"Everything is cut away but the Present"

Kierkegaard suggests that we're depressed, in modern times, precisely because we're trying to live in the present moment: we have emptied the past and the future of all meaning. "Everything is cut away but the present; no wonder, then, that one loses it in the constant anxiety about losing it." In these conditions McMindfulness is more likely to exacerbate depression than to relieve it. Relying on the present moment to supply all our meaning was already overloading it: piling more on is not likely to help.

I still think most people will need mindfulness practices (very broadly construed) to have a life worth living. But I've joined the rebellion against locating the present moment as the place where reality lives. There's a lot of reality. Some ways of reaching out to touch it are historical, and some are soteriological. The fact that "we look before and after" is a feature, not a bug. Sure, it can get us in trouble. What can't? Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

A quiet Fall day.

Interregnum

Interregnum. Summer has lost its grip, but Fall has not yet taken hold: cloudy, quiet, rainless days appear one by one and vanish. In the evening, Vega or Arcturus appear, dim and inarticulate, in the pools between the clouds, and vanish again, their messages undelivered. I am waiting, I suppose, for my two granddaughters to arrive -- one in Colorado, and one here. A pause, while Fall considers its approach; a long indrawing of the tide.

It's California weather, of course, not Oregon weather. My parents' generation of Oregonians tended to move to California when they retired, and their bones got tired of the damp and chill: climate change has accomplished this move for my generation without the trouble of packing. At the moment -- why not gathers such crumbs as fall? -- I'm content to live in a dryer, warmer state. The September slant of the sun has always pleased me, and we get to see more of it, now. 

---

(Notes on Kierkegaard's Either/Or, continued.) 

p 154. "As a passionately erotic glance craves its object, so anxiety looks cravingly upon sorrow." 

I'm nonplussed by this business of "the modern Antigone." Why? He must want to say something about the modern condition that just pointing out the ancient condition would not convey: but I'm not clear what that is. The sheer effrontery is impressive, of course, but effrontery is Kierkegaard's stock-in-trade.

Side note: K's sexism is the smarmiest, ugliest kind. I applaud any woman who has the fortitude to wade through this sewer. Thank God he never married: what a mess he would have made of it!

p 180. the fiction of the narrator in "Silhouettes" is that he knows all about love. Since K is obviously an awkward inexperienced young man, this falls on its face from time to time. K knows almost nothing about love, except what he's read in books. The farthest my generosity can stretch is to take all this as a species of literary criticism. 

p 198. It takes some doing to keep reading. My dislike of K is profound: I find him deeply, deeply antipathetic. All this analysis of seduction and its aftermath, which is all adolescent fantasy: and yet never the slightest twinge of what drove Shelley to imagine, "this could be otherwise: eros could be in service to agape."

Maybe K is right, and it can't be: but for God's sake, you want him to at least be tempted by the idea. Instead he goes on and on and on, clearly relishing the betrayals, lingering on them lovingly. No, I do not like this man: I find him repellent. For all his supposed sympathy with these Maries and Elviras and Susannas, he would not lift a finger to help them.

Either/Or, 2

There is an important metaphysical point being made in this apparently trivial issue of Don Juan, as archetypical "medieval" seducer, being only expressible in music. K is asserting that there is one single correct way to express the archetype, and that Mozart has done it. What this means is that Don Juan is in fact real, and that the expression of him must conform to his reality. It echoes K's assertion that Homer is the right treatment of the Matter of Troy, not just a treatment of it -- that the Matter of Troy demanded a particular expression. This is anti-modern, anti-Romantic, in the extreme, though to (say) Dryden or Pope it would have been a matter of course.

It is in other words a refutation of the "flat ontology" of the Romantic/Modern, which says that there is matter, stuff, which is inert, and then there is shaping spirit: there is nothing else. To speak of matter "demanding" a certain form is, to a Modern, a fallacy. But that's precisely what K is insisting on.

p 129: "Don Giovanni's life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life."

... what the actual fuck? The weirdest use of "anxiety" that I have ever seen.

Despite not knowing the opera, and not understanding the German philosophical turns of phrase ("qualified as spirit" probably means something, but damned if I know what) I think I have a sense for what K is talking about in this section: the manic phase of bipolar, when the force of one's desire seems (and sometimes is) irresistible. It's true that this is only really expressible in music.

p 145: "... this age... automatically makes the individual responsible for his life... One would think that the generation in which I have the honor of living must be a kingdom of gods."

p 151: "Since it is at variance with the aims of our association [ the symparanekromenoi, the fellowship of the dead ] to provide coherent works or larger unities, since it is not our intention to labor on a tower of Babel that God in his righteousness can descend and destroy, since we, in our consciousness that such confusion justly occurred, acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavor in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature's infinite coherence, that an individual's wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality..."

This page-long sentence/paragraph is a tour-de-force -- pure Kierkegaard. The intellectual pressure is enormous

Notes on Kierkegaard's Either/Or, 1

"language is bounded by music on all sides" p 69

Even when K is blithering he comes up with such valuable things. (Why, why are we discussing language vs music at all? No clue so far.)

"Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate." p 70

I have no idea, none at all, what K means by "spirit."

But, as often, I must have patience. This entire book, I suspect, is a sustained definition of "spirit," and looking for a simple definition is looking to skip the book. It's like asking 'what does Plato mean by "the good"?' Socrates said that "the good" was what life was for, but he also said he didn't really know what it was. He wasn't being coy, he was being honest. All Plato wrote were partial, fragmentary attempts to shadow forth "the good," especially in the person of Socrates: to ask for a simple definition of it is to totally misunderstand Plato's project. And so here. K's project is to shadow forth "spirit," and I'm just going to have to move in and out the tide of his thought and hope that the movement stirs something in me.

p 76 - 78: we're fairly embarked in actual discussion of Mozart's operas, here, and it may well be that reading the rest of this essay -- when I know nothing of Mozart, or of opera, or of music -- will be ridiculous and a waste of time. Certainly there's no point in reading this a second time without having at least some background. I'll persevere for now, but between having not the slightest notion of opera, and no idea what a phrase such as "desire is absolutely qualified as desire" may mean -- if anything -- I'm really not gleaning much here. Hopefully I'll do better with the upcoming essay on ancient tragedy.

Letter from Home

I'm coping, more or less. My back is occasionally sending jolts of dazzling pain to keep me from getting complacent.

The lot we were looking at, with the possibly unlivable house on it, got bought, so we're sad (primarily Martha) and relieved (primarily me) about that. I was having nightmares about trying to get under that house and jack up bits of the foundation, while rats and their fleas nibbled on me, and the floors split open.

Only two more days and this Christmas mania will die down and we'll be able to do things like grocery shopping again. Hooray! I'm very fond of Dickens but at this time of the year I have a hard time forgiving him for his part in launching the Christmas juggernaut. Weeks of international dementia. I know I could make some money by touting gift certificates but I can't stand to participate in the madness.

So we drive around some, looking at dismal little houses in dismal parts of town. It's a blessing that we have the same responses to places.

"What do you think of that one?" A little beige box among little beige boxes.

I'm quiet for a little bit, and then I say, "Well, there's nothing really wrong with it. It's just . . . sad."

"Oh, that's a relief. When you didn't talk right away I thought maybe you liked it."

What we most want is a spacious yard -- overgrown and ratty is fine -- with some mature trees, not necessarily with a view but not at least in dead flat terrain. Any old shack will do: we'd actually like to buy cheap and improve. We're perfectly willing to take something down to the studs and redo it. That would be fun, in fact.

We're going to a counselor and try hard to implement his advice, which is twofold: 1) to keep inquiring about each other's experience and feelings, 2) to refrain from trying to ratchet down each other's anxiety. He's fond of quoting Kierkegaard: "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." His idea is that rather than trying to soothe ourselves down, we should let our anxiety rise to the next level, where it will actually impel us to do things. And he's right, I think, that we spend an inordinate amount of time protecting each other and assuring each other that everything's just fine as it is. We generally respond to anxiety by trying to make it go away.