Literature and Poetry

After Stories (and Poems): The Forgotten Aesthetics of Persuasion

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

In the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible if you prefer, there is a story about a king and his excesses and a prophet who, as we would say today, spoke truth to power. The story is found in the book attributed to Samuel and the king was David, the most famous and revered of ancient Israel’s rulers. As is almost to be expected of men in power, David was infected with the notion that he might, with impunity, take all that his eyes desired, including the wife of another man — a good and loyal man who served David honorably. The king sleeps with Bathsheeba, the man’s wife, and she becomes pregnant. Hoping to cover up his rapaciousness, David recalls the husband, Uriah, from the battlefield and allows him the night with his wife expecting that he will do what all soldiers home from war would do given a night with the woman they love. Uriah would suppose the baby his, and all would be hidden from sight. Unfortunately for David, Uriah cannot bear the unfair advantage he has been granted over his comrades at the front and refuses to sleep with his wife. Getting Uriah drunk made little difference; he was a rock. So David had him killed.

Again, following an all too familiar pattern, David refused to acknowledge his guilt and his power shielded him from consequences and shame. That is until he meets with a prophet named Nathan. Nathan claims to bring news of a great injustice that had been perpetrated in the land. He tells David of a poor shepherd whose lone sheep was seized by a wealthy man in order to feed his guests, and this despite owning a great number of his own sheep. David is outraged; he demands to know who this man is that he may be brought to justice. Nathan, having artfully laid the trap, replies, “You are that man.” With that simple story Nathan bypassed David’s arrogant blindness and brought him to a startled recognition of the vileness of his actions.

I recount this well-known story because I have, in recent conversations, found myself expressing the need to gracefully articulate the virtue and necessity of making what would be very hard and unpopular choices for the sake our own personal well-being and the health of our society. Much of what I write, whether on matters relating to technology or in my occasional ramblings on other diverse topics, is premised on the assumption that human flourishing demands the recognition and acceptance of certain limits. I assume that the highest form of freedom is not the ability to pursue whatever whim or fancy may strike us at any given moment, but rather the freedom to make choices which will promote our well being and the well being of our communities. And such choices often involve sacrifice and the curtailment of our own autonomy. To put this another way, happiness, that elusive state which according to Aristotle is the highest good we all pursue, lies not at the end of a journey at which every turn we have chosen for ourselves, but along the path marked by choices for others and in accord with a moral order that may at times require the reordering rather than immediate satisfaction of our desires.

Put more practically, perhaps, the health of our society may now rest on our learning to live within constraints — economic, political, natural — that we have spent the last few decades ignoring or otherwise refusing. But no sooner do those words cross my lips or appear before my eyes as I type them, than I realize that they are likely to be unwelcome and unappealing words. And concurrently I realize that the language of limits may be misconstrued to mean that we must not pursue legitimate forms of material and social progress. On this point I endorse once more the distinction made by Albert Borgmann between troubles (read limits) that we accept in practice but oppose in principle, and those troubles (limits) we accept both in practice and in principle because we are ultimately better for accepting them. But this is all a hard sell.

On more than one occasion I have referred to an essay by Wendell Berry that appeared in Harper’s three years ago. The essay was titled “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits.” I refer to it often because I believe there are few writers who articulate the case for limits so well as he. Berry succeeds because he is able not only to criticize the ideology of limitlessness and point to its often disastrous consequences, but also to make a positive case for the possibilities of beauty and flourishing that arise from a life that embraces rather than refuses certain kinds of limits. Berry frames our limits as “inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” And it is this framing that is essential to the public case for any reorientation of our thinking and living in and with this world.

With her recent essay in The Nation, “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist,” Marilynne Robinson matches Berry’s gift for speaking hard words with a grace that allows them to be heard, even if they are finally rejected. As I read Robinson’s words I marveled at what was unfolding line by line. Here she was dismantling our idols and stripping our altars, speaking to us with a seriousness and gravity that is wholly absent from our political and cultural discourse, and yet it was all done with mesmerizing artfulness. It was pungent medicine going down with sweet delight.

We need more writers, thinkers, and leaders in the mold of Berry and Robinson. It is a testament to their winsomeness and wisdom that both articulated essentially conservative (although not Republican) and religiously intoned visions which were published in decidedly left-of-center publications. It is, of course, also a testimony to the poverty of our categories.

It occurred to me, then, that it was little wonder they were able to make their case so well since both were novelists and one a poet as well. Little wonder because it seems to me that the case for limits is best shown rather than told. In other words, it is best conveyed by a story rather than a lecture. Like David, we need our prophets to weave their critique of our deeply entrenched disorders into a narrative that would bypass our self-righteous defenses. Moreover, these narratives need also to capture, in the manner that only a story can capture, the beauty and love that attend to lives lived by the counterintuitive logic of restraint, moderation, self-sacrifice, and regard for neighbor and place.

That it is the novelist and the poet that is best positioned to make such a case is also not surprising since their work is a constant affirmation of the inexhaustible beauty that arises from the formal elaboration of endless possibilities within a field of real and imposed limitations. Consider language itself as the primordial model of a limited and bounded but inexhaustible resource. The use of language is bounded by the grammar that allows for intelligibility and poets have since times immemorial bound themselves to structures that have called forth rather than foreclosed boundless creativity. Little wonder then that daily finding and making beauty within the limits of language, novelists and poets are best positioned to articulate the fulfillment and joy that may arise from the refusal to prioritize personal autonomy and the unencumbered life. After all, just as the frictionless life is also a life without traction, the life that refuses all burdens and attachments is, to borrow a phrase, unbearably light.

My hope is that we have not altogether lost our taste for stories and poems, that the sun has not yet set on literary sensibility. It would be tragic if for clarity and simplicity’s sake we sought our answers from technocrats with bullet-points and found that we could not hear or be moved to action by what they had to say. Although, perhaps that would be for the better since the technocratic logic that refuses complexity is more a part of the problem than of any credible solution. Worse still would be to find that our habits of attention, as some of our more pessimistic critics have warned, had become so attenuated that we could not follow an artful plot nor give a poem the loving, patient care that it demands before it will yield its wisdom.

Reviewing Robert Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolution,” sociologist David Martin summarizes the book’s central message as follows: “‘We’ are inveterate story tellers as well as theoreticians … As ever in Bellah, his rigorous commitment to objectivity emits a normative aura: it is not a matter of putting stories behind us as childish but of telling the best stories to frame our collective existence.”

Indeed, and we might even put the matter more urgently. “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams admitted in a line from “Asphodel,” “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Alasdair MacIntyre famously concluded his ground breaking After Virtue by leaving us waiting “not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.” It would seem, however, that we would do better to wait for another, doubtless very different, Nathan to penetrate through our blindness and awaken us to the possibilities offered by St. Benedict.

Shared Sensibilities

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

Rochelle Gurstein captures in lovely prose a handful of thoughts I have attempted, with less eloquent results, to express myself.  “The Perils of Progress”, a brief essay appearing in The New Republic, opens with a story about “a lecture by an exquisitely sensitive, painfully alert poet friend of ours about how we live today” which elicits tired labels contemptuously applied.  As Gurstein puts it:

These days, even a few well-considered, measured reservations about digital gadgetry apparently cannot be tolerated, and our poet friend was informed by forward-looking members of the audience that she was fearful of change, nostalgic, in short, reactionary with all its nasty political connotations.

And this presumably from a learned and sophisticated audience.

Gurstein goes on to challenge the same NY Times editorial by Steven Pinker which drew some of my own comments some time ago.  She observes that in …

… disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as “keeping us smart”)—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two.

Gurstein concludes with some poignant reflections on the materiality of the book and the difference it makes to the experience of reading and the reader’s relationship to the author.  The essay truly is worth a few minutes of your time to read.  Also reading the few comments posted in response to Gurstein’s essay tends to reinforce her concerns.

At one point in the essay Gurstein spoke of Pinker’s “stacking the deck against” her sensibility.  That word, sensibility, struck me.  This is I think near to the heart of matter.  What Gurstein and others like her attempt to defend and preserve is not merely a point of view or a particular truth.  It is more subjective than that, but is not merely preference.  It is not at all like a preference, which, I suspect, is precisely what those who do not understand it will try to label it.  It is, well, a sensibility — a certain disposition or way of being in the world.  It is an openness and a sensitivity to certain kinds of experience and to certain dimensions of reality.  Because of this it resists description and facile reduction to the terms of a cost/benefit analysis.  Consequently, it can be difficult to convincingly defend a sensibility to those who know nothing of it.  Maybe it is best described as a “seeing the world as” or, perhaps better still, a “feeling the world as.”  A sensibility is a posture toward life, a way of inhabiting the world.

What all of this groping for words may have at its center is the experiential quality of a sensibility, and experience is, after all, incommunicable.   Unless, that is, two people share the sensibility and then words may even seem superfluous.  In this sense, those who share a sensibility, share the world.  Those who lack or fail to appreciate the sensibility Gurnstein articulates know only to shake their heads in condescending bemusement.  What those, like Gurnstein and her poet friend, who grieve the passing of a culture that nurtured their sensibility fear may be the onset of a long loneliness.

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Nota bene: This post was first published in early July of 2010. I re-publish it today because the Gurnstein essay had been on my mind, because I think it makes a point that bears repeating, and because I imagine that my audience is now quite different than it was nearly a year and a half ago. I have edited some of the temporal references accordingly.

Keats, Reflexive Aesthetic Judgments, and Website Reliability

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
— Keats

Perhaps, we might add, that is all you need to know on the Web as well. Tasked with evaluating two different web sites that do more or less the same kind of thing, I found myself initially valuing one over the other and then reversing my judgment after more extensive use of both sites. My initial judgment was almost entirely aesthetic. One site looked clunky, crowded, and out of date, very early 2000s. The other was clean and well organized, minimalistic and inviting. It was only after exploring both sites for a good while that I realized the less aesthetically pleasing site was, in fact, the better site and by far.

That initial aesthetic judgment was, of course, a rather subjective means of evaluating a web site. But I think we do that all the time. It is almost a coping mechanism. If, for example, we are looking for some bit of information and a Google search turns up a 100,000+ hits, who has the time to carefully evaluate even the first 20 results. We open pages and make snap judgments about their worth, we close and move on, or then linger for a slightly more careful consideration. That initial judgment, I think, is probably an entirely aesthetic one. Site design can convey reliability and we pick up on those cues, however trustworthy they may be, almost instantaneously.

To be sure, there are more sophisticated means of evaluating the reliability of a website and I’m sure most of us know what they are and employ them. But how often? I wonder if we fool ourselves into thinking that we reason more about website reliability than we actually do. If we are making initial snap judgments on an impressionistically aesthetic basis, then we are all Keatsian now and mostly out of necessity.

Of course, in another sense, we are not Keatsian at all. For really what we are attuned to is not some ideal form of immutable, eternal beauty, but rather the perpetually shifting styles and fashions of web design. “Contemporaneity in design is truth” may be closer to the mark. And perhaps the more significant manner in which the Web has made us Keatsians is in the fostering of negative capability. Or, more cynically, it may just be apathy.

Weekend Reading, 10/16/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

A little late, but it’s technically still the weekend right?

Here are a couple of pieces on the history of the Internet, or at least facets of Internet related technology, from Ars Technica:

“Cutting the Cord: How the World’s Engineers Built Wi-Fi” by Iljitsch van Beijnum and Jaume Barcelo. It gets a bit technical, but I’m not sure how that could be avoided in telling this story.

and

“Before Netscape: The Forgotten Browsers of the 1990s” by Matthew Lasar: Before Netscape? How many people even remember Netscape? Interesting retrospective complete with screenshots.

“The Grand Map” by Avi Steinberg at Paris Review: You’ve probably heard about the driverless cars that Google deploys to gather street-view images for Google Maps, some of you may even have seen one. But what else do these indiscriminate eyes gather into their field of vision? Quite a bit, and a good deal of it is decidedly not pleasant. Fascinating, but be advised some images lean toward disturbing.

“The Consequences of Writing Without Reading” by Buzz Poole at Imprint. Title pretty much describes the piece. Nice reflection on the reading, writing, and solitude in a media-rich age in which solitude is viewed as a punishment of sorts. “Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to use your imagination without wanting to know how.”

And finally, a couple of Infographics:

“7 Disruptive Innovations that Turned Markets Upside Down” from the folks at Mashable: Borders on providing a bit too much information, but otherwise an interesting, compact take on Google, Netflix, Pandora, and four others.

“Google and Your Memory” from the staff writers at Online Colleges. A representative of Online Colleges emailed me about their well-conceived and balanced info-graphic after coming across my recent post, “Don’t Offload Your Memory Quite Yet.” Take a look.

Paradise Interrupted: Train Whistles, Cell Phones, and Social Change

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

In his classic study of the pastoral ideal in American culture, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx takes a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal as a point of departure. In his journal entry from July 27, 1844, Hawthorne describes what he observes as he sits down in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts to take in “such little events as may happen.”

Hawthorne, whose prescient metaphor for electrification we noted a few days ago, begins by describing the spot as follows:

“… a shallow space scooped out among the woods, which surround it on all sides, it being pretty nearly circular, or oval, and two or three hundred yards — perhaps four or five hundred — in diameter. The present season, a thriving field of Indin corn, now in its most perfect growth, and tasseled out, occupies nearly half of the hollow; and it is like the lap of bounteous Nature, filled with bread stuff.”

He goes on to note that, “… sunshine glimmers though shadow, and the shadow effaces sunshine, imaging that pleasant mood of mind where gaiety and pensiveness intermingle.”

Then he turns from landscape to soundscape and notes, in Marx’ summary, “the village clock, the cowbell tinker, and the mowers whetting scythes.” These sounds are not perceived as an intrusion into the peace of the idyll, rather they blend harmoniously into the whole.

Marx notes how Hawthorne is not idealizing undisturbed nature for itself, but rather nature and human culture in seeming harmony with one and for one another. Marx also observes that the journal entry is not merely about the place, it is about the human psyche as well. The subjective experience of the place is the primary object of consideration.

As we continue reading, suddenly the acoustical and psychic harmony is shattered:

“But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive — the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.”

Hawthorne then turns back to his observations and of nature, noting the leaves and “comparing their different aspects.”

This passage is notable for how often its pattern is independently repeated in the literature of the period. Marx notes similar patterns of peace and tranquility suddenly and harshly interrupted by a machine. In Walden, Thoreau likewise is disturbed from his admiration of nature by the sound of a locomotive. In Moby Dick, Ishmael is exploring the skeleton of a beached whale and suddenly the scene shifts an he is inside a textile mill. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim  are calmly floating down the river when suddenly they are rammed by a steamboat.

The specific case of the train’s piercing whistle is also recorded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Marx suspects that if we had access to all the writer’s notebooks from the period we would have countless more instances of this “little event.”

It is, on Marx’s view, characteristic of a much older literary pattern employed first by Virgil in his Eclogues. The harmony of man with nature, positioned between civilization on the one side and wilderness on the other, is troubled by the intrusion of some “counterforce” which signals the greater reality within which the pastoral ideal is played out. The same gesture is made visible in the landscape paintings of the 17th century that introduced some momento mori into the idealized scenery. It is, for example, spelled out by Poussin when his shepherds stumble upon a grave with the inscription, “Et in Arcadia Ego.”

The trains whistle, then, symbolically signaled the larger realities that were inescapably inserting themselves into the cultural landscape. The train’s whistle signaled the arrival of Industrialization and the disordering and reordering of society that came in its wake. Emerson, for example, is explicit about this:

“I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods. Wherever that music comes it has its sequel. It is the voice of the civility of the Nineteenth Century saying, “Here I am.” It is interrogative: it is prophetic: and this Cassandra is believed: ‘Whew! Whew! Whew! How is real estate here in the swamp and wilderness? Ho for Boston! Whew! Whew! … I will plant a dozen houses on this pasture next moon …”

It is as if these “little events” were analogous to our asking where we were when Kennedy was shot or when the Twin Towers were attacked. We all, at least those of a certain age, have little narratives we tell about such moments when reality harshly intruded into our idylls and signaled the changing of the times.

As I read all of this, I also wondered whether similar widely shared, equally mundane “little events” were characteristic of other periods of social change. Perhaps, the first time one heard the ring of the telephone or the engine of an airplane overhead. What about our own time? I remember when I first began to notice, in the mid-1990s, that ads on television were now prominently featuring web site addresses. Perhaps, if we’re going for jarring, we might recall the when we began to notice people talking for all to hear on their cell phones in public spaces. I can imagine a contemporary, Hawthorne-like, taking in the scenery at a park let’s say, and then suddenly startled by ones side of some too-audible conversation. (Interestingly, this very scenario was the inspiration for a recent essay by Jonathan Franzen, a literary figure of our time if ever there was one.) All of these “little events,” these little annoyances, might be, like Hawthorne’s train whistle, signifiers of shifting social worlds and mental/emotional states of being.

Any other suggestions?  What your “little events” that in retrospect were harbingers of significant cultural change? What change did they signal? What symbolic role did they play? What larger meanings did they clarify?