The world and words this morning

After reading student calls for "reporting and tracking microaggression from faculty" and the need for "cultural humility training" for professors, and after reading the morning news of the latest people murdered for their incorrect thinking, incorrect beliefs, or incorrect efforts to help the plight of others in their faraway countries, I felt a little beaten down. The world seemed lacking in beauty and goodness.

Being rather silly at times, I had the urge to eat the last chocolate bunny. Unfortunately, the consumption of chocolate bunnies solves very little. Doesn't help.

Coming across a little passage of Nabokov helped. It had beauty. It had goodness. It was suffused with love, the work of a creative being reaching toward someone he cherished.

Three years have gone--and every trifle relating to father is still as alive as ever inside me. I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight. He will come towards us in our shared bright eternity, slightly raising his shoulders as he used to do, and we will kiss the birthmark on his hand without surprise. You must live in expectation of that tender hour, my love, and never give in to the temptation of despair.

Now this praise and image of glory expresses a son's love for his father. It also expresses a Christian belief in a creative, bright realm beyond this life--not a very popular concept among intellectuals when he wrote those words. Although you may be thinking that I'm wandering away from the original topic (the effect of too much chocolate, perhaps), this homage does have something to do with free speech, correct or incorrect thinking, and variety of opinions:

V. D. Nabokov, a lawyer and professor and athlete and editor of a progressive newspaper, was a liberal who was convinced change was overdue in Russia, but he eventually came to abhor and then oppose the bloody revolutionary chaos that arrived. Elected to the first provisional parliament ever formed in Russia, he was a courageous man, a hero to some. When he leaped up to shield a political enemy who was speaking at a rally in Berlin, he was shot to death by a pair of assassins. Their intended victim walked away unharmed    --both passages from a review of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Larry Woiwode in Books and Culture

First, I note again the beauty and goodness and warm love in the passage of a letter written to Vladimir Nabokov's mother. Second, I note that V. D. Nabokov was a liberal and a progressive who lost his life--who gave his life--in defending a political enemy. Third, I note the calls for campus tribunals and training. Fourth, I note the slaughter going on around the world in the service of abolishing incorrect beliefs and thinking.

Art & Tenebrae

As the usual martyrdoms have been fearsome of late—much of Yeats’s “rough beast,” much torture and death, the beheading of three young girls walking through a cocoa plantation on their way to school, and the heartbreaking scene of children rising up to slaughter their teacher and then burn her pulp of a body because she had touched a satchel containing a book belonging to another religion—I call it good to reflect on the inheritance passed to us by our ancestors.

For centuries past, artists in the West (and often elsewhere) created out of a Judao-Christian landscape. Not so long ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “I believe there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, and more perfect than the Savior; there is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ.” A dominant Christian worldview held that, despite the frail fabric of human nature, good and evil could be discerned and brokenness in the world redeemed and healed. For many artists in ‘developed’ countries, that lens for accurate seeing and restoration has been lost.

Every artist and lover of art ought to think about these things. Does one perform a metanoia, and turn one’s face away from trends and toward the handed-down vision of the timeless? Does one build an entirely different worldview? Or does one simply slide on into the gulfs of not-quite-thinking, never really being conscious of having a worldview at all? The last of these is a mushy state, and a shadowy destroyer of art and culture, quite prevalent in the West.

Me, I’m still thinking about the words of Tenebrae that stream forth in the darkness, closing with shivers of thunder. Afterward comes silence that waits on the footsteps of beauty.

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The image of shadowy forms passing in front of an Easter bonfire were captured by Radu Lucian of Bucharest, Romania, and are used courtesy of the photographer and www.sxc.hu.

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"Aversion to exposition," worldview, & art

"It seems to me that an aversion to exposition in fiction may be a 20th century thing. Earlier literatures seemed more comfortable with it than 20th century literatures. If this assumption is correct, does the new aversion come from a move toward more verisimilitude in writing?

"Why do infodumps feel unrealistic to us, particularly in dialogue? Much of what we say every day is expository. But transcribed into dialogue in a story, most of our expository conversations would feel unrealistic."

--Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus

******

WHEREIN I ANSWER QUESTIONS

DESPITE MY VERY OWN

(MY OWN, MIND YOU!)

IGNORANCE,

& EVEN VENTURE AS FAR AS

THE MYSTERIOUS GENRE OF ROMANCE...

I would say that an “aversion to exposition” comes from the same impulse as Jackson Pollock dollops (say that 20 times, fast!) and splatters: a conviction that the world is random, uncontrollable, and meaningless. Exposition, in the light of that idea, is drained of authority and purpose. In fact, one can have no confidence in assertions and perceptions as anything but one writer’s stray and momentary thoughts.

Such a stance appears “more realistic,” I suppose, if a writer or a reader subscribes to that worldview—and many writers have done so. Today it appears that most “literary” writers do so, and most writers of “fantasy." Writers of detective fiction are a different breed; no matter their personal beliefs, they must find solid ground in “right” and “wrong,” and within a universe that may appear like a labyrinth but will make sense, if a thread is properly pursued. For them, the man-bull at the heart of a Cretan maze will be discovered, revealed, brought to light. Although I know almost nothing at all about the genre of “romance,” that won’t stop me from a little wild expositon: that path takes one from “start” to “heart,” from the beginning of a labyrinth to the center where the man-bull is tamed and becomes Beauty’s beloved. Meanwhile, “westerns” can’t avoid the laws and heritage that point straight back to the code of Western morality and manliness nailed to the schoolhouse marm's door in Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

IT'S A MAD, MAD WORLD.

IT JUST IS.

The creation and dominance of a worldview that sees the universe as random is, I imagine, the reason that Modernism casts such a very long shadow. It is, I suspect, a reason that a certain amount of recent literature appears profoundly repetitive. If one’s birthright is merely “the random,” then there is a kind of fundamental simplicity to one’s vision. The past century is as far as you need look as an artist, because before that everybody was misguided. In fact, why read or look at your predecessors at all, if everything’s random? Because history and tradition and all those motheaten things don’t matter. Hence, in the latter half of the twentieth century, we often bumped into now old-hat complaints about writers who hadn’t read, artists who hadn’t learned to draw, etc.

The question for these has been how to move forward, because a great deal of what has been done is a kind of running in the hamster’s wheel. For many, the reclamation of skills and beauty is underway.

WHAT WAS THAT?

OR, EXPLOSION IN THE MUSEUM

Surely there is a sort of progress and movement--a pun is an evil thing! there were seven or eight of the relentless, cheeky things here, until I cleaned up the sentence and flushed them down the Oh, never mind--from the world of Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit (cannily canned in the lovely month of May, 1961) to Ofili's elephant dung and obvious pleasure in color and line.

That high prices have been shelled out--the Tate paid $61,000 for its Merda d'artista--gives the original joke of the thing a pleasant level of absurdity. Of course, the interest in the thing is not "in" the cans or their original commentary but in the twists and turns of a story about each little can and how it grew until one day it, as Manzoni wished, blew up in a museum, taking a lot of highly inflated pretensions with it. The story isn't finished until the last can blows up in the last museum, and the last outraged newspaper article is written, and the museums decide what to do about their expensive, blown-up cans and the unstoppable process of decomposition.

I wonder what is in the tiny can that has been x-rayed inside some of these cans? Was Manzoni just using filler, or is there even more message to the message? You can't say the simplest thing about these cans without a pun, you know; there ought to be an article about that fundamental impossibility.

Leave me alone! I am still talking about "aversion of exposition" and the random worldview!

OOPS,

NO,

I'M NOT...

BECAUSE IN THIS

VERY PARTICULAR SPOT,

NO, OH, VERY NO, MY DEAR NANETTE

--TAPDANCING TO MUSIC BY VINCENT YOUMANS--

IT'S NOT A MAD, MAD WORLD

Others long ago rejected the Modernist revolution of the random and ordered the world. For perfectly obvious reasons, these are primarily people who have a religious worldview—a Marilynne Robinson, say, in what is called "literary fiction," or a Charles Causley in poetry, or a Gene Wolfe in what is called "genre fiction." (But this cannot be a Buddhist view, because that leads again to the welcoming and the utilizing of the random.) Despite the fact that they can’t help being of their time and place (nobody can, after all), such artists are “more comfortable” with much from earlier times—an embrace of the chain of being, beauty, truth, moral underpinnings, and other elements dismantled in the twentieth century. They don’t lack subjects of meaning or a compass or light to see by.

These writers may never write about religion per se, yet they have a solid world underfoot. They don't live in one of those shifty, random houses slipping about on sand. What's outside the windows may be astonishingly mutable, but the house stands still.

LET'S NOT BOTHER THINKING ABOUT IT, SHALL WE?

Still others have a shadowy worldview, borrowed from the culture at large, because they've never bothered to think about how they consider the world. These, neither hot nor cold, are not particularly aware of what they do, and are blown like tumbleweeds by the winds of trend and fashion.

HERE ALL PONTIFICATION

WAS INTERRUPTED,

SADLY,

BY AN EXPLODING

CAN

Help!

Who said that?

Help?

Yes!