Beauty is truth, truth beauty

My review of Roger Scruton's book, Beauty, has just been published in the online art periodical, Artfractures Quarterly: Summer 2010. There's lots of other stimulating essays and reviews in there as well. Do have a browse.

Winter's Bone

Sometimes a film come along, like Winter’s Bone, that just reminds you how important cinema is. Unlike any other medium, the cinematic experience gives the viewer the psychic space to imaginatively explore the lives of those that they would never encounter in normal circumstances. But, this is more than an education in neo-realism. There is a certain moral position informing such film making that aims to exercise those faculties of empathy within us. Watching films that are more than entertaining distractions but have a serious intent enables us to imagine in a vivid way something of the invisible darkness in others.

Set in the Ozark mountains of rural Missouri, Winter's Bone follows 17 year old Ree as she searches for her father who has disappeared on bail after having put up their family home as a bond. If she does not find him within the space of a week, she, her catatonic mother and her two younger siblings will be evicted. The film is a chase, race-against-the-clock movie but elevated to something more profound by the rawness of impoverished lives drawn with a visual acuity and poignancy.

These American backwaters are not unfamiliar to film goers. John Boorman's 1972 film, Deliverance, starring Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds, presented the inhabitants of these peripheral sub-cultures as backward hillbillies, emotionally ruined by lines of familial consanguinity and intent on making city-dwellers squeal like a pig. The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men suggested that the contemporary cowboy landscape had lost its John Wayne values and become an amoral wilderness. Again, Ang Lee mapped this territory in Brokeback Mountain but, in that film, the landscape became a metaphysical backdrop to suppressed passion and eventual violence. In Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik avoids any consoling lyricism or horror film clichés in order to consider the grinding effects of poverty on a community. These are people who have aged before their time, the lines in their faces etched by the toil of eking a living from a barren land or surviving their loneliness by snorting lines or firing rounds into each other.



Winter's Bone possesses all the menace of any good thriller but the film’s real achievement is to place these thriller motifs within a domestic context. In between playing Nancy Drew, we witness Ree's effort to look after her family. Where ends cannot meet, she survives on the food handouts from neighbours or the hunting of squirrels for a stew. Played by Jennifer Lawrence with impressive emotional commitment, Ree combines gritty resilience with the awkward vulnerability of any teenager. Her world is one of trailers, cabins and anorexic dogs tethered to long chains. Yet, she accepts this stark, unforgiving existence for the sake of keeping her family together. When her brother and sister ask her if she is going to abandon them, Ree replies “I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back.”

Yet for all the emotional and visual austerity, this film does not succumb to fashionable nihilism. Winter’s Bone is a more nuanced project and seeks a kind of ambiguous redemption. Even in an hermetically sealed environment where the laws of barbarism and vengeance shape social attitudes, the possibility that individuals will choose generosity and goodness breathes hope across this tortured landscape. This hope may look grimy and weather beaten but it is still something recognisable as worth living for.

Lady Gaga and death

The Lady Gaga phenomenon seeps incontinently into every crevice of popular culture. She is, in the words of Madonna’s song, Vogue, on the cover of a magazine or, more correctly, every magazine. She has become a “living sculpture” that claims to fuse raunch, mortality and violence into an art form with its own pop soundtrack. At first glance, she and her arresting visuals look like performance art but, on closer inspection, they are too self-conscious, premeditated to be anything more than an exercise in crepuscular camp. With her Marge Simpson wigs and “look at me, look at me” shock tactics, the Lady Gaga brand has become as ubiquitous as Nike trainers and McDonalds. You can sneer at her, but it is hard to ignore her. She has become the Damien Hirst of the music industry, a headline junkie.

“Death subtends life, or underlies life,” the pathologist F. Gonzales-Crussi explains, “and the action of time consists in peeling away successive layers so as to render death ever more visible.” Lady Gaga’s striptease creates an aesthetic of the funeral parlour. Her walk-in freezer complexion and cat suits that give her an anorexic silhouette locate her inspiration in the mortuary. The Jacobean revenge narratives of her videos (that involve male models being burnt and poisoned) are meant to reveal “the skull beneath the skin”. Recently she has captured the headlines by wearing a dress made of proscuito crudo. Remember man that thou art meat. The more twisted and macabre, the better in this weird carnival of death. The cultural commentator, Camille Paglia writes in a recent article for The Sunday Times Supplement:

At last year’s MTV awards show, Gaga staged a barbaric spectacle where she was seemingly crushed to death by a falling chandelier, after which her bloodied body was hoisted up to dangle limply above her piano. On her current tour, she appears to be killed by a psychotic stalker, who gnaws her throat as the blood pours down her chest. Monster claws and other horror-movie regalia are a Gaga staple...All the frantic, flailing arm moves imposed on her by professional choreographers can’t disguise her essential depressiveness and spiritual paralysis...

It's not clear what Paglia means by “spiritual paralysis” but she captures the idea that something innate to the human person is damaged by such nihilistic preoccupations. This is the soul of man dragged through the sewers of the imagination or what the American art critic, Adam Gopnik, describes as the High Morbid Manner:

A detached, distanced, oddly smiling presentation of violence – a pageantry of violence – is, as every evening’s television and every summer’s big movie demonstrates, as much the popular fashion as the avant-garde one...The shock of the new, which for most of the century could reside as much in a black square as in a slit eyeball, isn’t available any longer. It’s not possible to shock any more by being new. The only way to shock is by being shocking.

Lady Gaga may dress as if she is the high priestess of the avant garde but she is simply appropriating the ambient culture around her – the torture porn of horror films and the drive-by fantasies of Grand Theft Auto. Her music sells because she can write a hook. She sells because she has tapped into the maggot infested corners of the contemporary imagination. "I want your ugly/ I want your disease," she sings. Disease and ugliness is what we get. The pursuit of Beauty is forsaken.

Without any eschatological hope or reference point, the secular mind ekes out a little comfort from futile distraction. With annihilation offered as our ultimate meaning one endures this living death by downloading Bad Romance and dancing like zombie.

Is the internet playing with our minds?

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene towards the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

Did you get to the end of the above quotation without pressing a link or playing the video? Reading anything on the internet is full of distractions, pop-ups, siren voices inviting us to click, link, search and surf. Unless I make the effort to print an article from the internet, I invariably don’t read it from beginning to end. Online I’ll skim read it and if it doesn’t hold my attention or I find it too difficult, I’m back to the Google search engine. Even when I am reading, I catch myself taking sneaky glances at my e-mails, Statcounter, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc. I am snacking or grazing on information, images and ideas. I have the suspicion that when I log into the internet, I am logging out of my usual ways of thinking. Reading a book and reading a blog or an article on a website feel like two cognitively different experiences. But, are they? And if they are, does it really matter?

Of course, the fact that all this immense store of data on the internet is just a click away is widely accepted as having radically benefited mankind. This is hard to dispute and only the Luddite would argue that we would be better off without the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee composed the code for the world wide web, the way human beings collected and transmitted information and ideas changed for ever. Now, with a quick Google search, I can find out within seconds that, for example, A Space Odyssey was released in 1968. No more traipsing to the library and wandering the stacks. For cherry picking information (the way I mostly use the net) I find the internet invaluable, but there are moments when I wonder how helpful it is if we want to think a bit deeper about things and ideas? How is the internet affecting our cognitive faculties and our ability to think more seriously?

One of the criticisms of this blog is that it is not bloggish enough. It’s not punchy, pithy or journalistic. It’s not angry, opinionated or flashy. The paragraphs are too long, the language too literary and rhetorical, the ideas too culturally arcane. These criticisms are spot on. But that’s the kind of blog I chose to create. Yes, there are links and videos, but I wanted to see if it was possible to put ideas and their expression at the centre of this medium in a way that was less feverish and less about convenience. I wondered if the effort and patience that have been essential requirements when reading a book could still be part of reading a blog? I’m not sure. And I become positively pessimistic when I read the pathologist Bruce Friedman, who also blogs about the use of computers in medicine, admit, “I can’t read War and Peace anymore, I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” I am beginning to suspect that this experience is not uncommon.

I think something is happening to our minds (or, at least, to my mind). We appear to be moving from a linear, narrative processing of information (largely influenced by the book) to something more staccato and disjointed (largely influenced by the Internet). A more contemplative, focused reading of material is being replaced by a hurried, superficial reading that fillets essays and articles for the “essential” facts and discards the rest as superfluous waste. We are becoming, in the words of one commentator, “skilled hunters,” butchering the involved, challenging argument for the gobbet, soundbite, snazzy snippet.

It appears I’m not the only one that has these concerns. In his book, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Nicholas Carr examines similar anxieties but places them in a broader technological context. He argues that there is growing scientific evidence which shows the internet is changing the way our brains function and that for all the benefits of the internet, there may also be real losses. Like the computer, HAL, Carr suggests that our minds may be going and being replaced with a radically new synaptic organization:

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenburg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the centre of art, science and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.

The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Nicholas Carr, Atlantic Books, London, 2010

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2

For the serious mountaineer, there is only one mountain. K2. After Everest, K2 is the second highest mountain peak in the world, standing some 28,251 feet. But whereas Everest has been “overrun by a circus of commercial expeditions” and thousands have had their picture snapped at its top, K2 retains its deadly attraction. Only 278 people have ever stood on its summit. Of those 278, only 254 have made it down to base camp alive.

On Friday August 1 2008 a series of international expeditions (Norwegian, Dutch, Italian, Serbian, American, South Korean and French) began an attempt on the K2 summit. By Monday August 4, eleven mountaineers and high-altitude porters (HAPs) were dead. Many of those who made it down alive were suffering from severe frostbite or were emotionally bruised by the knowledge that friends and loved ones had been killed. This became one of the worst disasters in modern mountaineering history. K2 with its natural arsenal of ice, snow, avalanche and altitude sickness had defeated almost all those who had tried to scale its fearsome heights. The Sherpas were wary of “waking the fury of the mountain gods” that they believed lived in the glaciers, seracs and crevices of this cold mountain. That fateful weekend the mountain gods roared.

Graham Bowley’s No Way Down provides a meticulous account of the central events that culminated in this tragedy. But, above all, he tells with wonderful economy the human drama of courage, hubris, self-sacrifice and ultimately, loss and grief. It is a fascinating exploration of the existential pull that mountains exert on the lives of some people.

For these mountaineers, climbing is more than a physical challenge but it bears a metaphorical weight as they attempt to articulate through the climb what it means to be mortal. Every groan of the mountain, every careless footstep, the ice screw and line badly anchored makes the cold breath of death visible. These tough men and women remind us that when we are exposed to our human fragility in such a stark, uncompromising fashion, we are also provided with a simultaneous awareness of what we are capable of and of what we cannot achieve by our own powers. It is not mountains that are conquered, it is fear. In a Himalayan light, the illusions and armoury fall away and we find ourselves clinging to a new clarity about ourselves. For some, this is a touching of the void. For others, a touching of the transcendent. In both cases, the climbing of mountains like K2 are death-defying and self-defining experiences for those involved. Bowley observes:

They (the mountaineers) had broken out of comfortable lives to venture to a place few of us dare go in our lives. They had confronted their mortality, immediately and up close. Some had even come back to K2 after serious injury in earlier years, attracted like flies to the light, to some deeper meaning about themselves, human experience, and human achievement.

In return, K2 had required from them heroism and selflessness and responsibility. It had also laid bare fatal flaws and staggering errors.

Gerard McDonnell was one of those who came back to K2 after he had been caught in a rockfall in 2006 and had to be airlifted to hospital. Back to fitness, this time he successfully climbed K2, making him the first Irishman to do so. There is a photo of him triumphantly holding an Irish flag at the summit. Bowley explains that Gerard’s reasons for climbing were, in part, due to his personal history. His father, Denis, had died when he was just twenty. In 2003, when he climbed Everest, he took with him his father’s rosary beads and told his mother, “I felt close to my dad up there.” For those who knew Gerard this was a statement stamped with real conviction rather than sentiment.

Sadly, Gerard McDonnell never made it down alive from K2, probably succumbing to the devastating effects of altitude sickness. Yet, during his descent, he is believed to have selflessly tried to help three Korean climbers who had fallen and got trapped in their ropes. He did so in the knowledge that this would put his own life in grave danger. At his memorial service back in his home town of Kilcornan, County Limerick, the priest said, “We know we are here to honour Gerard, to praise him, and welcome Gerard to his heavenly home. Gerard, who died on the K2. That is his burial place and in a sense where he wished to die…It was on a mountain that Moses communicated with God. It was on a mountain that Jesus was transfigured. It was on a mountain that Gerard achieved one of his life’s ambitions. It was such a spiritual experience that he even referred to it as being an honour to die on a mountain.”



No Way Down could have been reduced to a boys own adventure yarn. Instead, Graham Bowley chooses a more complex, rigorous route through his material. He does not allow the bravery of the mountaineers to camouflage their flaws and vanities. He shows how the different memories of those forty eight hours reveal as much about those who are recalling the events as those who they are recalling. And at the centre of his story rises K2. With prose that is as spare and precise as anything in Hemmingway, Bowley provides a vivid sense of how this mountain inspires both jubilation and fear.

The photographer, Anselm Adams, famously said that “No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being” No Way Down does not hesitate to explore these ontological intuitions and thus turns a tragic event into something with universal application. No Way Down is my favourite read of 2010...so far.


No Way Down: Life and Death on K2, Graham Bowley, Viking 2010

Fundamentalism

In On Balance, Adam Phillips suggests that you can determine when a thing is fundamental if it turns up in dinner party conversation or after a few pints down the pub and the tolerant façade people present begins to slip. The debate becomes agitated and sometimes violent. To protect us from such ugly displays, some polite forms of society have created the convention that we are never to discuss politics or religion…or, in other words, never to discuss anything that really matters, that pertains to Truth.

But, outside the etiquette of polite society, this is very hard to do. There are few human beings who live lives of obscene indifference. Most human beings consider something or someone as fundamental. Without this fundamental idea, without recognizing something as definitive, our lives are trivialised. The fundamental may be your children or the State of Israel or the Bible or your socialism. Whatever it is, it is fundamental to how you understand yourself, your place in the world and, for some, your eschatological purpose. In this loose sense, we are all fundamentalists.

It follows that we will want to protect these fundamental things from views that seek to harm them. “There is no such thing as free speech,” Stanley Fish writes in No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing Too, “because from the very start your sense of just how free speech should be is shadowed by your identification of, and obligation to, the good in whose name acts of speech are to be justified.” For example, the democrat will try and hold in some sort of harmonious tension the multiple views within society. However, if it is perceived that the fundamental idea of democracy is itself being threatened by a particular view then this dissenting view may considered inadmissible. Adam Phillips observes that “For the fundamentalist, as for the democrat, people can say what they like; but when they start saying things that aim to destroy the foundational preconditions of their given political culture there have to be penalties.”

But how do you manage fundamental beliefs in a pluralistic, liberal society? One possibility is that there can be what the political philosopher, Chantal Mouffe, calls "productive conflict", lively debate that invigorates democracy. Another possibility is that some consensual ground is mapped where we accept that there are fundamental things that we disagree on but other fundamental things (e.g., our common humanity, our desire for peace, our search for unity) that we can choose, at times, to recognise. Or society responds to these tensions by elevating the idea of tolerance with the result that vigorous “truths” are turned into flaccid “opinions” and bled of some of their power.

Increasingly these methods are being questioned. Productive conflict may be useful in a democracy, but who decides what is productive and for whom? Or what happens when discussions and negotiations keep breaking down and we are no longer able “to agree to differ”? I noted that in a recent article, an activist wrote, “it is not tolerance that we want, it is acceptance” signalling a philosophical shift to a position that is more sharply defined and, for the advocates of tolerance, threatening. Adam Phillips suggests the following modus vivendi:

We are talking about the moment in which people begin to believe, in despair or with relief, that co-existence rather than consensus is our best option; or alternatively believe that the unbelievers – those who are not of the same mind – must be eradicated. Coexistence, in other words, is the modern liberal’s last hope; the only remaining political ideal left, and one that will survive only if that is itself agreed upon.

Today the word “fundamentalism” is most often associated with religion. Islamic fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism is a complex phenomenon (too complex for a blog post) but it appears to arise, in part, as a reactive response to a contemporary world view, for example, to secularism or Western materialism. In this reaction, the balance between faith and reason tips towards more aggressive expressions. "The quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous," writes Pope Benedict in Salt of the Earth, "when it leads to fanaticism and narrow mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith becomes falsified." The fundamentalist becomes less concerned with honouring the fundamental and more concerned with strategies of conflict. When what is considered fundamental is defined as in-opposition-to rather than as a truth to be valued in itself, then the distorting effects of this process proliferate with grave consequences. When fundamental beliefs are imposed rather than proposed, human freedom and dignity is treated contemptuously.

“There is no goodness without belief,” wrote John Updike, “There is nothing but busy-ness. And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved to take into the next.” Most people accept that believing in something fundamental is essential if our lives are to have some moral coherence and purpose. Yet this can only be achieved if these fundamental beliefs are protected from the corrosive effects of fundamentalist designs. Adam Phillips advises that for the religious believer to achieve this involves keeping the vital relationship between faith and reason in play at all times. Without this relationship those things that believers consider fundamental risk spinning dangerously out of control. This is not a new idea, but it is one that Adam Phillips expresses eloquently in On Balance. For those, who believe in something they consider fundamental, this is a salutary warning.

On balance, excess and religious fanaticism

I am temperamentally suspicious of extreme positions in religion, politics, culture and people. These are commonly described in terms of binary sectarianism: liberal/conservative, progressive/reactionary, utopian/revolutionary. I find these tags intellectually lazy and adolescent. My psychological anxieties about such divisions are that (a) they are too crude to be useful in thinking deeply about ideas. By generalizing, they inevitably degrade the vital nucleus of an idea and (b) nuance, paradox, intellectual humility and the slipperiness of human thought become vices rather than virtues of intelligence. By making an aristocracy of the final word, the possibility that there may be something more to say about a matter or fresh ways of speaking about it are closed off.

It follows that the idea of mature, respectful “dialogue” with contrary perspectives becomes a sign of weakness. The possibility that other views may shed light on a given view is held as anathema. Such sectarianism must turn the person who holds a contrary view into an enemy. They are to be defeated either by battering them into submission with an argument or by battering them physically, verbally or emotionally until they no longer exist. The umbrella term for these attitudes and strategies is fundamentalism.

I am looking for something more balanced, especially in a world where there exist competing and opposing views. A balanced economy. A balanced body politic. A balanced Church. A balanced person. More balance in my life, my ideas and in myself. I believe that because balance is attractive and difficult to achieve that it has an inherent value. But, has it? For example, what makes me think that the “balanced argument” or the “balanced presentation” of a particular argument is of more value than the polemic or the rant? Could, in fact, the polemic or the rant be nearer to the truth of the matter than the meticulous weighing of ideas and expressions on some finely tuned scales? And, how does one determine what is the balance, what is the extreme? I clearly have some idea in my mind of what are excessive positions, but based on what? Maybe I should be more suspicious of balance?

I’ve been thinking about these mental balancing acts because I’ve been reading Adam Phillip’s infuriating and fascinating (you see, I’m trying to strike a balance and ending up with a critical imbalance!) meditation, On Balance. He writes:

When the dramatist Mark Ravenhill writes that “Art that isn’t driven by this basic impulse to create an unbalanced view of the world is probably bad or weak,” we are not shocked by this, partly because after Romanticism we take it for granted that this is the province of art; elsewhere it is balance that is required. Art, ideally, is where the unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible. If we want art to be an isolation ward it is because we know just how contagious these so-called unbalanced views of the world can be (fascism, racism and sexism in modern liberal societies are unbalanced views, but liberal democratic values are not).

I’m not sure this view bears close examination. I’m not aware that, for example, in the contemporary art world “unbalanced views” are proliferating and that dangerous germ cultures like fascism, racism or sexism are being grown. The really “unbalanced” views (and they are, at present, minority views) in this environment are that beauty, harmony and truth are more than bourgeois, cultural constructs. Yet, there may exist some art forms, such as in the theatre, and entertainment forms, such as comedy, where playwrights or comedians dare to tip the balance or knock it over.

The reason that Adam Phillips is convinced that “unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible” is because the memory of 9/11 casts a dark shadow over his thinking. On Balance is as much a book about this event as it is about balance or psychoanalysis. For Adam Phillips, 9/11 is the example of modern excess that colours all his views of other, lesser examples of excess:

The anorexic and the suicide bomber, the attention-seeking child and the compulsive gambler, the person who has more money than he needs and the person committed to celibacy are all involved, in their different ways, in extravagant violations of law, decency or morality; even though, of course, they may not see it this way. And this, too, is important when we are thinking about excess: what is excessive to one person may be to another person just an ordinary way of life. The devoutly religious are not, in their own view, overdoing it; terrorists are not, in their own view, overreacting to the injustices they feel they have suffered. Indeed, one of the many ways of describing many of our personal and political and religious conflicts is that someone is trying to persuade someone else that they are being excessive: excessively cruel, excessively disrespectful, excessively unjust.

Perhaps, we need to take a more balanced approach to our discussion of excess. Instead of lumping together all forms of excessive behaviour – “the person who has more money than he needs and the person committed to celibacy” – as if they were identical, we need to recognise that different excesses belong to different categories of behaviour. For example, is the excessive behaviour of grief the same as the excessive behaviour of sexual promiscuity? Can you ever have too much grief? If so, what is the right amount of grief? Can you ever have too many sexual partners? If so, what is it about having multiple sexual partners that could be damaging? Different excesses. Different categories.

Adam Phillips concludes his discussion of excess by considering religious excess or fanaticism. This, of course, interested me because I, according to Phillips, am supposedly living an excessive life as a religious celibate and for somebody who prizes balance that is unsettling. But, more importantly, this discussion (post 9/11) has widespread cultural implications. Phillips suggests that there are three ways to account for religious fanaticism:

i. …Excessive belief is called up to stifle excessive doubt, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: “If I don’t continually prove my belief in this extreme way, what will be revealed is extreme faithlessness, or despair, or confusion, or even emptiness.”

ii. ….Excessive acts of belief are required to persuade other people, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: “What matters most in the world to me will not be listened to, or considered, or thought about or even noticed unless a dramatic statement is made.”

I think there is something in these descriptions of extreme religious behaviour, but it is Adam Phillips third description that I found really thought provoking. I will conclude this post with it.

iii. …the religious fanatic is someone for whom something about themselves and their lives is too much; and because not knowing what that is is so disturbing they need to locate it as soon as possible…Because the state of frustration cannot be borne – because, perhaps, it is literally unbearable, as long-term personal and political injustices always are – it requires an extreme solution, which is usually a fast one…Fanatics are people who have had to wait too long for something that may not exist. Wherever there is excessive frustration there is a false solution; this would be an excessive way of putting it. Our excesses are the best clues we have to our own poverty; and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

On Balance, Adam Phillips, Hamish Hamilton, 2010