Our buddy Jed is currently in the middle of a harrowing bicycle journey down the southern coast of Maine. With all hope that he makes it safely to his destination, the northernmost MBTA station, let’s combine our collective telekinetic powers to keep him safe. Let no truck drift edgewise, no car door open inopportunely, and no draw bridge draw whilst Jed bikes up their midst!
Hi I rewrote Sparky Starts to…
Now it is called “HANK STARTS TO ROB A GAS STATION.”
Read and comment, make a sexy time.
-Etien
I’m declaring myself at a temporary stopping-juncture in writing thesis. As you’ll see, I have a lot of loose ends in this section. I totally understand that most of you will open it, say “holy shit, this is fourty pages long at ten-point font at 1.5 space–I’m not wading through this” and that’s totally what I would do, and it’s totally OK. I just hope my advisor doesn’t do that.
It sort of assumes that you’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow, but assumes that you haven’t read Deleuze and Guattari. I understand that is sort of the opposite of the situation for some of you on this blog. So it goes.
Gravity’s Rainbow and Schizophrenia
Obviously, if you do read it, give me some thoughts…you could even use the track changes function of Word to log feedback.
In Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes a silhouette on the so called ‘unhappiest man.’ He proffers a definition: “The unhappy one is the person who is always absent from himself, never present to himself.” Absence becomes the topic of study. How is the individual absent from itself? He considers the question in its temporal aspect: we are absent either in past or future time. Absence is then a matter of recollection or hoping.
One who hopes seeks his happiness in another locale. Yet, “strictly speaking he is nevertheless not unhappy, because he is present to himself in this hope and does not come into conflict with the particular elements of finiteness.” His hope is a distraction, at the worst. Hope can become the defining aspect of a personality, and in a not disingenuous way: it can be one’s wine, an intoxication and dulling of the sour mood. Hope does not grate against the real, and in optimism, one can be comfortable with pain, forgiving of plight. The recollector is not so lucky.
That is, the recollecting disposition is less thankful. We must distinguish the recollector from historians. These anthopologists exercise their minds in a sort of child psychology. The past has a “decisive reality” for them, it is settled, and is only a matter of interpretation and reconciliation. But on the other hand– “But if I were to imagine a person who had had no childhood himself, since this age has passed him by without real meaning, but who now, for example, by becoming a teacher of children, discovered all the beauty in childhood and now wanted to recollect his own childhood, always stared back at it, he would certainly be a very appropriate example. He would discover backwards the meaning of that which was past for him and which he nevertheless wanted to recollect in all its meaning.” Recollection is doubly a perversion of time, and so its manner of reconciliation — its countenancing of unhappiness, of immediate, unreflected sorrow — veers away and then back, in a single movement, from presence to absence to a reified present, an artificial presence. To unpack this: one goes on hiatus from the present to contemplate the past. The first perversion, ordinary enough– indeed, only a reversion. But if this recollection is unhappy, if it finds lack instead of ‘decisive reality,’ then it can only return to presence by a false path. It must determine a significance– that is, the mind must have something to say. Retrospection, entered under the authority of an unhappy mood, provides no opportunity for Daoi-stoicism. What is needed is courage, but courage is immediate, and as such, it is unavailable to that retrospective sight which wants for meaning in its media.
“But we shall go on.” Kierkegaard wonders what occurs in a synthesis of the two unhappy types, the hoping and recollecting. Each type, on its own, is characterized by absence, an incapacity to become present to oneself. One appears to be more unhappy than the other: the hoper has always his wine, but the recollecting individual refills bottles he is perpetually finding to be empty. What could be worse? What, indeed, but the unhappiness caused by the conflict of hope and recollection, the continuous interference of the one with the other and subsequent negation of the redeeming power of both? This unhappiest state would consist in a hope which continually mistakes itself for recollection, and vice versa. In an individual, “this is due, on the one hand, to his continually hoping for that which should be recollected.” Likewise “his hope is continually being disappointed, but he discovers that this disappointment occurs not because his objective is pushed further ahead but because he is past his goal, because it has already been experienced or should have been experienced and thus has passed over into recollection.” We must not let the appearance of a ’should’ alarm us. Temporality is what is at issue, but it is not the chiasmus, not the grave simultaneity of past and future times that engenders the absence of the unhappiest one. The experience of time becomes itself unhappy because it has so suffered from disintegrity and overreflection that the mind, no longer able to recall which of its whims has been satisfied and which deferred, confuses the whole lot. “He is continually recollecting that for which he should hope, because he has already encompassed the future in thought, and he recollects what he has experienced instead of hoping for it.” There is not a thing which can satisfy this unhappiness, because it hardly knows what it desires. It thus barely recognizes itself as dissatisfaction: the longing of hope is counteracted quickly by a plunge into contemplation of the past, and before recollection completes its doubled return, it has already transfigured some portion of its movement into a hope.
Forgetful as an Estragon, and disengaged as a Bartleby, the unhappiest one is a subject for comedy. “Ordinarily, he enjoys the honor of being regarded as being in his right mind, and yet he knows that if he were to explain to a single person how it really is with him, he would be declared insane. This is enough to drive one mad, and yet this does not happen, and this precisely is the trouble.” The options are few. One can wait it out, which is to take the passive role. The active one, of course, is disobedience– and the individual can be more or less persistent in this path. Either way, the unhappiest one finds himself isolated. Perhaps he is one of many: 400,000 poets standing around a pond, staring at their feet. Accompanied isolation. “Abandoned to himself, he stands alone in the wide world; he has no contemporaries to whom he can attach himself, no past he can long for, because his past has not yet come, no future he can hope for, because his future is already past.” As many as may wish can crowd in close; rational argument, or pathos, or duty are used to implore him. The trouble is that the quilting point is so well bound. It holds fast, having long ago constricted into an enormous knot. The unhappiest one experiences only the knot. “All alone, he faces the whole world as the “you” with whom he is in conflict, for all the rest of the world is for him only one person, and this person, this inseparable bothersome friend, is misunderstanding.”
Here we hit upon it: the One. The populace experienced in the nominative singular, socius. Freud’s father, Schreber’s God. What is to be done with Him. Let us return to this. Kierkegaard recommends comedy and sympathizes with tragedy. But do these alleviate the knot, or at least make it… likeable? He asks: “Is this an actual person or is it an image; is it a living person who is dying or a dead person who is living–” and with only a textual pause, he is able to answer, “–it is Niobe.” Niobe, too proud towards the gods that they punished her and took away her children. To the Greeks, she symbolized eternal sorrow. Kierkegaard, it would seem, redoubles her error: he apotheosizes her sorrow. He speaks of Oedipus, of Job, of all the ancient sufferers. He concludes with Sisyphus. “It is a quite poetic resolution–” says our unhappy one. But would he be so callous as to read Erasmus without giving way to a grin? Has the unhappiest one no courage for gaya scienzia, is he too sullen to bear ‘the greatest weight’? But these words have lost their appeal, or perhaps they never truly had one. We despair of becoming absent through the phrases we aspire to embody. Roles, also, do not appeal. What is to be done. How to see one’s contemporaries, how to know them without stopping them before one’s eyes as expressionless models. How to see them multiply; not through the needle’s eye, not as the One, and not so egotistically that they could be called ‘misunderstanding’. How to recollect decisively, how to treat one’s hope as wine, wine bottled in the deepest cellar. How to become present. Meditation, perhaps, but also folly. And how this. Next to the stony face of Niobe — or perhaps below her, but alive and well –, we place Diotima. “We are all of us prolific in body and in soul,” she says to Socrates, “and when we reach a certain age our nature urges us to procreation. Those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the flesh conceive and bear the things of the spirit. And what are they? you ask. Wisdom and all her sister virtues; it is the office of every poet to beget them, and of every artist whom we may call creative.” The Don died before he could become a shepherd, and the life of the squire could hardly suffice. Of all the characters in Cervantes, there is left only the narrator….