Platonic Shopping

“Hi. I’d like to buy a book.”
“Which one?”
“A good one.”
“Well,” amused, “there are lots of good books—”
“What are some of them?”
“War and Peace, The Sun Also Rises—”
“I’ll have one of those.”
“But,” confused, “don’t you care which one?”
“No, as long as it’s good.”

Mirror, Mirror

There is a widely reproduced image of a cygnet, head cocked, looking into a framed mirror. Gazing back, somewhat sternly, is a large adult swan. The picture’s aim, presumably, is to edify children. It promises the fulfillment, completion or perfection of what the child already is, if only incipiently or potentially. In time, all things being equal, and with perhaps some self-reflection, every cygnet becomes a swan. Read this way, the picture is fatal: one entity is presented in phases of development, its perfected form predetermined and inevitable. If only the swan were wearing a toque or fedora, its maturity could be regarded as a goal, and not a cemented nature. Would not this fulfill the picture’s aim?

The swan’s apparent disapproval might lead one to read it less as the end or completion of maturation than as conscience, directing, hampering, and feeding the cygnet’s growth. Even an imperious swan will benefit, however, from the artfully placed accident: when conscience, the voice or image of assured and mature wisdom, wears a fedora, everybody listens.

As You Like It

As one of the five senses, taste provides flavour.

As an attraction, bent or preference, a taste is often a badge, answering the call of the tribe. How else are tastes motivated? What sense did it make for our parents to say that we could or would or should enjoy this or like that? Tastes change; one can learn to like almost anything. Learning to like something might involve finding out just what it is, something of its history, what can be done with it, what other things typically come with it, how to get more of it, the differences between its varieties many or few, who else likes it and why. Altering, refining or expanding one’s tastes alters, refines, or expands one’s capacity to experience, compare, describe, enjoy, sympathize, and understand. Locking in tastes shuts out this altered, refined or expanded world.

There is a taste for the exotic, for science fiction, jazz, classical architecture, functional clothing, exquisite detail, solitude. Once the morsel is swallowed, all of these developed and learned tastes, aftertastes as it were, are metaphorical expressions of appreciation, requiring knowledge and skill. Good taste and poor taste are appreciations judged, or the capacity for so judging. This brings us back to badges.

If openness is among your aftertastes, if liberal or expansive is the sort of person you want to be, you will try many things, learning to like at least some of them, and judging the tastes you do not share very carefully indeed.

I Want! I Want!

Why should I shape myself into the form of a good man? Well, what’s wrong with wanting to be that way? On our being introduced, I reach out my hand to shake yours. Why should I? To be polite, as a sign of basic respect. Why grant respect? Because that’s the sort of man I want to be.

Can value be as flimsy as desire? What justifies mere wants? Where is morality’s grip on all of this? One longstanding answer is that God’s will justifies wants, grounds value. Whose God? and of what era? Why is His will self-justifying? God’s will is an excuse, a note from home.

Other answers will cite such large concerns as social utility and the physical survival of the race or of the biosphere. And these will serve as handy structures upon which to hang mediant actions, but only for people who have decided already that they care for the well-being of the whole, that they should respond to the needs of future generations or of other forms of life.

So anything goes? There is no wrong or right? Non sequitur. Consider that if value is ungrounded today, it must always have been ungrounded, yet we still ended up with the golden rule. Prisoners need chains; pilgrims don't.

Some people insist that there just are rights, there just is evil, and so on, regardless of the details. This is desperate, but its gesture finds an object: we are, every one of us, born into a world stuffed to excess with values. These values are, however, historically, culturally, sexually, and ideologically contingent, often competing and inconsistent. They cry out to be culled and sorted, woven by those who make the effort into harmonious and productive lives. The moral vacuum is a myth.

There is no easy way here – and that is important. Natures will be shaped, actions taken, values assigned, options rated, choices made. We should not expect these things to be easy.

Truth or Consequences

Why does truth matter? Isn’t it just an iteration? You tell me something and I cavil. You say, “It’s true, you can look it up.” Or I take your point immediately and answer, “True enough.” Truth matters to the extent that things matter.

People who tell the truth are honest or generous or dutiful or afraid, who seek the truth are inquisitive or driven or attracted by puzzles. Of course the truth of what you say matters to me, because lies matter to me, and commitment and friendship and crossing the street without being run over.

Telling me that you want to know the truth tells me absolutely nothing about what you want to know.

Truth is an afterthought.

Fair Warning

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit...” Colossians 2:8

Monster Mash

In deep, dark places there are monsters. And while not all of them stand on two legs, it is hard to resist reading them as if they were misshapen people with exaggerated vices, angry, malicious and hungry. One might think of ghosts as monsters, starving for breath.

By humanizing the horribly alien we draw it nearer to us, making possible the dread comparison: what that does, people do too; what became of it might become of me.

What are we doing, though, when we call a person ‘monster’? when, instead of pulling it towards us, we push one of us into the position of being one of them? Is this a punishment? Withdrawing the recognition of humanity sounds like a punishment. Replacing it with a monstrosity that is interesting only insofar as it partakes of humanity is less punishing than than it is confused.

Turning people into monsters sounds more like denial: what that does, I could never do. This is not confused; it is dishonest.

Here’s an idea: let’s stop pretending there are deep, dark places inside of us, indeed that any part of a human’s being is permanently closed, unavailable to description and light. This will not redeem the faithless, nor rescue anyone from a criminal pit. It will rid us of monsters, though.

Songs without Words, or Linguistic Notes

Is music a language? a family of languages? It is regular, meaning rule-governed, without excluding inventions by all or any of its users. This reminds us of syntax. It is uttered in sound and written in signs. It also evokes and conveys feelings, moods, emotions; in fact it does this remarkably well. It is situated at a conflux of traditions, habits and cultural norms, just like the languages we speak. (One cannot sing in a vacuum.) But what human activity is not so situated? And what else does music do? Will humming a tune order my dinner? Will arpeggios get me to the church on time?

One can imagine a world just like ours, but wordless, where colour and duration of tone, serial or simultaneous vocalization, harmonization, attack, volume, thematic variation, sonata-form development, song structure, cadence and resolution, even degrees of formlessness or atonality, blasts, sighs and whispers, perform systematically the very functions English and Spanish do in our world. This puts the metaphor in perspective, though, doesn’t it? Mere words in such a world would be music to the ears. One wants to be careful with conceits.

To be sure, languages, natural ones anyway, have musical aspects. Consider Mandarin. Tone, volume and attack function in English too. Music and language overlap, then. That’s not saying much. Humming the chorus of ‘Hungry Heart’ to a waiter who knows Springsteen might indeed bring me a menu more quickly than not. This shows us something about language, not music: it is plastic and improvisatory. But so is music! So is everything, when related to human use. Blasts, sighs and whispers are meaningful. Any body part can be used to say something, any object, any sound.

Maybe what makes a language a language, or a piece of music a piece of music, is what we do with them. We do a number of things with music, but the range and complexity of what we do with language is staggering. Yes, Ludwig, this is rough ground!

Fascination

Cranach the Elder's portrait of Luther should be titled Suspicion. The man pictured takes nothing at face value, but demands that even the artist prove his worth. Such an attitude is jaundiced. You'd think this would alienate him from us, but it doesn't: it makes him more human.

Yours Truly

Describe yourself. What elements of your description don’t apply to anyone else? Relativized to particular times and places, you surely have attributes and relations no one else does. You’re a node, then, on a four-dimensional map? What have you done that no one else has ever done? These are not rhetorical questions. Now exclude from the list all those doings that aren’t worth hanging your identity on, and what is left?

Many are kind, many are pretty or plain, many have clean hands, quite a few are hungry, all are self-aware: these things do not distinguish you.

We are stuck with the traits, manners, desires and languages that we inherit and absorb as social human beings. Those are what we are. There are also weightings, arrangements, transformations, developments and articulations of these public natures that do indeed mark you as an individual, if you engage them in that spirit, as your project, your need, your fate, your commitment, your decision.

Any number of people can make the same decisions you do, but they cannot make your decisions if you insist on making them yourself. (And this is NOT a ‘grammatical remark’: it is a line in the sand. Who actually makes your decisions is a contingent matter.)

Meaningful selfhood is undertaken, not discovered. It is worked toward. It is aspired to, and feared. It changes. It is energetic and active. It is complex. It is dangerous. At its best, it takes my breath away. It is the shaping I call you.

The Shape of Things

The Old English word ‘scop’ (pronounced shoap) may be translated, by a fine application of the etymological fallacy, as ‘shaper’, ‘one who shapes’. The Anglo-Saxon poet, then, was a real wordsmith: he prepared and manipulated received cultural materials in accordance with the regulations of his craft until those materials had been altered into a substantially new and satisfying form. Beowulf is such a form, Cædmon’s Hymn is another.

The received materials included stories, characters, morals, wisdom, truth, common experience, and the entirety of the language spoken by the poet and his audience. The regulated craft, itself learned and therefore received, involved numerous techniques for expressing sense in a manner then recognized as typically, characteristically poetic: introduction and development, alliterative metre, accumulative variation, heightened or archaic vocabulary, punning, allusion and so on. Some swatches of material, a long story set in the past for instance, would demand of the shaper a somewhat different set of techniques than would another swatch, say a meditation on the plight of an exile. A large part of the scop’s job was to know when to apply what tool to whatever material he had chosen, or been instructed, to shape. The final form was spoken, chanted, sung – we don’t know which – by memory to a live audience in a smoky, beery hovel. Its twin aims were to entertain and to edify. Its satisfaction is as familiar to us now as it was to its patrons twelve hundred years ago: great show, fine performance, encore!

Today, we possess written versions of a handful of these works. Their audience is small, elite even, and sophisticated enough to enjoy the primitive as art.

In what sense are such productions primitive? Genetically, perhaps. They came first. Enormous changes followed, extinctions and migrations of word and body, a cultural evolution so extensive that its terms, were they to meet in person, would barely recognize each other as commonly civilized. Is a primitive shape in any sense unsophisticated? No work executed under such exacting compositional constraints as those that harnessed the scop should count as crude. In terms of theme, The Seafarer and The Wanderer explore alienation, literal and figurative. The Battle of Maldon turns a devastating historical event into humane drama. In Beowulf, the Christian poet contrasts the proud sadness, the hopeless heroism, of pagan lives that could only be redeemed through memorial, imperfectly and temporarily, to his audience’s implied potential for transcendent salvation. So nuanced a viewpoint would compliment any writer of any time.

One way in which wordsmithy has grown is in the number, variety and power of its manipulative techniques. Another is the immense volume of the cultural material it has to work with, most of it unknown to the scop. Most importantly, contemporary writers largely choose the terms of their engagement, its method, material, and purpose. The craft is self-imposed now, but its process much the same. This should not surprise us. Dark Age peasants were people too.