Curiosity, Humanity, Rock and Roll!

 This came through from George Saunders' Substack list. I think Saunders is brilliant, but even more than that he seems genuinely kind, intelligent, and nice. The context was judging what one reads. It seems to me to have relevance for what and how we write, as well as application outside just literature.

That is, we accept that the writer had something in mind, something valid, something that was important to her. And then we wonder what it would have looked like, had she, per us, succeeded. And we do this not to judge, but to learn: to learn about how the form works.

Then there is Joseph M. Keegin's A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived, published by Psyche.

Baker’s story is relayed in beautiful detail in the philosopher Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (2020); the story of the Minutemen comes from Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (2001). Both are indispensable documents, in very different ways, of how the pursuit of creative and intellectual activities for their own sake results in an abundance of unpredictable, often unexpected rewards. Great art and thought have always been motivated by something other than mere moneymaking, even if moneymaking happened somewhere along the way. But our culture of instrumentality has settled like a thick fog over the idea that some activities are worth pursuing simply because they share in the beautiful, the good, or the true. No amount of birdwatching will win a person the presidency or a Beverly Hills mansion; making music with friends will not cure cancer or establish a colony on Mars. But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.

The culture of the 21st century – on an increasingly planetary scale – is oriented around the practical principles of utility, effectiveness and impact. The worth of anything – an idea, an activity, an artwork, a relationship with another person – is determined pragmatically: things are good to the extent that they are instrumental, with instrumentality usually defined as the capacity to produce money or things. Bright young people are shuffled into a narrow set of lucrative ‘changemaking’ career paths in business, consulting and law; so-called ‘relationship experts’ counsel status-based courtship, the acquisition of a ‘high-value’ mate; guides to ‘productivity’ – the cardinal virtue of the 21st-century US, now exported globally – top nonfiction bestseller lists. Ways of being together, including religious worship, are ‘social technologies’; knowledge of how to do something, even to quietly contemplate the strangeness of being, is a ‘life hack’. For today’s luminaries and wisdom-peddlers, it’s instrumentality all the way down.

However, what W E B Du Bois said of education in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) applies to the whole of human endeavour: the point is ‘not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.’ The good human life demands meaning and purpose, which cannot be won in any stable sense from things – like wealth or pleasure – that can only ever be means. Mere living might be possible under the solitary law of instrumentality; living well, however, is not. ‘The freedom from small utilities and large ones,’ Hitz observes, ‘from colourless surroundings, from the human diminishment offered in given social roles – this freedom grounds a vast variety of human possibilities.’ The Homo faber hypothesis of the early modern anthropologists and the US pragmatists was always an insufficient account of the human being: chimpanzees and orangutans use tools and weapons; ants and termites build elaborate supercities. No ape or insect, however, has been observed writing poems, philosophising or singing the blues.

Yesterday, I asked KH if he thought my stories were honest ones. This was after leaving the second clinic, I probably sounded nuts to him (but I think I do so quite often, poor fellow). He asked which ones, the Dead and Dying ones? Yes, I replied. He told they were. I was telling there was something I had heard that morning on Morning Joe, they were interviewing David Johansen, and he said something about being honest, not worrying about the hits. 

I do not know if anything I have written inspires wonder, but having read Richard Hughes Gibson's Critical Miniatures, will apologize for not having done so. Gibson's discussion about wonder needs to be read in full, so pardon this extract:

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle famously declared that “it is through wonder”—the Greek word is thaumazein—“that men now begin and originally began to philosophize.” Starting with perplexities close at hand, he explains, the first philosophers soon turned their inquiries to remoter marvels—the sun, the moon, the stars, the origin of the cosmos. But philosophers are not the only cultivators of wonder in Aristotle’s assessment. In a delightful aside, he argues that the “myth-lover” should be recognized as a kind of philosopher, a “lover of wisdom” too, “since myths are filled with wonders.”

As with everything Aristotle wrote, these words have been amply debated. Was he championing myth against the poetry-phobic Plato? Was he proposing myths as an incubator of philosophical topics or even future wonder-filled philosophers? Was he just being naïve? Thankfully, our concern, the art of fiction, doesn’t require a verdict on such questions. What matters for us is that long ago the great philosopher recognized that not only the universe but also the stories we tell about it ignite our capacity for wonder. Before moving the ancients to philosophize, wonder made them sing.

Of course, one rarely meets the old gods in the house of fiction these days, though if you wander into the more fantastic corridors you can still catch a glimpse, as Homer did, of Poseidon riding in his chariot over the waves as sea-beasts gambol in his wake. But even amid—or better said, because of—our modern, disenchanted world, storytellers remain the votaries of wonder. As critic Rita Felski has well observed, even so-called realist novels, despite their “scientific and historical pretensions,” are “imbued with magic.” Realism—no less than fantasy and sci-fi—“makes us see things, creates spellbinding fictions and special effects, specializes in hocus-pocus.”

This is what I have been trying to do with my fiction: writing honestly about what I have seen and felt and thought. I have never thought I would make a living from this; I doubted anyone would publish anything of mine. 

I like Dr. Keegin's argument, humanity needs to enjoy the wonders of curiosity. I like Mr. Saunders' idea that we need to be open to learning, even from the unlikeliest sources.

As for Stuart Whatley's Toward a Leisure Ethic How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization insists we need time to contemplate. I first read this argument in Walter Kerr's The decline of pleasure almost forty years ago, so forgot its lessons that I became a depressed hamster on an unstopping wheel, and only recollected it when the federal government saved me from that wheel by giving me time to contemplate what I had done with my life and what I might still do.

And I think this is spot: