I'm Glad You Asked Monday, September 01, 2003

In answer to a posting below, a little bird suggested that the celebrity I most resemble but hate is Vin Scelsa; Vin Scelsa being a deejay at a local public-radio station who plays lots of music I like and scrutinizes it at terrifying length. I can see what the birdie is getting at but I don't really dislike Vin Scelsa. In high school, he was my first introduction to a host of wonderful musicians, filmmakers and writers, like Leonard Cohen and Wim Wenders, when my idea of highbrow lyrics was Keith Emerson and "Rollerball" was an art movie. He was the first deejay I listened to religiously; I have a fond, but maybe inaccurate, memory of him interviewing Paul Simon for a full four hours after "Graceland" came out.

If there were ever an aesthete, it's Vin. He loves music, loves to talk about it and scour it for nuance. He reads whole chapters of favorite books on the air. He talks about his life and the art that moves him. In other words, he blogs without typing.

I guess I just decided I was too cool for Vin. He is not an ironic or abrasive aesthete, like the coneheads at Aintitcoolnews, or Kevin Smith, or Quentin Tarantino. He loves the music he plays and puts his heart out there in presenting it to you. ("Don't wear your heart out on your sleeve/When your remarks are off the cuff"--Elvis Costello)

But there came a point in my life where I stopped feeling earnest about Leonard Cohen and Wim Wenders; where "Wings of Desire" stopped being a piece of art that spoke to me in a way that nothing else in the world did, and became a very talky, very plodding middlebrow art movie. In other words, it all seemed very lame all of a sudden, and I couldn't believe he was going out on a limb for it.

That's not fair of me. Vin gave me a lot, and maybe I owe him another chance. (If I can listen to Jonathan Schwartz, I can listen to Vin.) As you can see here, I can still be earnest about art. The stuff I love, I love desperately, and I want everybody else to know about it. (Doesn't this paragraph from Evelyn Waugh change everything you know about literature and make you want to go out and be a Catholic????) And maybe us beautiful losers needs to stick together.

A friend of mine just asked me what "signposts" are. Every time I try to paraphrase this I get lost. So let me go straight to the source, Dr. Percy himself:

The old modern age has ended. We live in a post-modern as well as a post-Christian age which as yet has no name.

It is post-Christian in the sense that people no longer understand themselves, as they understood themselves for some fifteen hundred years, as ensouled creatures under God, born to trouble, and whose salvation depends upon the entrance of God into history as Jesus Christ.

It is post-modern because the Age of Enlightenment with its vision of man as a rational creature, naturally good and part of the cosmos, which itself is understandable by natural science--this age has also ended. It ended with the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

As the century draws to a close, it does not yet have a name, but it can be described.

It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.

I will give it a name which at least describes what it does. I would call it the age of the theorist-consumer. All denizens of the age tend to be one or the other or both.

Darwin, Newton and Freud were theorists. They pursued truth more or less successfully by theory--from which, however, they themselves were exempt. You will look in vain in Darwin's Origin of the Species for an explanation of Darwin's behavior in writing Origin of the Species. Marx and Stalin, Nietzsche and Hitler were also theorists. When theory is applied, not to matter or beasts, but to man, the consequence is that millions of men can be eliminated without compunction or even much interest. Survivors of both Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's terror reporter that their oppressors were not "horrible" or "diabolical" but seemed, on the contrary, quite ordinary, even bored by their actions, as if it were all in a day's work.

....

This is the age of theory and consumption, yet not everyone is satisfied by theorizing and consuming.

The common mark of the theorist and the consumer is that neither knows who he is or what he wants outside of theorizing and consuming.

This is so because the theorist is not encompassed by his theory. One's self is always a leftover from one's theory.

For even if one becomes passionately convinced of Freudian theory or Marxist theory at three o'clock of a Wednesday afternoon, what does one do with oneself at four o'clock?

The consumer, who thought he knew what he wanted--the consumption of the goods and services of scientific theory--is not in fact satisfied, even when the services offered are such techniques as "personal growth," "emotional maturity," "consciouness-raising" and suchlike.

The face of the denizen of the present age who has come to the end of theory and consumption and "personal growth" is the face of sadness and anxiety.

Such a denizen can become so frustrated, bored and enraged that he resorts to violence, violence upon himself (drugs, suicide) or upon others (murder, war).

Or such a denizen may discover that he is open to a search for signs, some sign other than theorizing or consumption.

....

One sign is one's self. No matter how powerful the theory, whether psychological or political, one's self is always a leftover. Indeed, the self may be defined as that portion of the person which cannot be encompassed by theory, not even a theory of the self. This is so because, even if one agrees with the theory, what does one do then? Accordingly, the self finds itself ever more conspicuously without a place in the modern world, which is perfectly understood by theorizing. The face of the self in the very age which was designed for the self's understanding of all things and to please the self through the consumption of goods and services--the face of the self is the face of fear and sadness, because it does not know who it is or where it belongs.

The only other sign in the world which cannot be encompassed by theory is the Jews, their unique history, their suffering and achievements, what they started (both Judaism and Christianity), and their presence in the here and now.

...

The great paradox of the Western world is that even though it was in the Judeo-Christian West that modern science arose and flourished, it is Judeo-Christianity which the present-day scientific set of mind finds the most offensive among the world's religions.

---

The paradox can be resolved in only two ways.

One is that both the Jewish and the Christian claims are untrue, are in fact nonsense, and that the scientific mind-set is correct.

The other is that the scientific method is correct as far as it goes, but the theoretical mind-set, which assigns significance to single things and events only insofar as they are exemplars of theory or items for consumption, is in fact an inflation of a method of knowing and is unwarranted.

To bracket this, a quote from a source that my questioning buddy knows very well:

My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.

And one more, from the lovely Sam Phillips, who dedicated this song to Dr. Percy (and who wrote another song about his novel "The Last Gentleman"):

i got myself so tightly wound i couldn't breathe
i could feel the fire burning underneath

i wanted to get lost and love the questions there
beauty and the truth i could breathe like air
then i finally found the signposts in a strange land

logic dances you from here to there not very far
making sense can't tell where you are

This is all a mouthful, I realize, so here's a personal story. I went back to the Church because I had a wonderful life but felt absolutely miserable in it. I had a wonderful girlfriend, a great job, a boss you dream about, a novel under my belt and a great writing career (theoretically) ahead of me, but more often than not I woke up cringing from the world. People told me I should be happy, on the theory that a person who has all the things I had ought to be happy. One good relationship plus one good career plus good health equals happy. The only thing not included in the equation is the variable; yours truly.

That's what Percy is saying. All the theories that govern our modern world are great as describing how grand masses of people and particles ought to behave. But they don't say a thing about how individual human beings ought to. This was a role religion used to fill; but as we all know God is dead, and nothing has taken his place in the zeitgeist. ("I thought you were dead." "Yeah, I get that a lot." --exchange from "Alien IV.") Signposts are what remind us that we live under imperfect theories. Being sad when you ought to be happy is a big one.

That's also the hidden theme of the Secret Thing. But don't tell anybody, OK?

@ 10:39:00 PM,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home