The Over-Soul

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solidarity

Irony

Contingency

The Audacious American Trinity

No matter how far I stray, I return always to the Audacious American Trinity: Father Emerson; Thoreau, his black sheep son; and the ever elusive Holy Ghost poet Walt Whitman.

Lurking in the shadows, of course, is Herman Melville: a Gnostic nay-sayer with Shakespearean ambitions and, nearly, Shakespearean size, who keeps me honest.

But those 19th century ecstatics of the Eastern seaboard, two of whom were alumni of Harvard College (can anyone imagine such daimonic genius to emerge from the classrooms of Harvard now?), and the mysterious third, from the New York island and an autodidact entire, summon me into their presence again and again and again.

I sometimes regret that I did not devote my whole life to their study, and then it occurs to me that, in fact, I did. Everything else has been a kind of punctuation, a pause and caesura, but one that fertilizes the American soil from which I have sprung. That soil, Appalachian and, so, somewhat poor and thin, is in need of enrichment from the peat bogs of coastal regions and the silt-rich Father of Waters (and, hence, the frequent visitations from Faulkner and Twain).

But, at the last, my estate will be handled by the firm of Emerson, Thoreau, & Whitman; my mortal remains commended to their care.

Emersonian Transcendentalism

"...Emersonian Transcendentalism is not a transcendence at all, but is the program of attaining [a kind of] transparency, which is the peculiarly American mode of the Romantic epiphany or privileged moment. Immanence and transcendence are both spatial concepts; the Divine is either in the world or above and over the world, but the Emersonian transparency gives us the Divine as being found through the world, which is not a spatial category at all, but discontinuous in the extreme, and as much an ebbing out as a flowing in, as Whitman, Hart Crane, and their compeers discovered."

Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, 61-62.

And of what, pray tell, does this transparency consist?

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear....Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintance, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature [emphasis added].

Emersonian Transcendentalism is akin to Hallajian ecstasy.

To Read Well

One must be an inventor to read well...There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part--only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar.

Some Axioms on the Art of Reading/Writing

Reading and writing are two sides of the same cognitive coin.

In the Qur'an and ahadith, God both reads and writes. For the human being, then, to read and write is imitatio Dei.

Likewise, in the Qur'an and ahadith, God is Creater. For the human being, then, to create is imitatio Dei.

The human reader/writer is, likewise, a creator (an artist).

Written Torah inspires oral Torah; by the same token, Qur'an inspires ahadith. Literacy and orality are not mutually exclusive modes; yet, they do not always occur in tandem. At their best, reading and writing provoke conversation. At their worst, they stifle it.

Humanitas is cultivated by reading, writing, and conversation.

A person who exhibits humanitas is a cultivated "soul."

In Mask and Silence

Like technology, art creates another universe of thought and practice against and within the existing one. But in contrast to the technical universe, the artistic universe is one of illusion, semblance, Schein. However, this semblance is resemblance to a reality which exists as the threat and promise of the established one. In various forms of mask and silence, the artistic universe is organized by the images of a life without fear--in mask and silence because art is without power to bring about this life, and even without power to represent it adequately. Still, the powerless, illusory truth of art (which has never been more powerless and more illusory than today, when it has become an omnipresent ingredient of the administered society) testifies to the validity of its images. The more blatantly irrational the society becomes, the greater the rationality of the artistic universe.

--Herbert Marcuse, ODM, 238-239.

Marcusean Humanitas

All joy and all happiness derive from the ability to transcend Nature--a transcendence in which the mastery of Nature is itself subordinated to [the foundational values of] liberation and pacification of existence [abjuration of violence].

All tranquility, all delight is the result of conscious mediation, of [the praxis of] autonomy and contradiction. Glorification of the natural is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation. [Attempts to control women's reproductive capabilities] is a striking example. In some backward areas of the world, it is also "natural" that black races are inferior to white, and that the dogs get the hindmost, and that business must be. It is also natural that big fish eat little fish--though it may not seem natural to the little fish. Civilization produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its own insufficiency, its own blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill this function only as post-technological rationality, in which technics is itself the instrumentality of pacification [not militarization], organon of the "art of life." The function of Reason then converges with the function of Art.

ODM, 237-238.

A Revolutionary Subjectivity

Douglas Kellner on Herbert Marcuse.

Repressive Desublimation

From Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964), chapter three:

The achievements and the failures of [globalized Western] society invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a backward stage of the development. What is happening now is not the deterioration of higher culture into mass culture but the refutation of this culture by the reality. The reality surpasses its culture. Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many [heretofore] insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth.

Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the "cultural values," but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.

The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a "higher" order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction--the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality. Their truth was in the illusion evoked, in the insistence on creating a world in which the terror of life was called up and suspended--mastered by recognition. This is the miracle of the chef-d'oeuvre; it is tragedy, sustained to the last, and the end of tragedy--its impossible solution. To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made for man become unconquerable cosmic forces...Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. But art has this magic power only as the power of negation. It can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal--the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion.

Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the "other dimension" is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs. Thus they become commercials--they sell, comfort, or excite.

"As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing...."

There is no telling how it will all turn out in the end. At the present moment, in this phase of exploration [i.e., after the collapse of the Soviet Union], the picture is confused by the novelty of the situation, the predominance of vicarious entertainment in the life of the masses, what Blake would call spectral enjoyment--everything on TV; the life-styles of the rich and famous offering vicarious participation in spectacles of waste; spectator sports offering vicarious agonistics; democracy restricted to mass voting for media stars. Not only bread but also circuses. It is not clear whether this half-hearted arrangement is an interregnum or the final solution. The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong.

Norman O. Brown, Dionysus in 1990.

It is one thing to bet that the Grand Inquisitor is wrong and quite another to embrace the present dispensation and fall in love with Big Brother. In this late essay, Norman O. Brown was second-guessing himself--as he often did. In so many ways, Brown embodied Van Gogh's definition of an artist: "I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved." Such second-guessing, however, sent chills of horror down his old friend Herbert Marcuse's spine. At the end of the day, Marcuse was a moralist in a fairly old-fashioned sense: that is to say, he was willing to take stands on what he thought was right and wrong. Brown, on the other hand, wished to move with Nietzsche "beyond good and evil." This is where the two men parted company. Put another way, Brown was ultimately optimistic about human beings and their future; Marcuse was hopeful as a matter of principle (see the closing lines of One Dimensional Man) but not what one might call "optimistic."

It is difficult to distinguish Brown's "optimism," however, from a counsel of despair. His embrace of James Joyce's HCE ("Here Comes Everybody") was Whitmanian in temper--he gazed out upon democratic vistas--but one may be forgiven for suspecting that, by 1990, he had thrown in the towel of political and cultural resistance.

The Mazeppist chooses, however, to give Nobby the benefit of the doubt and to believe that he was trying to make the best of a bad situation--particularly at a time in his life when the evening shadows were darkening.

Moreover, the Mazeppist does not accept a binary choice in this matter: either Marcuse or Brown. Instead, he embraces the third way of Van Gogh: he chooses to "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," or "to believe in God and tie his camel." Betting that the Grand Inquisitor is wrong, he still organizes his life around a Marcusian Great Refusal: seeing the inherent value of ascetic practices ("old ways") he chooses thrift, simplicity, delayed (and, frequently, abjured) gratification over the mindless consumption of bread and circuses.

In so doing, he identifies himself with those "arcane disciplines" that emerged from (and are emblematic of) late antique religiosity. He "wastes" valuable time in ritual behavior that offers no earthly reward. In this small way, he resists the flattening of his humanity into the single dimension that characterizes the consumerist personality.

Combining Brown and Marcuse, he chants Van Gogh's favorite line from the New Testament (2 Corinthians 6:10): "As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing..." (KJV).

Gul Baba's Turbe in Budapest

In 1900:

In 2014:

Infidel Piety

While refusing to permit himself the least ambiguity in matters of faith, a man may nevertheless find that some kind of religious language, both in its traditional form as we find it...in the 90th Psalm--and in spontaneous outbursts, now blasphemous, now desperate, is emotionally more adequate for him, more of a relief for an overflowing heart, than any other idiom he commands. If he could compose a first-rate poem, that might be still more adequate; but he cannot, and in his present quandary he addresses God. He does not believe anything about God and accepts no dogma of any sort. He does not feel more tolerant of the theologians than before. He turns to God as one might turn to a Shakespearean outcry or a Negro spiritual or a walk up a mountain, without belief.

You may ask how this differs from reading Lear, or even seeing and hearing Lear, without constantly reminding oneself that one really does not believe the story. The difference parallels that between reading, seeing, and hearing on the one hand, and crying on the other.

The dialogue without belief is not a matter of witnessing a spectacle, however sympathetically. It is an explosion of the heart, a bursting of its walls, a breakdown of inhibitions. One does not relax one's honesty; on the contrary, one does not permit one's beliefs or disbeliefs to get in the way of an honest expression of one's inmost heart. And if, more rarely, one should feel addressed, one listens first and asks questions later.

Surely, questions must be asked later on; else one invites self-deception. We can keep questioning, making absolutely everything subject to critical reflection, without necessarily sacrificing our emotional life and becoming intellectual shadows. We need not choose between thinking and feeling. Nor is it true that those who think most feel least. Men like Plato and Sophocles, Goethe and Nietzsche, show how the most impassioned thought and emotion can grow together.

There are those who, without belief, find themselves addressing and addressed spontaneously, now often, now rarely, and reflect on these experiences instead of arbitrarily limiting themselves to the more usual forms of sense experience. They are not trying to use these experiences to bolster up a preconceived system, but simply feel that in all honesty they must seek to do justice to them...

Even [for the people who would call themselves "Israel" the notion] that God is one was originally less a formula that had to be believed than a summary rejection of all polytheistic objectifications of the divine. The one God was the crucial term of a common language, but no effort was made to define God, and the way was left open for a multitude of different ideas. The intolerance of the Old Testament concerned practices rather than beliefs.

This antitheological piety may well have a future. Today [i.e., the late 1950's, when these lines were written; the situation appears quite different in early 21st century America] the many want theology and Socrates, too. Infidel piety is for the few whose beliefs are not dictated by their emotions and whose emotions are not shriveled by their unbelief. Later, others may fall in with it and make of it what the many have always made of every kind of piety: something that is either superstitious and possibly also fanatical or, more likely in this case, shallow and complacent.

--Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958), 285-287.

Because I began to read Kaufmann while still an undergraduate, "infidel piety" has never struck me as strange or self-contradictory. Indeed, it has long fit me like a well worn pair of Levis.

Van Gogh would have approved these hanific observations. The Mazeppist approves them as well.

Van Gogh's Hanifism

"...God may only appear once we say the words, those words with which Multatuli ends his prayer of an unbeliever: 'Oh God, there is no God.' You see, for me that God of the clergy is as dead as a doornail. But does that make me an atheist? Clergymen consider me one--que soit--but you see, I love, and how could I feel love if I were not alive myself or if others were not alive, and if we are alive there is something wondrous about it. Now call that God or human nature or whatever you like, but there is a certain something I cannot define systematically, although it is very much alive and real, and you see, for me that something is God or as good as God. You see, when in due course my time comes, one way or other, to die, well, what will keep me going even then? Won't it be the thought of love (moral or immoral love, what do I know about it)?"

"...precisely because I believe in life and in something real I am no longer as given to abstractions as before, when I had more or less [conventional] ideas about God and religion..."

[Vincent to Theo, 21 December 1881].

It is difficult to imagine a more profound religiosity--in the Irano-Semitic vein--than that of Vincent van Gogh. By "religiosity in the Irano-Semitic vein" I mean not a system of beliefs but, rather, a response to opening one's eyes upon the world, upon creation and, like the god of the first chapter of Genesis, blessing whatever one sees ("And God saw that it was good").

With Vincent, every painting was a benediction--some more successful than others in their execution, but that is beside the point.

"Mauve takes it amiss that I said, 'I am an artist,' which I won't take back, because it's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the very opposite of saying, 'I know all about it, I've already found it.' As far as I am concerned, the word means, 'I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.'"

[Vincent to Theo, 3-12 May 1882].

Hanifism

Much ink has been spilled by scholars in an attempt to determine the precise historical referent of the Qur'anic term hanif. Rather than review the scholarship in question, I will simply state that it is largely inconclusive. Perhaps the most judicious summary of the results of the research to date has been provided by Andrew Rippin:

"...the term hanif in the Qur'an speaks of a spiritual attitude and to go beyond that is a shaky proposition at best. Hanif reflects a notion of a basic religious impulse in humanity towards dedication to the one God. This is part of an overall social and ritual religious context, for sure, but more importantly, it is the basis of the Qur'anic ideology of belief which is embodied in the myth of Abraham and captured in the word muslim [note the lower case 'm']." Andrew Rippin, The Qur'an and its Interpretive Tradition, Aldershot: Ashgate (2001), 161.

In this passage, I take exception only to Rippin's phrase "Qur'anic ideology of belief which is embodied in the myth of Abraham." I would argue that to speak of "belief" in this context misses the point of the myth of Abraham and, likewise, misses the point of Abraham's "hanifism" which indicates not "belief" but, rather, inclination or, possibly, orientation.

Abraham's piety was, after all, refreshingly minimalist when it came to "belief," and his relationship to his god was, as Walter Kaufmann observed long ago, one of intimacy (see Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy, sec. VIII).

The Qur'an correlates Abraham's hanifism with his intimate relation to the Divine at 4:125. Abraham submits to, trusts in, inclines towards, and is an intimate friend of his god. The centrality of creedal affirmations are peculiar to post-Constantinian Christianity--not the way of Abraham.

Hanifism is not an "ideology of belief" but what Rilke termed "a direction of the heart" (see Kaufmann, ibid.). As such, it is the religious mode most suited to the humanist.

Eid al-Adha Meditation

The historical importance of the Muslim celebration of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) lies in the fact that it commemorates the abandonment of the notion that human sacrifice has Divine sanction.

That notion has been abandoned by those who claim to follow in the footsteps of Father Abraham (though it lives on in the Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement); the practice, however, continues on to this day in a variety of forms, both religious and secular.

Whenever, wherever, and however youth is sacrificed to age, the grim scene on Mount Moriah is reenacted.

Rembrandt's iconic depiction of angelic intervention deserves to be embedded in the conscience and consciousness of every human being however theistically or a-theistically oriented.

This year Eid al-Adha coincides most fortuitously with the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur.

Let these days be Days of Awe for each of us; let us learn to feel the angel's grip upon our wrists and let its strength stay our hands.

To that end, the Mazeppist has begun to wear, as a constant reminder, a leather band upon his right arm. He calls it his "Moriah" bracelet, a token of his heartfelt hanifism.

Van Gogh - In His Own Words

A Deep, Practical Philosophy

We read in Irving Stone's Lust for Life that when Vincent Van Gogh first viewed Anton Mauve's painting of horses pulling a fishing boat onto a beach "he knew he was looking at a masterpiece"--one from which he drew "a deep, practical philosophy."

To know suffering without complaint, that is the only practical thing, the grand science, the lesson to be learned, the solution to the problem of life.

(My translation from the French, p. 168).

Lust For Life

Gems from Irving Stone's novelistic "biography" of Vincent Van Gogh:

A motto from Millet (160): "I would rather say nothing than express myself feebly."

(My translation from the French).

Van Gogh remarks to Lautrec on his paintings of Montmartre dance hall girls (245): "They are authentic and penetrating commentaries on life. That is the very highest kind of beauty..."

A naturalist manifesto from Zola (276): "First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain and prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life!"

Remark attributed to Monticelli (300): "We must put in ten years of hard labour, so that in the end we will be able to paint two or three authentic portraits."

Van Gogh commenting on a canvas he produced in Arles (331): "It is good...It is well realized."

Van Gogh explaining to Gaugin his "theology" (337): "The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gaugin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape are one. When I paint a peasant labouring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up into the peasant. I want them to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, and the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life. That alone is God."

Vincent (Starry Starry Night) Don McLean