Aporia

Milan Kundera, in Encounter. He borrows the phrase “sentimentality hoax” from Carl Jung, who wrote that we in the West “are involved in a sentimentality hoax of gigantic proportions… Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.” Stravinsky, for his part, asserted that the “foolish sigh” of emotion in response to music was, essentially, bullshit:

“For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.”

That we react emotionally to music, to art in general, to nearly everything we encounter is a quality of our species with which we’re all familiar, against which we sometimes struggle but which we at other moments celebrate; Kundera elsewhere describes much of European civilization as being driven by “Homo Sentimentalis…the man who has raised feelings to a category of value,” which leads, in his view, to the falsification of feeling, tacitly competitive emoting, and other grotesqueries.

Whether one accepts Stravinsky’s argument, or Kundera’s rather more gentle variation, there is little doubt that part of developing one’s sense of an art is learning to disambiguate whatever feelings it provokes from its formal qualities; very bad art, after all, regularly precipitates tears, joy, fascination, amusement, longing.

The question remains, of course, whether good art can fail to do so. If art can succeed without any appeal to the intuitive faculties of an audience, it does so through referentiality, through some essentially essayistic commentary on the history of its medium or style or content; I have at times argued that what is essayistic, what requires an essay on a wall in a gallery to explain itself, its raison d’être, ought to have been an essay itself, as opposed to text encoded in the visual, structural, or musical. But I am unsure.

In any event, it is an arresting idea: that “music’s curse” is “its mindless aspect,” its capacity to move us without creative justification, to strike at us without any formal sophistication or even compositional intentionality. It is a curse because we respond emotionally to what is familiar, to what we’ve associatively learned to consider moving –”unconsciously or by force of habit”– and as such we favor what is clichéd in music, or what is only very slightly inventive: a new way of producing the 1-4-5 of rock, a new way to process the banal harmonies of the singer, etc. It is a curse because it rewards the derivative and repackaged and punishes the novel, the creative, the bold.

It is a curse, too, because it is a wonderful quality which only a composer like Stravinsky could deny, a quality which all other forms of art must envy; a real curse must also be a gift, because it then becomes impossible to abandon or combat; and thus: music remains the most affective of the arts, the most universal, the most beloved, the most dynamic, yet as often as not the most foolish, if not in its essence than in the sighs it cannot but seek to stir.

Carl Jung on James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia, quoted to me by the Mightly Flynn concerning this. A beautiful, nearly perfect image, it conveys with some sublimity how certain forms of mental illness and creativity are alike and, as importantly, how they are not. Joyce was aware of what they shared and worried that he was responsible for Lucia’s plight: “Whatever spark of gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and has kindled a fire in her brain.”

A reflexive inclination towards synthesis, towards novel combinatorial expressions, towards transgressive formal ideas, towards intensity of experience, towards synæsthesia and metaphor and imagination can be found in both the artist and the lunatic, but without the capacity to control and direct the mind’s attentions at least occasionally there is likely little artistic compensation for the suffering a hypersensitive and knockabout mind brings.

However much there is to see and feel at the bottom of the river -which for Jung may have been a great channel of archetypes and dreams from the collective unconscious- and most especially for an artist concerned with the interior spaces of consciousness, immersions vary: diving into it is markedly different from drowning in it.

Jung’s image is not only an excellent illustration of one distinction between artistry and insanity -the ability to return to land- but also an excellent evocation of psychosis: drowning in symbols from without and within, being subsumed by impersonal and suprapersonal mental currents, carried along alone in the deep where light fails to penetrate and one cannot distinguish something thought from something seen.

Carl Jung. This sentence ought to be inscribed in whatever spaces cultural critics occupy while scribbling their attacks on this or that generation, this or that movement. All of us ought to bear it in mind; we’d be less brutal in our judgments, more self-aware, less contented with ourselves, more forgiving of others.

A problem: criticism is a crucial part of reaction, of experience; one cannot limply allow all that happens to wash over one without a response. Indeed, a central problem in our culture seems to be a paucity of criticism: nothing is interrogated, dissected, contextualized, explained, partly because nothing is even heeded. Everyone is disgorging opinions and works in such a torrent that there is no time for real, contemplative criticism.

(A theory: relativism triumphs in the contemporary West not because most decide on it but because for various technological reasons there simply isn’t enough time or mental space to sort through so many competing, dissonant streams of information: better to let them pool, puddle, and evaporate).

Is it senseless to oppose the criticism that springs from irritation? Shouldn’t I be irritated by hypocrisy, by mendacity, by false art, by superficiality, by deliberate obfuscation in culture and politics? Is it really the case that my irritation isn’t driven by righteous outrage at the violation of moral or aesthetic principles so much as discomfited recognition of my own hypocrisy, mendacity, and so on?

I believe it is. I believe this explains why “hypocrisy” is the favorite charge of this indignant age: we are disgusted by hypocrisy because we recognize all our condemnations, all our judgments, as fundamentally hypocritical; hypocrisy is the essential quality of human outrage -which is always hypocritical-, and therefore it is our most severe accusation. We often hear: “I wouldn’t object to so-and-so doing such-and-such, it’s their denial of it, the hypocrisy of it!”

We know that we all disguise our motives, falsify our behavior, depend on various private selves, and since we are ambivalent about this necessary and constant form of dissimulation, we despise it in others. I have come to think of this loathing of hypocrisy is a coded request for forgiveness; whenever we savage someone for their flaws, we disclose what we detest about ourselves, what we hope to be forgiven for.

Carl Jung, as quoted by Alex Carnevale, of This Recording. I suspect we long ago passed a population level at which our evolutionary development suited us well for comprehension, cooperation, empathy, and confidence. We are anthropologically incapable of emotional and cognitive operations involving six billion individuals. The crowd is an ocean.

Tribalism abounds: we break the world into pieces we can process; we partialize it.

In some of the parts I’ve elected to ignore, all Hell has broken loose: earlier this morning, I was looking for a photo of Jung that adorned one of my father’s books. I searched for “Jung” and looking at images produced.

Mixed in with imaged of the psychiatrist were immediately disturbing photos of an older woman with something terribly wrong with her shape:

(I don’t know how long I can bear to have this image up here, incidentally, so gape while you can).

The inevitable life-killing Internet detour eventually yielded some information. Her name is Cathie Jung and she is a 71-year old lifelong aficionado of corsets, who now has a 15-inch waist. If you’re interested, she naturally has all the archetypal qualities of the odd: she maintains that it’s healthy, she is married to an orthopedic surgeon, etc. And of course, she has a web site.

I’m not going to comment on the catastrophe that is our desire to compress, bleach, stretch, inflate, cut, color, laser, or poison ourselves into attractiveness; I have no idea what sort of pathos led Cathie Jung to this. Perhaps she’s an utterly normal woman who merely likes sculpting flesh.

But after seeing her while looking for Carl Jung, it was interesting to read the above quote as though a message from the two of them. In the crowd of contemporary society, the negligible individual will do whatever is needed to avoid negligibility. A distinction of our age is the obsession with fame, as opposed to success. Until recently, one wanted to be famous for something: as a painter, as a statesman, as a hero, as a lover, a success.

Now, our entire popular culture is arranged around the haphazard distribution of fame -non-negligibility- to the detritus of the media-classes. Even they rarely maintain that they posses talent; fame has replaced talent, because it emerges that as we are buried in the crowds not art or skill or bravery is what matters: one must just not be subsumed in anonymity.

It’s likely that these blogs of ours are no different.