George Luis Borges' metaphysics, David Foster Wallace's Post Irony and Joyce's Ulysses

 

Purple Passion Flower Vine

If the back row can take this seriously and stop rolling their eyes I'll remind you that Borges took much of his metaphysics from Schopenhauer. A précis of Schopenhauer's work suggests: "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." Beware of what Schopenhauer understood by Will and by Creative Imagination, if you don't know, don't pretend you do. Borges's own thoughts on the subject included the idea that "Fiction is Metaphysics." Then, yesterday, we briefly played, ironically, with this understanding of metaphysics using the Modernist James Joyce's Ulysses, until overwhelmed by our own genius, Baxter and I sunk into a deep ennui with ill-temper that required lunch and a lie-down, which, according to Schopenhauer, genius is inevitably prone to. Our question this morning goes this way: "Does whatever comes after Postmodernism in the West, treat Plato and Immanuel Kant with respect, will these two giants of metaphysics become an example of really boring, soon forgotten and passionless or will they keep their place as tedious collectibles in one or other of the many Ivory Boarding Houses that does the laundry, serves breakfast, interesting lunches and dinner so no one has to think for themselves?" OK, as fans of Post Irony, what Baxter and I really need is for Kant to offer us an endless Critique of Postmodernism, then we might get a better understanding of this awful accusation that Postmodernism resulted in an all pervading cynicism where a buffoonish, snow-flaky understanding of authenticity defined as "genuine feelings and human connections" are impossible. Oh diddums, that's inches away from saying what we need is a good war.  Ask Baxter, try being on the receiving end of a radical Spleen's theosophical invective. Here we go, my good friend's still waiting for the Spleen's Jesus or maybe his Buddha to send him a manual. So let's just hold fast to the Chariot Theory of God and Men and assume an Almighty is an inevitable gathering place for Ideal Forms. Anyway, David Foster Wallace, was born in 1962, he was a depressed person, he threw coffee tables at his girlfriend, that sort of thing, he hanged himself in 2008 when he was 46. His critique of Postmodernism goes something like this: he reckoned the Postmodernism of the 1950's and 1960's used irony as a tool of rebellion. Good Lord! Beatniks, hippies, sex, drugs, rock and roll, pluralism, social safety nets, national health, unemployment benefits, mixed marriages, irony from the children of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernest Bevin. But on it went, in 1970's postmodernism, according to David Foster Wallace, who would have been a teenager at the time, became a fashionable cave, it was hip, it was super cool, people learned to love it, which resulted in a pervasive cynicism. David wanted a return to his ill-considered understanding of authenticity, he was a teacher looking for enthusiasm perhaps, maybe the back row really pissed him off and his solution to the cynicism he saw being promulgated by the cave of postmodernist irony was this new human condition referred to as Post Irony. The simpler answer might be to remain an existentialist by not parking the boat in a harbor of convictions that demands an enemy for an anchor. But there again we have the very ancient Chariot Theory of God and Men, a demand that experience precedes essence as well as an understanding of authenticity that suggests that like cats we people make our own meaning, so get over it. David Foster, who might not have grasped the fundamental argument of the postmodernists, which is that we're all better off without the wriggling around and lies meta-narratives require to maintain them, was born in Ithaca New York not Ithaca Ulysses' home Island or Dublin the birthplace of James Joyce's own metaphysics. Tomorrow an unironic introduction to hypocrisy. 

Submission to Life and Happy Endings

Clematis Paniculata

We've had a rather feeble shot at saying hello to George Luis Borges. Within the context of a temporal reality, today I look up at him as an early Postmodernist with Post Ironic tendencies and Magical Realist leanings.  Baxter and I loath those sort of categories, but to make ourselves sound important we still use them. Meanwhile, off and on, I've sat on Borges foot stool since the post office days, a good fifty years ago, and I still have a slight grudge against Tolkien, Frank Herbert and perhaps JG Ballard for distracting me. But when you get your books from second hand shops in a welsh city that boasts a university and hard drinking Welsh Nationalist Poets, what do you expect, you can't pick and choose! Either way, George Luis Borges had respect for our man Arthur Schopenhauer, for both his pessimism and his metaphysics. He embraced Schopenhauer's understanding that can be précised this way:  "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." You have to love that simple summary of an exceedingly complex set of ideas. Borges own understandings included the suggestion "metaphysics is fiction," and indeed his blurring of the real with fantasy is beautifully ironic. I know, Baxter is also wondering whether he exists and if so why hasn't the Spleen been given a kinder, more generous personality. As for James Joyce, Borges, like so many, Borges went love hate on him. He loved Joyce's blurring of dream and waking and he hated Joyce's lack of respect and somewhat cavalier attitude for those of his readers who have struggled to battle through the ridiculously long sentences at the end of Ulysses. Just to be sure on our shared definition of ironic. In 1502 it meant: by which a man sayeth one thing and giveth to understand the contrary. These days in the world of Giant Electricity Guzzling Language Modes, Irony means: a contradiction between what appears to be true and what is actually true, or between what is said and what is truly meant. It's easy to forget that all of Joyce's Ulysses happened on one day, meanwhile all of Homer's Ulysses was a ten year odyssey. And here I think my point would be Joyce's Penelope, Mrs Molly Bloom, definitely had a large number of admirers, including a possible lesbian attachment, as well as an abandoned singing careers, and on that one day, the 16th of June 1904 while her husband Leopold was having a Merry time out with menfolk and barmaids, Molly had joined with her very good looking lover, Blazes Boylan. And there she was at the end of Joyce's Ulysses, lying in bed with her husband Leopold, wandering about the meaning of it all and not finding a great deal of hope. Homer's Penelope, in most accounts, not all, had remained faithful during her husband's ten year absence, had done rather well with the family business, and was happy to see Ulysses back even if he had changed a bit and may have been suffering from post traumatic stress and a sort of narcissistic paranoia. Sadly for Molly, and in my view a tad cowardly of him, Joyce had given Molly the responsibility for the final word of his very long Ulysses. That word was "Yes." It was the word Molly had used in her answer to Leopold when he plighted his troth on a day out to a fishing village north of Dublin, many years before. Joyce thought Molly's "Yes" was a female word, whether good or bad, Molly accepted her lot, submitted to it, her "Yes" was an affirmation of her life and her place in the world. It was happy word, a happy ending.  Born in Dublin James Joyce died in 1941 in Switzerland, he was called a modernist. 

George Luis Borges and Post Irony

George Luis Borges, 1951 portrait by Greta Stern

George Luis Borges, no relation to the Danish entertainer Victor Borge, when he was a young man had a wonderful approach to personality. In a bit of writing he called The Nothingness of Personality he suggested and this is the quote: "I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He wrote this in 1922 when he was 23 years old. I'm tempted to suggest he was thinking about his own approach to the characters in his stories, I'm probably wrong. But he doesn't stop there, he goes on to say a few slightly cruel things about the "...general acquiescence conceded by a man in the role of reader..." who makes massive assumptions about and pays only a "slothful" attention to the "rectitude" of the "rigorous dialectical linkages" in the story, account, or whatever it is the writer has written. His use of the word "dialectical" is particularly enjoyable. The original meaning of dialectic began with the Greek for "conversation or good at debate." Aristotle saw the dialectic as a word that described a form of reasoning that produced conclusions from a premise assumed to be true. Two thousand years later Hegel used the word dialectic to describe a form of reasoning that resolved the internal contradictions within an argument through a three step process of thesis (a dubious premise), antithesis (another suggestion) and the third step was synthesis (a new premise.) Then when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels started waxing dialectical, in some quarters the word dialect quickly became another word for Mephistopheles. Which is about where we are at the moment with The Nothingness of Post Ironic Discourse. Is it Irony, is it a search for purpose, an operatic addiction to displays of passion, a resurrection of Swiss Dadaism? George Luis Borges point in his Nothingness of Personality had something to say about these sorts of conjoinments. As someone who wanted to write he was aware that he wasn't a whole person, when seated by his window with pen in hand he was a self who wanted to write words that gripped the attention of the reader, then when he was elsewhere, in the park or walking to the café, he was someone else. The temporal nature of being a person, includes the temporal nature of personality, we change from second to second. His other point in the essay was to point out that given the mostly passive role the reader played, a writer's words had to follow a custom of writing if they were going to retain attention and not stretch the reader too far. In another way, the writer had to latch on to mental heuristics in the minds of his or her readers. The thesis achieved (boy meets girl), an antithesis resurrected (girl doesn't like freckles), the synthesis was more or less predictable (boy throws himself from balcony). George Luis Borges found himself blurring the lines between speculation and reality, he embraced the postmodern understandings, it was back then when the demise of the modern and the emergence of a new truth seemed as terrifying or as ridiculous as the Post Ironic children of today and as ludicrous as the waddling and geriatric political classes attempting to incorporate or seduce them by reducing their passions to dollar bills. George Luis Borges went blind at the age of 55, he died in 1986 at the age of 86.  

The Plain or Gathering Place of Ideal Forms

Gray Tree Frog

On this first day of a possible rapture, Baxter has volunteered a word of two about Plato and chariots. It begins with a parable, allegory, haggadah, whatever you want to call it, this one is about people, gods and ideal forms. And yes, to give this particular exemplum from Plato a degree of juj I have run rather loose with the details while retaining the basic distinctions Plato makes between men and gods, as well as his approach to what knowledge is, where it is, and how we people get our fingers on it. We all, men and gods, start out the same. Dumb as bricks yet beady eyed and blinking in the light surrounded by Ideal Forms of everything there is. And lo as we become less and less adorable and more and more obnoxious we begin to outstay our welcome, so the power from beyond, the origin of all, what Schopenhauer might have called the Blind Irrational Universal Will that exists outside of space and time, what Plato thought of as a non-physical eternal realm, this power from beyond produces chariots to send us on our way. Not sure whether you get a weeks training, whether there's any classroom work, or whether horse management and chariot driving literacy is assumed. What does happen is that some of us are more adept at chariot driving than others, some of us have well matched horses who get along with each other. But some of us have no idea what we're doing, we're a little nervous of horses, their teeth and their hooves, we're given ill-matched horses who have little respect for each other. And off across the plain we go to explore the host of perfect forms, absorb every ounce of perfect knowledge that's been laid out on display for our benefit. Lucky for you if your chariot gets manageable horses, you can take your time, explore, maybe pause get a closer a look at the ideal form of feminine beauty, the perfect carpenter, perfect table, an interior designer or an ideal lemon tree. But if your horses are Ill-matched and uncontrollable, charging around like mental patients, good chance you'll hide in the bowels of your assigned chariot waiting for it to be over. In time the more confident charioteers cheer on their steeds and up they go toward the clouds where they become gods. It's like a rapture. Sadly the less confident charioteers get flung around, this way and that until they get tossed carriage-less out of the Realm of Ideal Forms, they fall to earth were they wake up in a birth canal, find themselves kicking and screaming as they enter the world as mortals. It sucks even worse, because as a new born mortal even though you had your chance to fully grasp and understand the totality of knowledge you remember nothing. You're an empty bucket that leaks. For us mortals, knowledge will never be learned, if we're lucky, and there's a slim chance, with a little help from Plato telling us how to think properly we might remember something from our visit to the Plain of Ideal Forms. The point to keep a hold of, whether you call it Will or Eternal Realm, for both Plato and Schopenhauer this whatever it is lies outside us. For Kant, the plain of the ideal forms is inside us. The European Enlightenment strove for the idea that for us consciousness was our individualized special place, it was time for us to master ourselves, become the self overcoming Übermensch. Now and then a wacko like Schopenhauer popped up, occasionally physicists in their dotage made the odd sinister suggestion about a universal consciousness. The well-off, god bless them, in the West, the comfortable, those subject to aggressive tutelage and the threat of career, while struggling with third generation wealth, feeling overwhelmed and disenchanted by The Enlightenment looked to the East for solace from a wider perspective on the subject of being alive. We wanted cold baths and the whip in the drive to define our frightfully special me.