joy and exclusion

Is it a human law that joy occurs in small, exclusive groups?

I was complaining to my friend Yuri that Jews are too intellectual. At Sukkot, the most joyous of the Jewish holidays, there is a lot of discussion about why we must be joyous on this occasion. All that discussion kills the joy for me. Join the Hasidim, Yuri told me. They are continually joyful.

How strange. The Hasidim seem dour. I once saw two Hasidic men walking down the street in Miami Beach. Despite the heat they wore full black robes and large black hats. They walked in opposite directions, on opposite sides of the street. When they came abreast, they stopped and stared at each other silently for a several seconds, and then walked on. They must have been from different sects, and the street wasn't big enough for both of them. Did these men hate each other, and also know the secret of joy?

Those American pioneers, living miles from civilization, who stare stonefaced down through time at us in old photographs, did they know the secret of joy?

Lenox MA

The Set Piece

I live with two cats and several plants. I like being reminded that most things live their entire lives saying little or nothing at all. In the woods you are surrounded by things that don't say anything but were living there before you came and will continue to live after you leave. In the academic world it is publish or perish: your survival depends on your production of words. The trees in the woods have forgone an academic career to live just as trees, in the woods, silent and anonymous.

As Randal's listening exercise proved, the woods are full of sound. There are many chattery little fuckers in the woods: birds, insects, frogs. Their chatter is part of their private commerce. It is a quiet sound, even a species of silence. It is not the sound of the great strivings of men. The blue jay is listening only to the sounds of other blue jays and is deaf to the calls of other birds, like the old locals in Lenox who get their morning coffee at O'Brien's General Store and have no traffic with the newcomers next door at the Haven Cafe. The buildings, O'Brien's and the Haven, sit silent like trees, side by side.

The woods remind me of this stanza from Hopkins' sonnet:

Each living thing does one thing and the same
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells
Selves. Goes itself. Myself it speaks and spells
Crying, "What I do is me, for that I came."

We know from the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard that each person contains inside himself an entire woods, a population of selves. Someone on the hike mentioned that Saturn was passing out of her chart. According to my friend the Jungian, Saturn is the archetypal judge. The lighter side of judgment is discernment, which suggests openness, variety, life. The darker side is verdict, which suggests closure, death.

Randal asked us to notice the vibration of open space and the response of our souls to this vibration. City life is cramped. There is not enough space for all the living selves inside me to do their one thing and the same. One in particular clamors for space at the table, and it annoys me, like a bumptious country cousin. In the wide open, in the woods, the table suddenly seems spacious. The vibration of open space is like the thin atmosphere of Mars, and I am like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, eyes popping out. The left-out self rushes in. It stakes my entire soul with claims of unmet demands. I am like a cursed Jew of the shtetl. A demon occupies my body and speaks through my mouth.

The only way to respond to such a demon is to assume that it is the dark side of something that is part of me and that has a light side, too, and to acknowledge the demon's claims but to reestablish occupation of my own soul. And after all, if it is a real demon I may as well bluff.


The Discussion

What is the metaphysics of inner selves? Are there stifled impulses trying to find expression, or are there indulged impulses going on a rampage? Is life like a bottle that needs to be uncorked, or is it like a bicycle wheel that needs to be braked? How do politics work in the city of the soul? Do some interests express themselves at the expense of others? I think not. I think that within a limited budget the city either allows all interests to express themselves, or else it represses all interests and all work stops. In some cities, however, there are certain classes, gypsies, say, of whom nobody expects much. The city considers the gypsies a nuisance, but it also doesn't think the gypsies are its problem. The feeling is that nothing can be done about them. They don't seem to want the normal things the city provides, like education.

What to do about the gypsies?

Quantum of Solace

It is a good James Bond movie when the bad Bond girl is an interesting role and the actress playing her can act. It is a great one when the same is true of the good Bond girl. In this movie the bad one turns out not really bad but never loses her element of danger. The actress, Olga Kurylenko, also does no mean Bolivian accent for a girl from the Ukraine. The good one is played meatily enough by Gemma Arterton to make her pat role of sleeping with Bond and getting drowned in oil by the villain feel natural. Her body is left on the hotel room bed covered in oil in a reference to Goldfinger, but the oil scene has enough of its own reality that the reference does not come off cute. Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis have written a screenplay confident that it can stand on its own.

Cuteness is part of the Bond tradition that is being phased out. The character Q was quaint, like those "There will always be an England" notes that used to end New Yorker articles. There may still always be an England, but the quaintness is a dead joke. All other Bond movies had an obligatory early scene where Q explained to Bond what his new gadgets could do. In this movie the gadgetry is limited to a fancy cell phone, and any super powers of technology that appear in the movie are revealed incidentally while the plot moves on. The one old-Bond technological joke toward the end of the movie is set up in the traditional way ("This hotel runs on fuel cells? But isn't that dangerous?") but the punchline falls flat and the joke feels expendable.

Also gone is the villain's super-scary bodyguard and the long setup for an ultimate fight between him (or her in the case of Grace Jones) and Bond. Cleverly, two Bond traditions are killed with one stone when the nice Bond girl trips the only candidate for super-scary bodyguard and sends him tumbling down the stairs. He has to wear a neck brace for the rest of the movie. But again the movie flinches near the end, and Bond, who can make unconscious four secret service agents in three seconds in an elevator, can't beat up the villain, a skinny corporate CEO, in one minute of hand-to-hand combat. This is the suddenly-everybody-can-fight fallacy of action movies that I thought was put to rest by Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity who, when he asked, "How do I know that guy at the bar can handle himself?", once and for all divided the world of men into the ones who can handle themselves and the ones who can't and banished the conceit that a man can cross over mid-movie.

There is a more systemic failure in this movie. Judi Dench is as solid as ever as M, with those straight-shooting blue eyes, but the story of her slowly losing trust in Bond, and suddenly regaining it, or maybe never having lost trust in him but only giving in to political pressure to arrest him, is muddy and contradictory and doesn't work as effectively as it could as a foil to Bond's go-it-alone logic.

There is also a lot of talk in the movie about Vesper, the woman who betrayed James Bond in the last movie. Honestly, I don't remember the last movie and I don't remember Vesper or what exactly she did to betray Bond. I think that I don't want to know those things. I want to see how this movie holds up on its own and don't want to read it like a kid reading a comic book with the asterisk that refers to something crucial that happened in another issue. By my standard the movie holds up pretty well in the tradition of movies whose hard boiled heroes are haunted by the past, except that the final scene is a little murky for someone like me who has forgotten who Vesper was or what she did.

Comic books answer a yearning, and if the yearning individual is brainy he will go looking for intellectual satisfaction in the place that answers his yearning. Big, endless yearning is something that has been palpable for some time in the music and movies of Canada. It sneaked across the border into American pop music in the last decade, and now it's in our movies. Every new Spiderman or Batman movie has to be long and Wagnerian. My best guess at the appeal of these movies, which are stultifying to me, is that they immerse their fans in an ocean of yearning.

The new Bond movie gives little solace to yearners. (A quantum, maybe?) If the first movie was too long and emotionally unclear and promised a more bloated sequel this movie is a disappointment. It moves at the speed of mind. Daniel Craig's James Bond is the avatar of cool logic channeled into quick unreflective action. Whatever is worth pursuing and knowing can be found and proven in steady steps that proceed from what is near at hand. There is even a case to be made that Bond is the personification of analytic philosophy. If Bond feels certain that the beautiful girl is the key to reaching the shadowy evil global organization, but the Bolivian general is taking her to his yacht in a motorboat, then running along the pier and hopping from boat to boat must lead Bond to an unattended old wooden fishing boat, unlikely to help him steal the girl but all there is, and if it's all there is it must be what's needed. If after he has stolen the girl three sleek rubber speedboats chase him full of guys with machine guns, still he is Bond and the ways to make one speedboat crash, slice the next one in two, and hoist the third one upside down with a grappling hook will make themselves known to him at just in time.

There is a feeling of inevitability to what happens. If Bond happens to have killed the assassin at the Hotel in Haiti when M had wanted the man brought in for questioning, we feel regret, but we also feel (1) the death was unavoidable and (2) there must remain another way for Bond to discover and foil the villain. The logic of Bond is final. He had to attack the assassin, and if in the flurry of the fight he sliced the assassin's carotid artery instead of just knocking him cold, then no other outcome could have been possible.

If people say that Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever it is because he best conveys this confidence, not only that he is after the right thing, but that if only he acts now the materials to deliver him to the right thing will present themselves and he will know how to use them without thinking twice. Daniel Craig has inspired the writers and director Marc Forster to strip away a lot of the Bond tradition that has become schtick and focus on what Craig can do with the character. The result feels more like an action movie and less like a Bond movie. In a happy way watching this movie I didn't know what to expect next. I hope the same team makes the next Bond movie.

There is a real emotional story and it is told with economy. In one scene Bond's friend, played by Giancarlo Giannini, is dying and wants Bond to hold him. The girl, who until now has tried to get away from Bond, just watches and waits, and we know her sympathy has shifted. Her kiss with Bond near the end of the movie is one of the most natural kisses ever in a thriller.

The movie has other original touches. The loud corrupt, CIA agent played with jolting authenticity by David Harbour, would by the logic of earlier Bond movies be, perhaps, stung to death by Bolivian scorpions, but the new Bond movie lives and lets live. The most exhilarating scene is the chase at the opera house, which is edited down to highlights, intercut with the ongoing death scene in Tosca and silent except for the sound of the orchestra and singers. We don't need to thrill you with that old Bond stuff, the movie says, and it's right.

Money analogies

Sex appeal is like profit. You need it to make the business thrive but it's not the reason to be in the business.

Writing is like finance. We need language and we need money and we need the people who specialize in each. Who will make sure the writers don't forget what words are for?

We need regulation.

Dating is like money. It has no value unless both parties believe in it.

Why Descartes Was Really Wrong

He was lying. He never doubted he existed in the first place. He didn't invent a new kind of philosophy. He didn't invent lying. Stories are lies. Stories are nice. You're in on the lie. Descartes invented lying and calling it philosophy, a new kind of lying where you're not in on it. Maybe you could say he invented breaking the bond between two people talking. He invented autistic philosophy, the philosophy of entertaining yourself only. No, it does too much violence to relationship to be called autistic. How about narcissistic philosophy, the philosophy of whatever odd thing I dream up and call my philosophical project. Even if it has no urgency or even reality to me I'll call it philosophy.

If Descartes had doubted his own existence he wouldn't have said so in French, the language he learned from his mother, or Latin, the language he learned in school. He wouldn't have doubted his own existence without doubting the existence of Latin, and school, and French, and his mother. Doubting your existence is meaningless without falling into a catatonic state where you have no language and no relationships. Doubting your own existence is in the realm of fairy tales. It's like silver grass. J. R. R. Tolkein says that fairy tales come from the discovery of the power of language. You put together two words for everyday things, silver and grass, and get something you have never seen in this world, silver grass. Glass and slipper. Pumpkin and coach. I and nonexistence.

Descartes must have felt the power of language when he thought of the idea of himself not existing. The problem itself must have brought him excitement, not anguish. His solution -- I think therefore I am -- was just a corollary to the problem. To state the problem was to invent a new use of language: the fairy tale where only the storyteller knows it's a lie, where the statement of the problem is a happy event for the storyteller and a sad event for the listener, and where the solution is mildly happy but mostly unsatisfying for both of them.

It's fashionable in cognitive science and neurology to blame Descartes for the bad idea that the mind is separate from the body. His idea was bad enough, but his behavior was worse. He didn't just introduce a split between the mind and the body. He introduced a split between me and you and between me and myself: me the talker and you the listener, me the thinker and myself what I'm thinking about. There were several published responses to Descartes' philosophy at the time, but did anybody talk to his mother? Don't exist? Who drank my breast milk? Whose shit did I clean up?

And, I would add, in whose language are you thinking the thought that you don't exist?

You might say, maybe Descartes never doubted his existence and never pretended to doubt his existence. Maybe the question, how do I know I exist? came from curiosity instead of doubt. Maybe it's not, I might not exist. Maybe it's, I do know that I exist, but by what process did I come by that knowledge? There are some things I know, and I know why I know them. There are other things I know, but I don't know why I know them. I know what ambiguous means, because somebody told me. I know why my car has a flat tire, because I saw the manhole sticking up out of the road and I felt the bump, and I know it's easy to put a hole in these sporty tires because I've done it before.

I know when my cat starts chewing my toes it means she's really hungry. This is a tricky one. I really know it from experience, but I strongly suspected it the first time she did it because why else would she be chewing the parts of my body that look most like pellets of cat food? By the same token I know what disambiguate means, because I looked it up, but I already strongly suspected what it meant because I knew dis-, ambiguous, and -ate.

I also know what a number is, and I know that pi is less than 22/7 (or bigger, if I made a mistake). I know these things more firmly than the other things, maybe even in a different way, but I have a less clear idea of how I came to know them.

Maybe Descartes was not even asking, by what process do I know that I exist. Maybe he was saying, I seem to know different things in different ways. In which of those ways do I know that I exist? Which of the different kinds of knowledge is it? Do I know that I exist in the same way that I know why my cat chews my toes, or do I know that I exist in the same way that I know that pi is less than 22/7 (or bigger), or do I know it in some other way?

I don't think Descartes was asking this question, because his answer didn't answer it. His answer was, I think therefore I am. His answer does say this much though about what kind of knowledge it is that I exist: it's the kind of thing you come to know by reasoning it out. How do I come to know that I exist? First I know that I think, then because of that I know that I exist.

This isn't making sense. I knew that I existed before I knew I was thinking. I didn't arrive at the knowledge that I exist through reasoning. We are back to the original Descartes who doubted that he existed, or lied about doubting that he existed. If it had been either of the other two questions, how I came to know, or what kind of knowledge is it, the nearest explanation at hand is different from the one Descartes came up with. How do I come to know I exist? That's a funny question. How would I come to know that I don't exist? It's hard to know even what it would mean for me not to exist, so I have never even contemplated that possibility. I would say this: I started out assuming that I exist, and nothing so far has made me question that assumption. But even that isn't true. I haven't really assumed it, because I wouldn't know how to act on that assumption, because I wouldn't know how to act on the opposite assumption. What is more true is that I have never seen any reason to raise the question. First you tell me what my nonexistence would look like and then I'll tell you why I know it's not true.

Descartes reminds me of certain people I knew as an undergraduate who arrived there with more brains than they knew what to do with. The prevailing wisdom for them was that whatever you know just from looking around you and making simple judgments is wrong. When my cat rubbed against my legs I said he was being affectionate, but they corrected me. He was marking his territory with the glands in his cheek. He thought I was a tree. I was guilty of anthropomorphism.

Oh? We anthropomorphize people, too. How did you first decide your mother was being affectionate toward you? You didn't. It's a question that you have never raised. If you think about what constitutes affectionate behavior in your mother it's pretty much like affectionate behavior in animals. The idea that my cat isn't being affectionate has almost nothing to recommend it. My cat doesn't treat me like a tree in any other way. He doesn't climb me when a dog chases him. After he rubs my legs he jumps in my lap and purrs.

Almost nothing to recommend it. It does have a certain autistic cognitive appeal. Here's a trick I learned at college, it says.

The Mother Swan

Tonight I paddled around to the far side of the island and saw the mother swan sitting on her eggs. The father was off fishing so I skulked around the back side and coasted by the tall reeds, with geese landing and barking, ducks meandering, and red-winged blackbirds clutching the reeds and calling hoarsely. The swans' nest was a tamped down clump of reeds. I passed within ten feet, and as I did the female lowered her head demurely on her back and watched me in silence. Demurely my foot, I said to her, you would tear me to shreds.

I circled around to watch her. A cardinal chirped in a nearby tree, my favorite sound of May. As the wind pushed me away from the scene I wondered how a swan engineer could know how build a nest out of reeds and how even a female swan could know a good nest when her suitor showed her one of his own making. Maybe she stomped around on it to test its feel, but still, what good would that do if she had never seen an egg before? What must it be like to accomplish an engineering feat with no consciousness of what one was doing?

The instinct of a scientist can be no different. The male swan hypothesizes that one small reedy corner of the natural world is in alignment with his desires, and he proceeds to demonstrate the validity of his hypothesis. The female swan then hypothesizes that that same reedy corner, now squashed flat, is a suitable place to sit and wait for whatever may happen in a week or two, and so she tests her hypothesis by sitting and waiting. So the scientist, confronting his own corner of the natural world, must look inside into a place of desire and instinct and drag out from that place a hypothesis, a wish, that this piece of himself will look the same, will be in happy accordance with that piece of the world that he encounters.

While the female swan was occupied with these thoughts I rounded the near side of the island. The male, surprisingly, was not disturbed into protectiveness by my loitering. On the contrary he swam on ahead of me, farther from the nest. Maybe he was wondering what he had gotten himself into, taking the opportunity for some solitude, while every few minutes another pair of honking geese, audible a minute away, came in feet first on the water to join their noisy buddies on the island. It is possible, I thought, that some of the droppings on the lawns lining the pond are swan droppings, but there are just so many geese, and so many geese droppings. The swan continued swimming away from his mate, who knows, maybe looking for somebody younger. I passed near a goose on my way into my inlet. He honked. I honked back.

Jungian Analysis of the Lady in the Fenced Orchard

There is a heraldic beast called Blanche duBois, half wounded bird and half woman. This creature presents a problem to the chivalrous man, who can have sexual feelings about the woman even while he rescues the wounded bird. Stanley Kowalski solved the problem by ignoring the wounded bird completely, and his friend Mitch solved the problem by ignoring the woman. The chivalrous man, attentive to everything, must acknowledge the complicated whole.

The truly chivalrous man expects no reward for, or even acknowledgement of, his good deed, which is lucky for him. As soon as the wounded bird gains a bit of strength Blanche duBois goes into a telephone booth and out comes Superwoman. Superwoman never needed any help from any man, not even her father, so naturally she disavows any relationship to Blanche duBois. Should any literal-minded chivalrous man ask her who she was before the telephone booth, she will say, with amusement and scorn, that she has always been Superwoman. And she is right. Superwoman always has been Superwoman.