Back to the Woods

 

For many years I did not vote in elections.  My motto was that it just encourages the sons of bitches.  And, I think that every choice one makes is a vote, often about things of more importance if of less pomp that voting for a president or some other claimant of power.  For most of the past twenty years, I have lived more or less as a hermit in the woods, something of a madman, and concerned with things fringier than politics.  I have occasionally offended someone, mostly by rejecting the gospels of Gene Roddenberry and Christopher Nolan.  Mostly I think people were amused or confused at best.  Presidential candidates seemed to me to be twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, and I expected that none of them would do anything particularly good, and I could only hope that they wouldn't be too bad.  For politics I had little to no passion.

In 2016, it became more difficult to ignore the commotion, as the two major parties nominated one person disqualified and one unqualified for office, or so it seemed to me.  I public supported Gary Johnson, and even registered and voted.  Living in a firmly 'blue' state, it mattered little for whom I voted, since the outcome was strongly Calvinistic.  I was fascinated by how much vitriol my choice received.  I was told that I was all sorts of things other than a free moral agent, who could make a fool of himself if he wanted to, but only in the prescribed ways.  I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected.  He had seemed like a bizarre cross of Il Duce and Oliver Hardy.  I suppose that what I had been missing was how many other people have as little faith in politics as usual as I have, and the politics of Trump was not usual.  

Slow forward to 2020 and the democrats nominated folks with even less qualities that I admired than they had in 2016, and I made clear why I found that saddening, and admitted that I would vote for Trump., who also had few qualities that I admired, but who had dropped (relatively) few bombs  He was no less a buffoon, but he had not done the horrible things I had been told he would do.  I was still allowed the satire of having a holy water pistol, and I still had my mostly useless Obama Care.  But.

But I was amazed again and again by how people I had known for years began treating me.  They expected me to justify my every statement, claiming I was being mean-spirited or illogical or worse.  I had never thought of saying things like that about them. because they said they were going to vote for Biden.  About some of their conclusions, yes.  Logic is a fascinating method, having nothing to do with truth.  One can proceed quite logically from false premises and arrive at a completely valid but false conclusion.

Slowly what I have come to realize is that many people have replaced the sort of passion once reserved for religious beliefs with political passion.  When there is nothing left to render to God, everything is rendered to Caesar.  Personally, I have never been one to put my trust in horses, and I am still enough of a Christian or whatever to hope with Locke and Jefferson that governments are formed to protect our natural, god-given rights, not to decide which rights we are allowed.   But to be honest, I do pretty much whatever I think is right, without checking with the civil code.  I suspect that most of us actually operate on a day to day basis like that, occasionally speeding or committing some small act of sedition.  

The truth is I just don't have as much concern about politics as many of my friend have, and I don't find my time spent pursuing the nuances of politics rewarding.  In general I think the big advances in human achievements have come more often in spite of the state rather than because of it.  If any of my dear readers think I am wrong and want to prove me wrong, go for it.  But please be advised that I will mostly likely not read their arguments.   I am returning to spending my time pursuing the nuances of quantum physics and sacramental theology and other esoterica, like aged Merlin, although it is unlikely that I will be visited by Nimue.  Perhaps that's a pity.  I will continue to try to be amused by the actions of the state when I can not ignore them, recognizing that many of the Bard's best lines were spoken by a mischievous sprite.  Indeed what fools.

Meanwhile,  I can do perhaps no better than to share Puck's request for forgiveness, being so unwoke as I am:

'If we shadows have offended/ think but this and all is mended/ . . /If you pardon, we will mend./Else the puck a liar call./Give me your hands, if we be friends,/and Robin will restore amends.

Or, it may be that I am not a good fellow at all.  

Seregation is back.

I have been watching two sorts of time travel stories over the past few days.  The first is the second season of The Umbrella Academy, in which our intrepidly diverse family finds itself in the Dallas of 1963.  One of the family, Allison, is a black woman, and she quickly finds herself caught up in the racial division and unrest of the times.  She marries a man who is an organizer in the civil rights movement and takes part in a sit-in at a segregated restaurant.  She works at a racially segregated beauty parlor.  When the rest of her family find her and things get really weird, she finally tells her husband that she has come from the future, and that there really were going to be better times ahead.

The second is the rush to re-segregate as practitioners of right-think act as quickly as possible to segregate themselves from any suspicion that they were ever attracted to any idea except the official story, and to banish the tainted from any opportunity to spread their wrongthink.  (It's kinda like the scene in The Umbrella Academy when the hard-working white male who is doing what he has been taught to think is right by the morality of his fifteen minutes compares the lesbianism of the woman (I'm not supposed to say that actually, as the character to whom he is speaking, Vonya, is played by someone who self-identified as a lesbian in the first season, and since she was then a lesbian playing a lesbian, everyone was happy, but not she self-identifies as a homosexual man and has a male name in the credits.  And I thought what happened in the series was weird.)--anyway, Ray tells Vonya about hoof-and-mouth disease, and how any taint of it must be eradicated before it spreads to the whole herd.

One of the hefers to be killed first, if I may continue to use Ray's analogy, has been Parler.  Parler is (was) a social media platform sworn not to censor its users.  When it first started, I signed up, because I want to avoid living in an echo chamber.  I have 'friends' on Facebook with as diverse a range of ideas as Facebook allow, but I wanted to see what was happening elsewhere.  I didn't always remember to post my cat photos to Parler, but I did make an effort to copy every even vaguely political post I made on Facebook and to paste it on Parler.  In many cases those posts were quite critical of President Trump, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'the fucking moron'.  Such posts often got 'likes', even 'hearts', on Facebook, and sometimes reasonable discussion on Parler.  When, however, I would post something approving of an action of the fucking moron, or critical of President-elect Biden, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'Mr. Potatohead', I was called a variety of rude names by my good loving liberal, come-together friends on Facebook.  If I were to be taken to Room 101 and say that Parler is (was) a hate platform, I would have to say, at least until the rats were let loose, that O'Brian must have been thinking of Facebook.

The racial segregation of the 1950's is quickly being replaced by intellectual segregation.  Mr. Potatohead's cabinet is touted as being very diverse, but it's a diversity of appearances, not a diversity of ideas.  Of course it is not even discussed in anything like those terms by the faithful.  Just as many groups consider people of other races not to be human, the Party denies that anyone who disagrees with them can even be an intellectual.  At least that has been my experience.  After years of being considered an intellectual, I have lately been called just about every kind of stupid because I voiced my opinion that Mr. Potatohead is not worthy candidate for the presidency, and that Harris is even worse.

There is, not surprisingly, no room for nuance. (Cue the case of Brett Weinsten.) I have  made clear my opinions about the fucking moron's failures.  He was not someone I would have chosen for the presidency.  But now I am supposed to shut my mouth and say nothing counter to the wonders of the winter of our discontent made glorious by the rising of the son of Scranton.  

At least during the days of racial segregation there were efforts, at least in mid-nowhere where I grew up, to provide separate but equal accommodations for the race that wasn't quite human enough for common discourse.  So in mid-nowhere, the first ancient school building to be replaced with something modern was Booker T. Washington.  In the new day of intellectual segregation, those who are not quite human are simply denied any platform possible.

What could go wrong? (In The Umbrella Academy, segregated for years from the rest of her family, Vonya destroys the world.)

R. Mutt, Identity Politics, and Sexual Dysphoria

 

If you have been a faithful reader of this rambling since the beginning, or if you have dug through it to see  what indiscretions against the required thoughts of this fifteen minutes I have committed in my past, you may remember that forty years ago I chose St. Chad as my patron because he had been educated in a great tradition that was making way for the big new thing, and he made his way through the birth pains of an entirely new world.  In Chad's case, his education had been in the oral tradition of the Celtic monks, and the big new thing was books imported from Rome.  In my case, my education had been in the bookish tradition, and the big new thing is instant electric connectivity.  I am trying to make my way through the birth pains of another entirely new world, but the changes have been greater, as often have the pains, that I could imagine forty years ago.

My other guide,  Virgil through what sometimes seem eight layers of the inferno, sometimes Beatrice through what seems like at least potential levels of paradise, has most often been Marshall McLuhan.  I have tried to pay attention to McLuhan's advice that to understand the future, we need to look at art.  The past few days I have been reading Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, and I have come more than ever to appreciate McLuhan's guidance, and to realize that we indeed are living in Duchamps's 1917 future.

R. Mutt's Fountain was entered in The Society of Independent Artists' show that year at the Grand Central Palace in New York, but was never actually seen at the show.  Duchanp later said he thought that was the best thing that could happen to it. Duchamp was, or claimed to be, a fan of chance.  But Fountain was famous enough to be photographed by Alfred Stieglitz,  and 'duplicated' for the Tate Modern.  And in an interesting but perhaps prophetic twist, some critics have claimed that it was really the 'work' of an unknown female artist, because of course it must have been.  Duchamp said it could be considered art because he had 'chosen' it, but he signed it with a pseudonym because it came from the Mott Ironworks, and also because it was a kinda of play allusion to Mutt and Jeff, since Duchamp was tall and thing.

Whatever the origins of Fountain and the other 'ready mades' that made Duchamp readily famous, they made the way for an understanding of art as 'chosen' rather than 'made', of function rather than ontology, of accident rather than essence.  

There are few things new under the sun.  Christian sacramental theology had long worked with such changes in categories, changing the ontology of a man by ordaining him priest, changing the substance of wine to the substance of blood, even though the accidents remained the same.  Just as Christians had undergone a catechesis to be able to receive the sacrament,so art critics and collectors needed some initiation to understand the new art. Like theater, it sometimes required a certain suspension of belief.

Who now is an artist?  Some one who either makes or chooses art. (Duchamp abandoned art and played a lot of chess.)  I have had a little experience in this game myself.  For years I was a serious journaler, and I illustrated my journals with a lot of different media.  I usually worked in coffee shops, and people would ask me if I were an artist.  I would say, no.  But then I would occasionally want some money, and I would make 'art' and sell it as an 'artist'.  I'm no Duchamp, but he sometimes did the same thing.  And some of his works were done with the pseudonym Rrose Selavy, which sounds in French like 'eros, such is life.'  (Few things in my life have been so confusing as eros.)

The road from 'choosing' a urinal and declaring it art has had many branches.  Few are so weird as that taken by Gordon Matta-Clark, who cuts up buildings.  But we are in a post-modern, deconstructionist time, aren't we?  Or is it that we were until a few moments ago?

Once water becoming wine and urinals becoming fine art were part of a fairly small category of transformations.  But now one  pretty much choose to  transform anything with no discernible change in function.  I have friends who on Facebook are 'activists'; their activities consist of choosing memes to post.  In the new global village, tribalism is once again important, but people are no longer born into tribes.  They choose them. It's an odd thing that the tribes with the loudest chants are not those who add anything to the world, not the Mott's who actually make useful plumbing fixtures, but the Mutt's who make lists of the injustices their tribes have suffered, of signaling virtue by claiming oppression.

The more Virgil side of McLuhan said that in the electronic age we would once again become tribal.  It's, I suspect, rather dangerous to speak of tribalism glibly, since there have been and are so many complicated variations of tribes.  I don't want to be so presumptuous as many 'anthropologists' have been, but I would suggest that one of the major differences between electronic tribalism and pre-modern tribalism is choice.  One needed to be born into or adopted by the Ojibway, or at least that's what one of my favourite childhood books, Ojibway Boy, claimed.  I liked to pretend when I was ten that I was an Indian, but it was only a pretense.  No one would lose his job if he said that I wasn't a real Ojibway even if I chose that as my preferred identity/pronoun.  In the electronic age we choose tribes, often oddly enough on the levels of presumed oppression they have as their privilege. (Oddly enough, there was a bit of that sort of thinking in Ojibway Boy.  The Ojibways were oppressed by the Iroquois, and that seemed to make the Ojibway boy more noble.  I had hoped to find it and reread it, but it doesn't seem available at the usual sus outlets.) Alas,despite what some anthropologists have said about tribal societies, they are very often very warlike. Like deadly warlike. Like liking on Twitter or burning on Twitter warlike.  

Many folk claim that we now live in the world or Orwell's 1984. But Big Brother has been atomized, replaced by thousands of droplets ready to report anyone who lets his mask down, especially if that one is from another tribe.  Lilliputian fact checkers  made it a Brave New World.

And what a Brave New World it is indeed. Dr. Moreau would be impressed.  Now we not only 'choose' art, and 'choose' tribes, we 'choose' gender.  I am not in any way dismissing or condemning people who really feel that they are another gender than what they appear outwardly.  Indeed I have some very dear friends who are 'trans'.  But it is important, I think, to recognize that they feel their gender is not a choice.  But in the Brave New World, it is a choice.  One can choose a chemical concoction to become  whatever one wishes.  It brings a whole other level of complexity to the question of nature versus nurture, or of free will versus determinism. It makes for many interesting questions to ponder, among which is if a woman won the olympic gold medal for the decathalon in 1976.

According to some online sources, including history.com, 'Caitlin Jenner--who was playing as Bruce Jenner--. .  . [won] gold in the men's decathalon at the Montreal Olympics.  . . . The secret to Jenner's success was preparation.'

I included the part about Jenner's preparation because I suspect it points to what can so easily make our participation in the Brave  New World in which we find ourselves: a dystopia, guided by Virgil, a noble understanding from the past, rather than in a paradise, guided by Beatrice.  The past of Virgil has a sort of reality and universal accessibility that is not available for the potential future of Beatrice.  

While writing this I have had a conversation with  the parent of a young trans-gender friend who has always thought that his outward appearance as a female did not match his inward nature, but who is not anxious to add chemicals or surgery to the mix.  I admit to  having enough insufficient for much of an opinion about our brave new world.  I keep trying to look at that world from a variety of perspectives.  (Cue Cubism.) But if I have an opinion, it is that my opinion should not be forced on someone else.  I can see R. Mott's urinal as a urinal, and I can see R. Mutt's Fountain as at least one of the most important art works of the twentieth century.  This sometimes gives me a  tribal dysphoria for which I am poorly prepared.  Once again, the modesty of St. Chad, who did not choose to impose his privilege on others, nor to complain about the injustice imposed on him, seems to be as important a guide as any.  I might choose to be the Archbishop of York.  History might not even recognize me as the bishop of Litchfield.