Returning

On PR2 a good literary program (their literary programs are always good) about Polish poets connected with the city of Wilno (now Vilnius in Lithuania). Literary, not nationalistic, and about poets who, if they did live long enough to experience the loss and the exile, have all come to accept it. Let’s give up Wilno and Lwow, they all said to a man, or else the fighting will never end.

Yet, they were exiles and as such found it difficult not to be sentimental. One, Konwicki, claimed that he could not write unless he imagined the scenes in his novels taking place in familiar places of the Wilno landscape. A literary historian later analyzed his novels and suggested that every scene can be shown to take place in Wilno, even if in the novel the story it takes place in Warsaw or Katowice.

A writer must be connected to some larger community, continued Konwicki, in the same quoted interview, and I have decided to connect with Wilno… and I have mined it for profit – literary profit – all my life. Hence perhaps the impossibility of myself imagining myself a novelist: I am part of no community. I can’t imagine anyone to whom I would want to address a novel.

But all that aside. The point I wanted to make here is something else: that all these authors – Konwicki, Milosz – have reported one thing. Having gone back for a visit since independence they have failed to find the city of their youth, their memories, and their poems and novels. The city existed only in the past.

The implied meaning of this observation could be taken to mean that the city is no longer a Polish city. Poles are a minority, most old Polish institutions have died – Polish radio, Polish press, Polish bookstores, Polish theaters, Polish cabarets. And there has been an architectural change, the city has grown, the surrounding forest has been cut down, and so forth. This no doubt is the same reaction which is reported by the German exiles who return for a sentimental trip to the former East of Germany, now West of Poland, and leave saying that it has changed, that it is not at all like they remember it, that they don’t want it anymore if it is to be like this. The unspoken subtext is – they (the victors) have changed it beyond recognition.

But these men don’t know what they are talking about. The truth is, that whenever we return to our former cities, we find them changed. And it is not because the language has changed, or the architecture, or the theaters or schools; but because we have changed. What was once familiar and homey, now no longer fits us. We have seen the world, we have grown, the former pot, in which we had been once planted, well, we have outgrown it. It looks ridiculously small now.

In truth, there is no going back, ever, no matter what the history or the politics.

Possible small inconsistencies

I am not sure how to describe Anna’s approach to religion. Reverence is perhaps the right term. She thinks there is no greater moral code than the Christian; that the Catholic Church has saved Greek and Roman civilization from the barbarians; and Poland from communism; that God is a kind of personification of all goodness; that priests are somehow wise because of all the books they have read.

(I can't resist an footnote about priests' books. In Iwaszkiewicz's "Mother Joanna of the Angels" the tsadik says to the priest, who had come to ask about demons: "Would you have me give you in fifteen minutes everything it has taken me a lifetime to learn?" In his voice is derision, but it is also quite bitter, for he means (but neither says nor perhaps realizes): "I have spent a lifetime poring over these books and still understand nothing". In other words, "I have wasted my life").

Anna goes to church every Sunday with the man with whom she lives in sin. He is not the father of her children and is otherwise married with two of his own. How she reconciles her religiosity and her life with her admiration, indeed, submission to, the teachings of the greatest and most moral force on the planet is totally beyond me.

Of course, in this Anna is no different from Peggy, also religious, perhaps more so, whose religiosity did not stop her from conducting an adulterous affair, during which, in breaks between bouts of love-making, she argued with her lover passionately in favor of the existence and goodness of The Lord.

How do these people do it? How do they manage to go to church and pray and praise the superior moral code with their lips and then – turn around and not comply? I haven't asked them because I always assumed they would be put on the spot, hurt, and perhaps offended. But maybe I am wrong. Perhaps there is an answer, perhaps they have found it.

Perhaps this is a circuitry problem: perhaps I see an inconsistency where there is none.

(Inconsistency, said Nietzsche (I think) is an obstacle for small minds only).

A crowbar for the mind

Patriotism, like all tribalism, is a tool with which to subvert the minds of others. You should do something for me because I belong to your tribe. For example: you should buy that lousy and expensive car made in my factory because I belong to your tribe. Or: you should pay me in return for substandard service, and not my competitors, even if their service is better and cheaper, because I belong to your tribe. But what has my tribe ever done for me? And why should my tribal origin limit my choice of services and products, or indeed, friends and lovers? Look at this member of my tribe, a drunken hooligan returning from a football match, yelling something incomprehensible, if clearly obscene, jumping up and down, being rude and confrontational, looking for a fight. What do I have in common with him? What do I want to have in common with him? Why should I owe him anything just because the team he roots for wears the colors of my passport? It's embarrassing.

Hegel Hegel Hegel

Europe represents a creative civilization, China a conserving one. Europeans invent, the Chinese copy.

(Quite. For example silk. And porcelain. And lacquerware. And paper. And movable type. And waterclocks. And gunpowder.)

This is how it happens: the professor says something he has no idea about, but which he read in a book. The student listens, his mouth agape. He has no idea why the professor says that, but it sounds good. We Europeans are creative, they Chinese copy us. Good.

Nevermind that the student has not invented a thing in his life, and probably couldn’t copy one if it came to it, either. He is creative. The Chinese are just knock offs. The professor said so.

It is a comfortable theory to adopt, especially if one is poor and can’t compete with the Chinese in business and has no prospects in life beyond slaving away at some dull job to make enough for a package holiday on Crete. At least one can feel superior that their success is only a result of slavish copying. Untenmenschen.

Obedient democrats

Where does the curious notion come from that democracy has its roots in Christianity? The west had various forms of republicanism long before Christianity and, until recently, rather few since. (English parliamentarism, the only surviving and uninterrupted parliamentary tradition in Europe, has its roots in Saxon tribal customs, not the Holy Writ). All Their Most Christian Majesties have been ruthless autocrats and the church has consistently stood against any creation of and later any extension of voting franchise. And now it does not hesitate to use psychological blackmail, public pressure, and legal manipulation to limit individuals’ rights (to abortion, for example).

The Good Lord, note, is a King of Heaven, not its President or Prime Minister. He is to be worshipped but not criticized. Submission, not consultation is the road to salvation.

A source of democracy? My foot!

Which of course it was

I forced myself to hear the last 20 minutes of Die Walkure last night, on the radio, from the Vienna Staatsoper. It was awful, even worse than the totally joyless Capriccio by Strauss last week. It consisted mostly of yelling at the top of one’s voice; it had no melody at all; what it did have was mostly crass and naïve, a kind of Customs Official Rousseau of music, but rather less talented; and very loud so as to drown out any small voice observing that it has nothing in it but volume. And it appeared to appeal to emotions which are totally alien to me.

Above all, it was serious.

But opera cannot be serious. One cannot take seriously fat people singing about transports of love, or flabby warriors stopping in the middle of battle to give a 7 minute aria. One can only take it unseriously, as a delicious joke. Mozart’s opera buffa, and his Gesangspiele are of course the ticket, but actually the entire preceding chapter of opera history, the opera seria, could not possibly have been either meant or taken seriously in its heyday. It wasn’t. The aristocrats turned up fashionably late, just in time for the ballet interlude, to see the girls’ legs. They dined here. In the Fenice, the diners upstairs threw chicken bones at the popolani standing in the pit below.

Because, of course, only when kidding can we actually manage to say something really profound. Opera seria was about noble characters acting nobly; for real noblemen, to be serious about that would be like being serious about dining.

Which of course it was.

The superiority of the western civilzation

I am not sure wherein people find the presumed superiority of western civilization. The invention of nationalism and communism perhaps? Certainly creative and effective, but anything to be proud of?

Then again, those who find it clearly superior mostly admit in the same breath that it has recently gone to the dogs. 50 years of peace, at last, rising standards of living, greatest personal liberty ever experienced by the largest share of the European society -- all of that is a downfall, downfall I say, moral corruption, consumerism and selfishness all.

Things were a lot better back in 1329. Or so says Ruskin. He still has many followers, as rigorously thinking all of them as he.

Forrester put it best: what do you mean the white man's burden? We're not white! We're pinko-grey! To see the nonsense of all these claims all one has to do is open his eyes and look.

In Bursa

A young, friendly carpet seller in Bursa once recommended a mosque for a visit (he was right, it was beautiful). He also suggested that I pray there. God is one, he said, and your God is the same as mine. But I don’t believe in God, I said. His pupils widened. Do you believe in anything? He asked with a mixture of surprise and disapproval. I believe in good people, I said. Good people come from God, he said. I bit my tongue because the first thing that came to my mind, a kind of bon mot – “Or perhaps God comes from good people?” – was not true. God comes from all sorts of people, many of them not good at all. Like the sort who assume that since God is the bestest, everyone who does not worship him must be morally inferior, if not totally corrupt. And such as those who claim to serve the truth. The truth? What is truth?

We want more minarets

If Turkey joined the EU, says Kazik, we might live to see minarets in Rome. Would you want that, he asks rhetorically. He is surprised by my answer, but announces proudly, "but I would not want to see it". Kazik is, of course, behind the times. He has not yet realized that the Vatican policy now is to make friends with all the former enemies – Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, all and sundry, against the one threat which threatens them all: disfatih.

Not so much atheism, or even agnosticism, but – indifference. The Vatican calls it “consumerism”, but the Vatican is perhaps deliberately misdiagnosing the facts. It isn’t that anything blinds or prevents us all from being religious, which, if we were only not prevented we naturally would be. It’s just that with modern medicine there isn’t much reason to turn to black magic for help. At any rate, Turks are religious. The Pope should want to see them in the EU. Better a religious infidel, after all, than an irreligious consumerist! At least he's a potential ally.

As for minarets, why I’d be happy to see them in Rome – or anywhere. As long as they are built beautifully and house a real muezzin and not his loudspeaker substitute. A real muezzin, one who can sing, like those in Malaysia, and would not be miked up if his life depended on it.

Reconciliations

I am not sure how to describe Anna’s approach to religion. Reverence is perhaps the right term. She thinks there is no greater moral code than the Christian; that the Catholic Church has saved Greek and Roman civilization from the barbarians; and Poland from communism; that God is a kind of personification of all goodness; that priests are somehow wise because of all the books they have read.

(I can’t resist an footnote about priests’ books. In Iwaszkiewicz’s “Mother Joanna of the Angels” the tsadik says to the priest, who had come to ask about demons: “Would you have me give you in fifteen minutes everything it has taken me a lifetime to learn?” In his voice is derision, but it is also quite bitter, for he means (but neither says nor perhaps realizes): “I have spent a lifetime poring over these books and still understand nothing”. In other words, “I have wasted my life”).

Anna goes to church every Sunday with the man with whom she lives in sin. He is not the father of her children and is otherwise married with two of his own. How she reconciles her religiosity and her life with her admiration, indeed, submission to, the teachings of the greatest and most moral force on the planet is totally beyond me. Just as was beyond me Peggy’s readiness to have an affair with me, even as she argued, in between bouts of love making, in favor of the existence and goodness of the Almighty Christian God. The very same god which condemned expressly what she was doing so well: adultery and the desiring of another woman’s man.

(Peggy in the end married a Jew. Is it surprising? Would I be more surprised if she married a Buddhist? Is it really different from Kazik, an accomplished pianist and a part-time classical musician, who married a girl with a strong and exclusive taste for Lionel Richie and such? Am I single because I do not see sufficient value in sex to put up with Lionel Richie as the other man in the bedroom?)

How do these people do it? How do they manage to go to church and pray and praise the superior moral code with their lips and then – turn around and not comply? I haven’t asked them because I always assumed they would be put on the spot, hurt, and perhaps offended. But maybe I am wrong. Perhaps there is an answer, perhaps they have found it.

Hutchinson on the Vistula

Poland is full of Hutchinsons – er – theorists of clash of civilizations. Understandably. Occupied by Russia, Poles affirmed their unRussianness by claiming membership in a different cultural stock. We are from Greeks and Romans, they used to say, while you, Russians, are from the Mongols. “These different political traditions are irreconcilable”, they said.

Russians left, but the theory stayed. Poles are still enthusiastic Greeks and Romans. Learned professors, who have never been east of Brzesc pontificate about the essential and unbreachable differences between the East and the West, us Europeans and them Turks, Chinese and all the rest. Differences about which, of course, they know nothing at all, certainly not first hand.

Poles are therefore to a man opposed to Turkish membership in Europe. Which is really silly: Turkey in Europe would mean at last a powerful European army and 70 million new Europeans who hate Russians even more than Poles. For Russian-fearing Poles it is hard to imagine a better outcome.

The mystical experience

The mystical experience is inchoate and as one emerges from it, one attempts to make sense out of it. Cliff Geertz calls this, I believe, re-editing. (Or some such). Due to the general poverty of our intellectual apparatus, this re-editing, or interpretation, has to happen in terms with which we are already familiar. This means that a Christian interprets this experience as Jesus, a Muslim as Allah, a Buddhist as enlightenment, and so forth.

Most explanations tend to the religious, using such mental furniture as supernatural beings and metaphysical orders of the universe. They tend to reaffirm one’s faith in these fanciful constructs. It goes a little bit like this:

A man in glasses looks out the window. “What do you see?” asks his companion further inside the room. “Glasses” answers the man at the window. “Just as I have expected,” says the companion. “Glasses, glasses everywhere”.

It is thus that it comes to happen that the same transcendental experience in two different men ends up confirming them in conflicting worldviews. Like the blind men feeling an elephant. “A tree”, says one, rubbing the elephants’s leg. “A snake”, says another who had come upon his tail. “You are both wrong,” says a third stroking the tusk. “Though what the heck this is, I have no idea.”

I am with the third man here. The really good trick is, of course, not to bother to interpret anything at all and to enjoy the experience as is. Who needs to know what it all means? Most certainly, like everything else, it means nothing.

The Emotions of Carl Philip Emmanuel

The view is oft ascribed to Carl Philip Emanuel that music is a language of emotions.

This is a popular view. Its popularity suggests that emotions are somehow in and of themselves interesting. But are they?

Given that most emotions are destructive and that the process of growing up appears to be not much more than learning how to control them – keep them at bay, even, what interest is there is trying to understand those of others? Knowing how X feels is supposed to be some kind of a clue about his character; that he loves us, for example, is supposed to be rewarding. I do not see why. The question how X feels is totally irrelevant. The real question is how X will act; and of that his emotions are not necessarily a useful guide at all.

In fact, listening to CPE, I do not see an interest in emotions at all, whatever he may or may not have said on the subject. (I rather do doubt he said what they say he did). Rather his central, and perhaps only emotional interest appears to be in a particular kind of emotion: a contented equanimity.

I share that interest. Other emotions do not interest me at all. Either mine – or those of others.

Veronica

I have lived on three continents. How can I take an interest in a woman who has lived in one country, tops two? I speak six languages. How can I find interesting a woman who speaks one or two? I have considerable expertise in South East Asian textiles and theater, Indian classical music and dance, early Italian painting, baroque opera, Persian miniatures, finance, evolutionary psychology, Far Eastern literatures, history. With what woman can I converse for more than 15 minutes without the conversation becoming a tutorial? And am I interested in tutoring? So a woman will have to be to me a beautiful body and a charming character. Lovely, but long term insufficient. Actually, progressively, insufficient in the short term, also.

Mental Deficits

Some time ago, the Surgeon General of the United States announced that, in his opinion, some 20% (or was it 25?) of Americans suffered from mental illness. I do not take this to mean that Americans are somehow crazy to an unique and unprecedented degree, but that we all are, and that a similarly rigorous (or not) study performed in any other nation –most for the moment have not had either the resources or the bloody-mindedness to make them – would discover similar rates of mental illness.

I also assume that the category “illness” referred to people who were suffering. But the scale of mental problems – or malfunction, if you will – must surely be much higher. For, surely, there are people whose brains regularly malfunction in certain areas of computation, but who do not suffer from the condition in some inordinate degree, or do not cause others excessive suffering, and who are as a result simply taken to be ungifted in some areas. And others who may not even notice, or be noticed, to suffer from these deficits.

Such areas as the ability to manipulate fractions, for example; or tone recognition; or the ability to manage one’s finances; or to sense the feelings of others, or any of the areas of computation which we assume to be natural or normal to all men, but which clearly are not.

In my case, one such deficit, one of which I am aware (there are countless others, I am sure), appears to be orientation within cities and buildings. I have no problem finding my way in nature, where I always seem aware of the cardinal directions, and the distance traveled and the distance remaining; and where by what seems to me a sixth sense I seem always aware of the position of the sun, the belichened side of trees and rocks, and so forth; but inside buildings and cities I am a complete idiot and the ease with which others negotiate them invariably amaze me. The explanation for this difference is simple: I have a faulty autolocation circuit, while my friends don’t.

So this is one rather glaring mental deficit with which I am obliged to live. There certainly are others, some too personal to discuss; as well as some others which I have had not the chance to notice.

The word “notice” is the key idea here. If the basic circuitry is there and we function normally – or at any rate satisfactorily –in most common circumstances of our daily life – shop, cook, work, copulate, bear and feed children, our peculiar mental deficits may remain hidden from view simply because they are never called upon; never, or, at any rate, rarely enough to enable us to ignore the evidence of the malfunction when it does arise. Oh, he was just tired, we say to ourselves when an otherwise satisfactorily performing person does or says something obviously wrong; we say, he is under stress; or not paying attention; or whatever. There are countless excuses with which to cover up the evidence of mental deficit. And we want to cover it up because a mental deficit can be a disturbing thing. For one thing, what would it be like to live in a world in which we would have to assume that everybody’s brain is somehow essentially different from our own? That we are, in fact, to each other aliens?

It is this inclination to cover up, from our own eyes, the existence of a mental deficit which causes husbands not to notice that their wives are suffering from psychosis; or wives that their husbands are pathological liars, despite living together, in close proximity, for 20 or 30 years.

So, how big is the proportion of the mentally defective population? If the mentally ill are 20 or 25%, are the happily defective another 25%? Another 50%? Are the defective in fact the majority? Is being defective in fact the normal condition, and being defect-free – abnormal?

The causes of such deficits are probably genetic: all the defective individuals are simply the mistakes of the gene-swapping system which constantly rearranges different features. Their defects persist in the population, and reproduce, because, it turns out the particular circuit they lack is not actually necessary for reproduction. What they have is enough for them to get by, and they do and they leave offspring to continue the good fight.

Yet, it always surprises us when someone we have known for a long time turns out to behave oddly under a new set of circumstances. Perhaps something terrible, some trauma, happened to him in his childhood, we say to ourselves.