Self-Images & Self-Creation

Right in the very beginning of one of his essays (literally on page 1 of the Parerga und Paralipomena), Schopenhauer makes a distinction between two types of philosophy: 1) that which is taught as a heave-to discipline in the University, which is the handmaiden of the State and subject to its interests and influences; and then 2) the type of philosophy that stands ready to cast off “full steam ahead” in the service of Nature and Humanity, philosophy as the “unhindered quest for truth.” We are meant to conclude, I presume, that folks like the then very-popular young Hegel are the university teachers-of-philosophy (the Kathederphilosophen), academic philosophers who are maintained in an upright position by their state-financed pulpit or lectern, who are duty-bound (career oblige!) to service a State-sanctioned vision in and of philosophy, which will fairly reliably represent the intellectual statu quo or unilluminated mediocrity of thought, although, rather than Thought, a Nietzsche might have called this a glorification and codification of the herd Instinct! So, Kathederphilosophen are really quite distinct animals from those philosophers, presumably like Schopenhauer himself, who “do” the true questing and journeying work of philosophy.

            In many ways universities remain true to the spirit of Schopenhauer’s rather grumpy tendency to make Disobliging Distinctions; and while I am in fact absolutely sympathetic with this particular D-D with respect to philosophy, my this-morning reflection is about a different D-Distinction—the one that Departments of Languages and Literatures have so often made among types of literature. First there is Academic Literature, all the wonderful stuff that has been hallowed, originally by the 17th century’s Battle of the Books in England, then by the 20th century’s “canon wars.” Then there is All-the-other-stuff that is thought unworthy of ivory-tower classrooms.

            The D-Distinction between Reading and Simply Reading can already be anticipated by looking at the types of authors one used to read at American universities. According to a 1965 survey by the National Association of Scholars, there was a time when English classes would spend their semesters pouring over many of the inhabitants of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World reading the famously and classically dead (the notably notable “dead white male” society!)—immortal names like Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Eliot could be readily heard echoing sanctimoniously in the corridors of Academe. A scant 35 years after that survey, and many of the immortals have bitten the academic dust; for while one could still occasionally catch the dulcet tones of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer lingering like an afterthought in the air, Other Sounds as well, New Sounds, were “unleashed upon ‘the learned world’” (as Harold Bloom writes in The Western Canon), distinctly less mellifluous echoes, less illustrious, less classical, and profoundly less masculine: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison.

It is a truism of literature in general (both academic + airport reading combined) that we are hooked on a book when the action of the story seduces us into exchanging our here-and-now version of reality (e.g., I am waiting at the airport….) for the fast-paced activity of Storybook (e.g., I am being hounded by the bad guys across roofs and through the back gardens of innocent and unaware citizens whom I am trying to save from horrible destruction at the hands of some Jabberwocky, and the inevitable clock is ticking in the background…). Similarly, we can become hooked when we see ourselves, some(mysteriously)how, reflected back to us in the eyes of Storybook in-dwellers.

            To the degree that either of these intuitions is accurate about our adventures in Reading and Simply Reading, I would argue that the academic Disobliging Distinction between them is fundamentally irrelevant, and therefore no better than bluster, swagger, and general, all-‘round censoriousness—because we have become involved in, transformed, and transported by the Literature of our Lives. We are Kidnapped.

During my rather extended sojourn in Academe’s hallowed halls, I have listened attentively to all of the above “dulcet tones” of the world’s authors, some truly great, some less, liking some more than others; and I have put myself personally into all the visions and experiences of the various worlds that have unfolded before me in their pages. And I have to admit that I still get caught up by a good Hero’s Tale – from Hektor to Reacher by way of Luigi Natoli’s Sicilian hero, Blasco da Castiglione—for me every hero is a good hero. So whether in the Reading world of the Academy or the Simply Reading world of everyone else, the Heroic Story is the secret passage at the back of the wardrobe for me to pass from my here-and-now into the not-here-and-now of Narnia, which can become my here-and-now if I choose to make it so.

We seldom if ever read O’Henry in our hallowed halls of higher learning. Yet this writer created some of the most significant collaborators of my life, teachers all, who continue to show me how my life can be if I choose to make it so. In a story called The Last Leaf, O’Henry introduced me to a proud, but humble old immigrant painter, Behrman, who, believing he will never create a work of art that people will buy thereby making him famous, yet creates one single work of life-giving art, but which goes (almost) unnoticed—because you and I notice! This unsung and lowly artist-hero created a single painted ivy-leaf clinging to an alleyway wall in the face of winter’s onslaught, a willful leaf that saved the life of a young woman, lying in bed behind the opposite window, whose despair was driving her into death’s arms. The old artist died that night from the cold; but the young woman took heart in the morning, and lived… she decided that if one single ivy leaf could resist winter’s icy fingers plucking it to its doom, then she could also resist death as well. In The Gift of the Magi the same O’Henry showed me how the Spirit of Christmas could be real in my life as a Love Story – that I could sacrifice my “pearl of great worth” for the Beloved, and, in the Love Story, it would go without saying that the Beloved would sacrifice her “pearl of great worth” for her Lover. O’Henry’s story showed me that I valued and wanted to experience this Love, so like the story’s hero I made this type of love the Adventure of my life.

            Tarzan was perhaps the earliest of my heroes. I so much preferred the Tarzan of Edgar Rice Burroughs to the Weismuller-esque Tarzans of cinema. Instead of Hollywood’s pseudo-buffed strongman swimmer, Me-Tarzan-You-Jane type of monosyllabic troglodyte, Burroughs gave me the vision of a polyglot and exquisitely educated Tarzan-Lord Greystoke whose first language was that of the Great Apes, and whose first man-language was French (albeit of a Belgian sort, bien sûr!). It was Lord Greystoke, the English aristocrat reared in the wilds of “darkest Africa,” who rose up through battle with his peers to be the white King of the Mangani, the tribe of Great Apes, and who later, in his personae of Lord Greystoke, would bring to the world of human injustices in the cities of Europe, the savage justice of the animals, the justice of the strong individual committed decisively to right action, in which context his “tribe” would remain whole and secure.

            It was James Fennimore Cooper who introduced me to Deerslayer, the hero of his Leather-Stocking Tales. This was the natural man who could have been the model for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a white man in the savage world of the early American frontier, who used all of his gifts, those inherited from his “whiteness” as well as those come from his long frequentation of the native wild-places and their inhabitants, to become the exceptional man in both environs.

            Another of my heroes is Mozart’s Papageno, the sidekick-to-the-hero of Die Zauberflöte. I think, though, that Papageno is important to me for different reasons; he is more a type or model-of-man that I have chosen to carry around with me so that I remember what has become important in this modern world of ours. But let me be painfully realistic about this particular hero-model: Classism continues to exist in these supposedly class-free societies of ours; and my experiences have taught me that I am a class hybrid. I do not fully belong, either by birth or by sentiment, to the privileged (moneyed) classes or to the normal working classes. Were I to have been alive during the French Revolution and the Terror I would have been guillotined—that is clear to me; for even though the principle occupants of my porte-monnaie are nearly always only dust-bunnies, my education places me socially in a privileged (albeit not moneyed) class, in an inter-class ni chèvre, ni chou. I experienced this in-betweenness throughout my adult working life, before the Academy, because most of the jobs that sustained me during my education were of the laboring sort. I did not mind the labor then and I still do not; but those laboring around me and at my side were often made uncomfortable by me because it seemed apparent to them that my life was not exactly like theirs. My education was changing the very nature of my social reality; following in the footsteps of Odysseus, the in-between course on the map of my life was already being charted, and was leading me to very different destinations, both short-term and long-term, from my companions.

            So Papageno sings to me the joy of the authentic common man, which is a testimony to Mozart’s genius. In a high-minded society whose courtly values and expressions were dominated by Verdi and Italian opera, with the creation of this Bird-Man character Mozart seemed to have understood how, and then dared, to translate the heart of a normal, socially powerless “simple man” into a language and for an audience that would only ever attend the Volksoper, whose joy was to share in the life and miseries of a bawling and grousing, but faithful and good hearted volks-hero-sidekick whose highest lament, in German the language of the people, is his lost-love (lyrics in German and English here). Mozart’s creation of this type of hero is significant, in part, because it anticipates the “rise of the masses,” which defines in many ways the 19th century. This is also most certainly why romantic lyrics, such as those of the famous Donizetti aria, Una Furtiva Lagrima, [Pavarotti], from his operatic melodrama, L'elisir d'amore, [1830s] continue to move us all, of all classes—because they validate our individual experience of the post-19th century world, and especially of that experience that we all most seek out -- Love.

            I read Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus & Goldmund for the first of many times when I was an undergraduate student of religion, only to realize that, in very fundamental ways that I could not remedy in myself, I was both Narcissus and Goldmund. I was a walking contradiction; but I also began to understand why the life of a seminarian was not going to be for me. I have “felt” the anguish of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary as she broke through the wall of 19th century French morality, which threatened to suffocate her. Her break-through (1856), which made her the heroic prequel of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1883), also transformed her into a spiritual and social pariah unto her death; and yet I had also felt along with Madame Bovary both the boredom of the mundane routines that await the “normal” life, as well as that intoxicating moment when we realize that we each hold our own destiny, our fate, in our own two hands. She made her choices, I mine.

            I am thrilled, and moved, each time I read through Milton’s Paradise Lost. After Satan and his legions have been cast out of the heavens and into the deepest regions of hell—Satan picks himself up, shakes himself off, sees laying stunned around him his myriad warriors, and, not ever one to give up as beaten, this prodigious angel shouts out to them in a great, virile voice: “Awake! Arise, or be for ever fall’n! (Book I).” Or how much have I learned about the world’s truth when, in Book II at the war council of the fallen gods, I hear the poet sing of Belial:

“in act more graceful and humane:

A fairer person lost not Heavn’n! He seemed

For dignity composed and high explóit,

But all was false and hollow though his tongue

Dropped manna…”;

or when Moloch, “the strongest and the fiercest spirit/That fought in Heav’n, now fiercer by despair”— in response to the deceptive and cowardly words of Belial, spoke words of absolute clarity and frankness: “My sentence is for open war…” And then there is Milton’s Satan, an exquisite creation if ever there was. Intent on wreaking havoc at the heart of his Enemy’s creation, Satan penetrates into Eden to seek out Eve and lead her into temptation. In this encounter (Book IX, 455ff) Milton reconstructs for us one of the most interesting experiences in all of the worlds, literary and real-life: Satan meeting Beauty, and Malice is struck dumb! This is the original Beauty meeting the Beast.

She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone: Her heavenly form
Angelick, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge:

All of these books are standing on my shelves—lovely sets covering the walls from floor to ceiling; and yet, in the interests of transparency, I do have to admit that while I own copies of them, I have not yet been successful in wading through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), which is of a density that defies the laws of physics; and, frankly, I have to admit as well that I would rather die or suffer serious dismemberment before plunging into the interminable 7-volume wasteland of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu). My wife loved Proust… but, Call me silly.

            However, the “people” I have met in these (other) collective pages—these guides continue to roam through the corridors of my life, my own private herd (flock? gaggle? school?) of Daimoni; and unlike the single and limited Daimon of Socrates, whose only job was to point out to Socrates the way he should not go, my myriad of Daimoni have continued to illuminate my path in all the varied and sundried circumstances of my life. They are the sign-posters who attend me and illuminate the dark places on the path of how I should go. In our broken and fragmented world where lessons and rituals are being forgotten as quickly as computer passwords, how else are we supposed to learn how to “do” real-world living and dying?

            In my life I have followed Horatio’s example in the face of loss—saying farewell to a friend: Good night, Sweet prince… and Shakespeare’s words actually expressed truly what I was experiencing in that moment of my own grief and loss. Horatio’s words taught me what to say in my own real-life pain, and they gave me comfort worthy of my feelings. This is the phenomenology, the lived space, of the Reading Life. Our lives are a flash in the pan, here today gone tomorrow, gone in the twinkling of an eye, ashes to ashes, dust to dust… all truthful sayings that have been, and are used in real situations by real people experiencing real grief.

            “I” am a handy Fiction upon which to hang the story of my life… the cohesion that links the passage of my days into an historical continuity, into the narrative continuum of Me. So I will be many things in my life; or perhaps more philosophically, there will be many pieces of me, many facets, that reflect the various ideas I will value as I pass through this world of mine.