![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Six impossible things before breakfast
I am going to try to toss out a few (perhaps even six) interlinked ideas that may make sense of the peculiar sequencing of my blog posts (though that may be too much to expect). Fortunately for my readers, I don’t have time to expand upon them.
The time-sensitive news item is that John Crowley’s collected essays In Other Words is in print and garnering blog reviews (I found one via Techrorati: http://asphalteden.livejournal.com/195309.html). My copy is apparently en route from amazon.com, which still has copies along with six or eight wholesalers. Remarkably, the wholesalers bought all the copies that Crowley fans did not, so the book is officially out of print upon publication. Be forewarned.
Friend Grady Harris, a.k.a. utopyr, sends the URL of a new(er) Kenyon Review essay by George Steiner, which in turn reminds me that I wish I had time to re-read and re-evaluate Steiner’s whole intellectual contribution (the re-evaluation including its flaws, of course, some but not all of which he has acknowledged in his autobiography).
Steiner was a key influence on my late adolescence (which lasted until, oh, age thirty-six or so)…the collected essays in Language and Silence were published when I was a college senior, and they gave me a perspective on the intellectual inheritance of the German refugee generation and the nascent influence of the postwar French thinkers, plus a prose style that I imitated for decades. (As did Steiner, who eventually became unable to imitate himself.)
I now realize that Steiner had the disadvantage of reading the key French and German thinkers upon publication along with everybody else who was completely trilingual, and as a result he was as likely to get them wrong as anyone does who first encounters a difficult text. Some of his misreadings, properly mapped, are monumental.
But he sounded so magisterial in his recounting that there could be no doubt of the importance of the Claude Levi-Strauss or the Jacques Lacan to whom he was introducing us in 1968. (I am anglicizing all and any French names I might mention; blogs should not be held to diacritical marks.) He seemed at least as au courant as Susan Sontag, if not more so.
Yet it was the Germans of the previous generation or two on whom Steiner was most profoundly convincing, and he wrote of them in prose worthy of Herman Melville.
“Old men read few novels,” the sentence with which Steiner’s essay “The Pythagorean Genre” begins, is a slight expansion of the mono- to bisyllabic structure of Moby Dick’s “Call me Ishmael.” And the rest of the opening paragraph is right up there with the opening of the translated version of Karl Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” (Which latter I discovered because George Steiner said that Claude Levi-Strauss always read it to jump-start the cadences of his own writing.)
So through Steiner I discovered the poetic parts of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope, soon afterward also covered in an exquisite 1970 special issue of Salmagundi on “The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals This latter was eventually published in book form and still findable on abebooks.com.
Of course Theodor Adorno and Bloch’s other Frankfurt School buddies fitted into some now-forgotten intellectual trends of that historical moment, and into the sociology of knowledge I had gotten via Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, not quite as literarily noteworthy as Steiner’s style but still a lot more sprightly than the Frankerfurters who competed with what Yale French Studies had just described as the Lacanians’ “French Freud.”
Eventually (over the course of the next decade) I discovered that a couple of Central Asian mystical traditions had figured out the basic insights of the sociology of knowledge six or seven centuries earlier. Not having the benefits of Freud and Darwin and having the benefits of a rigorous form of inward investigation that pushes the mind and body to the limits of physical survival, they had come up with explanations for the causal factors that resembled our own, but in a fashion reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The same, only utterly dissimilar.
Hence the fascination with reading texts from several different cultures that repeat what one already knows from the great skeptics of the twentieth century, only suddenly it all spins off into territory so alien to one’s own world that it reminds one of the science fiction novels that shaped one’s late childhood experience.
In retrospect (and this occurred to me only when I picked up the new Glenn Mullin book referred to in a previous post, which discusses Nagarjuna) I can understand why Thomas Altizer (see several much earlier posts re this, especially “Atlanta and the Death of God,” from summer 2006) confused me utterly by going off into the Buddhist logic of Nagarjuna alongside Blake, Hegel and Nietzsche… in, I think, The Descent into Hell, which came out in roughly the same time frame as the Steiner and Salmagundi volumes I’ve mentioned.
Unfortunately, it requires a great deal of setting up of prior plausibility structures (see the sociology of knowledge on this) before you can drop Nagarjuna into the conversation without everyone going “Huh?”
Of course Nagarjuna’s particular brand of centuries-old skepticism had played a role in the philosophy of a number of twentieth century Japanese thinkers, who were grappling with European philosophical thought in ways that were alternatively imitative, adaptive, and oppositional. (See that N.Y.K. steamship postcard a couple of posts back for the kind of imitation, adaptation, and opposition going on in the Japan of the 1930s…all of which eventually made Clint Eastwood’s newest movie possible. Taisho chic and the Japanese pro- or anti-Heidegger philosophers have as little to do with the sands of Iwo Jima as Izaac Mizrahi’s tableware at Target and the school of Harold Bloom at Yale have to do with bombs by the Green Zone in Baghdad. Or else as much. As is the case with any two things you choose to compare.)
I am going to try to toss out a few (perhaps even six) interlinked ideas that may make sense of the peculiar sequencing of my blog posts (though that may be too much to expect). Fortunately for my readers, I don’t have time to expand upon them.
The time-sensitive news item is that John Crowley’s collected essays In Other Words is in print and garnering blog reviews (I found one via Techrorati: http://asphalteden.livejournal.com/195309.html). My copy is apparently en route from amazon.com, which still has copies along with six or eight wholesalers. Remarkably, the wholesalers bought all the copies that Crowley fans did not, so the book is officially out of print upon publication. Be forewarned.
Friend Grady Harris, a.k.a. utopyr, sends the URL of a new(er) Kenyon Review essay by George Steiner, which in turn reminds me that I wish I had time to re-read and re-evaluate Steiner’s whole intellectual contribution (the re-evaluation including its flaws, of course, some but not all of which he has acknowledged in his autobiography).
Steiner was a key influence on my late adolescence (which lasted until, oh, age thirty-six or so)…the collected essays in Language and Silence were published when I was a college senior, and they gave me a perspective on the intellectual inheritance of the German refugee generation and the nascent influence of the postwar French thinkers, plus a prose style that I imitated for decades. (As did Steiner, who eventually became unable to imitate himself.)
I now realize that Steiner had the disadvantage of reading the key French and German thinkers upon publication along with everybody else who was completely trilingual, and as a result he was as likely to get them wrong as anyone does who first encounters a difficult text. Some of his misreadings, properly mapped, are monumental.
But he sounded so magisterial in his recounting that there could be no doubt of the importance of the Claude Levi-Strauss or the Jacques Lacan to whom he was introducing us in 1968. (I am anglicizing all and any French names I might mention; blogs should not be held to diacritical marks.) He seemed at least as au courant as Susan Sontag, if not more so.
Yet it was the Germans of the previous generation or two on whom Steiner was most profoundly convincing, and he wrote of them in prose worthy of Herman Melville.
“Old men read few novels,” the sentence with which Steiner’s essay “The Pythagorean Genre” begins, is a slight expansion of the mono- to bisyllabic structure of Moby Dick’s “Call me Ishmael.” And the rest of the opening paragraph is right up there with the opening of the translated version of Karl Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” (Which latter I discovered because George Steiner said that Claude Levi-Strauss always read it to jump-start the cadences of his own writing.)
So through Steiner I discovered the poetic parts of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope, soon afterward also covered in an exquisite 1970 special issue of Salmagundi on “The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals This latter was eventually published in book form and still findable on abebooks.com.
Of course Theodor Adorno and Bloch’s other Frankfurt School buddies fitted into some now-forgotten intellectual trends of that historical moment, and into the sociology of knowledge I had gotten via Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, not quite as literarily noteworthy as Steiner’s style but still a lot more sprightly than the Frankerfurters who competed with what Yale French Studies had just described as the Lacanians’ “French Freud.”
Eventually (over the course of the next decade) I discovered that a couple of Central Asian mystical traditions had figured out the basic insights of the sociology of knowledge six or seven centuries earlier. Not having the benefits of Freud and Darwin and having the benefits of a rigorous form of inward investigation that pushes the mind and body to the limits of physical survival, they had come up with explanations for the causal factors that resembled our own, but in a fashion reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The same, only utterly dissimilar.
Hence the fascination with reading texts from several different cultures that repeat what one already knows from the great skeptics of the twentieth century, only suddenly it all spins off into territory so alien to one’s own world that it reminds one of the science fiction novels that shaped one’s late childhood experience.
In retrospect (and this occurred to me only when I picked up the new Glenn Mullin book referred to in a previous post, which discusses Nagarjuna) I can understand why Thomas Altizer (see several much earlier posts re this, especially “Atlanta and the Death of God,” from summer 2006) confused me utterly by going off into the Buddhist logic of Nagarjuna alongside Blake, Hegel and Nietzsche… in, I think, The Descent into Hell, which came out in roughly the same time frame as the Steiner and Salmagundi volumes I’ve mentioned.
Unfortunately, it requires a great deal of setting up of prior plausibility structures (see the sociology of knowledge on this) before you can drop Nagarjuna into the conversation without everyone going “Huh?”
Of course Nagarjuna’s particular brand of centuries-old skepticism had played a role in the philosophy of a number of twentieth century Japanese thinkers, who were grappling with European philosophical thought in ways that were alternatively imitative, adaptive, and oppositional. (See that N.Y.K. steamship postcard a couple of posts back for the kind of imitation, adaptation, and opposition going on in the Japan of the 1930s…all of which eventually made Clint Eastwood’s newest movie possible. Taisho chic and the Japanese pro- or anti-Heidegger philosophers have as little to do with the sands of Iwo Jima as Izaac Mizrahi’s tableware at Target and the school of Harold Bloom at Yale have to do with bombs by the Green Zone in Baghdad. Or else as much. As is the case with any two things you choose to compare.)
