Art, Politics, Life

"There is nothing for a man but genius or despair."
William Carlos Williams

Leaving aside the imponderable quantity of my talent, I've long felt that what has held me back as an artist is my interest in life. A work of art should make us feel like Rilke before that archaic torso of Apollo. "You must change your life," it says. Well, I've simply been too committed to working out my issues through living to produce a significant work of art.

That's not nearly as a adventurous as it sounds. My rule has been to keep my experiments within the realm of the possible for the common man (I am a man, so I've only tried to live as men might). I've tried to keep things ordinary. I've held an academic post. I've held an administrative post. I've started my own business. I've married and had children. I've worked in my community. I've taken up jogging. All perfectly ordinary stuff.

I have eschewed any aesthetic that implies that the only way to live is to become an artist. Or a scholar for that matter. Artists and intellectuals cannot be taken seriously if their proposals only work for people who give up their productive labors to cultivate their "ideas". Ideas are only interesting in so far as they go into action. I don't mean that it's ridiculous to be an artist or scholar. It is ridiculous, however, to produce a work of art or scholarship whose true meaning is not "You must change your life" but "You must abandon your life".

The same goes for politics. My political career has been held back by my insistence on enjoying the freedoms I actually have. I cannot take a social movement seriously if it seems to commit me to a lifetime of social activism. I can't take a politician seriously who thinks that what he or she is doing is more important than what my bus driver or wine merchant is doing. I believe that we must first live, i.e., first change our own lives, and then express our broader base of discontent.

All that said, I do believe I have a work of art in me. Perhaps also a political project. I think I am making progress.

Condescension

What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris' bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; Which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful. And the critics join them, saying: well done, thus must it be according to the laws of aesthetics. Why, to be sure, a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips. Behold, therefore would I rather be a swineherd on Amager, and be understood by the swine than a poet, and misunderstood by men.

Søren Kierkegaard

The philistine often declares his admiration for the artist. This is generally interpreted as an acknowledgement of the profound suffering that the artist experiences, akin to that of the madman, but with the important difference of those well-fashioned lips, so that his suffering becomes articulate, and, if frightening, nonetheless imbued with beauty. We are not just impressed with the expression of the passion, we stand in respect of the intensity of the passion that appears to be expressed. We are grateful that someone else is willing to shoulder the burden of so much suffering, because it helps us (when expressed in art) to shoulder our own, much lesser burden.

But I suspect that in the heart of many a successful, comfortable philistine there is an altogether different reading of the poet's words. "This suffering," says the man of affairs, the big man about town, the self-made entrepreneur, the soi-disant job creator, "is no different from the one that I have mastered in myself. Art is merely an admission of defeat in a territory I have conquered. Success in life is the mastery of these emotions, not their expression." Thus all art, no matter how personal, no matter how pathetic, becomes an epic, a celebration of the deeds of great men, who don't feel the emotions expressed in it, but "deal with" them. Ah Palinurus! Ah humanity!

Money and Prices

I've been mulling the grammar of "money". Is it on one or the other side of the pangrammatical divide? If so, probably on the "power" side, I'm thinking. But what is to knowledge as money is to power? Well, money is the power to buy, i.e., purchasing power. Power is to people as knowledge is to things. Money always belongs to someone, let's say. It has an owner.

So what is to a thing as money is to a person?

The answer is: price. A thing's price tells us how much it is worth, just as your money tells you how much you are worth. Obviously, this is a very particular kind of "value", but I think the analogy holds. We know what things are worth and this determines their price. Price is a form of knowledge. Money, by contrast, is a form of power, a kind of mastery over people.

If money is purchasing power, price is simply purchasing knowledge.

Savagery and Laziness

It's long been my conviction that the only interesting political change that is available to us today will come from a coalition of forces drawn from the so-called extreme so-called right and left. This will require that Paul-inspired libertarians and Chomsky-inspired socialists lay aside some of their most deeply held notions about themselves and some equally ingrained prejudices about each other.

As to the latter, it is instructive to listen to Chomsky on Ron Paul's "savagery" and Joe Rogan (a Ron Paul libertarian, last I checked) on the "laziness" of socialists. Chomsky thinks that it is savage to allow an uninsured patient to die in a coma; Rogan thinks it is lazy to play bad songs on the street and ask people to put money in your guitar case. But surely it is sometimes necessary to let people die because the cost of keeping them alive is prohibitive. What is "savage" to Chomsky, I imagine, is letting a poor man die while keeping a rich man alive.

And surely it's okay to play mediocre songs on the street.

Ron Paul is right to point out that behind the uninsured man's situation there is, actually, a choice. You can live from hand to mouth and expect eventually to die in a coma or from the progression of some exotic cancer. Or you can live always fearful of the many ways you might die, insure yourself to the hilt, work hard to maintain that insurance, suck up to your boss so as not to get fired and lose your insurance, and then have the coverage you need should the worst thing happen.

If you don't require people to make such a choice, then too many people become entitled to draw on the productive capacity of the society (and therefore the labor of their fellow humans). Your contempt for savagery is also contempt for my freedom to be lazy. If I'm willing to die of a condition that would be very expensive to save me from, then I should be able to make that lifestyle choice.

Libertarians are very consistent about this when it comes to smoking. One argument for all kinds of state interference in smoking habits is that smokers cost us a great deal of money when they get the cancer they're setting themselves up for. In my utopia you'd be allowed to enjoy a life of smoking as long you paid for your own insurance or simply weren't so damned afraid to die. Chomsky seems to think that composure in the face of death is an attribute of savages.

The more I think about it, the more I can see that both Rogan's and Chomsky's opprobrium are aimed at me. I am utterly lazy and savage by their standards. I'm willing to make do with much less than I have if it will spare me the drudgery. And death is not so distasteful a prospect to me that I'll throw my support behind the perverse incentives of the medical-insurance complex.

I think I'm saying that the left and the right have to check their attitudes about work and death. Paul's take on death may be "savage" but noble. Chomsky's alleged laziness may really just be denunciation of "wage slavery". I think they could agree on these things if they tried.

Ooops

It's been the basic approach of this blog to play knowledge and power off each other like third-rate diplomats. To my horror, I'm discovering that composure can only be found in the correlation of wisdom and love.