Simen and I disagree about whether there can be anything “objective” about art. As a Popperian, I believe that the distinction between the objective and the subjective (or the relative) has been misunderstood and hyperbolized. Perhaps nothing is objective, but that does not mean that all is subjective. Newton’s proposed laws of motion were, for centuries, “objectively” true; confirmed by all experimental tests, they formed the basis of thousands of discoveries in physics and other fields. These discoveries were themselves experimentally tested, and themselves led to thousands of discoveries in the exponential fashion to which we’ve become accustomed.

But Newton was wrong; his laws were inaccurate. In David Deutsch’s terms, they were very, very good misconceptions, just as Einstein’s better ideas are very, very good misconceptions that will eventually be replaced by even better, more accurate, deeper ideas that explain more with less. This process is progressive: science gets better and better, even though it is purely the creation of “subjective” human conjecture —imagination— tested against reality for utility. We might say that the history of human knowledge is one of conjectures which are never complete or objective but which are ever-improving. To be ever-improving, they must be moving towards something; if they cannot reach it, they approach it as a line does an asymptote. Science asymptotically approaches objective, complete truth, never arriving but getting closer and closer (¹) . It is not objective —as the work of humans, how could it be?— but neither is it aimless or subjective.

But what about art? We do not tend to think that art is progressive. Indeed, the attitude of the age treats art as a private utterance, as pure subjectivity, or at best as a personal religion of some entertaining use to others. One epistemological consequence of the democratic ethos, unmoored from axiomatic values, is that we struggle with the idea of objectivity in anything, although we incoherently exempt the sciences from our anxious doubt. But this is a temporary phase, a confusion. It is not the case that art is purely subjective, aimless, without teleology or purpose; it is rather the case that art, like science, improves over time because it asymptotically approaches something. It happens to be the same “something” that science hews to: reality.

Consider the following work of art from tens of thousands of years ago:

From Chauvet, this depiction is among the earliest instances of art; it features a range of animals including, most prominently, cave lions. From tens of thousands of years later, in the 19th century, here is the head of a lion painted by Théodore Géricault:

It’s obvious that this is a better depiction, in part because we can reasonably assume that the intent of these two artists, across so much time, was similar: to capture and convey something essential about the lion. This intent was almost certainly inexplicit for the ancient artist, and may have expressed itself in other ways which recur throughout the history of art. For example, artists have occasionally conceived of their mission in ceremonial, religious, or supernatural terms, imagining that by performing acts in concert with images they might control reality (²). In later centuries, they might consider their art in more subtle religious, political, pedagogical, ideological, or emotional terms. But a sufficiently abstract definition might cover most cases:

Art seeks to virtualize phenomena for human benefit.

By “virtualize,” I mean only that what art offers us it offers on our terms. One can experience tragedy when a loved-one dies; one can know the awe and power of the lion when one sees it enter a cave in which one’s family is camped. Art seeks to make these phenomena, and the meanings they provide, available to you apart from the uncontrollable and contingent world, for a variety of reasons. Through art, we are enriched by experiences with less risk of suffering or injury; experiences are made more portable and reproducible, and are freed from temporality; we can begin at least to portray what we imagine, even if we cannot yet build it; and so on. Art, then, supports the same accelerated development of knowledge that consciousness, metaphor and language, and reason support, and all are related. Whereas we once built knowledge accidentally and slowly, when the inexplicit knowledge of environment and utility embodied by genes would lead to those genes’ replication and spread, we now have a range of means for building knowledge rapidly and at little cost. We can, at our discretion, experience alternative modes of being, the lives of others, worlds we’ve never seen; we can be taken deep within ourselves or so far away that we can no longer remember our names.

And from this, we learn. From art, from the virtualization of phenomena far removed from our practical realities, we derive values, politics, and purposes, in addition to whatever assortment of facts and information the art carries with it. Some essential values we seem incapable of arriving at any other way, especially in the absence of axioms or authority: compassion and empathy, for example, depend on the recognition of the humanness of others but are hardly logically compulsory propositions; art is unparalleled at conveying, in experiential and therefore broadly-intelligible terms, the bases of such moral notions, even to the ignorant and resistant. (³) Art is where we find meanings we cannot reason and experiences that we cannot otherwise have; that we recognize the value and utility of these experiences and meanings but cannot yet rationally justify them doesn’t mean that they’re purely subjective. The fact that our ancestors didn’t understand the stars by which they navigated didn’t make those stars subjective either. They were simply little-understood, but their utility was evident to all. The same is true of art and culture, emergent phenomena we dismiss because of weaknesses in our contemporary philosophies. What we cannot reduce we pretend doesn’t exist.

The consequences of purpose

If we say that “art seeks to virtualize phenomena for human benefit,” we can begin to critique art apart from distracting historicisms. This liberates us from, among other traps, referentiality and academic preoccupations. We can attempt to discuss art concretely in terms of its aims:

• Does the work virtualize phenomena well? Does it use the best forms for the phenomena it pursues? Does it use effective available techniques for their virtualization? Are the relevant parts of the phenomena captured and expressed? Does the work have a purpose, and are its aesthetic choices suitable for that purpose?
• Is the work novel? If it isn’t, it won’t “work,” for just as sound science that discovers what science already knows is redundant and contributes nothing, repetitive art with cliched expressions, moribund forms, or a derivative purpose is redundant and contributes nothing. Novelty is what permits consciousness to attend to phenomena, and is therefore a foundational value in art.
• Do humans benefit? The benefit may be to the artist alone, which is perfectly fine but should be understood as an extremely narrow sort of aim, like a scientific discovery that extends the life of a single human. The tension between an artist’s desire to express himself purely and without calculations about reception and the fact that art must benefit humans or be pointless is irreducible and beneficial, itself a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood.
• Art that is about art is as science about science: useful for practitioners but insufficiently universal in scope. Art that is about artists is as science about scientists: likely to be worthless where it cannot be generalized, and where it can it is hardly about individuals anyway.

An important note: art makes virtualized reality possible both for external sense experiences like seeing a lion or a landscape and internal, phenomenological experiences like emotional states or even qualia. The virtualization of meaningful human phenomena might involve nothing representational —music often does not— or taken from the world outside of us. A work of art which captures, provokes, or explores something like sorrow, hope, love, or fear might be highly abstract, impressionistic, unusual, just as our internal life is.

Artists are technologists

I’ve mentioned qualia twice, once implicitly noting that some do not believe they exist and once by noting that art captures them well. Qualia were first described by C.I. Lewis in 1929:

There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these “qualia.” But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects.

Another way of putting it: when you look at a red sign, the “redness” you see doesn’t exist anywhere. The sign is an almost entirely-empty latticework of vibrating particles. Photons bounce off of some of these and enter your eye at a wavelength, but that wavelength is a mathematical description: it has no color in it, and photons themselves are colorless. Your mind experiences “redness,” but you might also say that it “creates” or “invents” redness when prompted by certain light phenomena which themselves have nothing to do, now or ever, with “redness,” which doesn’t exist. Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel-prize winning quantum physicist, put it thus:

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.

That one of the founders of modern physics didn’t believe a physical or physiological explanation for qualia would be forthcoming is arresting. But more to the point, while scientists and philosophers try to determine what “redness” or “sorrow” really is, as a quale, artists are virtualizing qualia and catalyzing them in audiences. Indeed, much of the personal quality that art has consists in its relationship to deep, individuated qualia we ourselves hardly comprehend.

For millennia art outstripped the sciences in its ability to understand and recreate qualia, virtualize reality, and provide ennobling, edifying, educational, and entertaining simulations for humans. Indeed, art pushed science, demanding better technologies which required deeper understanding in dozens of fields. The demands of art pushed architecture, and therefore engineering and chemistry and materials sciences; art required new resources for colors and sculptures, shaping societies economically; the musical arts were constrained awfully until technology turned music from vanishing performances into enduring, widely-distributed works.

All of which is to say: artists are natural technologists. Historically, they’ve pursued the newest and best techniques, materials, and forms. When the methodology for achieving perspective became clear, few resisted it on the basis of a calcified iconographic style considered to be “high art,” or if some did they’ve been suitably forgotten. And had new inks, better canvases, or some unimaginable invention given superior means to the impressionists to capture washes of light and mood —like, say, film— they’d have used whatever was available. The purpose of painting isn’t paint, after all; nor is the purpose of writing a book. (⁴)

The purpose is instead to virtualize phenomena for the benefit of humans. The best techniques for doing so do indeed change; the schools of thought that shape artists wax, wane, wear out; intellectual movements, critical and popular reaction, and technology are all part of the contingency in which we work. But the orientation of art should not be towards the ephemeral (except in exploring ephemerality itself, permanent and vexing) but towards deeper, universal, clarifying aims.

In elementary school, we were taught about Europe’s cathedrals. Centuries of fatality- and error-filled construction and engineering innovation on the edge of recklessness produced spaces intended to virtualize the experience of heavenly light, spiritual elevation, credence in the sacred. A peasant from the fields could enter one and immediately understand; he’d not know Suger’s theories or the tradeoffs involved in the buttresses, but the purpose and effect of the art were somehow not lost on him. The same would likely have been true had he seen Michelangelo’s David or been permitted to hear Mozart or Hildegard of Bingen. With exceptions, of course, art has aspired to universality.

The extraordinary present circumstance in which art is not expected to be intelligible, to have any “benefit” beyond the meaninglessly subjective “enjoyment” of the “consumer” is an aberration. That art is denied its progressive success at virtualizing greater and greater parts of reality, conveying ever-more phenomena with ever-greater fidelity to ever-more people, is the result of a philosophical disruption and a subsequent error. We found God dead; we asked what had god-like authority and reeled to realize that nothing can. But we’ve accepted that somehow, science exceeds merely moody paradigms. It works. It gives us control over the universe and ourselves, reduces contingency and accident, allows us to be what we think we should be.

Art is part of the same process, and can be evaluated similarly. In allowing us to virtualize and experiment with realities and phenomena, and, gradually, to live in those realities, it is part of the same epistemological and creative process as science. We are simply at an earlier stage, and just as someone might have surveyed the globe in 500 CE and concluded, “There is nothing objective about the so-called sciences; it appears that every culture and every society simply invents its own ideas and none is really any better than the rest,” so we now struggle to understand how aesthetics and morality might someday be understood teleologically, not as expressions of “taste” but as forms of knowledge-generation, experimentation, and even reality-building.

Perhaps we are transitioning from artists-as-depictors and artists-as-catalyzers (⁵) to artists-as-world-makers. To create something, you must first understand it; to create a world for humans to experience, you must first understand how humans experience the world. Once you can reliably replicate any sense-perception, you must think of how such sense-perceptions are experienced in the mind: as qualia. Then you must think of how to generalize or objectify qualia, or how to catalyze them. This is not a task for science alone, though whether it is not yet or not at all I cannot say. It will involve art, however, particularly in the form it takes when it wants to extend itself into life: design.

Design is art which cannot ignore the outcome it pursues, which uses every technology or tool it can conjure to succeed, and which accepts the judgement of audiences. In this way, one can understand why so much of the vitality of art now resides in the commercial space: there, the artists still care about audiences, still have aims apart from themselves, still seek resonance, utility, universality. My anxieties about art stem mostly from this concern: if purposive, deliberate, universal art becomes the province of commercial design, art’s values will gravitate towards market values. The hope: those values will evolve intelligently through self-correction. But it seems safer to me to have a cultural space which accords art precisely the same sort of respect we pay science so that the arts can pursue their ends purely —ends far deeper than markets, capitalism, any historicism, incidentally— just as science exists apart from technology and its commercialization. But I doubt whether such a space is possible so long as we insist that all art is subjective, no teleology is imaginable, and there is no such thing as progress. Such an insistence is, in my view, both materially incorrect and snobbish, arising more from nostalgia for older forms or aristocratic art-culture than any real analysis of the present. We live in a world in which more people read, listen to music, and experience works of art than ever before. This is both art’s triumph and a prelude to its expanding role. From its earliest efforts to virtualize reality through its portrayal and later attempts to produce specific experiences in audiences, art aspires to the creation of worlds. As it converges with technology —in video games, for example— these worlds will grow to support the range of experiences and meanings humans desire, as art always has.

Abby and I fight from time to time; perhaps it’s often, perhaps not. How could we know? And why should we care? A couple introspects almost as poorly as an individual, absorbs and rejects ambient social standards of normalcy, ponders its viability as it ponders whether viability is a question of chance congruence —easy emotions expanding into one another’s moods and memories— or of conscious exertion, effort. Can we control our mutuality, the shape of our life together, the sort of couple we are? Are we perfectible and perfecting, or is our will as useless as it was when we were becoming our individual selves?

In a fight, you’re not yourself; you struggle to control yourself; but what are you and what controls you? A fight is possession, infection: something acts through you both, will not let you rest even when you want nothing else, draws you out again and again. A fight is about futurity: one becomes a vicious pedant, quibbles with a vengeance, adds punch to points with insults and dredged grievances, commits to total war because one believes that the correct resolution of some dialectical dispute will color the years to come. It is a matter of relationship policy. It is political, ends justifying means; it is absurd: there are no ends. Love is means.

Among the exhausting profusion of concerns in a fight are analytical, comparative anxieties. Is this typical, we wonder? Are we doing damage to one another? What is the extent of the failure here? Our fights support imaginary, dispositive commentary from the culture around us. Is our relationship: an idyll with rare, decent, minor interruptions? A healthy procedural fluidity with an appropriate concentration of quarrels? Clotted with conflict like a heart with thousands of meals’ worth of fat, our love the watery blood straining through the aggregating tissues? Or is it fatally combustible, conforming to patterns discussed with weary, head-shaking empathy by pop-psychologists on television?

We are ashamed to fight. Our love is what gives our lives meaning and an ugly, ordinary fight threatens to degrade that meaning, expose our love as hope, connect our private interactions to vulgar, public phenomena. A fight invites the presence of strangers, brings experts and cameramen and neighbors and relatives and hated classmates from long ago; they’re pressed against the windows, watching, soberly noting the various ways in which your fight just confirms all that they’ve always said. 

There must be defined types of relationships; technicians must publish classification systems for couples in different cultures, among different psychodemographics, with defined spectra and ranges for everything: % of ablutions conducted in anxious privacy; frequency of passive-aggressions, by partner; success rate of sexual propositioning divided by failure rate of last-ditch efforts at simulating forgiveness, or what scholarly pundits call –amongst themselves but also to reporters— “fucks per fight.” The instantiation of this academic knowledge in the consumer world will bring digital clarity: we’ll argue three times too many and a push notification will alert me that we operate outside the parameters of Apple’s relationship guidelines (developed in concert with NIMH, Oprah, and the editors of Self magazine; read your EULA for more detail). Integrated Facebook will frictionlessly announce: “Mills and Abby are no longer in a relationship.”

What sort of couple are Abby and I? The development of the identity of a relationship is the second sort of individuation we experience in our lives, and it is like the first: a process less than halfway controllable, a struggle with the unseen in ourselves and the unknowable in others, in the world. A self erupts; we try to manage its flows. One becomes oneself independent of one’s will, partly against it; one wakes one day —which day?— and has a personality, an emergence from interdependent mechanisms of defense and partialization, a tradition of judgments one maintains, then abandons, and eventually marvels to recall. One’s identity: attributes one inherited without assent, talents one doesn’t respect, weaknesses one considers immoral, features one doesn’t recognize, and a smattering of one’s own little efforts at self-creation. If the self is sharp peaks, hollowed domes, and trees blown sideways across a volcanic mountain, a relationship is an archipelago emerging and sinking in salty seawater, lava making the clear, cool ocean into screaming steam.

Why do we fight? I am volatile, casually insane, forever entranced by the notion that some idea or explanation will end the fight and eliminate our suffering if it is properly phrased, articulated, understood. Abby is also volatile, but she’s more grounded and decent. We fight for the reasons that everyone fights: no reasons, all reasons. We can overcome anything or be overcome by anything. At times it feels to me as though we’ve been weakened by something, as though our self-protective retreat into soft, controllable spaces has thinned our skin to molecules. We absolutely need whatever specialists presently say we need in sleep, food, and lifestyle structure; one lapsed bedtime, an errand awry, a vitamin deficiency, too few recuperative trips into cinematic natural spaces and we malfunction like rusted robots.

I worry, as I describe this delicacy, that it indicts us as people and discredits us as a couple. There is natural vanity in this —I want to tell you about how we fight rarely, how much we love each other, how happy we are, even as I despise myself for this needy tic— but there is also the great social terror: I worry that our relationship falls into the wrong category, has been described in the literature, is a malfunction in the eyes of researchers and the world. Are we an aberration? Are we white-trash? Are we defective?

I worry about these things, but I never worry about our love. How odd.

In Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending, a precocious schoolboy named Adrian Finn recites, from memory and in reply to a teacher, a definition of history:

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

It’s a marvelously provocative sentence. The book’s unreliable narrator, Anthony Webster, recalls the classroom scene in which it was uttered, recalls his friend Adrian’s easy brilliance, even recalls the historian Adrian cites as author of the definition: a Frenchman named Patrick Lagrange.

In their reviews, many critics mention Patrick Lagrange or quote his definition; in a sense, it seems to plainly assert the thesis, so to speak, of the novel. For The Sense of an Ending is concerned with the imperfections of memory —of its narrator’s memory in particular— and inadequate documentation and the illusory certainty we each have about our own history. Beneath this scarcely-interrogated certainty, Barnes posits, is an impenetrable morass of synthesized recollection and invention: experiences deliberately forgotten, lessons we cannot bear to learn, delusions we grasp tightly, fears we will not acknowledge, stories we repeat until we don’t remember the events they misrepresent. The Sense of an Ending explores how we compose the texts of our lives, and how as storytellers we lie to ourselves and others; how as historians we redact our perceptions and later our memories; how as academics we rationalize our behavior theoretically; and how as individuals we read our lives as inattentively and badly as we read novels.

It is fitting, then, that the French historian Patrick Lagrange is himself an invention, his remark a creation of uncertain provenance, his authority on the subjects of history and memory as questionable as our own. Among those reviewers who didn’t uncritically parrot his professorial assertion were some who seemed irritated by the false-flag fiction:

Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn’t have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation — and an alleged source — not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his creator manages in the course of the book.

This is an astonishingly dim analysis in many respects; notably, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Adrian concocted Lagrange; all we know is that the narrator Anthony Webster claims that he remembers Adrian defining history thusly and attributing the definition to a French historian named Patrick Lagrange. Did Adrian manufacture him? Did Webster remember him incorrectly? Did both occur? Did neither? Did Barnes mean for Patrick Lagrange to have been part of the fictional world of his characters? But in all other historical respects it is identical to our own!

With pristine irony, Barnes lightly enacts for us, for our experiential intellection, a moment of vertiginous epistemic uncertainty. We have not only a muddled and unreliable narrator, telling a story at some decades’ remove from the events which, at this point, can only be said to have “inspired” it; we have this narrator recalling words spoken by a friend to whose dark fate he may have contributed with an act he’s determined not to remember; and the words in question are, according to the friend, a quotation, that is, the friend’s recollection of the words of another; and he recalls that his friend recollects too the name of the author of the words: Lagrange.

There are too many potential points of failure along this chain of recollections and representations to count. Taken in its full context, it is a tidy, carefully-crafted satirization of the idea of epistemic authority, and it’s neither fussy nor demanding: read literally, it supports the novel’s themes; if one ponders the fact that the quotation is remembered, it supports the novel’s themes; if one digs and digs into it, and cross-references it with the world beyond the novel, one suddenly realizes that —as one of the book’s refrains has it— one didn’t understand, didn’t get it; and this supports the novel’s themes.

(That one clings to the authority of the definition, is attracted to its neatness, yet must accept that in its contextual totality it is self-subverting —approaching, from a distance, a sort of liar’s paradox— is delightful as well).

When authors attempt to enact some phenomenon, they must sometimes be clever, must use the structure of their novel or its relation to the outside world or some other element beyond its content to catalyze in readers something not described. This can be necessitated when an author’s themes concern aspects of the phenomenology of consciousness —how we experience deteriorating memory—, for example, or when our language is poorly suited to the task of describing a specific experience of the mind or world. An author may feel that the inner human experience of sorrow is something quite different from even a good description of sorrow, and so may attempt to make a reader feel sorrow deeply without talking at all about sadness, or, in some mysterious cases, anything sad directly (W.G. Sebald in particular excels at making one feel despair without being sure why). For some subjects, describing the experience with which the author is concerned would be to chase it away. To put it in another medium’s terms: you can make a movie about anxiety that shows people experiencing it, or you can make a movie in such a way that it produces anxiety in audiences.

In either case, there is a kind of knowledge being communicated. It could be disputed, by a particularly hard-nosed and reductive scientist, for example, that novels do not communicate knowledge of any real value, or at least none that would not be better-communicated, more clearly and without tricks, games, paradox, or play, by an essay. But this is not at all so. Beyond its capacity to entertain in ordinary senses —a crucial component of most wonderful art— the novel can communicate knowledge which an essay cannot, especially by manipulating the reader without his or her awareness, i.e., by enacting rather than portraying or describing.

The novel is a particularly superlative means for communicating experiential knowledge of an internal phenomenological sort; visualized narratives are too specific, perhaps, for us to inhabit the worlds they describe in the way we inhabit the worlds novels construct within us. We interiorize fiction as we do little else.  For Milan Kundera, this quality of fiction —that it constitutes a form of knowledge— is paramount, the novel’s real raison d’être: 

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

The form in which knowledge is expressed is often as important as its content (when they can be distinguished at all); Tom Stoppard once noted of his work that “if I were to write an essay instead of a play about any of these subjects it wouldn’t be a profound essay.” But of course Brazil was profound, especially in its enactment of the hero’s narcissistic, universally-resonant determination to fantasize his private salvation, an enactment that exceeded any possible description by involving you in his self-deceit, in his childishly egotistic romanticism, so that you identify with him rather than judge him. Thus: you might perhaps learn not to judge when you might try instead to understand.

This power that fiction has to unfold inside of you such that you are inside of it, subject to its aims, permits The Sense of an Ending to very gently show you how impossible it is even to know a simple text. It is Barnes’ talent that not only permits him to wield this power but to do so delicately, without making a ruckus. The achievement is such that one does not conclude the novel asking “What really happened?” as one often does in works with unreliable narrators, but instead feels almost in awe of the vagaries of memory, the mysteries of selfhood, will, and morality, and the groundlessness of so much of what we think we are.

Memory is as persistent an enigma as any, so integral to us as to be us yet almost always ungovernable and frequently treacherous. We do not remember as we think we do, as Kundera notes in Testaments Betrayed while remarking on the immense talent Hemingway had for dialogue:

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acoustisovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.

And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don’t realize how schematic and meager their content is.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it’s happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

Two aims, then, for a novelist to pursue: the first is the expression of the present moment in text with “the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity,” which, for a human, means a great quantity of internal mental processes and experiences in every instant. It was one of Joyce’s aims in writing Ulysses, and it required of him that he undertake significant formal innovations to describe what had never before been described.

The second: to show how one cobbles together from scraps of confused perceptions, bits of tattered abstractions, and naked invention an illusory sense of certainty about oneself and one’s history. Parts of this process are unconscious, parts unavoidable —inadequate documentation and all that— but parts are willed, the result of our nearly magical capacity for self-delusion and our deep need to feel secure, safe, decent.

If one were to write a review of The Sense of an Ending discussing some of these ideas, it wouldn’t be a particularly profound review, and it would stand in absurdly unwieldy contrast to the airy felicity of the novel itself. Barnes does not labor over machinations or belabor ideas; he tells a short, even plain story of a man whose memory has indeed been a forgetting, an array of errors and deliberately suppressed, dream-like visions, and whose present and future remain to him a complete and utter mystery. It is not clear whether he is a good man or a bad man, only that like all of us he had some difficulty seeing himself clearly, and difficulty even in understanding that.

When he was 23 years old, Tolstoy wrote that

[so] many memories of the past start up when your imagination endeavors to resurrect the features of a beloved one that through these memories, as through tears, you see them only vaguely. These are memory’s tears.

In its sentimentality it is clearly the work of his youth, but even then Tolstoy was thinking as Joyce, Barnes, Sebald, and others have about memory, about how even the face of one’s beloved mother can become vague in one’s mind, how this isn’t the negative of forgetting but merely a form of it, and sometimes a dangerously false one at that. One flaw of our invented memory that especially interested Tolstoy was its tendency to overemphasize the agency of the individual; Kundera’s summary of Tolstoy’s thought in War and Peace (again from Testaments Betrayed) and how it relates to the judgment of others, in this case, artists:

Tolstoy argues against the idea that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals. History makes itself, he says, obeying laws of its own, which remain obscure to man. Great individuals “all were the involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work that was concealed from them.” Later on: “Providence compelled all these men, each striving to attain personal aims, to combine in the accomplishment of a single stupendous result not one of them (neither Napoleon nor Alexander and still less anyone who did the actual fighting) in the least expected.” And again: “Man lives consciously for himself, but is unconsciously a tool in the attainment of the historic, general aims of mankind.” From which comes this tremendous conclusion: “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind…”

With this conception of history, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they “involuntarily” participate in events whose meaning is “concealed from them”), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them —Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-John Perse, Giono— all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?

Mayakovsky’s blindness is part of the eternal human condition. But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.

Thus a moral purpose for the novelist concerned with memory: to stay our ignorantly un-empathetic judgment of the past (and therefore of the present) by summoning this fog, not by simply describing it but by calling it forth to envelop us. Long after finishing The Sense of an Ending it lingers, and it must be the source of the novel’s title: on our paths within this fog, conducting our fitful, unending investigations of memory, we will not know an ending, a conclusion, a clear terminus to our wandering or wondering; we remain to ourselves a mystery, and can have at best only the sense of an ending to our inquiries. This sense, of course, is as unreliable as our narrator; we can have little confidence in our detection of a ground, an end, a resolution; and our conclusions are liable to be exposed, again and again after we reach them, as illusory. We should judge one another accordingly.

Music’s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almost nothing of a song’s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music’s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into their sense of identity —they argue about these pseudo-tastes, fight about them, draw moral conclusions from them, particularly about others— yet the same cannot be imagined for most other arts. Who can envision a redneck spitting into the dirt at the mention of a sculptor he considers emblematic of society’s ethical decay? Who can conjure inner-city youths following the internecine disputes between schools of painters?

This virtue —that we all react to music, and intensely enough that our reactions become part of our selves and indeed seem to us indicative not of arbitrary mood or opinion but of the quality of the music we react to— is a curse because it means many listen to music happily, as atmospheric noise or soundtrack or acoustic scenery, without being able to understand anything about its meaning or art.

This isn’t a problem in itself; there’s nothing wrong with using subjective enjoyment as your sole aesthetic criterion. But part of life is finding new things to love and new ways to love things more deeply, and understanding the creative arts —their scope, history, contemporary contexts, intentionality— opens them up for ever-deeper appreciation. But the most obvious way to learn an art is to become a practitioner of that art, a time-consuming and difficult task, and one impossible to pursue across all fields.

Fields that make such demands have a high barrier to audience entry. They compete against quasi-art designed for immediate enjoyment. Again: the magic of jazz was that, for decades, it was profoundly innovative, artistically revolutionary, and fun to listen and dance to.

Analogical Understanding

But we don’t dance that way now, and jazz grows sadly less-accessible to listeners every year; I know many people who have the same reactions to horns that others do to operatic voices: they simply hate the sound of them. Your art has lost its connection to ordinary people when elements of it are perceptually discomfiting to them.

I know many others who like jazz for what we might call “associative” reasons: they like Woody Allen movies, various expressions of “retro” culture, New Orleans, and so on. Certain jazz makes for excellent background music, and while we might lament that music so dense with intention, deliberation, improvisational heroism has become soundtracked, the same has happened to classical; and the same has happened to nearly all the arts (people eat popcorn in movies about genocide; people drink thirty-two ounces of Coke while blood pools on screen), and even to news and politics. Reproductive technology democratically trivializes everything. Love it or leave it.

You can enjoy jazz without grasping much about it for an entire lifetime, and should if that suffices; but if you want to enjoy jazz more and aren’t a musician, or aren’t familiar enough with music to follow, attentively and thoughtfully, instrumental music, to see what’s interesting about a piano solo (beyond its emotional impact), to know what to pay attention to while bassists duet, you need an analogical approach.

Here’s one I’ve used for years, even though I’m a musician and have studied music:

…when I talk to people who find jazz musically intimidating, or unintelligible in its refusal to be as repetitive as popular music, I sometimes tell them to try to hear in the solos little musical structures, any one of which could be a song in itself, but each of which is built, explored, and discarded with breakneck speed. Popular music relies on the ecstasy of trance: repetition of what resonates. Jazz relies more on restless exploration.

It’s not exactly like Levitt Homes and sand castles, but that’s one way to think of it. The point is that one needn’t know anything about music at all to hear in the short bursts of notes -up and down, side to side, angry or soft, symmetrical or jagged- little sound sculptures, built, perfected, then discarded.

That is: try and relate meaning you don’t understand to a form of meaning you do understand, one which will support some of the same logical, structural interrelationships present in what’s otherwise unintelligible to you. (This is, incidentally, the isomorphism you pursue in all forms of understanding; comprehension is analogical, all newly encountered phenomena relating to previously encountered phenomena, and developing this capacity for metaphorical relation is how you get better at understanding the world, in addition to getting better at understanding and loving and being made happy by creative arts).

Attention and Devotion

Two effective and fun demonstrations of this idea are different visualizations of John Coltrane’s seminal “Giant Steps.” It’s an excellent example, because it is not obviously emotional in intent or effect, so while much jazz —this song, for example, or this one— can be apprehended with the heart, “Giant Steps” demands cerebral attention, and not just for its frenzy; this song will be boring or grating if you can’t figure out how to map its meaning to a topography you understand. That might be a flaw worth critiquing, or cause enough to ignore jazz, but again: loving art makes you happier, so why foreclose the possibility simply because it requires a little effort?

Check out Michal Levy’s outstanding animation from “Giant Steps,” or for a more prosaic take, see Dan Cohen’s video, which tracks the sheet music for it.

Note that once you’ve watched those videos, you can apply that same sort of visualization methodology to other instrumental music —jazz, classical, whatever. Indeed, while the various visualizers which ship with music apps are generally considered the province of dorm-room stoners, they’re useful for attempting to appreciate instrumental music, because they do what’s needed most: they allow you to devote your attention to music while relating music to something you understand already, then have your own creative reactions in collaboration with the work of the artist(s).

When I really want to love music, I tend to close my eyes and listen to Keith Jarrett; the technical passages form landscapes, the affective passages move my heart, and their sum is enough to convince me of music’s total artistic superiority whether or not I consider anything like the song’s context, theoretical details, historical significance. For a listener, this is like an apotheosis: the fulfillment of one of art’s promises.

While it’s possible to bring the required attention to bear on a song without visualization, it’s hard, and getting harder every year; and art rewards attention above all. Music half-attended to is really music ignored, ill-understood, the slightest kind of pleasure. There is much more to love in the best music, and it’s easily accessed with just a bit of creative, analogical effort. Try it out.

(Thanks to David Cole for the conversational catalyst).

In a chapter on political systems in his remarkable book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch notes that

…compromises -amalgams of the policies of the contributors- have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.

Recognize at once one of the magical qualities of the American political system! Despite the fact that we live in the laboratory of the real -we can present the universe with any meaningful, properly-phrased question and reliably receive an indisputable answer- neither party ever believes that its policies have been falsified. 

Often, this is because our democracy -such as it is- requires compromise. In ten years, when America’s health care system is still a hideous, tragic mess, Republicans will believe that this is due to the faulty premises of Democratic legislation, while Democrats will believe that the legislation was fatally weakened by obstinate Republicans. While we can of course reason our way to our own hypotheses, we will lack a truly irrefutable conclusion, the sort we now have about, say, whether the sun revolves around the earth.

Thus: a real effect of compromise is that it prevents intact ideas from being tested and falsified. Instead, ideas are blended with their antitheses into policies that are “no one’s idea of what will work,” allowing the perpetual political regurgitation, reinterpretation, and relational stasis that defines the governance of the United States. 

The Autocratic Artist

There has been recent occasion to recall an odd organizational fact: the putative democratic spirit notwithstanding, it is nearly always the case that real artists are autocrats. Collaborative creativity isn’t an exception to this rule; typically, in bands for example, each collaborating artist is dictatorial within his domain, and whatever the extent of his partnership with his peers, there is rarely compromise.

This is not to say there is no persuasion. But persuasion is a radically different epistemological process:

• to compromise is to treat competing ideas as mathematical sums whose average might be equal to (or, more preposterously, greater than) the individual ideas themselves; while
• to persuade is merely to convince others of the soundness of an idea, often without the cost of instantiating any of the competing ideas.

Pondering the inexplicable, even disheartening superiority of the auteur over the democratic committee -considering one’s favorite tyrannical director, or weighing Google’s chances against Apple- one wonders: why do compromises not embody an aggregate of the intelligence of constituent ideas (or policies)? Why do compromises typically produce wholes pitifully less than the sum of their parts?

Deutsch’s book suggests that the real surprise is that anyone should imagine they would do otherwise. As a simple matter of epistemology, there is no reason why the blending of competing ideas would produce a better idea. Imagine if someone had proposed to Galileo and the Catholic Church that they compromise and agree that neither the sun nor the earth revolve, or that they somehow revolve around each other!

This seems obvious enough in science and other fields whose ideas we regard as being predictive, or isomorphic to physical reality in some quantifiable way. But it is no less the case in artistic and creative endeavors.

This is because creative ideas are types of explanations, and every explanation involves whole constellations of interdependent notions, speculations, assertions; a well-developed creative idea -a design, a song, a poem- is not an assembly of fungible units. It is a complete hypothesis unto itself about what will work for a given human purpose.

So while it seems perfectly natural, even morally preferable, to involve many voices and subject creative ideas to the scrutiny of committees, the result tends to be disastrous: the writer knows that his diction depends in part for its effect on his syntax, his punctuation on the typography in which it is rendered; the photographer knows that the same scene shot in a more commercially-appealing way is no longer beautiful but is now banal; the designer knows that the entire premise of his layout is undone by the substitution of a compromised header; etcetera.

That is: creative ideas embody whole explanatory and speculative matrices, even in their minor details. Compromises dilute the implicit, interdependent elements which account for the form and content of creative ideas, introducing new elements (from others, from committees) which derive from wholly different notions about the problems being solved, the relations between the elements involved, the speculations which are justified by experience and evidence, and so on.

Worse: compromise makes it impossible to sort out precisely which elements, or which implicit premises, were responsible for the success or failure of any given creative idea.

The Fault

When people discuss why small companies are more innovative than large companies, or why dictatorial creative thinkers -who are often terribly unpleasant people- produce better work than assemblies of talent, they often talk about speed, about “nimbleness,” and about bureaucracy.

But the essential problem is philosophical: creative ideas must be understood as hypotheses about certain sorts of problems. For the writer, the painter, the designer are all trying to solve a specific problem, and their hypotheses cannot be averaged anymore than Galileo’s could. While persuasion and collaboration are perfectly sensible, the real advantage the best innovators and creators have is that they understand that compromise is epistemologically invalid and procedurally fatal.

So why does compromise have its “undeservedly high reputation”? I believe it is because we are discomfited by the philosophical implications of the fact that some ideas are objectively better. We exempt science from our contemporary anxieties because its benefits are too explicit to deny, but in most creative fields we are no longer capable of accepting the superiority of some solutions to others; unable to sustain confidence in the soundness of the artistic problem-solving process, we will not provoke interpersonal or organizational conflict for the sake of mere ideas.

This sad, mistaken epistemological cowardice turns competing hypotheses into groundless, subjective opinions, and the reasonable course of action when managing conflicting, groundless opinions (about, say, what to order at a restaurant) is to compromise, because there is no better answer.

But the creative arts are not so subjective as we tend to think, which is why a talented, dictatorial auteur will produce better work than polls, focus groups, or hundreds of compromising committees.

What is predatory about writing is: observing, crouched to pounce, the lives of others; waiting for the flash of weakness or sorrow, sentiment like sinew that exposes what moves and pulls, tragedy like torn flesh, sure to seduce. Salivate at scintillating sorrows!

Now: this old black pair, her hair happenstance-hanging like moss from a dead tree, an unwilled mess that yet lives, his cigarette aged with him: crinkled paper filter of some old forgotten brand, his skin the crinkled paper of an old forgetful man. She says, drunk in the morning, her voice high and plaintive -the sickly sweetness a woman feigns to sound like a girl when that gives advantage- “Oh, they said it was all right, all right, all right; they like me at that hotel.”

The man is worn out with her and with everything, all life’s promises and assurances having come to nothing, to impoverished old age and vagrancy when he is richer in experience than nearly all who live, those young pink fools in their homes and on their phones. It angers him that she still thinks things work out. And it is even more ludicrous and intolerable to him that she, decrepit and skeletal -in the words reserved for the suffering: “shuffling, ambling”- imagines her revolting pantomime of coquettish charms will affect anyone’s heart but his.

“If you don’t pay money you owe it don’t matter one goddamn bit if they say they like you. They like money. Shit.”

As they walk away, I scan their clothes for more to tell you; I lick my chops: her ashy feet collapse atop her heels in filthy slippers, his trousers billow about spindly legs, muscle atrophied and then lost to time like everything else. I can’t hear them anymore, but I never really listened anyway. I just watched for my chance to gorge on their pitiful, exemplary, universal condition, their unloving loving, their living dying. Now I am full.

So David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity, his breathtakingly profound and impossibly affecting new book. He continues:

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not of prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress… If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

A disciple of Karl Popper and a quantum physicist, Deutsch is everywhere concerned not with positive absolutes but with the process of conjecture, refutation, and the gradual improvement of our explanatory understanding of the world, as well as the corresponding ability to control it. Amidst his many lucid, remarkably direct assertions about what we can know, what we can do, and the moral repercussions which follow therefrom, he tentatively offers only one moral imperative: “…the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative… all other moral truths follow from it…”

If optimism is “a way of explaining failure,” it is because of another of his pronouncements, which he advises humanity to chisel on stone tables: problems are inevitable; and problems are soluble. That is: there is no possible stasis of sustainability for humanity, or any other species, within any ecosystem or civilization. Only a continuous process of problem-solving will suffice to ensure our survival, and not only our survival but our gradual triumph over evil.

Evil! It is not a word he uses often, nor is it a word often-used today, although I suspect this is less because any of us denies the existence of evil -death abounds, injustice abounds, the suffering of the innocent abounds- but because we deny the existence of the good. In any event, discussing evils caused by insufficient knowledge, Deutsch writes:

If we do not, for the moment, know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory but do not yet have enough time or resources (i.e., wealth), then, even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it [or not]… The same must hold, equally trivially, for the evil of death -that is to say, the deaths of human beings from disease or old age. This problem… has an almost unmatched reputation for insolubility… But there is no rational basis for this reputation. It is absurdly parochial to read some deep significance into this particular failure, among so many, of the biosphere to support human life -or of medical science…

That humanity has not yet conquered death is due to one fact alone: that we have only been engaged in the critical, open-ended creation of knowledge for a few centuries, since the Enlightenment. Before it, fits and starts of such knowledge-creation are well-known, but none were sustained; all fell, all halted, some due to authoritarian political developments, some due to reactionary religious awakenings, and others due to happenstance accidents of history. Above all, Deutsch maintains, those societies in which proto-Enlightenments occurred tended to have a sense of optimism about the solubility of problems and the value of progress, an optimism more fragile than it appears, an optimism easily damaged.

He describes two heartbreaking interruptions in detail: Sparta’s defeat of Athens and Savonarola’s campaign against the Medici’s Florentine Renaissance- before concluding his chapter on optimism with a paragraph I will never forget, particularly when considering the real value of different cultural and political systems:

The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn’t factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even the laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have seemed at least plausible to formerly optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

I will never forget this. Conflict between those who critically examine, creatively conjecture, seek understanding and technological mastery and the atavistic and retrograde elements who believe in some holy antiquity or some savage’s noble edenic idyll is a real one, a suprapolitical one, and it has real victims. All of us who will die count among this number.

As typical humans, we share many moral disgraces; we are not saints, but those who have been -that is, those whom we consider qualitatively superior to us in moral reasoning and instantiated moral heroism- do not share one of our more universal, more pathetic failures as creatures of reason: our imbecilic concern for physical beauty.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows that it is not.

Note that Simone Weil doesn’t say that an ugly woman believes that it is not; she knows, and she is right: we are not our appearances, not at all. We are all aware that whatever physical beauty is, it’s not reflective of internal beauty, persistent beauty, the beauty we putatively seek when we long for another.

(In this sense, the ugly have an advantage: they don’t believe the self is bounded by beauty, while the beautiful often do; the same principle applies to all defects, and is the great leveling countermeasure to fundamental human inequalities).

Physical beauty as we understand it is

• defined nearly entirely by corporations, advertising, the lowest sorts of art, pornography, commerce, and the occasional vestigial evolutionary priority;
• ludicrously ephemeral, certain to decay with age in nearly every case, incompatible with all sorts of natural biological phenomena and inevitably to vanish as we enter senescence;
• outrageously hostile to the typical shapes, sizes, features, and natural configuration of almost every body in the world.

So: what we call physical beauty is arbitrarily defined for us, inherited by us from cultural sources who are neither aesthetically nor morally concerned with beauty as such but mainly with sales, and it tends to be fundamentally irrational in its demands, effects, and uses. 

Even beyond the obvious effects of this stupidity -the body dysmorphia, the self-loathing, the unhealthy beautifying practices, nightmares of high school- is the simple fact that nearly all of us cannot love someone as a partner unless they conform to these standards we didn’t devise and do not respect.

We all value physical beauty; we all long for it, seek it, exclude would-be lovers who lack it -no matter their tenderness, goodness, kindness, humor, generosity!- attempt to exhibit it at great cost. This insane stupidity is shameful; it is a moral lapse; it leads us idiotically astray as we chase what vanishes, what is unimportant, and turn from what ought to be the proper concern of love.

To return to Weil’s lovely formulation, we might say: not only is the beautiful woman fooled into thinking her appearance is herself, but so are we. Even though we know from history that physical beauty is nothing innate, is as faddish as fashions, we concern ourselves with it precisely as some do with money or social pedigree. And let us be honest: to allot love based in any way on attractiveness is not in any way different from allotting it based on wealth, standing, or fame. We are all gold-diggers.

But if it is not physical beauty we should love -because the book is not its cover, because it is not predictive of anything that matters in a relationship, because it will degrade and, if it was important to our love, so will the love itself- what should we love?

We tend to contrast the superficiality and arbitrarity of appearance with the qualities of the self, as we understand them: moral decency, kindness, humor, dynamism, etc. But, as Tragos noted, it is not difficult to extend the argument against valuing beauty to those qualities as well: to such an extent, all are the happenstance of genetics and environment, even if some are presumably less necessarily transient than beauty. For this, Weil has an answer which is harder to immediately understand:

What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him… Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin.

What do we love when we love another? What should we love, or is “should” an absurd word to use in this context? Is it as ludicrous to cherish intelligence as beauty? If we value what seems to matter most for a relationship’s longevity, are we merely chasing a different, comparably reductive sort of goal as the one pursued by the gold-digger or the beauty-seeker?

What in a human is both distinct and worth loving in itself?

Amazing Andy and I discussed something last weekend: the odd relationship between critical, reactive gossip, the unalterably private, and the formation of friendship. Consider the following, if you like:

• You sit through another meeting, another class, another dinner party. What passes between the participants is performance; these are not fora for honesty, after all; nowhere public and social truly is, as you learned when just a child. You are obliged to redact, censor, restrain your strange human urge to complete honesty –an urge we may take as a solitary sign of innate moral goodness or as a mark of laziness: it is so hard to lie, to feign approval, to conjure phony responses to inanities! You are not yourself; you enact a role. You are coworker, guest, polite chit-chatter, neutral diplomat.

• Through your mind rushes a torrent of unutterable observations; they are darkly comic; they are subversive; they may be cruel; they are true in a sense; they are reactive; they seem, to you, to be a kind of arch-reality against the surreality of the gathering. They concern the petty and the profound: he is a fraud, her idea is catastrophically stupid, his child is ugly, her relationship is a sham, he spits, she stinks. While others bloviate, posture, preen –or even if they are simply, innocently absurd– you cannot help but mentally call them to account, critique them, deconstruct them. But you must do so alone, secretly.

• A break in the clouds! You step outside for a cigarette, walk to the bar for a drink, run to your desk to retrieve some papers, and when you see a compatriot –fellow sufferer in the meeting or the party– you share, tentatively at first, your reaction: “There is some real, uh, unusual thinking going on in there.” It is a spark; the conversation ignites; a connection has occurred and suddenly the two of you can at last –after so much pretending– be honest! In excited whispers, released from constraint, you share impressions of the stupidity, hypocrisy, incompetence, lunacy you’ve had to pretend you don’t see.

• Thus: gossip.

• Gossip starts as the determined reclamation of privacy from the coerced publicity of shared spaces, shared lives. Compelled to live with one another, to pretend to respect, like, understand, support one another, we nevertheless have windows of conversational escape: we alight with a friend, say what we think, are brutal and critical, subversive and comic.

• Oddly, this is the beginning of many friendships: shared, whispered reactions against others. Because what is public is irreducibly performative, authentic friendship revolves around what is not public, what cannot be performed, what is hidden and what is, so far as anything human can be, un-calculated.

• That which cannot be public is the currency of friendship, the guarantor of intimacy. And gossip cannot -for various practical and moral reasons- be public. Shared secrets, mutually-disclosed but socially-unacceptable sentiments, are the arch-reality against the surreality of performative acquaintanceship.

• Since we live in an economy of notoriety, celebrity, and publicity, commercial pressures focus technological innovation on convincing humans to be more and more public. Thus: private friendship, real friendship, born of intimacy that cannot be performed, friendship that entails taboos and violates cultural norms, is pushed further into the margins of social experience.

• Everyone knows: on social networks as in real life, the back-channel is the real channel; whatever is said on the wall or on the public post is shaded by the chatter in private messages, email; atop the hierarchy of online friendship sit those people with whom you directly correspond, often about others.

That what is positive can generally be public means that as often as not, negativity is the axis around which authenticity-dependent friendship forms, particularly in the compulsorily crowded spaces of our lives: the office, the social network, the party. This is how the battle feels: like a struggle between impossibly chipper forces advocating the permanently public and negative, reactive forces seeking spaces for the free expression of unutterable critiques. Since no one has yet determined how to monetize the latter, we see industry assembling in support of the former, but one has the sense that all that staged socializing is Potemkin-talk; as always, the essence of the human communicative experience remains privately-shared, socially-untenable asides about how much we detest one another.

From the archly, desperately savored summers of school youth to the compressed weekends of one’s domesticated adulthood, and even to the longest, most varied and transporting travels, one is haunted while on the lam from ordinary life by a fear of wastefulness, of anticipated forgetting. The question is never far behind one’s present delight: have I squandered this time?

What is one really asking? There is a question of substantiality, of the weight and fullness of the memories to come; we are anxious that, in retrospect, the weekend’s treats will not outweigh the dreaded irritations of the workweek, or that the adventures of summer will fade into oblivion and we’ll be lost –terribly, hopelessly– in the tedium of school.

What a strange thing, this nearly mathematical reckoning! Sitting in the sun, feeling its warmth on our legs, or looking up into the entrancingly gray, clouded cityscape of a wintry metropolis, finally away from our offices and classrooms and workshops and stores, we are tormented by some bookkeeping mechanism in our mind, which in spite of any beauties or pleasures ceaselessly imagines how we’ll recall this moment, evaluates the weight of the recollection, and fretfully ponders whether it will be enough to counterbalance the typical days to come!

But what are we counterbalancing? Why should the weight of a memory matter to us so, as though the successive present moments which constitute our lives are so burdensome that only the heft of some extraordinary recollection can suffice, can compel happiness amidst an awful, tedious monotony, can restore balance to our lives! Even if our present is a nightmare, our memories are merely fictions, fast-fading stories scarcely more durable than the moments which they mostly misrepresent: that we should live for a false, frangible, decaying record is silly, senseless, futile!

When I catch myself worrying about the recollective weight of a weekend, I feel insane, as though I obsess with building sandcastles as a tide looms; I fear the oblivion of forgetting and so miss the present I ostensibly care to recall. And oblivion is inevitable, while the sun shines on us in the present moment alone.

By what standards do you weigh time? Is it on weekends that the drive to substantiate time, and thereby life, seems most pitched? Do you have these concerns at all?

In discussing posthumous criticism of Thomas Mann, Clive James notes, in a characteristically provocative aside, something of interest:

“…a modern cultural trend: mass therapy for the semi-cultivated, transmitted through supposedly edifying examples of the idol with the feet of clay.”

Mass-therapy for the semi-cultivated. It soothes one’s fragile ego, one’s tender disappointment at being so unremarkable -so bound by the happenstance configuration of one’s self and one’s circumstances-, to believe that none are any better. It is therefore a profitable mission of the democratic institution of journalism to edify one against despair by helping one to conclude that just as one is all foibles and clay, so too is every hero, every idol.

It is an inalienable imperative for the journalist, from the investigative reporter to the tabloid bloviator: expose, undermine, humiliate, bring low whomever one can. We hunger for more, so they bring more; they expand the scope of journalistic inquiry to include those accidentally made noteworthy by some misfortune, those momentarily elevated by some pop-culture episode, those whose claims to fame are tertiary, quaternary. The search for dirt is the search for clay; it appeases a public which cannot abide the idea of exceptionalism except in the narrowest, quantifiable fields, and even there insists that achievement be counterbalanced with hideous flaws.

(Indeed, the cleverest celebrities strategically cultivate and present their flaws as an orchestrated countermeasure against democratic contempt; they choose, so to speak, what sort of clay suits them and how it is to be photographed. This process is a trope to us now, a worn script; the confessional interviews, the stint -always a stint- in rehabilitation clinics, the book; and we find it harder and harder to tell real suffering from artificial suffering, desirable suffering, the sort of suffering which confers a moral aura and makes one culturally invincible).

We’ve inherited a culture in which idols, and many lesser sorts of elevated personages, are hunted, their private lives scoured for signs of imperfection; and technology is extending it such that we are all hunted, and all our lives are similarly scoured: the Internet is fecund territory for judges and critics; here we all are, together. 

In any event, I was reminded of an amusing scene in Milan Kundera’s Immortality, in which a character named Paul argues against the “metaphysical inequality” of great art:

We started to talk about all sorts of things. Avenarius referred a few more times to my novels, which he had not read, and so provoked Paul to make a remark whose rudeness astonished me: “I don’t read novels. Memoirs are much more amusing and instructive for me. Or biographies. Recently I’ve been reading books about Salinger, Rodin, and the loves of Franz Kafka. And a marvelous biography of Hemingway. What a fraud. What a liar. What a megalomaniac.” Paul laughed happily. “What an impotent. What a sadist. What a macho. What an erotomaniac. What a misogynist.”

“If you’re ready, as a lawyer, to defend even murderers, why don’t you come to the defense of writers who have committed no wrong except for writing books?” I asked.

“Because they get on my nerves,” Paul retorted cheerfully, and poured some wine into the glass the waiter had just placed before him.

“My wife adores Mahler,” he continued. “She told me that two weeks before the premiere of his Seventh Symphony he locked himself up in a noisy hotel room and spent the whole night rewriting the orchestration.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “it was in Prague, in 1906. The name of the hotel was the Blue Star.”

“I visualize him sitting in the hotel room, surrounded by manuscript paper,” Paul continued, refusing to let himself be interrupted. “He was convinced that his whole work would be ruined if the melody were played by a clarinet instead of an oboe during the second movement.”

“That’s precisely so,” I said, thinking of my novel.

Paul continued, “I wish that someday this symphony could be played before an audience consisting of the best musical experts, first with the corrections made in those last two weeks, and then without the corrections. I guarantee that nobody would be able to tell one version from the other. Don’t get me wrong: it is certainly remarkable that the motif played in the second movement by the violin is picked up in the last movement by the flute. Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance, but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least.”

His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won’t be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?

“I don’t deny those symphonies their perfection,” continued Paul. “I only deny the importance of that perfection. Those super-sublime symphonies are nothing but cathedrals of the useless. They are inaccessible to man. They are inhuman. We exaggerated their significance. They made us feel inferior. Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius that it never understood. Just think of this outrageous inequality: millions of Europeans signifying nothing, against fifty names signifying everything! Class inequality is but an insignificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality, which turns some into grains of sand while endowing others with the meaning of being!”

The bottle was empty. I called the waiter to bring us another. This caused Paul to lose the thread.

“You spoke about biographies,” I prompted him.

“Ah… yes,” he recalled.

“You were happy that you can at last read the intimate correspondence of the dead.”

“I know, I know,” said Paul, as if he wanted to counter in advance any objections from the other side. “I assure you that rifling through someone’s intimate correspondence, interrogating his former mistresses, talking doctors into betraying professional confidences, that’s rotten. Authors of biographies are riffraff, and I would never sit at the same table with them as I do with you. Robespierre, too, would never have sat down with the riffraff that had collective orgasms at the spectacle of public executions. But he knew that he couldn’t do without them. The riffraff is an instrument of just revolutionary hatred.”

“What is revolutionary about hatred for Hemingway?” I asked.

“I’m not talking about hatred for Hemingway! I’m talking about his work! I’m talking about their work! It was necessary to say out loud at last that reading about Hemingway is a thousand times more amusing and instructive than reading Hemingway. It was necessary to show that Hemingway’s work is but a coded form of Hemingway’s life and that this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives. It was necessary to cut Mahler’s symphony into little pieces and use it as background music for toilet-paper ads. It was necessary at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts!”

Drunk on his own words, he got up and raised his glass high: “I drink to the end of the old days!”

Art: cathedrals of the useless, coded biography. Tabloid journalism: an instrument of just revolutionary hatred, hatred of perfection, of the falsified ideal. The end of old days: the end of idols, the advent of the age of the crowd. Does Paul describe our world? Is it better that we never forget that all are clay, fallible, weak? Is this a gradual, undirected, democratic revolution against all forms of the elect, the exalted, and if so, what is given up, what is lost?