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Tuesday, December 29, 2009

My Response to a Reader's Comments

4:58 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
On my essay, "The Divided Self," a reader left this comment:

Your story is eerily similar to mine. I was leading a completely stressful life - a LOT of drinking, smoking, zero exercise, eating crap. And then, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I instantly changed, did a complete 180 didn't touch a single beer or a cigarette or a slice of pizza. All I ate were cupfuls of cheerios, protein etc. No more than one slice of bread per day. I exercised 2 hours daily. In 3 months I dropped 55 lbs, and my doctor said my blood sugar was back to normal and I wouldnt need medication to control it anymore. He even wanted to do a case study on how I did that.

And then - I graduated, got my PhD. A month later, it started with one beer. and now a year later, I am pretty much an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. No more exercise and lots of crappy food. I gained back all the weight. I cough, freak out for a while, throw my cigarettes out. and then go search for them in the garbage. I use my asthma inhaler and then go and smoke. I don't even know why I do this. The entire duality of my personality has me beat.

When I was taking care of myself - i was a LOT calmer, reading philosophy, whatnot. BUT I was nowhere as creative as i am now. Iam a musician (stereotypes woohoo), and I find myself writing more often when I am drunk and disoriented and so on.

Now which life do I choose? I guess it all comes down to balance - but HOW? balance seems forced. balance seems complacent. or is it? It seems so to me - the other desperate life is much more interesting - but it just might kill me.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts - a friend suggested your blog to me. If you find balance, tell us how.

I was moved by the comment and wanted to answer the commenter's questions to the best of my ability. Here is my response:

Please do not take this response to mean I have all the answers, I certainly do not. But I'm living as you are, and trying to cope with many of the same things, i.e. quitting unhealthy behaviors and adopting healthy ones.

You say, "I guess it all comes down to balance."

Here I'm tempted to say, "No, it all comes down to timing."

In an ideal world, I think all of us would want to lead more balanced lives--eating moderately, exercising moderately, working less, and so on.

But in the day-to-day business of living, I feel balance is not so much of a choice we have. We just deal. As you said in your comment, any attempt to create balance, feels forced.

I re-read "The Divided Self" after I read you comment. It is very similar to an essay I just posted, called "The Undiscovered Self".

I'm looking at my life now from the perspective of these two essays, which essentially try to grasp the same problem.

It's strange. I don't even think about smoking anymore. I quit. It's been three or four weeks now. I just don't think about it. Which is very strange in light of the essay, "The Divided Self". Because in that essay, I'm describing what appears to be my utter inability to quit smoking.

The thought to have a cigarette will cross my mind, but for some reason, now, I don't act on it. And before I was helpless. So what explains this phenomenon?

I'm reading John Dewey's seminal work, Art as Experience, and he talks a lot about the ebb and flow of human experience, nature, and life. As humans, we really do have to go through these revolutions, these cycles. Granted some people with have more accentuated rhythms than others, higher peaks, lower valleys--all of us are familiar with these cycles.

Listen to how Dewey describes it. He's wonderfully accurate:
Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed.
And here:
Nevertheless, if life continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. Here in germ are balance and harmony attained through rhythm. Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, and because of, tension.
And so, from these passages, you can infer that there is meaning behind our "bad periods"--that is, the periods where we pick up smoking again, have lots of casual sex, drink too much, etc. This does not mean unhealthy, compulsive, addictive behavior is acceptable. It just means that the human being can be understood as moving through phases of order and disorder, but that each stage of disorder has the potential to lead to a higher stage of order, a higher level of consciousness.

I think there is great sense in this philosophy.

You mention that since you returned to drinking, you're more creative. In this post, I examine the effect of pot on my creativity.

Everyone is different, of course, in regards to creativity and intoxicants.

I too had the sense when I was taking drugs that I could at times tap into a well-spring of creativity. But for me it was an illusion.

Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, etc., generally occurs during a person's phase of "disorder". And yet, I had a tendency to see order in my disorder. This was part of my distortion.

I began my response to your comments by saying I thought it all came down to timing instead of balance. Reading the passages by Dewey, however, it does seem to come down to balance.

From the point of view of nature, yes, balance is what makes the human being whole. It is the complete cycle, from order to disorder and back to order.

But from the point of view of the human being, I still believe it's a matter of timing. Where you are at in any given moment of your life will determine your "success" at living. But fear not, because according to the philosophy of Dewey, we are all on a self-balancing path, even in our darkest moments.

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Sunday, December 27, 2009

The Undiscovered Self

10:31 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
Examine the spirits that speak in you. Become critical. --Carl Jung
For Christmas, my girlfriend bought me The Red Book by Carl Jung. It's a gigantic book with spellbinding illustrations and exquisite German calligraphy--the second part of the book is a lengthy introduction and translation of the work.

I used to read a lot of Jung. As an adolescent, I went through a Jung phase. I recall reading the fat white psychoanalytic volumes, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Symbols of Transformation, Alchemical Studies . . .

What drew me to these scholarly works I could barely understand? It was the prolonged stage of my life when I always had a book in front of me, my eyes fixed on the pages, almost obsessively. And yet, if you were to ask me to explain what I was reading I couldn't tell you--

Jung's scholarly work was elusive enough to capture my imagination. I could project anything onto the pages--and I underlined and highlighted furiously. I communed with these books I hardly understood.

Buddhism was something I experimented with for about five years. This was the period of my sobriety--after years of drug abuse. Disciplined, vegetarian, clean and sober, I exercised profound control over all areas of my life. I meditated, read spiritual books, and only on occasion wanted my life to be otherwise.

Eventually I grew away from this rigid lifestyle. Somewhere I faltered. I stopped going to Zen "sits". I went out to bars once in awhile. Picked up smoking.

New Age spiritualism turned me off. Not that Jung ever belonged to that movement. But he practically heralded it, and whenever I would think of Jung, I would think of those New Age bookstores sprouting up everywhere in the city. So I stopped thinking about him.

At the tail end of another reckless period of my life, I've returned to Dr. Carl Jung. Over Christmas, I read The Undiscovered Self. My father has an entire shelf devoted to Jung. My impulse was to read as much as I could before plunging into The Red Book, so as to understand it better . . .


The story behind The Red Book is this. At the time of Jung's death, an unfinished manuscript entitled "The Red Book" was discovered. It was stated in his will that all of his published, scholarly work should be made available to the public, but Jung did not take a position one way or the other on "The Red Book."

This may have been because "The Red Book" did not fit into an easy categorization for one of the founders of psychoanalytic theory--it was a creative work. Inspired by Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Carl Jung set out to write an account of his "fantasies," or confrontations with his unconscious. The book began as a series of notebooks, called "black books," which were then used to create the final version of "The Red Book".

I am a lover of pictures. If you know anything about my online presence, you will know that I post an enormous amount of images on the Escape into Life Tumblr. Turning the pages of Jung's Red Book, I sense a similar visual tendency in him--an obsession with design, color, typography . . . and then the tale itself, which has been described as both archaic and modern, fascinates me. But I haven't begun reading it yet; I've only thumbed through the German text, a visual treat, a cornucopia of symbols.

Let me return to my experience on Christmas night, reading The Undiscovered Self. It's important, I feel, because it cemented my convictions about quitting drugs and alcohol for the last time. I sensed from before that my obsession with drugs was a chimera, but I had to go through the heavy use one more time. I had to re-learn what I had forgotten.

I had been tempted by the promise of a carefree life. It started with a girl and proceeded from there, to smoking cigarettes, to going out to the bars, to taking drugs. The disciplined life seemed so austere, so dry, and unnecessary. I wanted something new. I craved novelty.

But this was not novelty. This was repetition. I had been here before--like a blind rat turning the same corner, entering the same dead end. My conception of myself never changes. It is a wonderful script because it is so utterly the same; I live it over and over and over again.

The Undiscovered Self:
When the fantasies reach a certain level of intensity, they begin to break through into consciousness and create a conflict situation that becomes perceptible to the patient himself, splitting him into two personalities with different characters.
Fantasy does this to me--it splits me into two different people, each in conflict with the other. I fantasize about drugs or women, about getting high or having a romantic encounter, and soon I'm at war with myself. I'm at war with the part of me that wants to get high or have sex and the part of me that thinks it's not such a good idea.

And the fantasy grows. It grows until it tears me apart, and the next thing I know, I'm acting out that other person--the cheater, the liar, the addict.

What does it take to keep the human passions in line? It seems I barely manage. With advertisements everywhere telling me to eat this and buy that, I wonder how modern man is able to have a mind of his own. We're pulled out of ourselves constantly. But I don't need Hollywood pulling me out of myself when I have a built-in fantasy world doing it for me.

The Undiscovered Self:
This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality.
How these lines resonate with me! I've even chosen the name "Lethe" for my alter ego. Lethe comes from the River of Forgetfulness in Greek mythology. I've been using the name in my fiction for years. When I read the words, "he forgets himself in the process," I smile. Because that's why I chose the name to represent me. I forget. And my forgetfulness is my character, my original sin.

But let's talk about what Jung says here: "putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being."

What does it mean? It means that our conscious self, or ego--constituted primarily by its aspirations and inner problems, by its suffering--is merely an idea of the self, and not the real self.

How do I know this is true? Because mostly who I parade in front of my friends is who I think I am--it's the elaborate narrative I've subsumed into my personality. And if you're a writer, like me, you're good at telling stories.

My "conception" is essentially a story I have about myself. It has a pattern-like quality. No matter what happens to me in my life, what unusual events befall me, experience is sublimated by my ego or conscious self. I absorb everything into my conception of myself. And I live in the (fake) knowledge of myself. But this is only my conscious self, and sadly, it is a fraction of my spiritual person.

When Jung says "the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality," he is talking about the negative potential of thoughts. Each thought that occurs, sometimes with a strong force of emotion, perpetuates the illusion of the conscious self and further separates us from reality. We lose touch with the immensity of human experience when we live inside the repetitive script of our conscious, thinking selves.

The irony of being human is that we seek to escape our "selves." We are drawn to novelty and new experiences, new lovers, new foods, new ideas . . . The irony is that within the confines of limited ego-consciousness, we are determined to find a way out. Our escapes, however, only leads us back to our known selves.

So then, what is true novelty? What is true unknowingness?

It is outside my conception of myself. Outside my conscious ego. Outside the person who I think I am.

I'm sick of repeating the same dramas in my life. Perhaps you too have some of these. I just wonder if I can trust in something that is unknown. How do I learn to trust in the unconscious, which by definition, I do not know what it is?

This is the world of Carl Jung. The collective unconscious. Accessed through dreams. Or meditation. Or what Jung called "practicing active imagination."

What will we find on the other side of our conscious selves? Who will we discover?

Life is depressing if you always know what to expect. The same mood of dissatisfaction, the same loneliness, the same longings, the same annoyances. But when you realize that there is this whole other way to view yourself, namely through not-knowing who you are instead of through knowing, then life begins to feel like it might be sufferable, or better yet, it might even be fun.

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Sunday, December 20, 2009

32 Outsider Art Masterpieces

7:17 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
CLICK TO ENLARGE
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Escape into Life: Issue no. 6

7:22 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
DRIP DRIP by Mel Kadel

This issue of Escape into Life caught me by surprise . . . I received an email from a friend, telling me about his band's latest EP, Hearts on Faces. After listening to the album for about a song and a half, I just knew it had to be in the next issue of Escape into Life. Here are some highlights:

The Museum of Everything . . . author and art critic, David Maclagan, takes us inside a truly original setting for London's latest collection of Outsider Art.

The Poetry of Peter Davis . . . poetry like you've never read before, be prepared to laugh hard.

Electric Literature . . . Gretta Barclay, EIL Book Critic, reviews a new literary magazine hailed by The Washington Post as a "refreshingly bold act of optimism."

Hearts on Faces . . . hear the full EP of The Equines and read all about this indie pop act with a contagious sound.


Escape into Life, arts and culture webzine, is a publication based on the concept of citizen journalism. The goal is to create a journal of poetry, essays, and art from writers who are already publishing on the Web and who would like to gain more exposure to their blogs. The artists we feature are the very best we can find, and the writers have a background in writing and a passion for the arts.
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Saturday, December 12, 2009

The Obscene Bird of Night

6:56 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post


4. The Obscene Bird of Night, by Jose Donoso

The epigraph of the novel, The Obscene Bird of Night, is taken from a letter by Henry James Sr. to his two sons.
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
The novel opens with a stately funeral procession for Mother Benita, the Mother Superior of La Casa del Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnacion.

The Casa is a huge, gothic convent with labyrinthine hallways, "endless courts and cloisters connected by corridors that never end," many of them being boarded up now that the building is no longer used as a convent. Instead, it has become a refuge for a horde of old women who inhabit the dark, sequestered rooms.

Much of the story takes place inside this ghastly building. The narrator's description of the convent is so meticulous and repetitive, almost like a refrain, that the setting is impressed upon the reader's mind.

The narrator of The Obscene Bird of Night is practically an enigma, moving between the voice that opens the novel--holding an endless, open conversation with Mother Benita--and various other narrative voices in the first person.

Reading the novel for the first time can be an exhilarating but also somewhat confusing experience. Only after my fifth reading do I feel confident in saying I understand the logic behind the panoply of narrative voices.

You may think there are several narrators of this novel. For example, there is Mudito, a mute who lives in the Casa and is ordered around by the old women; a nun who is indistinguishable from the other nuns; and Humberto Peñaloza, secretary to the wealthy landowner and politician at the center of the novel.

But in fact all of the narrators are the same person, the various guises of Humberto Peñaloza, who, later in the story, we also learn, is a writer assigned by Don Jeronimo de Azcoitia (the wealthy landowner) to write "the history of Boy's world" . . .

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

As a writer myself, The Obscene Bird of Night endlessly fascinates me for its subtle and intricate construction. The tense shifts, point of view shifts, and various story arcs, all contribute to the grand illusion of Jose Donoso's unique magical realism.

This quantum fiction is geometrically precise, laid out like concentric circles around a common theme. Three or four narratives overlap each other, each with characters that act as doubles, or doppelgangers, to the characters in the other stories.

Beyond this literary pattern-making, Donoso's fictional world acquires its strangeness from absorbing an abundance of genres, including legend, fable, fairy tale, detective story, memoir, Modernist novel, and Realist novel. It also serves as a veiled critique of the ruling class in Chile, and a handful of other South American countries which operate similarly. But the critique never becomes too literal because the novel adeptly weaves in and out of a myth-like story with fabulous creatures and unlikely characters.

It is also a novel about a colony of monsters.

Don Jeronimo de Azcoitia must produce an heir for the continuation of his family line. Here is his uncle urging him, as a young man, to marry:
You can't go, Jeronimo. Listen to me, son, be reasonable. You're the only one left . . . and I had to take it into my head to become a priest, may God forgive me for saying it. You're the last one who can hand down the family name. You don't know how I've dreamed about an Azcoitia playing an important part once more in the country's public life! I waited for you so anxiously, assuming your obligations while you were enjoying an immoral life in Paris. But you're here now, and I'm not going to let you go.
Jeronimo falls in love with the "prettiest, most innocent girl who frequented the social salons at the time, a distant cousin with many female Azcoitia ancestors behind her".

After he proposes to her, he has a vision of perfection about the two of them. He sees their union as a "stone medallion", part of an "eternal frieze" of more medallions that carry the family name. We read, "He merely took pains to see that the magnificent legend of the perfect couple was fulfilled in both himself and his bride-to-be."
Jeronimo kissed her into silence. The womb heaving against his body would open to procure immortality for him: through their sons and grandsons, the frieze of medallions would extend forever.
There's only one problem. Ines has a nursemaid she's had since childhood who Jeronimo rejects. When Ines was young, she had a stomach illness that almost killed her. Peta Ponce, the nursemaid, preformed a miracle which removed the stomach illness from Ines by transferring it to Peta, the healer. Ever since Peta made this sacrifice, Ines has shown a fierce loyalty towards her.

Jeronimo believes that Peta Ponce is a witch, and he may be right. Trying to get her husband to overcome his fears, Ines takes him to the place where Peta lives. The grotesque setting, full of strange odors, large crates, and old clothes, repulses the aristocratic Jeronimo.
The heap of rags gathered itself together in order to give human reply to Ines's call. The old woman and the girl embarked on a conversation Jeronimo wasn't prepared to tolerate. The scene didn't fit into any medallion of eternal stone. And, if it did fit into any, it was into the other series, into the hostile legend that contradicted his own: the legend of the stained and the damned, who writhe on the left hand of God the Father Almighty. He had to pull Ines out of there immediately. To prevent her from taking part in this other series of medallions, the ones linked to servitude, to oblivion, to death. Ines was only a child who could be contaminated by the least little thing.
Ines's relationship to her nursemaid separates her from Jeronimo even in marriage. We are also told that "the heir began to take longer to arrive."

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

A prolonged waiting period ensues, with Ines spending more time with Peta Ponce, and Humberto becoming closer to Jeronimo in his duties to protect him. Each character is a double of the other--Jeronimo and Humberto, Ines and Peta. On the one hand, Jeronimo could be said to represent the light, and Humberto, the darkness. The same goes for Ines and Peta.

But Jose Donoso, in his Jungian intellectual and artistic vision, wishes to invert the simple, fixed equation of light and dark. And so, he blurs the characters and their interactions to create an alchemical reaction, an inversion of light and dark, good and evil, beauty and ugliness.

In the middle of the novel, after Jeronimo has been married to Ines for some time but has not produced an heir, a sexual act takes place. You have to read the novel to understand how ambiguous this part of the story is. We never really learn what happens. There are only possibilities, speculations, hypotheses. Either Jeronimo is finally able to impregnate his wife; or his secretary, Humberto Penaloza, impregnates her; or--and I believe this is the most likely of the three possible story-lines--the narrator impregnates Peta Ponce.

Whoever the child's parents are, the outcome is an heir for Don Jeronimo de Azcoitia. Jeronimo's vision of perfection, symbolized by the stone medallion, "one section of the eternal frieze," is at last a reality.

And here's when the story really starts to get interesting:
When Jeronimo finally parted the crib's curtains to look at his long-awaited offspring, he wanted to kill him then and there; the loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump, its mouth a gaping bestial hole in which palate and nose bared obscene bones and tissues in an incoherent cluster of reddish traits, was chaos, disorder, a different but worse form of death.

This post is part of a series of posts on "25 Profound Works of Literary Genius".
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Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Shakespeare's Sonnet 29

2:17 AM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee--and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

This sonnet by Shakespeare is a remarkable demonstration of the flux that goes on in the human psyche, and how abruptly self-perception will shift from one extreme to the other.

We are presented with a depressed point of view, the very attitude and frame-of-mind each of us know intimately. It's when we measure ourselves against others that we feel so inadequate. The "outcast" state springs to mind because suddenly we're fixated on our lack versus what others seem to possess naturally and have a sheer abundance of.

If only I had Richard's talents, or Geraldine's riches, or Samantha's good looks, or Marko's confidence . . . then I would be happy!

I know because my mind will often drift into this "sullen" sphere. Before I met my girlfriend, I believed my luck with women was horrible. There were so many men who "just had it"; it was something I couldn't define, but I was sure whatever it was I did not have it.

And I deeply resented this about my fate--I was destined to watch women flock to other men. When I contemplated my future, I was very much in the mind of Shakespeare's discontented speaker.

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

The shift in the speaker's self-perception is remarkable because it represents the shift that occurs when we stop obsessing about ourselves and turn our thoughts to a loved one.

The fixed belief I had about my poor luck with women changed when I got a chance to spend a weekend with one woman in particular. Then my thoughts were set on her--not myself--and I was able to hear, if not the "hymns at heaven's gate", then maybe the chorus of "Mother of Pearl" by Roxy Music.

The last line of the poem enacts a complete reversal of the first in sense while it mimics the precise meter of the first line in sound.

Between the first and last line, Shakespeare has given us a microcosmic demonstration of the self. He dramatizes the process of self-reflection--moving from an embittered, deflated ego to an elated, love-swept self that affirms the Beatles when they sing, "All you need is love/love/love is all you need."

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Sunday, December 6, 2009

Escape into Life: Issue no. 5

9:58 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
Nicholas Hance McElroy, from The Heart is Bigger than the Gland

This last week I've been researching the next novel for "25 Profound Works of Literary Genius" . . . so expect that soon.

In the meantime, I have the pleasure to present to you Issue no. 5 of Escape into Life, online arts journal. A wonderful synergy occurred with the coming together of this issue--from the fabulous poetry of Chris Tysh's "Molloy" to an in-depth interview with Juliet Harrison, a horse photographer who is not your typical horse photographer. Here are some of the highlights:

White Horses: An Interview with Juliet Harrison . . . . Harrison told us in the interview, "I call myself an artist, first and foremost. My objective is to create Art that in turn can speak about the horse."

Molloy: The Flip Side . . . . Chris Tysh's verse transcreation of Samuel Beckett's "Molloy". Mark Kerstetter, poetry editor for EIL, gives a wonderful reading of her work.

Revolutionary Content: Online Publishing . . . . In this inspiring essay, Dan Kern talks about how new media is changing our world.

Knowledge is Pleasure: Ambient Mixtape . . . . Enter the vast ambient landscape of Escape into Life’s guest DJ, Wildcat.
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Friday, November 27, 2009

Escape into Life: Issue no. 4

2:27 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
Paper Geography by Letha Colleen

We have another fantastic issue of Escape into Life for your entertainment and enlightenment this weekend. You'll find two excellent art essays, a poetry and illustration double feature, and a musical blend.

What is Genius? . . . . Tony Thomas examines the question of genius in the arts and science.

Creativity, Institutions, and Outsider Art . . . David Maclagan, author of Outsider Art: from the margins to the marketplace, discusses defiant creativity and the use of the term "outsider art”.

Poetry by Emari DiGiorgio . . . In this double feature, the poetry of Emari DiGiorgio is presented alongside the illustration art of Raphael Vicenzi.

Jam Tape 2: A Musical Mix . . . Experience a musical blend of blues, electronic, jazz, and Irish music by Jamreilly, the Official Escape into Life DJ.
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Saturday, November 21, 2009

On Genius

11:02 AM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post
Rene Margritte, Clairvoyance (Self-Portrait)

Reading the New York Times Book Review, one frequently comes across assertions like:
But looking at her writing from this perspective misses the most interesting part: her sentences. No one writing in English today produces anything quite like them. Take, for example, the following passage, early in the novel, in which the principal narrator, an authorial stand-in named Mimi, looks east from the track around the Central Park (or, properly speaking, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) Reservoir.

“Windows high above Fifth Avenue flashed the bronze setting of the sun. I will never understand how that brilliant display, mostly blocked by the apartment houses on Central Park West, leaps the reservoir’s expanse. And do not care to understand, demanding magic from this forbidden journey, though the simple refraction of light at end of day may be grammar-school science.”(1)
The reviewer has chosen a specimen, if you will, in order to demonstrate the author's genius. This hardly seems offensive to most of us; this is the critic's job, to make statements like that. But this morning, whether it was because I hadn't slept the night before or because something had finally occurred to me, I found myself questioning the way in which we--I do it too--talk about artists and their work.

Specifically, their finest work.

We read, "No one writing in English today produces anything quite like them." And then, a passage that illustrates the reviewer's claim.

The passage is beautiful; I was certainly moved by it. But let me challenge you to another point of view, a point of view which is provisional and openly philosophical . . .

What we think of as a writer's unique and individual gifts, those sparkling sentences that critics extol--in my present understanding--are really the effervescence of language itself.

What I mean to say by that is, art in poetry or prose is language in its purest, most accessible, most fluid form, nearly on a separate wavelength. It's on a wavelength most of us can hear, just not all of the time. When we hear it, our hearts swoon, our minds expand.

This is a language that is common to all, a language that resonates with large numbers of people. My immediate reaction, like the critic of the New York Times Book Review, is to elevate the artist who created these lines, to point to the individual. But there is something behind this reaction that bothers me.

It seems we like to pick out the gifted as if they were our own shiny fruit. We like to exclaim, "Ah, this is genius!" It gratifies us to make these declarations, and it somehow serves us.

A critic will point to a work of art, or a beautiful sentence, as if it were possible to isolate perfection--to sever the part from the whole, the text from the context. I am doubtful of this ability to zero in on transcendence.

I believe the magical passage, the stunning work of art, is not the watermark of individual genius, but instead the reflection of a higher state of mind. The artwork is evidence of some journey. Art criticism flattens the journey, however, by making it into a vacation. Now it's as if the artist went on a vacation and brought us back a souvenir. We grab for the souvenir at our first chance because it really is magnificent to have such a beautiful thing in our hands. Blinded by the act of possession, having stamped our names across the material object, we see no further--

In this mode of appreciating art, the furthest I can see is not far enough. Fixated on the individual and her gifts, I lose sight of the deeper meaning or beauty in the work of art. By reducing art to the individual, and setting a spotlight on the hand that wrought perfection, I mistakenly short-circuit the whole enterprise of art.

The author's passages, or the artist's brushstrokes, should be signaling the opposite reaction. Art is a universal language, not an individual one. What if we approached the appreciation of art from the other side, from the side closest to the collective "we"? Do we even have a universal language to praise art? Or is our criticism and praise decidedly individualistic?

Furthermore, all art is in flux, even after its creation. This makes it hard to pin down exact marks of genius; evidence for genius seems to move around a lot and vacillate. After all, the concept "art" is in our minds.

In sum, there is no permanent, eternal art. Art wavers between a radiant work of genius, an emblem of culture, a historical artifact, and a hundred other possibilities. Art can be or mean almost anything, as recent -isms have shown. Culture will continue to see it differently as it passes through the kaleidoscope of history.

Artists have in fact done themselves a great disservice by allowing others to praise their works. (I expect you to disagree with me here.) But, suspend disbelief for a moment, what if we attributed an author's sparkling sentences to a state of mind rather than an individual person?

What if we looked upon great works of art, looking beyond the individual creator, and toward something common to all--the underlying language that makes this art so moving in the first place.

Prior to these insights, I trumpeted individualism. I trumpeted individualism because I felt a strong sense of being an individual myself, and I felt a strong sense of being able to identify other individuals. I saw the enterprise of art as essentially individualistic. The artist works alone, the works are understood alone. Art is the conversation between two individuals, one real and one imaginary (the author's ideal reader, or artist's ideal viewer).

But now I'm coming to believe that individualism in art is not what makes it special. Individualism is the coat an artist sheds over time, growing closer to the patterns of her art as she moves further and further away from her individual sense of self. And those moments of greatness, the superb execution, exists outside of the artist. What we point to when we declare, "What genius!" is the second space the artist has created between herself and her work, the plane onto which the universal occurs. Exquisite sentences arise here, but so do many other things, such as wisdom and love and a profound synthesis of mankind and nature.

Could it be that the beauty we perceive in art is not the mark of an individual genius, but instead evidence of a higher consciousness, evidence of a God I don't believe in, or simply the invisible rails between two people who have never met?

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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Tale of Genji

9:13 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post

3. The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (transl. Edward G. Seidensticker)

At this point in my series, 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius, which happens to be very early, you may be thinking "Why does he have to pick books that are over 1000 pages long?"

The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil and The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin are both multi-volume works. Now I add to the list The Tale of Genji, which is no less than 1090 pages and 54 chapters. If it is any consolation to readers who dislike long books, most editions of The Tale of Genji have the woodcut illustrations reproduced from a 1650 edition of the novel.

So there are pictures.

But let me get to the real reason why I've made The Tale of Genji number three on a list of 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius . . .

Some stories, from the moment you begin reading them, beckon you into a world--a world that by the first page has already charmed you, has already captured your interest with only a handful of details about that world--and you are ready to settle down into this fictional place and stay there indefinitely.

Such was my early experience of reading this delightful novel, which also happens to be the "first great novel in the literature of the world".(1)


I remember the exact twinge of emotion as I began The Tale of Genji. You may have felt this before, it often comes at the beginning of a great novel. You read the first sentence and your heart strings pull a bit, you read the next sentence, then the first paragraph; and what fills you thereafter is such a tremendous amount of sheer love, a deluge of love--

Whether it is a love for the author, or for her created world, I'm not certain. But I'm pretty sure that it relates to a love of literature. The pleasure of books that happened to me long ago. And so, now you know why I prefer multi-volume works . . . . longer books afford a longer holiday in the imaginary realm.

The Tale of Genji is a romance novel, but nothing like the romances of its time, or the romances of our time for that matter, because of how realistic and believable it all is. The novel describes court life during the Heian dynasty in 10th century Japan--and to a contemporary reader, this is a real treat.

We are treated to details of setting, daily rituals, and gossip of a pre-modern society. A work of fiction that takes place in the 10th century, and was written in the 11th--imagine that!

The seductive power of the novel lies in the charm and charisma of its hero--the idealized prince, "the Shining Genji". Genji's extreme good looks, his poetic sensibility, and the many women he seduces all interest us, but it is the contradiction he seems to have been born with that lends his character even greater mystery.

On the one hand, the narrator paints her hero as if he were a god, possessing gifts beyond human measure; on the other hand, the story of Genji is the story of an emperor's son born out of wedlock. The "prince" therefore has common blood running through him. This other side of Genji, which is human, which is fragile, also makes him an emotional wreck.

The narrator seems to know everything there is to know about Genji, and the story itself is engrossing. It is a preeminent tale of passion from beginning to end. But Murasaki Shikibu, the Japanesse noblewoman and author, gives her readers more than a sensationalistic biography. The richness of psychological observation, the depth of characterization for a novel written at such an early point in history, the loose-flowing narrative strung together with Japanese couplets, suffuses the literary work with a dual sense of modern and ancient.

The narrator's attitude toward her subject, her awareness of Genji's inherent contradiction as both a person and a character, adds a layer of complexity to the tale. If you are like me, you will find yourself trying to guess what the narrator, and by extension, the author, thinks about Genji. Because her point of view seems to change throughout the novel, along with the good and bad fortune of the protagonist . . .


The story behind Genji's birth tells as much about Genji as it does about the ancient emperor and his low-ranking concubine. There is a strange connection between Genji's birth, the formation of his character, and the subsequent events in his life . . .

We read about the events surrounding his birth in the first paragraph:
In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything she did offended someone. Probably aware of what was happening, she fell seriously ill and came to spend more time at home than at court. The emperor's pity and affection quite passed bounds. No longer caring what his ladies and courtiers might say, he behaved as if intent upon stirring gossip.
We are immediately drawn into the court intrigue. By the end of the first paragraph, we seem to have all of the information we need to understand the story.
His court looked with very great misgiving upon what seemed a reckless infatuation. In China just such an unreasoning passion had been the undoing of an emperor and had spread turmoil through the land. As the resentment grew, the example of Yang Kuei-fei was the one most frequently cited against the lady.


Sympathy arises for both the emperor's concubine and the emperor himself. The predicament is laid out so plainly that we grasp it without effort and want to know what happens to each of them.
Though the mother of the new son had the emperor's love, her detractors were numerous and alert to the slightest inadvertency. She was in continuous torment, feeling that she had nowhere to turn. She lived in the Paulownia Court. The emperor had to pass the apartments of other ladies to reach hers, and it must be admitted that their resentment at his constant comings and goings was not unreasonable. Her visits to the royal chambers were equally frequent. The robes of her women were in a scandalous state from trash strewn along bridges and galleries. Once some women conspired to have both doors of a gallery she must pass bolted shut, and so she found herself unable to advance or retreat. Her anguish over the mounting list of insults was presently more than the emperor could bear. He moved a lady out of rooms adjacent to his own and assigned them to the lady of the Paulownia Court and so, of course, aroused new resentment.

When the young prince reached the age of three, the resources of the treasury and the stewards' offices were exhausted to make the ceremonial bestowing of trousers as elaborate as that for the eldest son. Once more there was malicious talk; but the prince himself, as he grew up, was so superior of mien and disposition that few could find it in themselves to dislike him. Among the more discriminating, indeed, were some who marveled that such a paragon had been born into this world.
If my discussion of The Tale of Genji has peaked your interest, but 1000 pages sounds too long, there is a shorter edition with fewer chapters (by the same translator).

You may also like to read a few chapters online.

I do recommend the translation by Edward G. Seidensticker over the Waley and Tyler translations. The Seidensticker translation, hailed as a classic, is without embellishment. The Waley translation, while beautiful and poetic, strays from the original too much. The Tyler translation does not quite evoke the same mystery. It is too dry, too scholarly perhaps.

This post is part of a series of posts on 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius

1. Edward G. Seidensticker, Introduction to The Tale of Genji.
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

New Issue of Escape into Life

9:08 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post

I've been busy editing the online arts journal, Escape into Life, and so I apologize for the brief hiatus since my last post . . .

The Blog of Innocence is still running, but the time between posts may vary. My next post will follow the series 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius; I'll be writing about the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.

In the meantime . . . check out the new issue of Escape into Life. Here are some highlights:

Norman Rockwell: The Outsider . . . draws fascinating parallels between Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Poetry by Regina Green . . . Regina Green’s poems have appeared in The Human Genre Project, A Little Poetry/Voracious Verses, and Cahoots Magazine.

Bill Viola’s Bodies of Light . . . illuminating art review on a new video exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in New York.

The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage . . . a book review on a novel both humorous and sad.

What is Escape into Life?

Escape into Life, Arts and Culture webzine, is a publication based on the concept of citizen journalism. The goal is to create a journal of poetry, essays, and art from writers who are already publishing on the Web and who would like to gain more exposure to their blogs. The artists we feature are the very best we can find, and the writers have a background in writing and a passion for the arts.

Kind Regards,
Lethe Bashar
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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

British Illustration: Late 1970, Early 1980

12:28 PM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post



























Images from Best British Illustration '80
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