Bataille 3 (Proust and Sade)

Do you actually read multiple new entries in the order in which they were added as opposed to in the order in which they appear? I suppose it would be good to create a style in which order of ideas doesn't matter... but, to continue with 'Literature and Evil', Bataille remarks that Proust is one of the least naive writers imaginable, and yet if you take the unpublished writings of his youth, some ten years before 'la recherche', you can find assertions that Bataille calls 'aggressively naive'. He includes the following quote, "it is this that moves us in 'the Phaedo'; when following Socrates' argument we suddenly have the extraordinary feeling of hearing a line of reasoning whose purity is unaltered by any personal desire, as though Truth is superior to everything else, because, in effect, we perceive that the conclusion Socrates will draw from this reasoning is that he must die." This is coming from a man whose later work will form one of the most adamant arguments ever made against the existence of a disinterested will to truth - who expounds at length on the fact that only desire can drive a search for the truth, and it is never just a desire for Truth for it's own sake (which, as I've already pointed out, is an idea that can be extracted from 'the Symposium' as well). Proust's naivete, by the way, comes as no surprise to anyone that has read any part of 'Remembrance of things past' (well, unless it was just the final volume maybe), since throughout, the narrator is constantly at great pains to show just how naive he once was, how the path to his final revelation was anything but straight, how it was built on the formation, loss and reformation of countless illusions and dead ends, how there is no direct or economical ways to learn the things he learns (as Deleuze explains, t is all a giant lesson in semiotics - things in themselves are not accessible, only signs which tell us about them. Those signs are like a language and you must go through a long grueling process in order to learn to read them). The particular sort of advocacy of falsehoods that the older Proust embraces makes no sense without the earlier aggressively naive devotion to the Truth (think in this regard of the young Nietzsche, devoted as he was to Schopenhauer).... at least this is, as I understand i, Bataille's reason for including this quote at the beginning of his Proust chapter. His entire discussion of Proust centers around a relatively minor event in 'Swann's Way'. A father is devoted to his daughter - is practically his only concern in life. The daughter is a lesbian, and had her lover living with her in her father's house. Though the father's devotion to his daughter was undiminished, sadness and worry about his daughter's position/ behavior sent him to an early grave. The father is shown in an extremely positive light - his devotion is thoroughly selfless, and we eventual discover that he is the greatest artist in the whole of Proust's work. After the father's death, the daughter and her lover profane the father's picture while making love. The explanation given is that because of the ban relating to the daughter's desires, she felt a constant guilt attached to pleasure, and it seemed that only the guilty and the wicked had access to pleasure. THough the daughter continued to love and admire her father, in order not to have guilt toward him ruin her enjoyment of the relationship she was having, it was necessary to embrace her guilt and think of Evil as itself pleasurable. She no doubt reproached herself for the act afterwards - had she not cared about her father the symbolic act of profanation would have had no interest for her... and of course, Proust himself had a mother who worshipped him and was deeply upset by the gay lover he had living at home with him or her - Proust's father being already dead at that point.
I think I've recounted all of that to you before... in a sense, that discussion doesn't relate so well to Sade, as I can't imagine him being a pure young idealist before going bad - though maybe I'm wrong. In a sense it very much does, as a genuine denial of the existence of Good and Evil, which is admittedly sometimes found in Sade, makes everything else he writes senseless. Have I said all this before in this blog? I fear I might have. I should also point out that in Sade it isn't 'Evil' so much as 'crime' that is prayed, and the existence of laws (divine, human and natural) that is generally discussed. As Bataille points out (so does Blanchot), it is extremely odd to speak of, or think of Sade's books as dangerous, since in order to be dangerous they would have to make crime seem attractive, and invite emulation, whereas in general Sade's books are calculated to awake disgust in the reader. For a person to be turned on and excited by all the mutilations killing, necrophilia and so forth that fills Sade's books, they would have to be unusually sick... (entry breaks off here, unfinished - perhaps to be finished one day?)

More on evil

Martin Amis, who I don't have much respect for or interest in as a writer, wrote a book called 'Time's arrow' in which the soul of a Nazi officer of some sort ends up having to relive the life it has just lived backwards after the moment of death - not remembering or recognizing the life its lived and not really understanding what it is seeing. Killing appears to be giving life - an experience which the soul finds thrilling. Relationships begin with recriminations, and sometimes violence, then they get sweeter and closer, and then the people involved finish by drifting apart and slowly forgetting one another. I only think of this because it is the way blogs are set up - what comes last is the first thing visible. As you scroll down and read them, the authors move from experiencing something to anticipating it - moving steadily from knowledge to ignorance as the writers unlearn the things they've learned, forget their conclusions, etc. There ought to be a better way to set them up.
Anyway, one of your last posts you asked about Evil as the opposite of bourgeois... I would guard against saying 'Bataille and Blanchot and co.', partly because Blanchot isn't really the best example of that tendency (which I hope to have an entry about very soon), partly because I was thinking about older and more straightforward, or literary rather than theoretical writers like Baudelaire (who Bataille has an early chapter on in 'Literature and Evil'), and partly because, especially in a forum like this, I have such an unhealthy tendency to take the ideas of better men and make something else out of them. I feel better when we're talking about stuff we've both read where I know I won't leave you with a mistaken idea of the writer in question. Anyway, in response to the question of what Evil is here - dictionary definition, what is generally understood by 'Evil', etc. (and it is funny you mentioned the possibility of Evil as a metaphysical category that people haven't properly understood - either in this post or the next I think I'll touch on Sade as a sort of Evil Socrates, looking for the ideal form of Evil, knowing that individual manifestations of evil, being finite can never give genuine satisfaction, and are necessarily found lacking). Contrary to what you said I was talking about how Evil is generally understood - at least by those who claim to take the side of Evil (when you claim to reject evil, you are no doubt thinking in terms of Nazis, serial killers, rapists and the like - for most people this is unattractive, genuine evil, as opposed to the fun, attractive pretend evil of conmen, rogues, bank robbers and scoundrels you can identify with in the movies). I mentioned the idea that intensity in life was, if not exactly opposed to longevity, at least necessarily linked to an idea of danger (how this would explain the joy of creation, success in major projects, the rush of good music, etc., I don't know - it keeps me from finding the idea entirely convincing). Those who do things like extreme sports (If I understand the concept properly), partake in a totally non-political form of embracing danger, and this has little or nothing to do with Evil, which I imagine is always a somewhat political concept. The punk kids who write things like 'Anarchy' or 'Satan' on public walls, assuming they still do that, are doing something different - and note that 'Satan' and 'anarchy' are slogans that can be associated as can often appeal to the same demographic in the same way. The sort of punk-ish adolescent-angst types often fall into a sort of uniform anti-conformity, that's very different from genuine, independent non-conformity (and the reactionaries are often inspired in a similar way to react against anti-conformist uniformity by irritating the leftists any way possible and asserting their own imaginary higher individualism)... which is a large digression to say that whatever safe collections most of these punk kids might fall into, they generally are inspired by a genuine desire for subversion, understood as a challenge to the safe, stability posited by the society they are making little symbolic gestures against. A society with an essentially bourgeois value system (which is not a particularly martial value system) pushes people along the surest path to a secure job, with a minimum of shock or uncertainty - keep in mind that guilt and reprimand are attached to failing to live up to the responsibilities attached to keeping this social system going. Neglecting work for the sake of parties and amusement, or simply failing to be successful within the system gets you treated not as Good, but the opposite - an attitude which is often internalized - in order to enjoy yourself and not suffer too much from your guilt, you have to embrace the role of 'Evil' (which is a less banal and more romantic term than simply 'faulty', 'defective', 'talentless' or 'lazy'). The safest path is the least intense, and the teenage rebel, should he write 'hail Satan!' on the wall or wear some silly death metal t-shirt with graffic pictures of demonic violence on it (its the heavy metal types rather than the punks have the most exagerated, un-ironic expressions of teen angst), the demons on their t-shirts identify themselves as attracted to, interested in, and basically siding with 'Evil', which is being put in opposition with 'Good' defined as a bourgeois concern with safety and stability - keeping death, hunger and disease at bay with insufficient concern for danger, excitement and intensity within the long and comfortable life on offer - there are just some rare unsettled few who take a conflation of evil and intensity to an unhealthy extreme where some sort of real human suffering or genuinely destructive act becomes attractive - though most people, and not just rebellious teens do like to have some sort of occasional contact with real risk of some sort - though it's teens who are most likely to take this too far and play with a less controlled risk, possibly doing real damage to themselves or someone else. The fifties, and especially fifties-style sitcom and advertising images are of continuing fascination in American culture - it's constantly parodied, 'exposed' and dismantled, precisely because it is seen as a social projection of 'Good', which is found wanting. By introducing disfunction into it, people, mostly bad would-be artists, often miss there intention - the ideal itself remains unscathed, and society can be seen as left condemned for not having really lived up to that ideal. When what is normally repressed from that image is introduced, when blacks or gays or whatever else is brought in and that fifties nuclear family image fails to cope with it - showing itself bigoted and small-minded, once again it isn't condemned for the order and stability promised, instead the order is shown to have been founded on disorder, the violence excluded from the image is not really dispelled, but just hidden away in ghettoes and foreign sweatshops. The safety and security on offer will only be Good when they have been made available to everyone. Nietzsche says something very similar when he talks about 'the last man', when he claims that society's aim is to make the individual non-threatening and what creates danger is defined as Evil - his mistrust of 'altruism' and 'selflessness' comes from precisely this. People generally don't define Good and Evil, they think of the words in terms of images and associations. You may say the image of Good will a person who will do anything to help others, even at his own expense and that Evil is doing anything to hurt others, and I wouldn't disagree... when I talk about Blanchot's Lautreamont I'll actual come closer to that sort of definition in dealing with someone who sides with Evil - but generally when someone gets the urge to say 'hail Satan' or 'up with Evil' or anything of the like, the motivation is a provocation of the bland, safe and orderly and a yearning for the dangerous and disordely. When people watch painfully gory movies or get fascinated with books about serial killers, it is because the nearness of death and all that society banishes provides a necessary testing of the limits of our own mortality. The most cutting thing Hannah Arendt could say about the Nazis was that their evil was banal - which totally robs it of the thrill and excitement Evil is supposed to have.

Another Response Post

It's shocking how rarely I do the things I intend to - even when there really is enough time and no worldly reason not to. When you tell yourself over and over that this time you will be more disciplined and stick with your work and you always fall through - does that mean the discipline simply isn't there and no decision you make can change that? The answer would seem to be yes, but I have to live in hope that it isn't. All this to say the entries I planned to make last weekend and didn't fit in with a number of more important responsibilities I've been neglecting. There are plenty of things I hope to write here in the next few days simply because they'll naturally accompany things I"m doing otherwise (plus I would kind of like to make an extra entry as aside on Medea and maybe Aristotles poetics which I worked with a certain amount over the past week, even though those are subjects I don't really have to continue thinking about now)
I don't know what you mean when you say the dichotomy between inspiration and craft is bogus. That the dichotomy has been made and has been taken up as an important topic in various times and places, especially during the renaissance is indisputable and there is clearly plenty to be said about it. If you mean that the two things can't really be separated, that in anything worthwhile one isn't separate from the other - I agree and I think I said as much in my last post. It doesn't amount to much more than saying that behind every worthwhile product of intellectual labor is something innate and something acquired, or to be more accurate, there's part of the creative process that you do have control of and part that you don't have control of - it's as logically evident as talking about nature and nurture - clearly who we are is determined in part by biology, who we are and are programmed to be when we pop out of the womb and partly the external circumstances of our lives and who our experiences make us - what other option could there be. If by saying the distinction is bogus you mean it isn't worth talking about, either because it is so evident or because not much definite can be said about it... I don't really agree. It isn't something I would want to take as a central topic for reflection - I don't find it interesting enough for that, but sometimes stating simple things as clearly as possible can be helpful in not getting muddled when you talk about things that are less obvious - and I do think that interesting things can come out when the dichotomy is looked at more closely and breaks down into other less obvious things. Do we really have no control over inspiration? Is it entirely innate, and innate in what way? What is it that is accessed? I think it is obvious why those questions present themselves forcefully to so many people - especially artists who want to have a greater deal of control over their own inspiration - want to be able to provoke it, fuel it, make it last and increase its intensity. It IS kind of interesting to look at what makes a person a great writer/ thinker/ actor whatever, and to what extent that ties in with other aspects of a personality and the way a life is lived. For myself I think I kind of fetishize craft, because I'm lazy, and want to stop being lazy. It is a dream of being rigorous and disciplined and of having control of the things that can be learned and controlled. It's funny - growing up, I always had a thing for the figure of the scholar or the monk, cloistered away from the world and selflessly devoted to some object of study or other - the word 'archive' gives me a little thrill, though I don't actually have the patience to spend all that much time digging through archives. We are attracted by our opposites- some of us at any rate... In Yeats' little scheme of things - the opposite phase of the moon.
As to Plato and Phaedrus - after I write what I'm about to write, I'll have to go back and double check what exactly you wrote, to see that this response makes sense. When condemning sophistry, Plato writes that a sailor will speak better about sailing than a poet whose characters sail to war, that a doctor will speak better about medicine than a poet whose characters are wounded and needing mending, trying to say it is knowledge of the contents of a speech rather than the craft of making a speech that should be of preeminent concern... I'm just trying to put this together with what you said. To some extent division of labor seems to me more relevant than literacy when talking about whether or not a poem or something of the sort can be used as a repository of public knowledge. In a culture where different members of a society need to be competent in the same things, that sort of transmission seems natural enough to me - or on subjects that are of concern to everyone, such as morality, religion, politics and history. For specialized skills that sort of transmission makes no sense. Anything of sufficient length and specificity to be of use to a specialized trade would be too long and uninteresting for other members of society to want in the middle of their epic poems. Maybe cobblers had rhyming pneumonic devises that only spread among cobblers, and so forth, but would those have been heard or known by the general public. I recognize that we are talking about the fact that Plato would be living at the time when this system would have clearly outlived its usefulness and been dying off - and it is impossible to ignore how often he has Socrates quoting poets to aid him in serious discussion, and all of this argues for the idea that this was by no means unusual and that it must have been normal to consult homer on various topics - the fact that doing so no longer made much sense for most practical subjects is part of what the argument seems to me to be... and this would mean that in attacking poets as authorities, in a sense Plato's Socrates would be taking the side or reading and writing AGAINST oral transmission. Rhyme and repetition are the opposite of dialogue. Words must be fixed in their places for a rhyme to work, for meter to persist. Nothing an be changed. Authority would be harder to shake and challenged when everyone knows something by heart. Perhaps you are right in saying that a written text cannot stand up and defend itself - but it can be analyzed and altered, and opens itself up to closer scrutiny than the long-winded speeches that Plato wants to pin on Gorgias and his ilk. The question and answer practiced by Socrates seems to invite the slow examination of each line of something, which I can more easily associate with writing, than acting on general impression, on the sort of emotional signals that can be given in the performance of a speech regardless of it's contents (if you read out the dictionary as though it were an impassioned speech, people would recognize what you were doing with out having to be told - showing just how much of public speaking relies on something other than analytical thought). Can a mathematical proof stand up and defend itself? Some would say it carries its own defense around with it. These are just my first thoughts reading what you wrote...

Plato and literacy

So the only other post I think I'll find time for this evening has to do with Plato, a dear friend of yours. For a reading group, I read the Phaedrus last week, and intended to read Derrida's essay on the Phaedrus as well but then ran out of time. What I read of it made it seem to me more accessible than anything else of Derrida's I've read. I think I'll give it another go in the spring when I try to write a thesis chapter on Derrida.

So instead of having lots of deep thoughts about speech and writing from my new reading of Derrida, I wound up being reminded of other thoughts I'd come across a few years ago, in Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato. Do you know it? Essentially, it's a book-length argument to the effect that Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic is the response of a literate culture trying to move beyond the confines of orality. Let me explain.

Literacy only became widespread in the Greek world toward the end of the 5th century (says Havelock--I certainly don't have the historical knowledge to question this claim), so that, even though there were written texts long before then, they played only a marginal role in what was still a predominantly oral culture. An oral culture can only preserve of itself what its members can memorize. As a result, memorization was a crucial skill in the transmission of culture (Havelock argues that the muses are better understood as spirits of memorization than of inspiration), and what was to be transmitted needed to be easily memorized. Two tricks that make for easy memorization are rhythm and emotional salience. Thus, a great deal of culture is preserved orally in the form of epic poems. Havelock calls the Homeric epics an "encyclopedia" of Greek knowledge, remarking on how Homer slips in tips about how to steer a ship, how to govern a state, how to ride a horse, and everything in between, all in the form of an engaging narrative told rhythmically, so that people would remember it easily. He also notes that it's easiest to memorize something when you don't distance yourself from it but engage with it emotionally. The mimesis of the poets that Plato disparages is their way of fully becoming the narrative that they recount in order not to forget it.

Along with widespread literacy comes a number of changes in the very nature of thought. No longer relying on emotional identification in order to memorize texts, people can step back from them and think about them, analyze them. Socrates' dialectic consists heavily of him asking his interlocutors to think about what they've just said, interrupting the flow that would be necessary for the repetition of familiar truisms. A number of other consequences follow from literacy's freeing of the mind from the act of memorization. One is that it makes possible a great deal more abstract and systematic thinking. Another is that it separates the subject from the things it thinks about, creating a notion of a self distinct from the world that it perceives.

In essence, Havelock argues, Plato's major cultural contribution is that he was the first to come squarely to grips with the fact that literacy had ushered in a new way of thinking, and that, for it to flourish, it would have to vanquish the old way. Read from our modern perspective, Plato's banishment of the poets can seem bizarre, but in the context of 4th century Athens, Havelock claims, we should see it as an attempt to establish philosophy and rational thought as the only game in town.

I don't have enough background in classical scholarship to find Havelock's argument unconvincing. For my own part, I find it fascinating. Though it does raise a couple of questions about the relationship between orality and literacy in Plato. In the context of the Phaedrus, the obvious one is how we explain the valuation of speech over writing. My best guess is that Plato's interested in establishing individual rational reflection as superior to a mythical group-think based on passing on established truths, and he thinks that kind of rational engagement requires active interlocutors. His criticism of writing is that it can't speak up for itself and defend itself: it can't engage in the dialectic necessary for rational thought. For this point to stand, it's important to note that the importance of literacy for Plato isn't based on the material importance of written texts, but rather the kind of thinking that written texts make available to us. That kind of thinking can be exhibited in oral discussion, as long as that discussion takes place between literate men.

I believe there's also some stuff in Havelock's work that I've not read about Plato's concern regarding the undifferentiated diffusion of writing and its attendant dangers, so maybe I shouldn't speculate what Havelock would say about the writing/speech thing in Phaedrus since I've not read what Havelock has said on the topic.

This, though, raised another question for me: what if Socrates never wrote anything because he himself was illiterate? Unlike Plato, he didn't come from aristocratic stock, so it seems entirely plausible that he couldn't read or write. And speaking of literacy, I wonder if calling the legendary poet Homer blind was a way of signifying his illiteracy? A blind man can't read or write, after all.

inspiration vs. craft

There are I think four separate posts I feel I now owe you. I'm not sure how many I'll get around to writing. I do have a spare hour at the moment, so we'll see how much I manage to churn out. First I want to say a couple short things in response to the two posts you've written since I last wrote. For the record, in case I don't get around to any or all of them, the other three things I wanted to write on were Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato; a paper my supervisor wrote, and in particular my objection to a certain way of reading philosophy's place in intellectual life; and some reflections on the declining prospects for anyone who wants to make a living off their wits.

But first, just two short things about your two posts. The first is that I think really this contrast between inspiration and craft is bogus to start with. As you rightly point out, there's a great deal of craft and discipline in the creative output of improvisers, and the same goes for Breton, Kerouac, Rilke, Nietzsche, Coleridge, or anyone else who's ever claimed to put pen to paper in a burst of spontaneity. I think it helps here to draw an analogy to sport. On one hand, virtuosity in any sport relies on--exemplifies, even--a spontaneity and a creativity that delights us by moving faster than the speed of thought. On the other hand, this virtuosity is only possible through intense and rigorous training. No one claims that everyone has a magnificent end-to-end run culminating in a magnificent slam dunk in them, waiting to get out if only they can shed their inhibitions. Why should we make an equivalent claim about writing?

I suppose the main difference is that you can revise writing and you can't revise your moments of sporting genius. But even revision, if it's going to make any improvements, has to be inspired. You have to be "in the zone" or else you're not going to see the changes that can turn your lacklustre prose into something beautiful.

The second thing I wanted to say was really more a question about evil as you discuss it with regard to Blanchot and Bataille and that lot. You talk about them identifying good with bourgeois values and evil with spontaneity of a sort. How would you characterize this characterization of evil? For instance, it's clearly not meant as a dictionary definition, or some description of how we use these terms (who would call a saint "evil"?). Is it meant to be prescriptive, telling us how we ought to use the word? That sounds a little odd too. Or is it a metaphysically tinged use, relying on the assumption that with the word "evil," we pick out a metaphysically real category, and that most people who use the term (in its traditional sense) are mistaken about the nature of that category, and their redescription of evil is meant to give a more accurate account of a cateogry that others are misdescribing? Or is it something else?

Bataille 2 (approaching Sade)

I shouldn’t make promises about what I’ll write or when I’ll write it, since I’m so incredibly bad at keeping such promises. I would be too ashamed to admit how I’ve spent most of the past week – suffice to say, very little of it went to reading or writing. My lapses of discipline become more and more frequent and last longer and longer. I keep hoping that this time I’ll recover my discipline and my will will hold, but perhaps I’m an inherently weak willed creature. Well, nothing for it but to write what I can and when I can. I’m going to use this entry to start getting thoughts on Sade in order for a paper I have to write – was supposed to finish months ago… actually one of two papers on Blanchot, though I’m bringing Bataille into this one (and it’s the other one that makes the project sort of unpalatable and keeps getting me desperate to procrastinate). Anyway… I wrote a little on the first two essays in ‘literature and evil’, and introduced some of the main dichotomies – present verse future, self-indulgence verse discipline, etc. There are long passages in Bataille that seems so concisely and intelligently formulated that there seems to be little or no point in writing about it – it can’t be paraphrased without some loss – everything is equally important, nothing is repeated and the economy of language is admirable. It already is analysis and doesn’t need to be analyzed and at times it seems so evidently elegant, simple and true that I couldn’t possibly take issue with it (at times and in passages). I mentioned that he associates love and death. For Blanchot two general human imperatives often come into conflict – the desire to extend life and the desire to make it more intense. He claims that that making life more intense does not necessarily oppose lengthening it, though it can’t be done without an element of danger. For him the safe, the practical and the orderly (which he generally seems to equate with the Good – no discussions of selflessness or sainthood here. These apologists of evil, especially in that generation explicitly or implicitly make the Good the same as the Bourgeois [an admittedly vague concept itself] and want to claim saints in the same category as artists and madmen. They are excessive, and therefore, in a sense, evil. They seem, though Bataille doesn’t discuss them, on the side of intensity rather moderation). The social order, in trying to create longevity equally opposes death and the individual moment. People who try to explain humor and laughter always make asses of themselves – Bataille sees them as a toying with destruction in order to make light of them, master or withdraw from them, temporarily take away their sting (I think Bergson writes something like that as well – I forget his theory). This is clearly applicable, if at all, only to very specific instances of humor and totally unsatisfying. Likewise, Bataille talks somewhat unconvincingly about human sacrifices. He cites the theory that the purpose of a sacrifice is to bind a society together (he doesn’t name specific people who hold or defend this theory, but I think I remember Durkheim’s theory of religion being along these lines – in a religion what is always worshipped, in a sense, is the community… sacred fear is partly fear of falling outside the collective which gives the individual strength, meaning and protection. The more extreme the collective experience – the tighter the bonds created – group fear and collective enemies create cohesion, as I suppose, would extraordinary collective accomplishments). For Bataille cohesion created by human sacrifice would be an after effect rather than the purpose. The purpose would be to test the limits of endurance (he points out that some people had to sacrifice their own children – think of Iphigenia). The greatest counter to death is to experience it, or as the French say, to ‘live it’. I don’t think Bataille ever uses the term catharsis, but he does mention the theater as an ancestor of the human sacrifice. Human life being limited, the problem of evil for Bataille consists of brushing up against, testing and crossing the limits. It is a desire for the impossible. Which still doesn’t bring me to Sade or Blanchot…

Response

I have done little reading or anything else this week… I always feel a little uncomfortable when you respond to things I’ve said involving Proust, because he’s often implicated in the various supplements, interpretations and tangents I’ve hung on to him before he got to you. I think intensity of thought and experience was more central to him than time – true intensity only came about in solitude. That said, time does interest me, as does a goal of perfection. I realize that live performance is all about moment and experience, that a live performance is not supposed to stand as a monument – it is moving rather than static, and it makes sense to say that in an experience like that is, in a sense, lived rather than examined ‘perfection’ seems like a less relevant concept. Still… (and I’ll digress before saying what I was about to say, with aside about perfection, and our blog which is conceived of as a conversation, where I write down ideas I would usually never write down in such a half-baked form, where amidst all sorts of nonsense come things that are headed in the right direction but still wrong because of the formulation, because they seeds of ideas and unprocessed observations that haven’t really been checked or analyzed. This blog is a rejection of perfection for the sake of exchange. If we each waited until we had something polished and convincing to send, we wouldn’t get nearly as much insight into each other’s thought development as I think and hope we will this way. The downside is that I do already often feel embarrassed about what I’ve written, am writing or even am about to write – I’ll have to stop talking about that though… and just come back to stuff like my comment on Plato which I feel have to be lifted out of the half-idiot state they’re now in)… I think in talking about time and improvisation, you are also party touching on the difference between craft and inspiration – which is not to say that there is no craft in live performance and in improvisation, quite the contrary, but when people praise immediacy, movement and unreflected creation in art, there usually is some lingering background thought of the divine breath entering the body, of some sacred space being tapped and our highest selves being released. I think of renaissance debates on the relative merits of ‘nature’, meaning talent, and ‘art’ or artifice, meaning work and carefully acquired skill. I think of surrealist automatic writing, and Breton being ashamed of his initial desire to correct or polish lines in ‘magnetic fields’, which sort of went against the point of the experiment, and I think of Jack Kerouac claiming that he taped countless sheets of paper together so that while writing ‘On the Road’ in a mad continuous fit he wouldn’t have to pause to change sheets in the typewriter (did he claim to have written it in a day or something like that?). This is linked in too many people’s minds far too often to things like altered states, drugs and so forth, and sometimes a belief that brilliance is all in the unconscious and can express itself without thought. Of course there is such a thing as talent, of course over-analyzing what you are writing often ruins it, makes it contrived and unnatural, and of course when you are in the middle of creating something worthwhile often, though not always, you do feel almost like you are on things, what you are working on starts taking form and you don’t feel that it is entirely of your own doing, it can seem necessary, natural – but still, I have an almost protestant devotion to the idea of craft, of work, of revision. I think this is in part because I put too much stock in romantic notions of genius when I was very young, and not believing that there was such a thing as craft in writing kept me from actively learning it when it would have come quickest and easiest – and when I didn’t have other responsibilities to distract me from it. In performance the hard work of the craft comes through repetition – drilling into yourself gestures, ideas and structures that you can always fall back on, and also cultivating a certain style and rhythm of thought. Repetition, like revision is a circling back, revisiting, and each revisiting leads to refinement towards impossible and unreachable perfection – which is a necessary thought even if its realization is an absurd thought, as undesirable as it is impossible. Though mystical inspiration would seem to be more closely linked to speed or the moment and humble craft to taking time and proceeding with care – an ideal of perfection is linked to them both and never attained by either. I’m not going to talk about perfection just yet – it will involve another equally long tangent and there is something else I planned to write about…

But now that I’ve already composed something so long, I don’t think I’m going to start writing about Sade just now as I planned to. I’ll do that tomorrow and then maybe perfection or Plato on the weekend.