More Notes on His Endlessness

I have just spent a snowed-in weekend—in a city increasingly evenly divided between people who grew up with snow and people who have scarcely ever seen it, it takes very little snow to create cross-cultural traffic havoc—and took the occasion to finish re-reading John Crowley’s Endless Things, or rather to read the book for the first time, having pre-read its text in a not quite identical version in bound advance proof. (I took this occasion to ponder the few rewritten paragraphs.)

Not a bad proofreading job, all in all—one word still painfully misspelled, unless there is a variant of which I’m not aware (proofreaders always need to be taught the necessity of tautening the condition of a text); a close-quotation mark missing on one piece of direct discourse; an auxiliary “been” still omitted from a descriptive sentence that has no reason to replicate the spoken vernacular. (I as much as anyone love Crowley’s unparalleled ability to reproduce the way we really talk and think, in fragments, that is. But.)

And it is evidence of Pierce’s scattered mental state in his new world that his recollection of Latin and art history has gone to hell, albeit perhaps no longer in a handbasket.

One case is probably just a difference of opinion: knowing the odd employments of art history majors, I think the folks who came up with the name of Festina for a car would have remembered very well something like the Warburg Institute’s fascination with Renaissance neo-Platonism’s metaphysics of “festina lente,” make haste slowly, And then such an idea person would have giggled, as one does when one has put an inside joke over on an unknowing superior.

And he can be excused, given the surroundings in which the idea occurs to him, for his slip in thinking of Hermes and his Corpus Hermetica. One Hermeticum, two Hermetica (or a collective plural), to go along with one corpus, two or more corpores.

If my brain physiology will let me (and it often hasn’t) maybe now when the DEFINITIVE TEXT of the final three novels in the cycle appears in 2008 (and it would be nice if Overlook Press could get the Deluxe Boxed Set out in time for Christmas 2008, if not Election Day 2008) maybe I can engage in my first full-fledged piece of literary analysis in several decades, as distinct from literature-inflected multidisciplinary artistic analysis.

I remain fascinated with the slipping and sliding between alternate opinions (both as expressed by characters and by the nearly omniscient but not omnipotent narrator, who, no matter what Alain Robbe-Grillet grumbled half a century ago, is in this case clearly not God, or at least not the sort of God Who isn’t engaged in disentangling His own frame tale) and the systematic creation of ambiguity from chapter to chapter regarding who is writing what. (Indefatigable Crowleyans will have mapped all this out long before I ever get around to thinking about it again.)

As I say, I wouldn’t bet money on seeing my own commentary on all this. Not even if somebody gives me an advance on the book.

landscape and looking: rethinking a few out-of-fashion scholarly modes

Mapping the Self: On Soft and Hard Scholarship of Perception and Aesthetics


Looking just now at the title of a phenomenological study of place and location, I realized I was unlikely ever to read it because it would contain little I didn’t already know, and much with which I would once have agreed but now do not.

Phenomenology, like Jungian psychology, is held in contempt these days for reasons that have more to do with the present climate of presupposed cynicism than with those discipline's actual errors, even if the actual errors may be many.

Phenomenologists and Jungians alike often seemed to inhabit what the captains of industry would consider an airy-fairy world; which is not a good thing when you think that Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Carl Jung alike would have considered it part of their duty to provide accurate maps of the inner world of the captains of industry, every bit as much as of the inner world of any dreamer of dreams and see-er of visions. A science that is pretty good at re-conceptualizing shamanism but decidedly uncool with understanding the interior mechanics of late capitalism is a science with real problems.

It doesn’t matter that the habits of late capitalism may be self-destructive as well as destructive of others (as well as self-empowering and enriching of others, and we leave that argument to one side, or we, shall we say, “bracket” it). It matters that we understand the self-understanding of the people who have those habits, and those who do not, and then explore the relationship or non-relationship between incompatible ways of looking at the world. Not of thinking about the world; of looking at it. (Actually, there are a lot of issues beyond looking, but this is a post about landscape and looking. Phenomenology and Jungianism are also diametrically opposed in their approaches to the problem, but this is why so many disciples of Stanley Romaine Hopper felt impelled to deploy them both as complementary ways of getting at the apparent and far from apparent aspects.)

The anti-phenomenological philosophy that believed in the wisdom of ordinary language (the language in question being English) was also discarded quite some time back, but the punchline of an ordinary-language anecdote about place and townscape will make my basic point.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, the Addison-Mizner-variety city hall in my Florida hometown was due for demolition. (Surely someone has written about the builders who did such competent knockoffs of the Spanish or Central American-style architecture that Mizner championed, but let us bracket that, too.)

As I had said a few years earlier to the modernizers who were determined to disco-ize the Wisconsin Lutheran Church of my mother’s childhood, I thought it was shortsighted to destroy what couldn’t readily be built again, instead of finding reversible ways to re-invent the existing structure.

My father remarked, lapsing deliberately into the vernacular, “Our city manager ain’t got no imagination.”

“Imagination” has long been a cuss word among academics, along with “Romanticism,” but all the analytic presentations in the world couldn’t replicate the emotional tone of this particular building’s relationship with the lakefront behind it and the then somewhat weather-tattered landscaping in front of it. The point is that, of course, the decision-makers would never have seen this agreeable sight, their focus being entirely on finding a parking place, walking up the steps that cost money to be made handicapped-accessible, and walking down the oak-floored corridors to the offices where the bound volumes of documents were spilling off the inadequate metal shelves. (Microfiche was an inadequate stopgap in days when city computer systems were off-limits to mere desk clerks.)

So the old city hall was a goner, and the only question was whether by sheer accident the planners would commission an architect with an eye for landscape to produce something not too limited by its decade. Except in my father’s quip, the word “imagination” never came into play (and it didn’t do any work, either).

Now, it so happens that we have ample numbers of studies of issues in urban planning that approach the issue from what turns out to be, for all intents and purposes, a naively god’s-eye view. The issues addressed are those of traffic congestion, unanticipated consequences of the new construction in question, and, in counterpoint, problems of how the new construction will fit into the overall urban fabric in visual terms.

Who defines those “visual terms” has usually been discussed in terms of power and motivations, whether those of economic abstraction or the convenience of users and involuntarily inconvenienced motorists.

The aesthetics of the situation is talked about as one more variable in an enormously complex equation.

It is considered out of fashion to attempt to figure out whether the disproportions are of such a magnitude that the vast majority of passersby will see the thing as butt-ugly.

And of course what is ugly and what is beautiful does alter over the generations, but interior perception is still based partially on human physiology.

And in order to discuss the relationship of physiology to cultural conditioning, we need some way of getting at the unconsciously constructed emotional tone of the perceivers.

And at that point we are back to things that phenomenology and the Jungians grappled with in their separate misguided ways, but things that still exist even if the bare mention of them makes contemporary cultural critics reach for their revolvers. (Before remembering they do not carry them.)

I do believe (I hope)

Listening to the WCLK performance of a resonant cantata of "We Shall Overcome," arriving at a comfortably prosperous Thai restaurant at two p.m. to find it packed with African-Americans and other ethnicities, many of them looking like they had attended the King Day events earlier in the day, I found myself thinking again that it is good to imagine that the country has come through its forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Even though it almost certainly is not true, for history does not construct itself according to the archetypal patterns imposed upon it.

Except, of course, when it does.

Many digressive thoughts stem from that topic, but I shall quit while I am only modestly destroying the rhythm of real and/or delusional hope. We begin empty, and we fill the spaces of the not-yet with what as yet is only the might-be. Which sounds more convincing in German, but it is empirically verified nonetheless.

Or at least that is what I hope.