Month: July 2011

The 1st Mood: The Past Must be Smashed. 

“We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” –F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909)

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” –Faulkner

Thanks to Faulkner, Ibsen, and Chekhov, we recognize that the past cannot be wiped out or destroyed. In Ibsen’s Ghosts, the father’s decisions are inherited, in the form of fate, by the son. Modern fate is like that: the coordinates of our lives are set by and only intelligible through existing social structures. Hence, for us there is no creation ex nihilo.

The 2nd Mood: The Past Must be Worshipped

“When the sense of a people is hardened like this, when history serves the life of the past in such a way that it buries further living, especially higher living, when the historical sense no longer conserves life, but mummifies it, then the tree dies unnaturally, from the top gradually down to the roots, and at last even the roots are generally destroyed.”–Nietzsche, “Use and Abuse of History for Life”

For Nietzsche, antiquarian history can be uplifting but also crushing: uplifting because through reverence the historical man “gives thanks for existence.” Nonetheless, over time and under the wrong cultural conditions, antiquarianism can turn the past into an idol, mummifying it, entombing it and thereby ourselves. Isn’t our cult of turning holy places into museums, our yearning to preserve neighborhoods through law a mummification of the past? The decadent impulse of antiquarianism: to clutch the past, to embalm it in nostalgia, to kill it again, while producing nothing of value in the present or for the future.

The 3rd Mood: The Past Must be Loved yet Transcended

“For it is central to the conception of such a tradition that the past is never something merely to be discarded, but rather that the present is intelligible only as commentary upon and response to the past which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, yet corrected and transcended in a way that leaves the present open to being in turn corrected and transcended by some yet more adequate future point of view.” (137)–Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

The past flows to us through traditions without which our lives would not be conceivable in the terms we presently use: terms such as “self,” “democracy,” “freedom,” and “love.” When traditions work, they confer upon us roles, identities, a sense of rootedness. Yet traditions can be muddled, incoherent, lost, or imperfect. In multiple senses, they can fail us. When this happens, it is up to us to correct and transcend them: up to us to recuperate what is valuable, to correct what is mendable, and to transcend what is unsalvageable. The past–taken in, taken up, held onto–is also, and importantly, transmogrified. Like alchemy.

A Postscript

Run the forms of consciousness described above through your life as well as through different cultures. The question, “How do you stand toward the past?,” does not go away unless it is meditated upon and, even then, it is not immediately put to rest. Like our pasts, the question can only be quieted through inquiry, conversation, and practice.

Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, published in 2009, might just as well have been a play or a dialogue. The first part takes place in Venice, the second part in Varanasi. The protagonist Jeff Atman–yes, that is his surname–is a freelance journalist who writes about art, music, and celebrity. He attends Venice Biennale in 2003, one of the largest art exhibitions and bacchanalias of the year. Some time later, in Part 2, he is commissioned to write a 1200 word travel piece on Varanasi. His assignment has him there for 2 weeks; he stays on indefinitely.

The novel could be construed as a dialogue between Parts 1 and 2, and the form of the dialogue would be an antinomy. In philosophy, an antinomy is a special kind of conflict between diametrically opposing views. In this case, Part 1 poses hedonism, the apotheosis (pun intended) of a certain strand of western civilization, while Part 2 exhibits the way of spiritual enlightenment. My conclusion is that the antinomy does not reveals a Kiekegaardian “leap of faith” in which, without criteria with which to decide, one must make a radical choice between hedonism and enlightenment. Rather, it shows that both options are one-sided (“one-sided” in Hegel’s sense), both therefore wrong paths to follow.

As it is portrayed in the novel, the present-day Venice is a site of decadence where art has become an endless game of provocation and where pleasures seek satisfaction and terminate in boredom and dissatisfaction. The source of Jeff’s unhappiness, we gather, is unquenchable desire: desiring the wrong things, desiring too much, desiring too much of the wrong things, all of which leads to disquietude and dis-ease. This has been Jeff’s life up to his mid-40s.

In Varanasi, a holy city located along the River Ganges, something strange happens. Slowly Jeff loses his identity (the hard edges of his memory, his anxieties, his individual pursuits), his sense of time (which is replaced by eternity, the ever-present), and his desires (his longing to possess objects, sexually or otherwise). He shaves his head, bathes in the fetid waters, speaks in Koans. And yet, although he is freed from desire, we are led to ask: in what sense is he still human, in what respect still among us? One senses a lassitude, an inertia, a great enfeeblement of the embodied spirit, as if death–its rhythms, its eternity, its turn-and-turn-about–could bring relief but no unity of the person.

In sum, Venice represents the mental dis-ease of the individual ego whereas Varanasi symbolizes the enfeeblement of the whole person. It occurs to me that the way to overcome this antinomy is to meditate more fully on two thoughts–Epicurus’s that one must satisfy the right desires and Aristotle’s that one must love what one desires. To meditate on these thoughts is to discover that one can be of the world without being beholden to the world.