I am Spartacus as a New Narrative for David Wallace's Post Irony Depression

Unknown Moth on Moonflower

Rabbit-Rabbit, I guess. It's not a truly ancient salutation to the first day of the month, around 1909 it appears in print, it was something children were saying in England and might have soon disappeared if President Franklin Roosevelt, who was diagnosed with Polio in 1921 hadn't adopted it for his polio charm or whatever. For a long time, across many countries, rabbits have been a symbol of growth, abundance, fertility, rebirth. You only have to see them in spring, there's something in new grass that hops them up, they bound around with no shortage of self esteem, like rabid mental patients, frightening the cats. The thing about new spring grass, it's very high in moisture, sugars and starch and contains very little fiber, it is like an all natural doughnut washed down with a caffeinated soda pop for the rabbit world as well as a source of rabbit constipation. You can always talk about the rise or fall of collective insanity anytime you want, go back to the Roman Emperor Titus and the equally autocratic Roman Emperor Claudius in 52 AD and 80 AD respectively, they put on sea battles as an entertainment for the masses. So why not a healthier diet, a more stable body mass index, no facial hair something called FAFO, something else called PT, they must both be naval expressions. Either way these bunny hopping offerings from our higher echelons must have been a less expensive alternative to the massive cost to the treasury of Sea Battles with Real Live Casualties as Spectacle to keep an understanding of the world simple and stupid, or KISS as it's called by the very un-woke safety people on the big boats that aimlessly wander the oceans looking for good will or trouble. After that sort of mind blowing desperate hunt for spectacle by the destroyers of the Roman Republic, the First Century AD decision to introduce a more formal practice of Condemnation to Beasts, otherwise advertised as publicly feeding lions with fresh Christians must have been a rather clever economy measure. In our own Post Enlightenment, Post Irony arena my own current favorite in state orchestrated spectacle is that of unlabeled, and slightly pudgy, slavishly obedient to a bee stung and aging princess, masked men with bearded JD running styles employed by the taxpayer attempting to chase down urchins with Brylcreem free and wonderfully flowing youthful hair riding their bicycles. Me, as an upstanding, and paid up member of the back row, it's a narrative I heartily approve of and can't get enough of. I think David Wallace had he lived would agree..

God Bless Taliesin and The Role of Myth

 

Late Aster not Fleabane

We've talked quite a lot about the Welsh Bard Taliesin and his capacity to sooth the furrowed brows of autocratic scumbags masquerading as Princes. Recently we've explored Wallace's suggestion that as Postmodernism became established it promoted a cynicism that needed to be replaced by a refreshing and positive yellow brick road that  postmodernists would refer to as narrative. Whether he turned left or right, up or down, David Wallace always found Oz. My own view is that as society progresses beyond the hunter-gathering period, it get's fat and confused by agriculture, is made to feel divine by the conquest of nature and Industrialism, it chokes on the Enlightenment, and as the post industrial age is subsumed by labor saving devices, gym memberships, exercise bicycles, cosmetic surgery and other forms of mutilation including tattoos, those of us in a position to grasp for fame and fortune can often lose touch with a self that has been well grounded in Hume's: An Enquiry Regarding Human Understanding. Briefly in the United States the project for common sense, William James' pragmatism fostered by his devotion to the understanding that truth emerges from facts, rocked the New World. Meanwhile in a Europe that had been around a bit, Nietzsche having desecrated the sacred texts attempted to describe the Victory of Will in his long poem Thus Spake Zarathustra. Not the most inspiring vision from Nietzsche, his Zarathustra - his advanced man, his superman, his perfectly wise superior human - to me at least, without a narrative, sounded a little bored out of his skull. Zarathustra descended from his mountain top, he went to find his own story and lo his vision of a world without God revealed the last real man on earth to be a creature fat and confused, addicted to every vice Dante could make up, including whatever that thing is people do to their lips to make them look bee-stung and puffy. And yes indeed while God tends toward a following much informed by a cynical hypocrisy, narrative remains a fundamental ingredient of any society, including hunter-gatherers. And by narrative I don't mean fiction or metaphysics, I mean myth. 

Prim yet Improper.

Praying Mantis

As we old farts attempt to dwell merrily in a Post Irony Condition - otherwise known as Wallace's search for useful narratives that are neither abject snowflakeism, Starbucks didgeridoo-libtardism or unchecked, self-aggrandizing fanaticism in beaky caps masquerading as an "enlarging" cause but is, in fact, a narrow, sentimental, and ultimately "pathetic" form of bondage to a chosen self-image - let's attempt to pour scorn on Cynicism and the Cynics. Mind you, perhaps I'm a little too touched by my own experience as a callow youth in what many might have considered a Remand Home. I fondly remember a week long lecture from the pulpits advising the student body to beware of cynics, cynicism, insubordination, Bolshevik attitude, dumb insolence, it was quite a long list with no mention of Socrates, and as a paid up member of the back row, it was a week I thoroughly enjoyed. Any large language model, and pretty much every dictionary will tell you that there are two kinds of cynic which apparently mean  different things. The word cynic comes from a Greek word that means dog-like, so think about that before patting yourself on the back. The ancient word Cynic belonged to a school of philosophy that was founded around 400 BC. Good to know that Schopenhauer, an admirer of Poodles who once threw a seamstress down stairs which resulted in a judgement against him which directed him to pay her a quarterly pension for the rest of her life, may have fitted in very well with the ancient cynics, who took joy from publicly flaunting convention, engaging in improper acts, and were all together very outspoken. Yet in their rejection of conventions Ancient Cynics chose an asceticism that believed in self-sufficiency, simplicity on the understanding that true happiness lay in freeing oneself from worldly concerns, they eschewed wealth, fame, social status, comfortable housing and stuff generally. The other meaning of cynic from Webster's Dictionary goes like this :  "..a person who distrusts human nature and believes people are motivated solely by self-interest, often expressing this with scorn or sneering. They are skeptical of altruistic motives, questioning the sincerity or goodness of others' actions and expressing this through negativity and fault-finding." Webster's definition of cynic makes an excellent description of what dumb insolence might look like to the frail. Baxter and I are still inclined to suspect that the opposite of cynic is "idealist" : "One guided by ideals especially one that places ideals before practical considerations," or "an adherent of a philosophical theory of idealism." Idealism as a philosophy claims that ultimate reality is mental, it exists above and beyond a materialist's material world. A manifestation of Schopenhauer's Will, as opposed to Hume's empiricism or Marx's materialism. "What do you want? Give me a washing machine, a mule and Pork Chop! A shotgun sound and away I ran." As a potential narrative for Post Irony this abuse of the Bob Dylan line leaves plenty of room for good old fashioned pre-late stage postmodern irony, a whole world of healthy cynicism and a puerile skepticism, sounds about right to this end of the keyboard.

Schopenhauer as an inspiration to us all.

Late Blooming Chicory

What does "objective love" mean? If your time here on earth was at any time informed by Arthur Schopenhauer you'd have heard that human emotions are a manifestation of the central and never ending, totally irrational, pretty much random, restless driving force that underlies all of reality. Arthur called this force Will.  Here manifestation means to make tangible and all of reality means everything in the universe. If the Will, for Arthur, is the underlying force, the reality, then the  world as an Appearance of the Will, or the world as a Representation of the Will, is the universe of everything that we experience through our senses which are then parsed by our collection of irrational and wholly unreliable emotions.  Arthur would have placed religion in the category of Representation, it was an Appearance, a manifestation of the Will as interpreted by our fickle, capricious, inconstant emotions which for Arthur was essentially a mechanism of suffering. To reach for the title of a pamphlet Lenin wrote about his own ambitions, his classically human desire to rule the world was summarized thus: "What is to be done?" Unlike Lenin, Schopenhauer had options rather than a series of scientifically supported solutions to the permanence and inevitability of interminable suffering. Arthur gave us people three basic drives which in people are internal tensions that lurk and become urgent needs which are sometimes thought of as motivational forces which compel us to satisfy needs that include biological drives, psychological drives and social drives, and here worth remembering that for Arthur, reality as interpreted by our emotions, was just one nightmare followed by another. Anyway, Arthur's first drive is Egoism, this most prevalent of drives is all about me and how much more important and deserving I am than anyone else. The second drive Arthur boldly decided is less common, or is supposed to be less common, it's what Arthur thinks of as malicious and negative. Of course some of us are prone to it especially around elections time, and yes it's when you wish that horrible things and terrible suffering would happen to other people. The third drive is compassion, an ability, nay a desire, to see beyond your own ego or maliciousness and recognize the inevitable suffering of others. Somewhere in this third drive, Arthur sensed the beginnings of an understanding that could lead to a shared and cooperating social concord. He might have been the Franklin Roosevelt of his day, instead he searched for an escape from the torment of emotions, their insistence on interpreting an irrational Will and as a result driving us, without our consent toward greater and greater follies. Arthur's solution was two fold. We could seek temporary relief in the aesthetics of this or that art form. The ballet, opera, getting bombed out of our skulls at an Eisteddfod or a Pink Floyd concert. Or we could find a permanent solution, a salvation in an asceticism that ignores all desires, dreams, human relationships, does away with the will-to-live and finds inner peace and harmony far away from the endless cycles of misery that would otherwise be cast upon us. So, let's not get too cute but objective love for Arthur might well have been surrendering to a callous and unloving reality by giving up on the will-to-live, not suicide, but Schopenhauer's Will, the irrational and restless force that is reality manifest through our emotions. And there we go, Borges "fiction as metaphysics." Joyce's submission to life through Molly Bloom's "Yes, Yes, Yes...." David Wallace's fruitless search for a comfortable narrative to replace the cynicism the poor chap perceived in late stage postmodern irony.