Writing, Moping, Shakespeare, Late Capitalism; The Indigestible Bits of Existence

 Monday

I signed a lease. Will be paying over the damage deposit today. Yesterday was not a good day. I think the sinus infection made a return. All I did was make a couple of changes to "No Ordinary Word" - a sentence in the first paragraph, and a change to its title to "Learning The Passion and Control Twist". I was submitting the story to a place where I had sent an earlier version of the story, and I thought let's figure out a new title. I went from entangling yin and yang to twisting to twist. It was almost "Twisting the Night Away with Passion and Control", but I thought that was too long, and night doesn't really come into the story. I got a bunch of submissions made. I got a pile on the table that needs taken care of. Also, I learned that liver goes well with cumin and with curry powder, and that I will never fix liver ever again!

 

At the Shakespeare Festival by David Schurman Wallace (Paris Review) is at the bottom, melancholic, but a reminder of how Shakespeare persists.

Speaking of Shakespeare, a Harold Bloom video which I have not previously posted:

 Unlike about every academic I have read who discusses Shakespeare, Bloom has a passion for Shakespeare. He sees the earthy energy of the writer. Seeing the same thing, it is good to see someone else with the same opinions!

I re-watched the movie Hopscotch last week, and I never mentioned it. Thing s I should say get lost in the heat of the moment. What struck me was first and foremost that no one younger than me would find it interesting - no spectacle, no violence, no sex. Not that it was a big movie back then, but it did make money (if I recall what I learned from checking up it out on Wikipedia). It would have been a date movie. Nor do I think Walter Matthau's humor would work nowadays - an intelligent cynicism does not seem to flourish nowadays. If it did, we would not be so ready for a dictator. We prefer brawn to wit nowadays. Finally, I did not recall Glenda Jackson was so both such a gamine figure and so androgynous. 

 I also watched a Sonny Chiba samurai movie - Quentin Tarantino talked about Chiba and that sparked my interest - and had a good time with it, even if it is a bit grim. I have acquired some of the tender sensibilities of the current era, which defines winning in a different manner.

 Not much of a Ginger Rogers fan, but after the following, I appreciate her more:

 

 A short lesson in late capitalism, that kind of put a dent in the phrase for me:

 A Patti Smith interview that touches on her performing Bob Dylan's response to the Nobel Prize. I ignored Smith for most of my life, but in prison I came to appreciate her more. She is from Philadelphia, which takes pride in that. A very intelligent woman; my fault in ignoring her.

 And I did a Lone Wolf and Cub movie:

 And I think that brings me up to date on some items.

sch 6:08 

 I worked up another blog post that will come out today at 3 PM on Charlie Kirk, went thought the email, and submitted "Going for The Kid" to Unlikely Stories. I found that the publication has a YouTube channel. Although, I like the magazine, but have not had time to give it proper attention.

 Time I did something besides type.

 7:55

Waiting to go to Indy, so this will be very short.

I went to the bank for my damage deposit, and then I ran that up to my landlord. That was between 10:30 and noon.

Before that, I did some work on "The Women in His Life".  Afterward, it was fixing lunch, then a meal in the slow cooker, reading the mail, doing the dishes, getting ready to make the Indy trip. I just finished up with some of the email.

2:11 PM 

Jerry and Ann picked me up around 3:30. I started fixing the Table of Contents for my collection "The Dead and The Dying" - and was glad to have a reason to stop.

We got to Indy's westside close to 6 PM. I did get to see the WaWa in Chesterfield, after hearing about it for years while in Fort Dix FCI. It strikes me as a McDonald's that had unnatural relations with a 7-Eleven. Or a Quiznos.

It took me about 2 hours to get back, but I made a stop to see T1. 

That was a very strange experience. She came to the door, asked can I help you. While I expect an angry greeting, her completely not recognizing me was unexpected. Then there was her husband poking his head around the door - or I assume her husband. She was recognizable, if a bit too aged. Absolutely no questions about how I was doing, or even any real greeting. She asked if I was there about Nic. I fibbed a little by saying yes. She told me she had lost track of him years ago. Also, an oddity. Truth is I had several things to talk to her about, but, as she said, they were sitting down for dinner, so I felt no sense of welcome to talk more. I realized when I was leaving, she probably did not know or care about Joni's death. It also crossed my mind that she did not ask for my telephone number. I got a very strong sense that she had cut herself off from her past. There was another, smaller, sense that they - she and her husband-had cut themselves off from their surroundings.

When I got home, I felt like a zombie with a bad case of indigestion. 

 And like a zombie, I spent the next few hours watching videos on YouTube.

Like Lone Wolfe and Cub (what can I say, I'm a fan!)

Before that, a lot of historical/political stuff while I worked on my email:

 

 

 I got on an MC5 kick before that:

 

 Tuesday was not good. I woke late, fuzzy-headed, but stubborn about getting to "The Dead and The Dying". This I did, and got it out in the email.

I had Doug Kershaw playing on the background, and I went through a lot of his recordings. Some surprises came up while listening:

 

 Then I moped for the rest of the day; pretty much the following movie was the highlight:

 I have not seen the movie in around 40 years. Having seen a video about the movie on YouTube, it got my interest up and when YouTube put it in my path, I grabbed it. I did not know before this was a Michael Mann film. I had forgotten all of the cast but for Scott Glenn and Jürgen Prochnow. But it had left an impression in my mind. I agree with the YouTube video, it is pretty good until the climax. Think the ending of Wonder Woman. The special effects could have been better even back in the day. On the whole, it was good watching it again. Other thoughts: this might be the only Mann movie without any Americans; Prochnow was a very good actor, whether it was possible now with digital formats to improve on older, weaker special effects, and whether the supernatural aspects were as well-thought-out as the realistic.

The other highpoint was getting a date for going to Evansville. 

Today was a better day for the writing, even if I still had a roiling stomach and my neck got stiff from sitting for about 5 hours. Having Jerry's car, I made a run to Payless for Coke Zero and cleaning supplies and lunch. Otherwise, I was at the computer from 5:30 to 11:30.

I was also back at my story for the afternoon. Now, I need to do the editing/proofreading. That is not on the books for tonight. I may have a date tonight.

The dishes are done, the trash is out.

 I will leave you with one more video, about one of my favorite Japanese filmmakers:

 

I broke off for an hour. MW called and got me up earlier than planned. I called her back, and we spoke for a while. 

 

Kit Marlowe Is Back!

 Well, sort of. Everyone gets fascinated by who was Shakespeare, and that was, in a way, my introduction to Marlowe back in 10th Grade. I take Shakespeare as Shakespeare. He is not as interesting as his work, whereas Marlowe may be more interesting than his work.

Yesterday, The New Yorker published Anthony Lane's Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble. There is a new book out about him.

Marlowe’s rackety reputation outlasted his death and then went quiet. Not until the twentieth century, and yet more so in our own time, did it become cacophonous again, amplified by claims that he spied for his country, and that he and his work exult in a flourish of gayness. (“Edward II” is dominated by the monarch’s obsession with his favorite courtier, Piers Gaveston.) There are mounds of commentary on Marlowe—historical, biographical, critical, and wildly fantastical—and all sorts of reasons to add to the heap. The latest addition is by Stephen Greenblatt, whose densely textured account of Shakespeare’s life, “Will in the World,” was published in 2004. Now he brings us “Dark Renaissance” (Norton). The title makes it sound like a low-rent knockoff of Assassin’s Creed, with hooded malefactors swarming over pixelated piazzas, and the subtitle, “The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” is equally brazen. Yet Greenblatt is right to sound the trumpet. If anyone’s story tugs and bullies us back into the past, it has to be Marlowe’s. Roll up and enjoy the show.

About the work, a slightly different viewpoint is in Metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised  (Letters, The Guardian)

 And one last batch of quotes from Robert McCrum's review in The Independent, Inside the life of the perfect nobody who many say was better than Shakespeare

Dark Renaissance brings the wheel full circle. Greenblatt, having confessed his “fascination” with the author of Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta, captures the pivotal moment when Marlowe’s unforgettable, mighty lines (“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?”) wowed London audiences during the years before and after the Spanish Armada.

Here, once and for all, in a profound meditation on the well-springs of creativity, Greenblatt nails the playwright’s staggering originality: his fleeting role (six years at best) in the making of that glorious world-class dramatic phenomenon, Elizabethan theatre.

 I cannot say that Marlowe was better than Shakespeare. He never wrote an outright comedy, and his comedic characters are more things of farce. He has none of the counterpoint of plot and subplot as does Shakespeare - his music is rougher. The analogy that came to me is comparing The Sex Pistols to The Clash.

The thing to do is to read Marlowe. Out loud, and away from the academics who will strip the life out of him, as they have tried to do with Shakespeare,

sch 9/9 

 

 

 

Writers Advise: Pynchon, Wallace, Amis, Leonard; Showing With Ross MacDonald

 I read two of Martin Amis's novels, but I know he had the reputation as a bad boy of English writers. Seeing him paired with Elmore Leonard lit the fuse of my curiosity mixed with fear. It is a little shocking to hear Amis's respect for Leonard. A very good discussion of writing that raised my opinion of Amis.

 

 Why Martin Amis Hated David Foster Wallace & Thomas Pynchon - Write Conscious

 

I think I have made it clear here what I think of David Foster Wallace, but if I heard the presenter correctly, he ranks Wallace a better writer than Amis. He also gets down Zadie Smith, who I adore.

Show, Don't Tell: Donna Leon's Timeless Lessons for Well-Crafted Books surprised me:

 One pedagogical tactic that desperate teachers might employ is to direct the attention of their students to the novels of Ross Macdonald, for there are few better, more concrete examples of a writer who went quietly and artfully about the business of showing his readers the souls of his characters. Even more artfully, Macdonald kept authorial comment to a minimum while allowing the characters in his novels to strip themselves—or one another—bare with the words they hurled or simply let drop inattentively.

***

Show the location, show the location, the huddled students are told. Well, how’s this for showing? ‘We trekked to the far side of a big central room.’ Then there is Mrs Biemeyer’s explanation for her delay in noticing the absence of the painting: ‘I don’t come into this room every day.’ Just in case Archer hasn’t grasped the wealth of the people who are going to hire him, Biemeyer laments that ‘There ought to be some place in a four-hundred-thousand-dollar building where a man can sit down in peace.’ This in 1976, when that sum bought a lot more house than it does today. And notice that Biemeyer refers to his own home as a ‘building’. 

Write Conscious again with Harold Bloom on Gravity's Rainbow

 

I remain a Pynchon skeptic, but I will let you make up your own mind. It may be that I do not get his sense of humor.

 

Check out Publishing ... and Other Forms of Insanity, sign up for its newsletter, and posts like 22 Great Websites for Writers

 

sch 8/29 

Writing Resources: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (Writing Forward)

The theme that ties all essays in this book together is creativity and the act of keeping a healthy fountain of ideas flowing. Bradbury shares his wisdom on this topic not by preaching to aspiring writers about what they should be doing but by explaining what he did. He explains that he started writing a thousand words a day every day at the age of twelve. My personal daily goal as a writer is also a thousand words per day, although I didn’t start when I was twelve, and I often don’t hit my goal, especially when a project moves into editing, publishing, and marketing.

sch 9/6

Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain; Love makes the difference

As one who thinks teachers sap Shakespeare of any life, it may seem contradictory to post these documentaries about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Let me explain. I did not find any of the following to have sapped the life out of Mann's novel. They give readings that more often give food for thought. They all seem to actually love The Magic Mountain, and they bring their passion to the discussions. And that is not what I find objectionable in how we get Shakespeare. Readers should find reasons for reading the novel. Writers may get ideas for their own writing. I feel that I missed much in my reading - even though I found the novel a joy and an eye-opener - whether I can apply any lessons learned to my own writing is unlikely due to my age. If you are a young writer - especially an American - listen, then get the novel, and read it. A reader of any age should read it.

An aside about Shakespeare, there is one academic worth reading: Harold Bloom.  He loves Shakespeare. Love makes the difference.

One last thought about the following, when people get together to discuss this novel, even the college lecture, is how they do not get stuffy. 

 David Wellbery, Thoughts on Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain with Steve Dowden and John Burt (this one was particularly because of the interchanges between the speakers. Who would think the phrase BS would show up when discussing this novel!) 

A BBC documentary:

 100 Years of "The Magic Mountain" with Samantha Rose Hill, Paul Holdengräber & David Kaplan:

 A discussion that is not so formal, but without being simple-minded. I learned that Mann preferred humor to irony. I have such a problem with thinking of Germans being humorous. Yes, even with having been a fan of Nietzsche for most of my life.

A few more videos from real people reading The Magic Mountain, hoping to encourage readers.

 How To Read "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann (5 Tips) + bookclub!

 Audiobooks on YouTube. My mind wanders when I am read to, but I understand others like audiobooks, so I decided to include these via this link. 

 Think beautifully, live beautifully. 

sch 9/1 

My Two Cents On Charlie Kirk.

 I did not know much Charlie Kirk. What I did know did not interest me. Since his killing, there has no improvement in my opinion. I began this post two days, hoping that sense would finally prevail in this country.

That he was killed for his ideas is reprehensible. That others want to use his murder to justify their hatred of other Americans, is worse.

I was eight years old when RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed. I remember when George Wallace as shot. The Weathermen were bombing, and the Symbionese Liberation Army was robbing banks - and kidnapping Patty Hearst. 

We had enough peace that the Oklahoma City Bombing was a shock.  Since then, we have not taken seriously the violence of the Right. We were too self-satisfied about the solidity of our American Way.

Enough should be enough.  

The murder came up during last week's group session, and I will repeat what I said there. There seems a difference between these killers and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray: there is a desire to be seen and heard and social media fame.

What I did not say then, but will now: the Democrats did not condone or encourage or lionize The Weathermen, while MAGA does all of that for its killers.

Inappropriate comments about Charlie Kirk assassination gets workers fired - which makes me wonder if we do not understand that the First Amendment only applies to our governments.

DCS worker out amid other fallout from Kirk assassination (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

 A British commentator raises the point why Charlies Kirk's words are being suppressed by his allies. Maybe because they do not want reminders of his not being a lamb.

 

Widow of Charlie Kirk says her ‘cries will echo around the world like a battle cry 

Erika Kirk, speaking from her husband’s Turning Point USA office on Friday evening, said Charlie had been killed because “he preached a message of patriotism, faith and of God’s merciful love”.

“The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done,” Erika said. “They should all know this: if you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea what you just have unleashed across the country and this world.”

***

Using divisive language and at times bigoted rhetoric, Charlie Kirk played a crucial role in bringing young people, especially men, into the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. He was known for his inflammatory and discriminatory views, believed in no separation between church and state and said that Democrats “stand for everything God hates”. He claimed the west was in a “spiritual battle” with “wokeism”, Marxism and Islam, and called for a total ban on transgender healthcare, described immigration from Muslim countries as “civilizational suicide”, and peddled conspiracy theories about Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

 

Mother Jones reported on this as Politics September 12, 2025 The Full Weight of the Federal Government Is Being Used to Memorialize Charlie Kirk 

Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), for instance, wrote on X that she had contacted the superintendent and principal in a district where an art teacher is accused of writing “One Nazi down” on Facebook after Kirk’s murder.

“Cheering political violence is always wrong,” Miller-Meeks tweeted, “and should NEVER be done by those who educate our children. I will be contacting the superintendent and principal first thing in the morning to ensure this is addressed immediately.” The art teacher was subsequently placed on leave pending an investigation. 

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana suggested several measures against people who either criticized Kirk online or celebrated his murder. “I’m going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” Higgins declared on X, in a statement suggesting actions that were not legal and one that clearly overstepped his authority. “If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution… those profiles must come down. So, I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers’ licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”  

***

Soon after Kirk’s death, many conservative and far-right activists called loudly and widely for revenge, variously blaming the left, the Democratic Party, the media, and an “anarcho-terrorist” network for the environment that led to the murder. Prominent extremist groups and pardoned insurrectionists have also said they’ve been galvanized by Kirk’s death, and plan to use it to intensify future organizing, as well as seek their own forms of revenge. When Trump announced Friday afternoon on his favorite TV show Fox & Friends that a suspect had been arrested, he downplayed the idea that the far-right acts violently. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”

Funny how after the attack on Pelosi's husband, or the murder of the Minnesota Democrats, there was no demonizing of the Republicans or calls for revenge by Democrat politicians. The "conservatives" know they are wrong, they promote hate, they are anti-American, so they call for violence to protect themselves.

 And they get away with their hate:

 And so much for the vaunted leftism of UC Berkley: UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move.

Nuts: Rep. Mace to introduce resolution authorizing Charlie Kirk to lie in honor at US Capitol. I agree with the comments, not an elected official or war hero.

The most important sentence you will read this week about the Charlie Kirk murder (Chris Cillizza):

 Those are the items that have come through in my email and Google News feed. There have been items indicating that the killer was actually to the right of his victim. If so, more proof that the Right's knee-jerk reaction to blame the Left is a sign of bad conscience and ulterior motives. Whatever his motives, his does not represent an organized political movement. Those wanting revenge on their political opponents are the epitome of an organized political movement.

 

sch  

 

Writers - Why?

Good questions in Impulses, Sources, Trajectories: Douglas Unger on Discovering Why You Write (Lit Hub)

Self-discovery is one of the essential rites of passage toward maturity and later mastery for writers. Part of this artistic self-knowledge can be achieved by developing self-awareness through self-appraisal of one’s origins, impulses and sources necessary to answer the most basic artistic questions: What kind of writer do I want to be? Where does my writing come from? Why am I writing?

Once a writer can articulate some answers (and these answers will change over time, with life events, and with artistic failure or success), only then can the writer best determine the trajectories of stories, novels, essays, and of a literary career. Discovering one’s impulses and sources (artistic self-knowledge) is essential for answering these questions. Jean Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (translated by Bernard Frechtman) poses similar inquiries. Sartre writes of “a pact between freedoms” and of the writer as making an “appeal” to a reader to engage in this pact as a mutual striving for freedom. His answers to the question why write? are inspiring. We can hear in them, too, some of the relief and ebullience in his reaffirmations of humane values after the defeat of Nazism and its horrors in World War II (also, one can hear an echo of the call to the barricades during the French Revolution). For Sartre, creative sources must be political. When we write, he states, we “bear the responsibility for the universe.” (p. 55).  As grandly overwhelming as this statement is, this motive, which Sartre asserts should also appeal for change, can help reveal our sources.

Still―how can we know? How do we arrive at this self-knowledge of our sources?

Self-examination is required, much of it specific to the story or novel in the process of the writing: What is its impulse? What is its trajectory? Where does it want to go? And why?

I write this blog to give me a place to think things out - obviously politics, but writing itself.  It is also the place where I can put the journals I kept for the past 15 years. There are people deserving an explanation for things I have done.

 I also mean to share here what I am reading and thinking about. The hope is that someone who wants to be a writer will learn from my mistakes.

The journals, hopefully, will keep alive some of the people I met over the past 15 years. 

But the fiction? Some of it is to keep alive stories from my past and people I once knew. Some of it is therapy. And some of it is both. I want to tell the stories of where I am from in a form that captures life here, and some of it is just for fun, to amuse me with telling the story. I do not have a style, for I came back to fiction too late to acquire a style.

Mr. Unger goes into different concepts of the writer. These are worth reading, for I found ideas here not seen before. Since I do not have a style, I have not tried to write sentences for their beauty. Perhaps there is time for that. Maybe the best thing is to try and combine the best sentences with the best story.

sch 9/1 

Sorry, But This One Is Mostly For Me: History, Ethics, Narrative

 Early in the morning, catching up with the reading I as too tired to do last night, with too much to do this morning, and having overslept, I read A Higher Thing than History: Zach Gibson reviews Hayden White’s second volume of “The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory.”  (LARB). It is a long essay, I suggest it be read in full. It has given me much to think about - the high points follow. I think I have not yet reached the correct level of nicotine and caffeine to do more than feel an impact on my ideas, and, therefore, on my own writing.

I have a vision for "Chasing Ashes" that incorporates history and current events - history both personal and of a wider scope - both versions of history incorporating ideas that have and have not attained the level of myth - the personal incorporating more and more autobiography as I gird my loins to put what is in my head into print - the amorphous mass from which I came and in which I live.

So, these notes are more for me than you. If they lead you to ideas and works, all the better. Right now, I am in the midst of educating myself. 

White’s most noted contribution to historiography is the hard line that he draws between historical reality and its narration. The past itself, as an amorphous mass, is wholly distinct from historical narrative, which “endows this reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.” The meaning of events in the past derives from their narration, which White contends is always an act of interpretation. He continues: “Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened.”

The upshot here is the inextricable bond between the interpretation of a historical event, and its emplotment, or “the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind.” White turns to Northrop Frye to identify four main modes of emplotment: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. To narrate in a given mode is to implicitly bestow a worldview upon the narrated events, serving as an explanatory gesture on the historian’s part.

Romance dramatizes heroism, staging Manichaean struggles between good and evil, virtue and vice, or light and darkness. Comedy holds out hope for triumph and reconciliation; at its most basic, a comic view of history tends to favor a progressive outlook of gradual improvement. Tragedy, meanwhile, sees the human condition as one of irresolvable division—a state of affairs that humankind cannot overcome—but offers consolatory revelations about humanity’s limited agency. Finally, satire “presupposes the ultimate inadequacy” of the visions held forth by the other three modes, and instead ridicules all three for their failure to comprehend the world in its complexity. For the satirist, the past’s romantic heroism holds no relevance for the present day, comic resolution remains forever out of reach, and tragic epiphany amounts to illusion.

***

White’s resolution lay in establishing a relationship between the past and the present as an ongoing process of figuration and fulfillment, a doubly articulated sense of time akin to the resonance between events in the Old and New Testaments explored by early biblical scholars. Figurative causation demands that we look backward to establish what the present might owe to the past, where the former’s values lie, how it might attain its goals, and how it will use its historical inheritance. At the same time, the anticipation of a future fulfillment means that we must forgo determinism and accept the burden of ethical accountability that goes hand in hand with existential freedom.

To anticipate fulfillment is not to give oneself over to historical necessity but to put forth a “challenge to time [and the] denial of change” that Paul Ricœur saw in the act of making a promise. Where he is more flexible than Ricoeur, who saw the keeping of promises as a preserve for self-constancy against a backdrop of change, White maintains that promises remain morally fraught gestures that attune us to how our actions in the present will be responsible to others in the future. Promise-making not only embodies the mutually dependent relationship between figuration and fulfillment but also illustrates the leap into the unknown that accompanies ethical action.

***

When writers move from the historian’s initial question (“What happened?”) toward concluding questions of causation (“Why did it happen?”) or ethical import (“What should I do?”), the look for significance goes beyond “scientific meaning,” making truth and meaning coterminous with the “determination of ‘what is the case.’”

However, White did not seek to collapse historical knowledge into meaningless relativism; the revelation that “science becomes ideology” was never his final aim. Rather, it was his starting point. White hoped to underscore how storytelling (of all stripes) stands as a distinct form of knowledge from scientific empiricism. Primo Levi’s book on Auschwitz, for White, embodies the particularity of narrative meaning, which he praises for juggling “facts experienced, as it were, from outside himself,” alongside “other kinds of materials—opinions, considerations, beliefs, and judgment—which are not fictions so much as simulacra, because they are not given to sense and must be invented on the basis of inner experiences.”

In his Poetics, Aristotle situates history, which deals only in particulars, below poetry. Poetry, he wrote, “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” because it speaks in universals and relates “what may happen.” This is true of scientific, reproductive history, but the productive task that White assigns to historical narrative—not the search for meaning in the archive but the production of meaning through emplotment—blurs Aristotle’s disciplinary line. Figurative causality makes it possible for a storyteller to fill the role of the Aristotelian poet and historian at the same time.

The “wager” that White places on the imagination in the “Is My Life a Story?” lecture rests on “the possibility that commitment to an ideal life is in the end both more realistic and more authentic than any simple or complex choice to affirm ‘things as they are.’” White’s unremitting critique of scientific historiography can be seen as an attempt to shake off the constraints imposed on historians. Together, his essays seek to shed the discipline’s superficial commitment to reproduction and move toward the elevated intellectual duty that White assigned to historians in his 1966 “Burden” essay: the productive power of mythos.

Also touching on the issue of narrative and documentation is Bénédicte Sère and Caroline Wazer in Conversation About Inventing the Church.

 I also want to come back to Essence is fluttering (Aeon).

On the other side was Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou, 莊周), perhaps the strangest philosopher of any culture, and a central focus of my book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self (2025). Zhuangzi (again, the writings ascribed to him – called the Zhuangzi – were probably written by multiple authors) rejected Confucian role-conformism. He argued that you shouldn’t aim to be a sage-king, or an exemplary mother, or any other predetermined role-identity. You shouldn’t aim, in Wilde’s terms, to be other people. In our highly individualistic culture, we can’t help but expect this line of thinking to continue: just be yourself! But this is not what Zhuangzi says. Instead, he says: ‘zhi ren wu ji (至人無己),’ translated as: ‘the Consummate Person has no fixed identity’ or ‘the ultimate person has no self’. The ethical ideal is not to replace a conformist identity with an individual one. It is to get rid of identity altogether. As the philosopher Brook Ziporyn puts it, ‘it is just as dangerous to try to be like yourself as to try to be like anyone else’.

Why is it dangerous? In the first place, attachment to a fixed identity closes you off from taking on new forms. This in turn makes it difficult for you to adapt to new situations. In her book Freedom’s Frailty (2024), Christine Abigail L Tan puts it this way: ‘if one commits to an identity that is fixed, then that is already problematic as one does not self-transform or self-generate.’ Borrowing a term from psychology, we could call this the problem of ‘identity foreclosure’. The American Psychological Association defines ‘identity foreclosure’ as:

premature commitment to an identity: the unquestioning acceptance by individuals (usually adolescents) of the role, values, and goals that others (eg, parents, close friends, teachers, athletic coaches) have chosen for them.

But the radical message of the Zhuangzi is that it can be just as dangerous a ‘foreclosure’ to accept the role, values and goals that you have chosen for yourself. Doing so cuts you off from the possibility of radically rethinking all of these under external influences.

sch 9/8