In Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics, David Berlinski writes: “[The calculus is] the story this world first told itself as it became the modern world” (49). When we look at authors such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, the content of their writings is secondary to their chosen modes of representation. The modern world, therefore, is a world concerned with representation more than ontological justification. Mathematics is an invented system, and the calculus functions incredibly well as an instrument with which to approximate the natural world. As a truth discourse, mathematics today is a subset of science, which is one of the only institutions that can fully legitimize a viewpoint. Playing the role that the Church once played in affairs of truth, mathematics relies on symbolic precision that is betrayed by its English counterpart, but which ultimately depends on a similar set of abstractions. Ultimately, mathematics holds authority in truth because its philosophical origins designate it as a language that is purely concerned with modeling phenomena through logical deduction. It is entirely reducible to its axioms, it revels in simplicity, and it concerns itself with only the events that it is logically able to concern itself with. Its use of infinitesimals (of course, before Weierstrass and Cantor formalized their definitions of a limit and infinity) and concepts that reach beyond our empirical rationality stems not just from a loss of higher order ontology, but also ultimately from a higher trust in representation and utility. The calculus may betray our intuition, but it gives us a suitable way to represent the world that is accurate and acceptable. It has earned its respected status by virtue of this overwhelming modesty.
Wow, it has been a long time/Saramago
It’s been quite a while. I could furnish a whole bunch of reasons as to why this blog fizzled just as quickly as it was born, but none would be quite as satisfactory as this: I’m a college student and this type of obligation-shirking seems to ride me like a backpack. I’ve been reading plenty of great books for school, but my natural tendency to compartmentalize aspects of my life kept all of my thoughts inside the classroom and inside Word documents.
Now you may ask: “why the hell are you posting on this again?” You may ask: “Levi, what are you doing with this post?” You may even ask: “do you realize you’re a jackass neckbeard?” To all of these, I am going to offer a slightly off-topic response.
I do intend to bring this blog back. Once school’s over, I want to start taking this more seriously. All of the things I mentioned in my “mission statement” hold true. As of right now, while Dartmouth still has its administrative tendrils snaking inside my nether holes, I will offer quick flash posts about what I’m reading. It could be a couple of sentences. Could be just one sentence. Could be a couple paragraphs. The point is that while I do not have time for long, involved, and intricate reflective posts, I am perfectly capable of sharing some of the insights that smack me in a manner I’d quasi-arrogantly dub serendipitous.
So here it goes. This is a flash post on something I found very interesting in José Saramago’s Blindness. The section begins after a man dies from gangrene, a result from a wound inflicted by the woman mentioned in the following quotation:
“It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and unbalanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality. Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.” [78]
What a juxtaposition of pondering thought and fact. It looks like the thrust of the book is about how we go about constructing experience. The narrator bluntly states certain facts (that the woman did, in fact, bring about the man’s death), but then goes further to say that it was chance and probability that twisted her emotion, translating it into the physical action that resulted in his dying. Saramago’s reconfiguration of this situation asks us to examine our notions of guilt and responsibility. True, this woman may be responsible for this man’s death, but to what extent could she have known that her action (kicking his leg with a stiletto because he fondled her without consent) would follow a dark and meandering alley into a future in which this man dies of infection?
It is peculiar that a lot of reflections on human nature come to us, the readers, through the voice of the narrator. While the narrative itself is comprised of all these allegorical events and actions, it is not until we hear the narrator speak that the book’s “charity of spirit” becomes apparent. Reading the quotation above, commas and run-on sentences galore, I’m tempted to say that Saramago’s use of the narratorial voice is a strongly humanistic enterprise; that is, the narrator becomes a charitable medium through which we may learn how to sympathize and understand these events. Through the narrator, we’re given a framework that makes it easier to step back and avoid the fervent desire to assume a stance and defend it. I think Saramago would say that without the traditional discourse of “guilt” infecting our gaze, we are granted access to a much more existential problem when we read into the conflict mentioned in the above quotation. To which emotions or actions should this man’s death give rise?
Between cause and effect there is a darkness that no one’s stare can penetrate, and should we not respect the fear, anticipation, and anxiety which we all, eyes fixed and straining, cast into this abyssal uncertainty? And if, as Saramago says, effect continues weaving its way through time in a series of unending ripples, then what of the stories, the lives, and the atmospheres that crumble, however coincidentally, in their wake? I’d place a few ducats on the idea that while Saramago implores us to always immerse ourselves in compassion for each other and the unknowable fates that befall us, there are still things that must be practically dealt with, some things that must not be forgotten. Some things that do not benefit from abstraction.
[T]his man is dead and must be buried.
Introductions
Welcome! I’m happy to be able to write this first post, and I’m already flattered that you’ve followed some link or put this address into your URL to be reading this. This is a rather long post, so I feel like it would be useful to outline it. In the beginning, I speak a lot about why I’m writing this, why literature means this much to me, and the impulses that have prompted me to start the project. Later, the post details what exactly I want to happen with the blog, what kinds of ideas I have surrounding its purpose, what I think should be the appropriate dialectic w/r/t my writings, others’ comments, and general conversation.
The best way to start this post, I believe, will be to explain the impulses that instill my desire to do so. During sophomore summer at Dartmouth College, I took a class entitled “British and American Poetry Since 1914,” taught by Shalene Vasquez. I felt very fortunate to be able to take this course because, as an English major with very few of his required classes under the belt, I often have to take whatever courses that are being offered with no regards to interest (see: Issues in Post-Colonial Lit. and Jewish-American Lit.). Prof. Vasquez’s course, although held in the muggiest classroom in Kemeny Hall during (supposedly) one of the rainiest summers in Hanover, finally gave me something I hadn’t had in an English course at Dartmouth: an opportunity to academically investigate a lot of the poems I had found not only incredibly thought-provoking, but also relevant and helpful to my life. We discussed T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Wilfred Owen, H.D., and Langston Hughes, among many other poets. Each class was carried out as a Socratic investigation of a single writer (or, in many cases, a single work by a writer) and it helped me figure out why exactly I chose to be an English major, why I feel like I am destined for academia.
On that first day of class, Prof. Vasquez gave us a vague exercise on how to approach poetry. It would serve well as a preface as to why I have the desire to start this blog, why I have the impulse.
We all sat down in a strange, rectangular room that smelled vaguely of carbolic acid. In a beautiful twist, reminiscent of the desperate deliberation of the first day of high school, everybody’s outfit seemed planned and everybody’s hand was spring-loaded, waiting for Prof. Vasquez’s questions. She passed out a Xeroxed copy of Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz.” She asked us various questions, e.g. “is this abuse?” and “why was this poem once printed on Father’s Day cards?” and “how is this poem structured?” Vasquez was goading us with these questions, sitting back with a smirk as the dedicated and the passionate battled each other with words: debunking theories, modifying claims, putting words together to express themselves.
What Wittgenstein said about conversation being the most useful form of therapy is so true on this merit: at my unhappiest, I feel, above all things, alone. As if the English language, in its beautiful and ancient history, can only offer a stale approximation of what my soul rages to express. Once this concession is made to the perceived meaninglessness of existence, I crumble. David Foster Wallace has one of the most frightening quotations about this kind of loneliness. He says that imprudent scholarship and popular culture grants us the opportunity to have: “the freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” My question, and Wallace’s question in This is Water, is “if an intellectual experience affords you this loneliness, then of what use was the experience?” Forgive the lack of eloquence, but I want to make it through life without wanting to put a bullet in my head.
This class sparked within me something I had waited years to experience: something to defend. Ideas. Hypotheses about the world and the people that inhabit it. Even the most solipsistic poems I read in that class turned into desperate attempts to illuminate what it means to be human and what it means to exist. I suddenly began to consciously think of literature as what I always knew it to be: a heuristic device with which the most acne-ridden 15 year old, the most overweight shop clerk, and the most lithe gymnast could not only spend time investigating and picking apart, but also look to for answers. My questions about the world rarely surface as articulate interrogations; more often, they remain within my gut and manifest as strange discomfort. Think of it as mental malaise. As a simple example, I’ll relate a quick little anecdote. A couple years ago, I used to get high with a couple friends. This probably isn’t surprising. Anyways, I stopped doing it when this vague, disquieting aura would surround me. I couldn’t identify what I was, and every sentence I spoke to describe this feeling seemed to be perpetually eluded by the insidiousness of it. I would describe it as experiencing failure on every level, accumulating and overwhelming me. I felt like every sound I made was the wrong one, therefore a failure; every movement I made was jerky, therefore a failure. Ultimately, that resulted in a sense of desperation because, and please understand this, it is easier to fail and get it out of your way quickly than to try and rebel against it, only to still fail. The feeling was a desperate desire to fail as fast as possible, but even that sentence feels like a useless approximation. Needless to say, I don’t get high anymore. Anyways, years later, I read Infinite Jest. There was one section where Wallace describes Hal getting high, describes the feelings that surround him when he’s stoned. I have only two words for how it made me feel:
Holy shit.
It was exactly how I had felt. Each word in that book nailing down what felt like air to me. I was immediately relieved, and it is for reasons like this that literature assists our lives. It helps us gain a better “emotional lexicon,” helps us to articulate ourselves, and increases our understanding of not only other people, but also ourselves. This may sound breezy and preachy, but the concreteness of the aforementioned situation reveals literature to have a serious dignity and power. David Foster Wallace’s words relieved me. Who else was I to ask with words, when the question wasn’t even on my tongue?
Poems and novels are infinitely complex little worlds, created with care and precision, yet still burning with the arcane ardor of the human spirit. “My Papa’s Waltz” is not a long poem, but there are so many elements that can be picked apart and looked at critically: word choice, metric structure, dated ideals, sound structure, function of the poem as a whole, ideological suppositions, etc. etc. The idea here is that literature condenses intense, gut-level, cloudy, unfathomable emotions into a smaller, more transmissible form. Every worthwhile author I have read has always been invested in human emotion, what it means to be human, what it means to construct experience. I have always felt that the most accurate metaphor for the job of literature centers around what seems to be the deep, dark well of “meaning,” or whatever we experience as meaning in our lives. There is no way that a person will ever be able to see to the end without throwing themselves into it, but it is the author’s work to throw a light on its sides, to see the patterns underlying its composition. In Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, she writes: “For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.” Expanding this quote to include the entire branch of what we consider literature, I can think of nothing more true.
Now, with all my ideas about literature laid out spread-eagle and bare for you, it seems about time to talk about what I want to do, exactly. I must remind everyone and anyone who reads this that I am very new to this medium, and therefore am still a bit unsure as to how I want this project to unfold fully, i.e. the exact types of analyses/meditations/responses that I want to provide. I have, however, some rough ideas that will undoubtedly smooth out as I find the appropriate form for these writings.
I will write responses to what I read. I am currently reading José Saramago’s “Blindness” and I intend for my first post to be about it. I want to give it a rigorous reading and say critical things regarding it and its message, but I want my emotional response to remain intact through all of this. If I am to respond emotionally, then I am obligated to say right now that my opinion will be in the open. I will not proselytize, but it will be there. I must say that literary criticism involves searching for an author’s personal prejudices, beliefs, and implicit opinions in order to deconstruct them, so I realize the fact that my opinion’s presence in an otherwise analytical post detracts from its academic credibility (because of the added “meta-discourse” it establishes), but this blog isn’t supposed to read like PMLA. It is, above all, invested in my desire to have serious, interesting, entertaining, and fruitful conversations about the novels, poems, and short stories that I read. Recall the blurb about Wittgenstein and conversation as therapy.
This means a couple things. I cannot assume that all readers will have read the material in question, so I am planning on giving thorough and concise analyses that do not require your knowledge of the books. Of course, you will be more prepared and entertained if you have read them, but I do not plan on writing vague little quotes that allude to obscure happenings in a 6,000 page book. My point is to be as clear as possible. Readers comfortable with the material will hopefully find substantial ideas in my posts, enough to be able to criticize/modify/start a discussion about my interpretation of the book in question. Readers without knowledge of the novel will also hopefully be given enough so as to be able to comment on the nature of my analysis, the emotional note the literature struck within me, or to ask questions. Anything relevant to the post will be maintained and responded to. That is to say, I will not neglect your post. It may take a while (seeing as I have no internet at the house), but you will receive your response in a near-timely manner.
As far as I can see, this is what I want to happen with the blog. I can definitely see myself incorporating different types of media (Youtube videos, scanned documents, paintings, audio files) at a later time, and at some point I’d like to post some of my own writing (which would be open to public scrutiny). At this point, though, I am going to mainly review/analyze/respond to literature.
I’ve said all I need to say at this point. Until you guys receive my next post, I bid you adieu. Guess I’ll end this with a quote that got me through a shitty night a couple days ago.
“The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.”
-Hart Crane
