What is Bliss?

Ordinary—or, let us say, conventional—emotions occasion what Kierkegaard scholars* sometimes call "the suffering of inwardness". They indicate a "subject" of feeling, usually, i.e., "conventionally", situated inside the body, but in any case contained within the apparatus of feeling. We say that we are in pain or in love. But there are moments that can be said to be "saturated" with feeling, moments in which we are what Andrew and I have been describing as "overwhelmed" by emotion. (Wordsworth described these moments as those in which we experience a "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion" and he proposed to have the poet recollect these moments "in tranquility", producing a poem.) Here the suffering breaks the bounds of our inwardness.

In the case of pain, we actually have a conventional idiom to capture this. We sometimes say, not "I am in pain" but "It hurts". Under extreme distress, as in torture, we are told, the pain becomes impersonal, i.e., the personality is dissolved. But this also happens in the case of intense pleasure. It is a testament to the strength of our Christian conventions about love that we don't recognize the morality of the moment when we pass from saying "I am in love (with you)" to saying simply, and, very precisely, ecstatically, "It loves (us)." But this impersonal love is, of course, the true nature of the thing. It is bliss.

* * *

In my exchange with Andrew, I suggested that a poem might have a similar effect on our emotions as a drug like MDMA (ecstasy), at least as it it used in therapy. It is here sometimes used deal with the trauma of terminal illness, the loss of loved ones, or extreme experiences like rape and torture. It allows the sufferer to take a dispassionate "observing" stance toward the emotion, rather than letting the overwhelming feelings associated with the trauma dominate. This, in turn, allows the counseling to proceed through territory that would otherwise not be possible and speeds the recovery of the patient. The emotion is still there (and that's essential to the therapy) but it is somehow "suspended" in the mind or heart for contemplation.

I don't want to deny therapy to the mentally ill, but in ordinary life I'm not a big fan of psychology and psychiatry as public functions. These sciences (and intermittently dark arts) have largely replaced poetry in the management of emotion in our culture, framing the way we understand ourselves even in perfectly ordinary situations and relationships, where we should be feeling perfectly ordinary kinds of pleasure and pain, with, as we mature, greater and greater refinement. The social sciences, however, probably have a greater influence than the literary tradition on what we see on TV these days and what happens in our schools, which become sites merely for the presentation of illustrative examples of general conceptions of social living and human being. One day, perhaps, there will be no need for poetry at all because everyone will simply have a ready supply of the perfect pill … call it Bliss.

This was something Irving Layton worried about in the 1960s, where he somewhat presciently suggested that:

The society of the future will have no more need for living, creative art than for religion. To the comfortable air-conditioned suburbanite of tomorrow the intuitions of the one will appear as ludicrously pitiable and archaic as those of the other. Indeed, they will be as incomprehensible to him as the vanished ecstasies of bull-worshipping. Such a society — its outlines are already visible to anyone who is not afraid to take a good look — will be run by a tolerant élite composed of scientists, well-heeled technicians, and efficient commissars, buttressed by serviceable cadres of social workers and psychiatrists. As the tragic drama unfolds,these groups must play the assassins of whatever is passionate and unpredictable in human experience — that is, of art. (Engagements, p. 93)

As this discussion proceeds, I'm actually getting a little more hopeful than I've been for a long time. The difference between a pill and a poem is the poem's specificity. The pill "prepares a free relationship" to any emotion (which is why it is a good for a partying as it is for therapy) whereas a poem is the notation of a specific set of emotions. This, I would think, makes literary pleasure a "finer" thing than drug-induced ecstasis. And this might perhaps be why there will always be a function for literature, no matter how good the drugs get. Of course, we might get entirely beyond the need for fine feeling—because, ahem, we're just always, you know, feelin' fine. But I doubt it.

"The doctors are working day and night," sings Leonard Cohen, "but they'll never, ever find a cure for love." My hope lies in the continued existence of highly specific forms of bliss, the fine-grained, richly textured ecstasies of literary pleasure.

_________
*I should apologize to Kierkegaard scholars, who will be puzzled, I now realize, at my attribution here. What they mean (and Kierkegaard meant) by "the suffering of inwardness" and the very ordinary kind of suffering that I'm talking about here are, I think, completely different things. I remembered the phrase from the spine of a PhD dissertation in the Søren Kierkegaard library at the University of Copenhagen where I used to read in the late 1990s. Writing this post, I liked the sound of it and thought I knew what it meant. A bit of reading has given me reason to doubt that I do.

Emotional Notation

[A response to Andrew Shields' comment]

Poetry is the art of writing emotions down, just as philosophy is the art of writing concepts down. In 1879, Frege published his Begriffsschrift, normally translated as "conceptual notation", a formalism that was supposed to make the connection between thoughts perspicuous. It was not intended to describe how we actually think, it was not a delineation of some natural "language of thought", rather it was an artificial simulation of thought, intended to be more precise than our ordinary thought processes. Likewise poetry is an Ergriffsschrift, an "emotional notation", an attempt to make the connections between our feelings intense. It does not stimulate genuine feelings, but artificial ones, which foster greater precision in our emotional apparatus and, therefore, a finer range of genuine feeling in the long run.

In making a poem, I don't "express emotion", I write the emotion down. I don't communicate a feeling to the reader but offer the reader an occasion for greater precision in feeling, through the intensity of the emotion. So there is certainly something "emotional" about the process of writing a poem, just as there is something conceptual about philosophizing. But it is true that I do not, at the time of writing feel the emotion. In an important sense (and this is something T.S. Eliot emphasized) the poem is intended to free us from feelings (and personality). More precisely, as Heidegger said of philosophical questioning into concepts, poetry "prepares a free relationship" to the emotion.

This freedom can of course itself be felt. It is the exhilaration that is familiar to us as literary pleasure, what Nabokov called "aesthetic bliss". It is not, to be sure, the possible bliss that comes from feeling the emotion that is the ostensible theme of the poem. That feeling, after all, may be altogether painful.

What is a Poem?

A poem makes you feel better. It does not take away your sadness but makes you better able to feel it. It does not make you happy but makes your joy more precise. Since it is a work of art, a poem improves your ability to imagine—specifically, your ability to imagine feelings, your own and those of others. Poetry is the art of writing emotions down.

An emotion is a capacity to feel some particular feeling (as a concept is a receptivity to a particular thought). In order to have an effect on the imagination the poem must make the reader feel something. A poem does not produce an actual feeling, but a virtual one. It produces an artificial feeling in an artificial setting that makes you more capable of feeling the natural one in its natural environment. It works an art upon the "nature" of our emotions, which is really just our culture.

In the poem, you do not write "about" the emotion, you simply write it down. A love poem is not a poem about love. Nor is it about the beloved. It is the love, duly noted, presented to the imagination in writing. It is madness to suppose that a poem can make the beloved love the poet, but it can make whatever love there is more present, more felt, as a presence, an intensity. A good poem can also make the emotion unendurable, and thereby the act unavoidable.

It can, conversely, make the impossibility of the act tolerable. It can bridge the distance between the feeling and the action.

Just as any work of art must extricate a set of materials from the "everyday" environment in which they are implicated, so the poem must extricate the emotion from the historical forces in which it is willy-nilly implicated. This also has the effect of setting free "the subject" of the emotion, releasing it from the "personality" that has been constructed around it. It is a political construct. The poet, for example, meets a beautiful woman (a woman's beauty is intensely political) and the poet undertakes to compose a poem "to her beauty". His task here may be to free her lips from the policy that governs her face.

What is a Work of Art?

A work of art is an object that improves the imagination. It need not be made by human hands, but it does at least have to be found and presented as art. A natural object in its natural environment can be mistaken for a work of art (or simply misrepresented as such), but this is because the experience of the beholder is wonderment in a manageable amount. The beholder feels invigorated and refreshed and slightly humbled, but the ability to imagine is not finally improved. Actual awe in the face of natural beauty cannot be mistaken for aesthetic experience.

It becomes a work of art by removing it from its natural environment (obviously, the artist can do this originally in the imagination) and placing it in an artificial setting. Here it can have its effect on the imagination.

A beautiful woman can under the right circumstances be a (found) work of art. (A painting or a photograph of such a woman is not, of course, such a circumstance. Here the work is the painting or the photograph, and the woman merely material out of which it is made.) Under such circumstances, however, she must cease to be an object of love, and even desire. Thus, when her lover says, in an attempt to flatter, "You are a work of art," he is either making a poetico-philosophical mistake or demeaning her. "I am using your beauty to improve my faculty of producing accurate imagery," he is saying.

The natural setting of a beautiful woman is one in which she is loved.

Complexity, Anxiety, Happiness

Two observations from Cyril Connolly's Unquiet Grave:

"Angst is inherent in the uncoiling of the ego, the tapeworm, the ver solitaire. It dwells in the Lacrimæ Rerum, in the contrasting of the Past with the present. It lurks in old loves and old letters or in our despair at the complexity of modern life" (Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1944, p.43).

"Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable. Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine; yet day-dreaming brings guilt; there is no happiness except through freedom from Angst and only creative work, communion with nature, and helping others are anxiety-free." (p. 37-8)

The Correct Method (Poetics)

The best way to study poetry is to read a lot of poems you love.

Solitude and Privacy

"Even in the most socialized community, there must always be a few who best serve it by being kept isolated. The artist, like the mystic, naturalist, mathematician or 'leader', makes his contribution out of his solitude. This solitude the State is now attempting to destroy, and a time may come when it will no more tolerate private inspiration. State Socialism in politics is likely to lead to social realism in the arts, until the position is reached that whatever the common man does not understand is treason." (Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, p. 54)

A few years ago, I started collecting quotations from the early twentieth century about the state of the individual in the culture. Cyril Connolly has thought as much about this as anyone. This is my favorite of those pithy, two-sentence pronouncements on the topic:

How do you react to our slogan 'Total Everybody Always'? Have you at last understood that your miserable failure as an individual is proof that you pursue a lost cause? (TUG, p. 100)

I believe the whole "national security" scandal is bringing these issues to the fore again. The state would like to abolish privacy and this means granting no one a space of solitude. It also means replacing the arts with the social sciences in our understanding of who we are. Never again will we compare personal experiences; we'll just consider our "social graphs". We're no longer to be individuals, just members of groups (always several groups, but groups nonetheless). And who we associate with will always be a legitimate concern of the state, a "matter of national security". Since we're nothing but who we associate with, the state's domination will then be total. Total Everybody Always.

These days, I find myself agreeing with Terence McKenna. How do we fight back? "By putting the art pedal to the metal!" That is, we must learn to make a contribution of our solitude. If it takes a few milligrams of DMT to "get into yourself", maybe that's what you've got to do. Oh, yes, I forgot, the State has outlawed such things. Maybe this post is really an homage to Colorado and Washington and Uruguay. They're showing the way, friends.

(P.S. David Brooks sucks. As demonstrated ably by Andrew Gelman and, well, himself.)

How to Answer the Question

"What happened was … somewhere along the line I realized that this question had to be addressed on the fundamental level of consciousness." (Leonard Cohen)

Truth, Beauty, Justice

The Pangrammaticon divides experience into two broad domains, the epistemic (or scientific) and the ethical (or political), separated and connected by imagination, which can perhaps be considered a domain in its own right, namely, the aesthetic (equally philosophical and poetical).

Philosophy cultivates the aesthetic of knowledge and is, in that sense, the "love of wisdom". Poetry, meanwhile, cultivates the aesthetic of power and is, to that end, the wisdom of love.

Perhaps there is a "pure art", a cultivation of imagination for its own sake, separate from any epistemic or ethical interest. This is the modernist fantasy. A science that just and only knows. A politics that just and only masters. A philosophy that just and only thinks. A poetry that just and only feels. And an "art for art's sake" that just and only imagines. It can't ever be this way of course. The hope, ultimately, is that these professions could spare us the trouble of knowing, mastering, thinking, feeling, and imagining. But each of us must do these things for them to happen. All these things.

Art recovers the beauty that remains between the truth and the justice we have accomplished. Another way to put it: art seeks happiness in the space between our honesty and our decency. That is why art is always being accused of indecency and dishonesty.

It's always hard times for an honest man. A decent one. Happiness lies in overcoming the difficulty. Beauty is difficult.

Path Dependency

It's the notion that "history matters". That the story of how you got here tells you (more exactly) where you are.

A man may feel he has arrived at a truth about the world in which he lives by way of a decade of critical thinking and self-doubt. He may now find, however, that he shares a belief with people who have held it with perfect self-assurance, as doctrine, for just as long.

The Cramp

"Belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions." (E.P.)

Something of a fundamental insight this morning.

Composure is the conquest of distraction. But what is distraction, really? It is what pulls us away from experience, the presence of things and people in our lives. How does this pulling-away work? Well, it draws us out of doubt and pain (which is part of life) and into moments of certainty and pleasure. That's why we let it happen.

But here's what occurred to me. Why do we come back to experience? Why do we compose ourselves? And why is this so difficult?

It is because we are drawn out of experience and into fixations on "truth" and "justice". We make a discovery and believe its truth. Or we make a decision and desire its justice. And these beliefs and desires can be so strong that we don't want to expose them to corrections by experience.

Truth and justice should always be thought of as temporary situations. But we let them hold on to us for too long. The meaning of a fact, its relative "truth", should always be determined in a corresponding act. And the passage from fact to act must always be experienced. But the meaning of an act, its relative "justice", is always determined in a corresponding act. Again, the passage is experienced.

We see that something is the case and we think, "Okay, what are we going to do about it?" Or we do something and must "see what happens".

But sometimes we experience a fact, a truth, and think there is nothing to do about it. Or we do "the only thing we could do" regardless of the consequences. We don't feed the fact or the act back through experience. We let it stand, as such.

This is how science and politics were born. They are distractions from the experience of truth and justice. They are fixations on one side or the other of the pangrammatical divide. Composure teaches us to return to experience.

Essence and Emergence

I think the answer to my riddle is emergence. Emergence is to essence as inspiration is to existence . . . as poetry is to philosophy.

In testing the analogy, I've been toying with a related matter. Is there a supplement for "accident"? In philosophy, we like to distinguish between the essential and "accidental" properties of things. At one point, I had the intuition that "accidence" is on the power (i.e., poetry) side of the pangrammatical divide. But I kept it on the knowledge (philosophy) side because accidents strike me as a property of things and facts, not people and acts. What then is to emergence, as accidence is to essence?

The answer, I think is transience. People are transient as things are accidental. These are important moments in the relationship between becoming and emergence, being and essence.

P.S. Surfaces are to emergence as appearances are to essence.

Inspiration and Existence

I may as well just face it head on. Sometimes I lose track of my analogies, which leads to the pangrammatical equivalent of a contradiction. In the last post, I explained that "essence" is to knowledge what "existence" is to power. But I have elsewhere suggested that existence (Dasein) is to philosophy what inspiration (duende) is to poetry. Since philosophy is to knowledge what poetry is to power, I have, I think, put "existence" on both sides of the pangrammatical divide. This is not good.

I think I will be resolving this problem in favor of keeping existence in the domain of philosophy, with, perhaps, the important qualification that this moves a lot of Heidegger's "existentialism" into the domain of poetry. This will leave us with an understanding only of the being of things, their facticity, not the being of people, which is always an activity, and therefore never actually being, but always (virtually!) becoming. There's reason to think Heidegger wouldn't mind. But I'm sure the philosopher's vanity is stung by being confined to the merely "extant". The point is that the subjective component of being, upon which all beings depend for their "existence", is not being at all, and Heidegger was perhaps right, therefore, to suggest that philosophers are consigned to gesturing at the creative force of becoming with the less impressive, if somewhat ominous, name of Nothing.

At the level of experience, like I said in my last post, I want to maintain the idea that standing (L. stare) is to knowledge what breathing (L. spire) is to power. Hold your breath and stare at something. Imagine. Then you might see what I mean.

So the problem now to be solved is: what is to power and poetry as essence is to knowledge and philosophy? What (in the domain of poetry) is to inspiration as existence is to essence (in the domain of philosophy)? Essence is to being as ___________ is to becoming.

Essence and Existence

"His true Penelope was Flaubert."

Thomas Presskorn raises an important point in his comment to my last post. I had cited Flaubert's "power is essentially stupid" and constructed its pangrammatical analogy as "knowledge is essentially cruel". But "essence" also has a supplement, namely, "existence". So, for example, when Russell says that "the essential business of language is to assert and deny facts", we supplement this, not by challenging this narrow specification of the essence of language, but by adding an existential "business", namely, to enjoin and denounce acts. This is what Thomas is reminding us of.

Charitably, he attributes the oversight to an imprecision in Flaubert's formula, not my analogy. It's a plausible excuse, since essence is to knowledge what existence is to power, and power could therefore be said not to have an essential nature at all, only its inexorably existential culture. But he might also have said that my sense of the supplement was off. Simply by carrying out the substitutions, I could have come up with "knowledge is existentially cruel", and this would actually be a better solution than to censure Flaubert (whose precision is presumably absolute!).

Consider: stupidity is also "essentially" on the knowledge side, not the power side, of the pangrammatical divide. And there is, in fact, nothing wrong with constructing statements across the divide (which is wholly, indeed purely, imaginary). The trick is to construct the supplement symmetrically. To recap, then, we'd have:

power is essentially stupid
&
knowledge is existentially cruel

The mistake was mine, not Flaubert's. One way to interpret all this is to say that when power pretends to have an essence it is being stupid. This happens when the tyrant invokes God as the source of his power, for example. But knowledge is cruel when it makes existential assumptions, which, perhaps, happens when the genius denies God as the aim of his knowing.

Like I say, pangrammatical analogies are only as true as their originals, and these in turn only ever as true as aphorism can be. We're just following out the consequences. I'd like to take this moment, also, to remind us that existence is to essence as inspiration is to extance. This is because power is to breathing what knowledge is to standing.

Stupidity and Cruelty

"Power is essentially stupid," said Flaubert. Before artists and intellectuals assent too heartily to this remark (which is of course as true as an aphorism can be) let me note its pangrammatical supplement: knowledge is essentially cruel.

A Theory of Mind

There is a theory about gulls.
When they dance on the grass, their
footfalls patter like rain drops,
and the worms come out.*

On this basis, the art of worm
charming—the expert simulation
of precipitation—has been developed.
There are competitions. In England.

With elaborate apparati, the charmers
endeavor to conjure an image of rain.
The theory says it is a trick, of course.
But are the gulls illusionists?

Do the worms think it is raining? And what
do the clouds make of all this foolishness?

_______________
*There is another theory that is worth noting. The worms may not be attracted to the surface but driven from the ground by vibrations that really sound like an approaching mole. This should not make a difference to the line of argument this poem proposes. But somehow it does, at least intuitively. To run away from a sound seems immediately less "theoretical" than to be attracted to it.

The question, in any case, is simply: What "thought" is it reasonable to attribute to the gulls? Do they think even that worms will be attracted by their dancing (or do they have "no idea" why they tap their feet when they are hungry)? Is it like the so-called rain dances of so-called primitives? That is, do they think their gods will favor them if they dance earnestly enough? Or do they know that what they are doing sounds like rain, and that worms appear when it rains? (And, if the alternative theory is right, are they, like the worm charmers, wrong about this in theory, despite their demonstrable success in practice?) Do the gulls go so far as to think they are fooling the worms? Do they take pride in this victory over the stupidity of their prey?

A "psychology" is rooted in a theory of mind. What does our psychology of birds tell us about the psychology we use to understand ourselves? And does our corresponding, if implicit, psychology of worms constitute a reductio ad absurdum of psychology as such? Is a theory of mind always, finally, a belief in magic?

The Correct Method

Wittgenstein famously said that philosophers cannot explain, only describe. There should be nothing "theoretical" about it. Already in the Tractatus, he said that "the correct method in philosophy" would be just to articulate propositions of natural science (without actually asserting them), though presumably an illuminating selection of them. As I understand him, he meant that a philosophical presentation consists of series of descriptions that together (in sequence) reveal the concept or concepts under investigation. The "investigation" itself is the process by which the descriptions are made and their proper arrangement is determined.

He put it very simply in his remarks on Frazer: "We can only describe and say, human life is like that."

Now, if we were to say something similar about poetry we would have to say that poetry only prescribes, and does not evaluate. It arranges synopses of propositions of cultural politics (without actually enjoining them). And this made me think of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo", which ends, "here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life."

Philosophy consists of a series of descriptions that finally implies "That's life."
Poetry consists of a series of prescriptions that finally implies "Change your life!"

On Religion

In answer to Presskorn's question, I'm probably something of a fundamentalist about religion. The Pangrammaticon divides experience into two broad domains, the Real and the Ideal, which are addressed by particular crafts. We use science and philosophy to grapple with the Real and politics and poetry to grapple with the Ideal. Science is the theory of the real, Heidegger tells us, for example; the Pangrammaticon then teaches us to derive from this that politics is the practice of the ideal. Philosophy is the art of writing concepts down; poetry is the art of writing emotions down.

All crafts are about developing our receptivity (to the real) and our capacity (for the ideal). Philosophy makes us more receptive, through thought, to concepts. Poetry makes us more capable, through feeling, of emotions. Science makes us more receptive to things, as objects. Politics makes us more capable of people, as subjects.

Or to put it another way. Science brings us knowledge of what is, but philosophy tells what can be known. Politics brings us power over who becomes, but poetry tells us who can be mastered. In the end, philosophy must "know" the "it" and poetry must "master" the "self", the scare-quotes indicating the principled impossibility of the task and the principled non-existence of its focus. Or to put in another way. Science tells us what we are seeing. Politics tells us who is doing it. Philosophy tells us what it is. Poetry tells us who we are.

What's this got to do with religion? Well, religion assumes authority over all those functions. Pangrammaticism is not a religion but a deconstruction of religious experience into the discrete moments that, in the absence of a properly functioning religious authority, must be composed at any given time, in any given place, in lived experience. Given a properly functioning religious authority, what I'm doing here is a complete waste of time.

(Cf. my notes on the novel.)

Dispassionately Irrational

I think this is the epithet of the ideal philosopher-poet. One seeks truth through the dispassionate contemplation of the thing. One seeks justice through the irrational enjoyment of people. Or something like that. The trick is not just to be irrational. Not just to be dispassionate. But to temper your irrationality with dispassion, or, which amounts to the same thing (though in a better sense than commonly assumed), to situate your passion within reason.

The Best Critique of Anti-militarism Ever

(Cf. Laura Helmuth)

It is in the nature of luxuries to eventually be taken for granted, and some of the greatest underappreciated luxuries are wealth and modern warfare. Thanks to aggressive imperial expansion, almost no children in the developed world die of missiles or land mines. And because these weapons are now so rare, peace activists have the luxury of indulging in conspiracy theories. Many of us would have died already if it weren’t for routine military interventions; we are on our second or third lives. And because war is so much more distant than in the past, some people have a romanticized notion of our place in the community of nations. We used to be more in harmony with our neighbors, the thinking goes, and local communities naturally know how to govern themselves. I have a hard time following the logic—something about respect and kindness and understanding? It’s utter nonsense, of course—what’s natural is to be a target: a vector for deadly terrorists and enemy states.