• I’m dipping in and out of quite a few books lately: Camus’s The Stranger, Percy’s Signposts in a Strange Land, The Essential Kierkegaard (trans. Hong and Hong), and Tyler Cowen’s The Age of the Infovore. I might have a separate post down the line about the Cowen, which is interesting reading about the cognitive patterns of autism and how our current information economy favors some of those characteristics.
• My friend Anna has started a new collaborative blog, So You Have an MFA, which I might contribute to on occasion. The overall theme is: Now what?
• Hollywoodland is a very good period piece noir about the death of George Reeves, who played Superman on TV in the ’50s. Was it suicide or murder? Adrien Brody plays a private investigator who sets out to discover the truth. Also starring Ben Affleck and Diane Lane.
• In 2009, Steve Earle released Townes, an album of Townes Van Zandt covers, which is as good as it sounds. Highly recommended.
• Inventors: Check out Quirky, a social media product development company. I saw their founder give a talk the other day. He’s a real young guy who when in high school convinced his parents to take out a second mortgage on their home so he could market an invention (a kind of iPod cord that helped him listen to music in class without the teacher catching on). With Quirky, you can submit invention ideas, and a network of roughly 60,000 members collaborate to make the invention workable, and then Quirky builds and distributes it and you get the royalties. Things are for sale in Bed Bath and Beyond, among other major retailers.

Here’s a fun article about the coming convergence of our real-world selves and our digital selves. An excerpt:

Walking past a bank of plasma screens in Austin that were sputtering out tweets from the festival, I saw the claim from Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president, that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone.

This dispatch from last month’s South-by-Southwest festival discusses the idea of Web 3.0, where we’re online so much we’re no longer conscious of being part of the network. Here’s another fun article about how this might affect the banking sector.

Articles like these are why Kierkegaard and Walker Percy are resonating so much with me lately (see posts below). Our society is progressing to the point where we no longer have physical tasks to do — for instance, tomorrow’s automobiles will be computers. We won’t be changing oil or spark plugs or doing anything with them ourselves. More and more work will take on a level of abstraction. Corporatespeak will be replaced with techspeak. Advertising and entertainment will converge so that you don’t have a TV show with commercial breaks. Rather, everything will be entertainment and advertising all in one. The net result will be that we’re all plugged into everything and at the mercy of marketers, who for their part get paid to keep us in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic sphere, focused on the immediate here and now. The era of the individual is over. What that means for the workspace is that everything is collaborative, like Wikipedia or Facebook, but what does that mean for our spiritual health? My guess is that individual self-hood will soon become a game, a process of attainment in the material world. How many friends can you amass on Facebook? What kind of discounts can you get when you eat out? What can you win by filling out that survey? Where can you find the cheapest gallon of gas?

But like the Judge in Blood Meridian, I have to think that the most interesting games have genuine stakes. Where are the stakes in the new gamification of our world? I see a real menace emerging. I think we’re going to see a lot more inexplicable violence in our world over the next decade.

This book by C. Stephen Evans does a good job of introducing Kierkegaard’s life and philosophy in clear terms to someone who doesn’t have a deep background in philosophy. Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher from the 19th century, is important for his contributions as a theological thinker and a philosopher, and one reason I’m interested in him because he combines two philosophic strands that interest me: Naturalism (the idea that we’re determined by forces beyond our control, especially biology) and Existentialism (the idea that we are defined by and responsible for our actions). As a Christian philosopher, Kierkegaard’s central idea is that we’re created by God as a species (subject to certain biological roles) but that we’re endowed with the freedom to create our individual selves. Furthermore, we have a duty to develop our selves in a certain way, according to our natures. Some key takeaways:

• Spheres of Existence: As I wrote below, Kierkegaard has this idea that we live in three separate stages or spheres — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The aesthetic sphere is characterized by the “here and now,” by sensory satisfactions and immediate desires. In the ethical sphere, we attain consciousness of a higher purpose, a duty to develop our selves. In the religious sphere, we progress even further and recognize our distance from God and seek to close that gap. I’m not totally clear on the difference between the ethical and religious spheres.
• Subjectivity: One of Kierkegaard’s key lines is, “Truth is subjectivity.” It seems like he does believe in an objective Truth, but that for Truth to have any meaning it requires a subject to acknowledge it. Because I’m cooking up some connection between Kierkegaard and the Internet, a way I’m understanding this is that the Internet exists objectively, but a subject has to connect before it has any meaning. A converse idea from Kierkegaard is that “Subjectivity is Untruth,” meaning, I think, that there is an objective Truth. You have to dial into the Internet, rather than just say, “I’m online.” Truth exists outside of the subject, but Truth requires a subject to have any meaning. As I’ll go into in another bullet, Kierkegaard is big on the individual, and one way to move from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere is to step away from the pack, rather than simply following others. (Think about inane “sophisticates” who pass off as their own opinions they read in the news, rather than having original thoughts of their own. Kierkegaard would encourage them to get a life.)
• Faith: Because Kierkegaard’s thought is rooted in Christianity, his is a philosophy of faith. He tends to believe that we learn the way Socrates teaches, by being shown what we already know. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but it seems like he believes the source of faith is ultimately divine, i.e. not something we can be taught. From Evans’ book, it seems faith is linked to the idea of moving from the aesthetic sphere to the religious sphere, of becoming an individual self. Also woven into the mix is the idea of God incarnate as man, which Kierkegaard calls the Absolute Paradox (another thing to accept on divinely inspired faith).
• Despair: I’m on more familiar terrain here. For Kierkegaard, there seems to be two kinds of despair — a weak, passive despair in which an individual is not trying to develop as an individual. This is the most common kind of despair, the despair of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. It’s also the despair that comes from consumer distraction, and from being a societal follower rather than an individual, or from being a copy rather than an original. I think Kierkegaard would have a field day with Facebook, which is one giant community where the object is to participate and blend in. In many ways, I think, Facebook is epitome of the aesthetic sphere, whose purpose is to keep us in despair. I’m not the only one who thinks this. A second type of despair, according to Kierkegaard, is a despair from defiance, from willing yourself into becoming a false self. I’m not totally clear on how this despair works, though I can see it might have an influence on Camus. Evans is firm in the view that Kierkegaard does not believe in “radical choice,” as the Existentialists do, but we do apparently have the ability to defy our true selves. Someone should write a paper about the despair from defiance and Milton’s Satan.

I’ve been doing some reading Walker Percy. Last night I read Linda Whitney Hobson’s Understanding Walker Percy, a great place to gain some basic biographical details and an introduction to Percy’s philosophical framework. I’ve been meaning to read up on Kierkegaard for a few months now, and may have to after this book. From Hobson’s book, Kierkegaard had this idea for three spheres of being — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In the aesthetic sphere, we’re in despair because of the meaninglessness of everything, but we might not realize we’re in despair. In the ethical sphere, we understand the meaninglessness but strive to live an ethical life anyway, stoically accepting it. In the religious sphere, we’re knights of faith striving to overcome the despair. (I’m not totally clear, but I think that’s the gist of Hobson’s synopsis.)

In terms of Percy, Binx Bolling is living in the aesthetic sphere. He’s a consumerist, and he moves from one secretary to the next, and he drives an MG, all in an effort to stave of the “malaise” of the “everyday.” These moves are a series of “rotations,” to use Kierkegaard’s term, an effort to avoid confronting the despair. But he is jolted out of his complacency and renews his efforts at “the search,” in which he becomes the knight of faith. He knows he’s been participating in rotations and now is willing to confront the truth.

The reason Percy speaks to us today is that our world has many more rotations to keep us from confronting the everydayness, the malaise, the despair: Facebook, blogs, cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle, video games, political histrionics, email surveys, retail VIP memberships, iPads, etc. So much stuff! And all of it keeps us distracted from any kind of spiritual questioning. Is it any wonder religion is an endangered species, carried on primarily by fringe lunatics with financial or political stakes? The real danger is that if we’re buried in the aesthetic sphere, what happens when the rug gets pulled out from under us? When the stocks crash or the housing bubble bursts? Then we see the facade for what it is, we get a glimpse of how fragile our worlds are and how we’ve been living in despair, and to deal with it we go crazy. That’s how the tea party forms. That’s why people blow up abortion clinics or have affairs or embezzle money from their employers. We perform risky behavior to serve some end, some manufactured meaning (to restore our nation’s finances or to restore morality or to get rich and pay off bills). Manufacturing some end, some meaning, is another rotation.

In many ways, the worldview of Percy shows up in DeLillo. Speaking about White Noise, DeLillo said he was trying to capture a “radiance in dailiness,” which seems very similar to this idea of rotations. The characters in DeLillo are distracted by the radiating media to the point where they become spiritual vacuums. It takes a disaster — an end-of-the-world-type scenario — for them to lift out of the malaise and rediscover life.

Inspired by Cormac’s eruditeness, I went back and reread some Milton, himself an interesting artistic model. After spending seven years at Cambridge, Milton then studied privately for another six years before, at age 30, announcing his intention to become the great English bard and to write the great English epic. Thirty years later, Paradise Lost. In the interim, he followed Virgil’s footsteps and wrote some pastoral poetry, which Samuel Johnson considered “easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting.”

Despite Johnson’s analysis, “Lycidas” is worth rereading. The story is simple enough: the speaker’s friend has died in a shipwreck, so he laments and then questions what it even means to be a poet. He ends on an optimistic note that despite his body being at “the bottom of the monstrous world,” his spirit is uplifted. There is a final, enigmatic stanza where a second voice comes in and comments on the speaker, the “uncouth swain.”

On one hand, to give credence to Johnson’s criticism, the poem is clearly an exercise because, unlike the speaker, Milton was not a childhood friend of the real-life Lycidas (Edward King). So there is that artificiality. Nevertheless, the poem is interesting for its pairing of classical and Christian motifs — the pastoral ladies Amaryllis and Naeara are paired with St. Paul and the clergy. And the real heart of the poem seems to be Milton’s concern about the nature of being a poet: “What boots it with incessant care / to tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade / and strictly meditate the thankless muse?” There is a sense that Milton, too, could die young, before he’s had a chance to complete his great work, a feeling I think most artists can relate to. For instance, it’s the same sentiment Keats expressed in “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” And “Lycidas” references one of Virgil’s poems, where Phoebus Apollo thumps the poet’s ears for his impatient ambition. Developing the patience to do the work, and then having faith that you’ll live long enough to complete it, is one of the more challenging things about becoming an artist, I think.

Side note: English nerds’ ears should perk up at this line: “Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth.”

I should have a Cormac tag on this blog. Last night I started the Best American Short Stories 2010, and read Steve Almond’s “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” an amazing story about a poker player. In his contributor’s comment, Almond mentioned the Judge’s speech about war as a game, which got me rereading chunks of Blood Meridian. At the library this afternoon I flipped through the books on Cormac criticism, and this one had quite a few essays about Blood Meridian, including Leo Daugherty’s “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian, as Gnostic Tragedy,” which I highly recommend if you’re interested in such things.

To summarize Daugherty’s article: Gnosticism is a creation myth in which the world is created by Archons (lower gods), who have been split away from the world of God (top god) and are residing in the world of earth. Archons created man and included a divine spark in his soul (a piece of top god). Man, therefore, is living in the evil Archon world but feels the tug toward an alien God. Blood Meridian acts out this drama with the Judge as an Archon, whose god is war and whose unmerciful killing is a way of controlling his dominion. My mind has been blown and I am going back to the books.