures have had upon each other is also inspiring (and written for a German audience).

“To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency towards reversion may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert upon humanity.  Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the womb.”

In lesser words, group think is for babies who don’t have the courage to think for themselves.

“Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into aesthetic sensibility and discipline taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art.  To judge a work of art by artistic or religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing, though it is an end at which no individual can arrive.”

Eliot’s Christianity is as unapologetic as his poetry, and it is heartening to know that even an Eliot struggles with the relationship between his art and his belief. 

“We know that good manners, without education, intellect, or sensibility to the arts, tends towards mere automatism; that learning without good manners or sensibility is pedantry; that intellectual ability without the more human attributes is admirably only in the same way as the brilliance of a child chess prodigy; and that the arts without intellectual context are vanity…we must not expect any one person to be accomplished in all of them… we are driving in the end to find it in the pattern of the society as a whole.”

I think this paragraph says a lot about the sort of people Eliot had to spend too much of his time with: pedants, prodigies, and the vain.  Not that these are his friends, but he’s obviously tired of single-minded or thoughtless individuals he met in his circles. But he’s also right… it brings to my mind the famous Paulian scriptures about the relationship between faith, hope, and love. Virtues need each other’s support.

“I have suggested elsewhere that a growing weakness of our culture has been the increasing isolation of elites from each other, so that the political, the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, are separated to the great loss of each of them, not merely through the arrest of any general circulation of ideas, but through the lack of these contacts and mutual influences at a less conscious level, which are perhaps even more important than ideas.”

I think the real divide today is between the political elites and the elites he mentioned above. Our political class has learned how to win political battles, but are woefully ill-informed about the truths of what they are fighting over.

 

 

Rollar coaster day

Well, I had a great morning and a pissy afternoon, and not just because it can’t decide if it’s going to rain or not.

The morning was great because I wrote a thousand words of a novel, then went to the gym, came home and ate, and then wrote another thousand words. So far, so good.

Then I went to a lecture about research methodology that was too vague to be very useful, which wasn’t so bad really. I got a chance to diss Google for their search engine’s partialities, but didn’t get a chance to complain about how the days of browsing for books in a library is more difficult than it used to be. I can’t just ask, “Where’s the Chinese lit section? I want to browse for books on a particular topic,” because it’s all so electronic and the libraries so big even the librarians can’t keep track.

Then I went to poetry class and we had a constructive dialogue about each other’s poems, but then the professor put on his bad cop hat and told us he was disappointed with our essays judging by criteria he was never very specific about in the first place. If he had given us the same speech two weeks ago, we would have given him the essays he wanted. My professors are good at explaining their subjects; I just wish they were better at explaining their assignments.

I also think I told too much about myself to one of my classmates, because we had talked about a third classmate and this afternoon the third party looked at me funny, in a knowing sort of way. Fortunately I didn’t say anything particularly bad, just that when he invites the class to go hang out in a bar my first thought was that I didn’t really have the money, so we might be self-conscious around each other for a while because he’s rich and I’m not (and she made it quite clear she knows how much money he has).  But I’m not going to tell the first classmate anything more about myself if she’s going to be like that.

I have chess club tonight but I don’t really feel like going. With all the scheduling nonsense and room changes I’ve only made it to chess club twice in a month and a half. I’m beginning to think my club fee will be a donation.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Stranger, pause and look;

    From the dust of ages

Lift this little book,

    Turn the tattered pages,

Read me, do not let me die!

    Search the fading letters, finding

    Steadfast in the broken binding

All that once was I!

 

From the “Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay”

 

Millay has a way of hitting things on the nose. I’m really enjoying her “Collected Poems” and am reading on the side “Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal” as a part of grad school strategy to not only read more poetry but to figure out how to read (and understand) it.  Meanwhile I’ve snatched up two stanzas from her poems to kick start two of my own novels (attributed, of course).

 

The first essay in “Millay at 100” argues that she is underappreciated in the sense that critics don’t think she’s worth the time to analysis but academics apparently enjoy quoting her. Perhaps that a good sign that her poetry is well written, evocative, and easy to understand. For most people ease of understanding is a sign of good writing, but I suppose critics need difficult writers to justify their profession.

 

I chose this quotation above because it speaks to me personally, and to anyone else out there being an author, regardless of your publishing success. Anyone’s work could, basically, molder away, become an “ex-poem” in the sense that no one reads it anymore. The statistical chance of anyone achieving the literary longevity of Austen or Dickens is depressingly low, and probably getting lower with 3000 new published books each year crowding for attention, drowning each other out.

My Introduction to Exeter

I can’t believe how busy I have been between the paperwork, getting to know various clubs, seminars on life and law in England…

 

Exeter is a beautiful place, but the hills are both a source of the beauty and my leg aches. My butt is sore after walking up these hills and when I get home and sit down my calves take their turn to complain. It’s a very nice small city and I’m amazed at how far a pound will go when I go grocery shopping.

 

At the club for SF, fantasy, and horror, there wasn’t much talk about any of that, but at the Sherlock Holmes fan club they talked about Holmes, Dr. Who, Harry Potter… I suggested they rename themselves the Fandom Club. They took that comment in the spirit in which it was intended.

 

The student body is pretty diverse and interesting.  I ran into some of the same people more than once and the conversations grow from there. I’ve found that I can strike up conversations with Chinese pretty easily by starting off with “Ni hao. Wo zai Nanjing Daxue wu nian jiao Yingyue,” which means, “Hi. I taught English at Nanjing University for five years.” The conversation usually moves back to English, but it’s the opening I need. I could end up with as many Chinese friends in England as I had back in China, depending on how busy everyone is.

“A History of England” by David Harris Willson

I was a little surprised that this textbook was written by an American, since America plays such a minor role. Granted, when it was published America was new to being a superpower, but it even makes our roles in the First and Second World Wars feel so trivial.

It was also written before professors stopping putting their own conscious opinions into the textbooks, so we get little authorial asides about which historical figures he wishes to redeem. For example, he goes out of his way to write that the appeasement of Hitler wasn’t entirely Chamberlain’s fault; English memories of WWI were still too painful and the Depression was keeping their concerns economic. The last several Prime Ministers had been trying to help Germany recover to become a market for British goods, and the Germans electing who the Brits thought at the time was just some nutter wasn’t going to stop their desperate economic policies.

The take home lesson from reading these 800+ pages was the precariousness of good government. For 2000 years, England has wavered from good to bad government, regardless of being monarchical or democratic. Power shifts that have little to do with policies and too much with politics change the government of their, and probably most, countries.  It’s rather depressing to be reading about a good king or prime minister doing their best only to have it set back by a following incompetent.

And yet progress is made. England did become wealthier and more democratic, often times in spite of their leaders. Progress comes from innovators, grass roots movements, and the expansion of knowledge, while politicians play their games.

From Robert Scholes “The Roots of Science Fiction”

“This radical dislocation between the world of romance and the world of experience has been exploited in different ways. One way, the most obvious, has been to suspend the laws of nature in order to give more power to the laws of narrative, which are themselves projections of the human psyche in the form of enacted wishes and fears…in the sublimative narratives of pure romance they are merely more obvious than elsewhere because less disguised by other interests and qualities.”

 

This is why literature is the true window to our souls, reflecting our worldviews more than our world. People who wish to resist evil but don’t have the power to do so will be attracted to stories about the successful resistance, and the less power one has the more power one will dream of having, hence why children are attracted to comic book and video game heroes. Adults develop “other interests and qualities” so one’s taste in literature can evolve, but the same basic desire for empowerment or satisfaction never goes away completely.  Just yesterday I read an otherwise very good novel, “The Language of Flowers” in which the heroine has remarkably forgiving friends, leaving me wondering if that is what the author secretly wishes for.

 

“When romance returns deliberately to confront reality it produces the various forms of didactic romance or fabulation that we usually call allegory, satire, fable, parable, and so on…traditionally, it has been a favorite vehicle for religious thinkers, precisely because religions have insisted that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that the common-sense view of reality – “Realism” is incomplete and therefore false. Science, of course, has been telling us much the same thing for several hundred years…thus it is not surprising that what we call ‘science’ fiction should employ the same narrative vehicle as the religious fictions of our past.”

 

Science fiction latches onto many of the same questions as religion, but no one novel that I am aware of tries to answer all of them.  The existence of evil is the most common question addressed, but free will v. fate, equality v inequality, our relationship with nature, and our origins are all questions SF authors have struggled with.  Books like “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The Lord of the Rings” have directly shaped more minds than any book of philosophy. Philosophers may have indirectly shaped more minds, because more popular authors have read their books, but a literary game of connections gets too complicated for me.

 

“And if a writer transports men to Mars merely to tell a cowboy story, he produces not structural fabulation but star dreck – harmless, perhaps, but an abuse of that economy of means that governs mature esthetic satisfaction. Or if he allows such a variety of magical events that his fictional world seems deficient in its own natural laws, his work will fail structurally and cognitively, too, though it may retain some sublimative force.  But in the most admirable of structural fabulations, a radical discontinuity between the fiction world and our own provides both the means of narrative suspense and of speculation. In the perfect structural fabulation, idea and story and so wedded as to afford us simultaneously the greatest pleasures that fiction provides: sublimation and cognition.”

 

Probably the reason I named “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The Lord of the Rings” is because they provide both sublimative and cognitive satisfaction. Any of the books I enjoy rereading reach that beautiful level of story and idea, from “Jane Eyre” to “The Gap Series.”  Even the controversial “Atlas Shrugged” reveals ideas through plot and description, even if it is weighed down by excessive dialogue.

“Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey” by Isabel Fonseca

“Bury Me Standing” is a disillusioning book, disillusioning about both Europe and the Gypsies. Fonseca seems to have organized the chapters to ease us into the degree of perfidy Europe is guilty of in its treatment of gypsies, from the simple discrimination familiar to students of African-American history to the Holocaust (called the Devouring by the gypsies). 

 

What was disillusioning about the gypsies was how their freewheeling, nomadic, romantic reputation was really a vast minstrel show. The real gypsy culture involves child marriage, rampant illiteracy, and superstitions about the uncleanliness of women. Their real poetry and music are things they keep for themselves, while bear training and fortune telling are cons they pull on us. The most free-wheeling aspect of their lives is a substitution among their men for small time wheeling and dealing capitalism instead of professional careers, and that only works out well for a minority of this largest of European minorities. They aren’t even very nomadic, since the vast majority of them have been settled for generations, only moving when forced to by violence.

 

What was disillusioning about Europe was the centuries long mistreatment of these people. Linguistically they can be traced back to India, but as a group were apparently first brought from Armenia as slaves for a certain Vlad of Romania, the father of the Vlad who inspired Dracula. And like most enslaved groups, they were vilified to justify the slavery. And ever since they have been vilified as criminals, spies, or traitors to justify discrimination to this day, even in countries that would never again dare do the same to Jews.

 

My sweeping statements are necessary for the sake of summarization, but Fonseca worked with an anthropological style, interviewing gypsies all over Europe and even living among their families. Her approach was more individual and thus more heart breaking than mine.