the Klimt / Benjamin weekend, with side excursions to Eric Kandel and Erin Morgenstern

Longtime readers of the joculum blog will remember what today is. Yesterday was the Gustav Klimt Sesquicentenary, and the Woody Guthrie Centenary, but most people on earth who celebrated anything celebrated the French national holiday.



I was particularly minded to remember Klimt, however, by virtue of having just been given a copy of Eric Kandel's The Age of Insight, the 82-year-old Viennese-born Nobel-laureate neurologist's attempt to explain the trajectory from the art and literature of Vienna 1900 to today's neuroscience. Arthur Schnitzler and Egon Schiele meet the amygdala and the hippocampal subfields.

In other words, this spring 2012 book of which I had previously been unaware (it seems not to have gotten much beyond "Briefly Noted" in general-interest journals) explores exactly the juncture of cultural history, psychoanalysis and neuroscience for which I have been calling.

At least one reviewer seems to have missed the entire point of the book, so I am reluctant to make comments on it until I have had time to read it sequentially and reflect on the relationships among its constituent parts, though this has never stopped me from making a fool of myself on previous occasions.

It does seem, on first viewing, to be a sensitive attempt to correlate the insights of the art with what we now know about brain physiology, all the while recognizing that history does make a difference.

How history makes a difference is the question. I am currently pondering the specifics of the popularity of Erin Morgenstern's novel The Night Circus (though those Fifty Shades novels might make a more provocative topic). I have a small enough interest in the plot to make me reluctant to wade into it, but I was surprised to find one of its brief fantasy sequences (the containers that hold pleasingly evocative textures and odors of not always pleasant situations) elicited strong Proustian memories of similar moments in my own life, plus moments never quite attained but longed for nonetheless. How can so many (but certainly not all) of us have sufficiently similar emotion-arousing conditions, so that Morgenstern could describe them with confidence that they would captivate her readership? Why would such moments have similar effects across a wide spectrum of the middle-class English-speaking population? (I can't speak for other classes and linguistic groups; see the next paragraph.) No matter how much I draw upon the writings about sexual selection in the habits of blue-color-loving bowerbirds, the evolutionary survival advantages of liking leafy groves, and the existence of Stephen Jay Gould's spandrels, I can't come up with even an implausible explanation. At the other extreme, the standard cultural-studies jibe, "You feel that because the cultural imprints of your upbringing made you feel that," doesn't explain why the cultural imprinting should have worked in this case when in so many other cases, it didn't.

I think of the scene in C. J. Koch's novel The Year of Living Dangerously in which the Australian journalist's Indonesian assistant Kumar exclaims over the little roadside restaurant where they stop on the drive to upcountry Java, "This is a very good place, boss. It is like Europe. ...In my dreams I am always at a table beside the footpath, drinking coffee."

You can adduce all the influences of widely read novels and advertising photographs and the relationships between colonized and colonizer that you want, and still not come up with a satisfactory analysis of the distribution of desires. (The distribution of physical goods is a little easier to explain; as Koch's novel has it, if I recollect it rightly, "Kumar clearly felt that the problem was not the existence of frivolous objects and means of attaining pleasure, but that the wrong people had exclusive possession of too many of them.")

The study of our inner ape gets us only so far along the road to understanding the uses of the symbolic and why its effects are so unevenly distributed according to what seem to be personality types. All of us want food, sex, and sleep; not all of us want coffee by European footpaths, just as not all of us want to engage in extreme bungee jumping, shows at Dollywood, Wagnerian operas, pop-up fashion previews, hot yoga, or three-hour-long Eastern Orthodox Eastern liturgies. We can categorize these activities, but we still seem to be at the most rudimentary stage of sorting out their affective origins, despite the arrogance of the individual academic disciplines.

I am going to keep writing until I reach 1500 words, since that seems to be the point at which I stop. Or perhaps I can shut up at half that length, for once. I keep writing ever shorter summaries of the rationale behind "From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again."