Goines On: Poised for the day

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Goines was in the home stretch of his reading of Julian Barnes’ book about Dr. Samuel Pozzi and France’s Belle Époque (1871 – 1914). The doctor has died (of gunshots fired by a disgruntled patient), and his measure is being taken by many, including his friend the French aesthete Count Robert de Montesquiou. Barnes introduces the Count’s measure by saying:

Ask Wednesday: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Who's asking?

By Morris Dean

As far as I can remember, I didn't wonder as a child why there was something rather than nothing, and I don't remember hearing anyone voice the question. I believe I came upon it for the first time at age 19, in a book by German philosopher Martin Heidegger –Introduction to Metaphysics (from a 1935 lecture).

The day the music died

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
in a library

I know where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news that Philip Larkin had died. I was driving to work through Durham and was on that section of road right after Duke University Rd. becomes W. Chapel Hill St. I was listening to Morning Edition on WUNC 91.5 FM. And since Larkin had died the day before, on December 2, I know from the 1985 calendar that I heard the news on a Tuesday.
    Larkin was a librarian and a poet. He was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), just as Kingsley's son Martin was a contemporary of Christopher Hitchens (both born 1949). They all knew, liked, and wrote about one another.
    Hitchens introduced Larkin's main poetic theme, death, in the prologue of his memoir, Hitch-22, in the course of talking about having been prematurely "killed off" by a London magazine that contained the sentence, "Martin [Amis] was literary editor of the New Statesman, working with the late Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes...." [p. 12]
    Julian Barnes had titled his own meditation on death Nothing to Be Frightened Of¹. To Larkin, as with Woody Allen, it certainly was something to be frightened of. But whereas Allen didn't (and presumably still doesn't) want to be there when it happens, Larkin didn't want to be dead, and he wasn't consoled by the thought that when he was dead, he wouldn't be dead, because he wouldn't be:

Philip Larkin...observes in his imperishable "Aubade" that [not knowing that you are dead] is exactly the thing about the postmortem condition that actually does and must make one afraid:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true....
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear....[p. 14, Hitch-22]

But given that I blog daily, whether I have anything to say or not, it was because of another bit about Larkin that I'm writing this article today. (Let's not dwell on death for now.)
    As I indicated recently, I've been reading Kingsley Amis's Memoirs. It has a chapter on Philip Larkin:

[Larkin] always knew where he stood, never fooled himself or said anything he did not mean. When he told you he felt something, you could be quite sure he did feel it, a priceless asset to a poet, and a poet of feeling and mood at that.
    The same quality ensured that when he had nothing to say he said nothing, a turn of mind that helped him not to write any bad poems. [emphasis mine; at about 2 hours, 25 minutes in the digital recording I'm listening to]

    That is, I wanted to take this occasion to say something that I do have to say: I apologize for the times I've had nothing to say, and said it.
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1. A couple of quotes from Barnes's book can be found at http://moristotle.blogspot.com/2008/12/it-is-difficult-for-us-to-contemplate.html and http://moristotle.blogspot.com/2008/12/other-possibilities-beyond-brute.html.

Word games

Robert Conquest
(b. 1917)

So far, I've had three suggestions for the final line of Wednesday's limerick,

There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
    So this elderly menace
    Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________

all from my old college friend Jon:

We did it in a bed and said "Oh, yes."
And all that was required was togas.
Straight sex, rats, does not rhyme with Stoke Poges.

I like these, but I'm disapponted by Oh, yes's and togas's failing to include a rhyme for "Stoke" and "poke," and, of course, the clever third line repeats the given first line.
    Jon's first two suggestions are easy to adjust:

Where he did it in bed and said [choke] "Oh, yes!"
Where they managed the deed in bloke togas.

(I think togas came in men's and women's styles!)
    I don't expect to find "the solution" later in Hitchens's book, but in reading on I found something even better, more about word games, of which, we have to admit, writing limericks is one:

I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead....[p. 130]
    I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, they can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin [Amis, son of Kingsley] was—is—a genius at this sort of thing. It arose—arises—from his willingness to devote real time to the pitiless search for the apt resonance....[p. 164]
    Something of the same was true of the "Friday lunch" that has now become the potential stuff of a new "Bloomsbury" legend...There was never the intention or design that it become a "set" or a "circle," and of course if there had been any such intention, the thing would have been abortive. The Friday lunch began to simply "occur" in the mid-1970s, and persisted into the early 1980s, and is now cemented in place in several memoirs and biographies. Let me try and tell you something of how it was.
    It began, largely at Martin's initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot's successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer's literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Time's op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell's masterwork [A Dance to the Music of Time] and among Mark's aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: "It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less [sic] than three times."...The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn't otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae....[pp. 168-169]
    ...but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick [emphasis mine]...always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well....
    Simple "versified filth"—Amis senior's crushing condemnation of most popular limericks—was not allowed.
    Indeed insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the "Seven Ages of Man" shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
    Then fucks, and then fights
    Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

This is not the only example of Conquest's genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik "experiment" in five lines? Barely a problem:

There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
    That's a lot to have done in
    But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in. [pp. 173-174]

There's probably another blog entry to come of this. I see that on p. 435, the index entry for "word games" also gives reference to pp. 264-266.

I used to think that my limerick, "No End in Sight" (November 26, 2006):

Religious war burns on and beleaguers
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
    But it brings no relief
    From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.

was pretty darn good, and maybe it isn't bad, but it compresses far less into itself than either of the examples from Conquest.

If I'm a lost sheep, so are we all

A friend, frustrated by my refusals to "believe on the name of the Lord," finally just asked me:

What DO you believe in? Where does your Hope lie? And what do you believe is going to happen to your soul when you die?

I'm glad for the occasion to write about this here. As I told my friend:

In a nutshell, I trust to chance and cautious living. When we die physically, our personal identities (our consciousnesses—our "souls" if you will) go poof.

I notice now that she capitalized "Hope," and the phrasing of the question (Where does my Hope lie?) presupposes that there must be something (outside myself?) that I can trust (or hope) to fulfill my aspirations (my hopes). I don't think there is such a thing.
    My hopes are simple. I hope that I die before my wife and children. I hope that what time I have left before I "go poof" will be tolerable if not better than tolerable.
    My friend also, curiously, concluded by saying:

As far as I can tell, no one has come up with a cure for death.

While I can't be sure why she added that, it seems to suggest that her main hope might be that she will somehow survive death—since we don't have a cure for it and are, therefore, surely going to die. (I know that she trusts, as multitudes of terrified people do, in John 3:16, "...whosoever believeth in him [the only begotten Son of God] should not perish, but have everlasting life.")
    As another friend, Nortin M. Hadler, MD, writes in his indispensable book, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America, "Even Methuselah died." By the way, he tells me that that will probably be the title of his next book; look for it from the University of North Carolina Press.
    It so happens that I've been reading another book as well (I'm rarely not reading at least two concurrently). The other book is Irvin D. Yalom, MD's latest, Staring at the Sun, whose subtitle is "Overcoming the Terror of Death." Dr. Yalom frankly acknowledges that a signal function of religion is to help people overcome that terror. It seems to serve that purpose for my friend.
    I hasten to add that I'm not reading Dr. Yalom's book as a prescription for my own terror, but because I tend to read whatever his latest is. I learned only recently that he has also published another novel, so now The Schopenhauer Cure is on my reading list. I hope to live long enough to read it.

My friend also asked me:

And where do you get that belief from [whatever I DO believe]? That is the real issue.

She didn't say why this is "the real issue," but I guess it's a reference to what is for her the obvious fact that the Bible is "the Word of God," so why am I not getting my beliefs from it?
    I replied:

Mainly I get [my] belief from having rejected all of the fantastical, wishful beliefs to the contrary.

It should be obvious what the wishful is in my friend's eschatological Christian beliefs. (I qualify the beliefs that way to exclude from this discussion the kernal moral teaching of Jesus Christ, to which I myself subscribe: have compassion for one another, you are no more deserving than the next person.)
    Actually, from observing my friend's life, I'd say that she gets something else from her religious beliefs, something not uncommon, something that I can even recognize from having experienced it myself through religious belief: something like a narcotic high. On another occasion, my friend referred to "the God that I love so much." She wrote, quoting the entire 104th Psalm, that "in the first verses you will see His Majesty and Power." My friend is clearly high on her idea of God. This is a real, present value for her.
    Karl Marx, of course, famously referred to religion as "the opium of the people," but as far as I have been able to make out he was referring to the hope of eternal life to make up for their miserable existence here on earth.
    No, this something else that religious belief can provide is a buoyant, trance-like feeling, maybe like a cocaine or a heroin high. As much as I might like to have experienced one of those highs in order to be a better witness for the simile, I have not experienced either, nor even a marijuana high. But the religion-related highs I have experienced were transporting and pleasant.
    So, why am I not swallowing any of it? Well, I haven't swallowed any cocaine or heroin either, and I didn't finish either of the two joints I was offered. I prefer what I regard as the truth to the various fantasies of resurrection, the separation of the sheep from the goats, eternal bliss, eternal fire.

A pertinent text for this preference came to hand this morning, from Maureen Dowd's November 8 op-ed piece in The New York Times. She quoted Emeric Pressburger, a co-director of the 1948 film classic, "The Red Shoes," who (says Dowd) wrote in a letter to Deborah Kerr in the early ’40s:

No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.

I do not wish to fake an escape from the existential reality of our human condition. I prefer that reality's austere nakedness, however cold like an ancient marble statue of Venus it may be. Should I suffer inordinate physical pain in my final hours, I will more than likely be glad of offered painkillers, but I am confident that I will regard the impending poof as a blessing, nothing to be frightened of².
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1. The photograph of the "lost sheep" was taken by my son in the hills above Rila Monastery, south of Sofia. I've used only a small detail from the original:
   
   
2. The title of Julian Barnes's book that I was reading at this time last year—because it was his latest book.

"Other possibilities beyond the brute either/or...."

Another edifying passage from Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of:

In one of my novels I had a character imagine that there must be other possibilities beyond the brute either/or, the ultimate would-you-rather, of 1. God exists, or 2. God doesn't exist. So there were various alluring heresies, like: 3. God used to exist, but doesn't anymore; 4. God does exist, but has abandoned us; 8. God did exist, and will exist again, but doesn't exist at the moment—He is merely taking a divine sabbatical (which would explain a lot); and so on. My character got up to number 15 (there is no God, but there is eternal life) by the time he, and I, reached the end of our imagining powers.
    One possibility we didn't consider was that God is the ultimate ironist. Just as scientists set up laboratory experiments with rats, mazes, and pieces of cheese placed behind the correct door, so God might have set up His own experiment, with us playing rat. Our task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden. Near one possible exit we hear distant ethereal music, near another smell a whiff of incense; golden light gleams around a third. We press against all these doors, yet none of them yields. With increasing urgency—for we know that the cunning box we find ourselves in is called mortality—we try to escape. But what we don't understand is that our non-escaping is the whole point of the experiment. There are many fake doors, but no real one, because there is no eternal life. The game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences. To watch these humans, freighted with consciousness and intelligence, rushing around like frantic rats. To see how one group of them instructs everyone else that their door (which even they can't open) is the only correct one, and then perhaps starts killing anyone who puts money on a different door. Wouldn't that be fun? [p. 187]

"It is difficult for us to contemplate...."

A passage from Julian Barnes's recent book of ruminations on death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, that I found particularly compatible with my own view:

It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. This is what growing up means. And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation. Here is a Catholic journalist rebuking Richard Dawkins for poisoning the hearts and minds of the young: "Intellectual monsters like Hategod Dawkie spread their despairing gospel of nihilism, pointlessness, vacuity, the emptiness of life, the lack of significance anywhere at any time and, in case you don't know this useful word, floccinaucinihilipilification." (It means "estimating as worthless.") Behind the excess, and the misrepresentation, of the attack, you can smell the fear. Believe in what I believe—believe in God, and purpose, and the promise of eternal life—because the alternative is [expletive] terrifying.... [pp.171-172]