Nov
30
Light is scarce - mornings are bright, but mid-afternoon is the limit of the only afternoon. The land turns dark and the seasons are celebrated indoors. The browns of tea and soup broth, the reds and oranges of my books continue Autumn indoors.
Parents have been obsessed with the terror in Bombay. I’ve been struggling to concentrate while I hear Dad “talk” to Mom, positing various theories about who was involved and how at a volume which could easily rival that of a Twilight fan.
I park myself at the dining table late in the evenings - my books are there right now, it is 23:45 atm. The computer room where I usually read is tucked away at the farthest end of the house: the TV and radio are always on - except now - tuned to news. The present echoes without mercy if you don’t occupy yourself here; it is fitting that none of the books I’m working with engage texts younger than 300 B.C. The present has been very merciless the last few days - cranked at high volume, the TV has been displaying the fighting at the hotels, complete with the gunfire, the explosions, the gore which makes me sick to watch.
The two books I’m reading for writing a better dissertation are centered around war. In Plato’s Laws, the main interlocutor - Klineas - believes the natural human condition is not only a war of all against all, but even stems from a self that is at war with itself. He believes this because of his background: the laws, mores, rituals he was raised with, i.e. dining in common, exercising to train for battle, not having any drinking parties, all scream that preparation for war is the most important thing, and should dominate even a time of peace. In the Iliad, of course, the age of heroes means there is a strange kinship between the Greek heroes who win at Troy and Troy (Ilion) itself. Like Troy, all the heroes perish, save Odysseus, who never quite bought into being an aner (a “manly man”) as opposed to an anthropos (human being) at any cost.
All of this is to get a grip on what Socrates is doing in the Memorabilia. There could be no Autumn indoors, it seems, when Athens was clearly going to lose to Sparta. That time, of course, is the setting of much of the Memorabilia. Yet Socrates didn’t change or overindulge his routine - he visits a painter, a sculptor, an arms maker; tells a brother how he should get along with his sibling; talks to a general about military matters with no sense of urgency, but almost one of curiosity.
The section I’ve been stuck on is about the gods. There’s a theology and a cosmology in an argument from design that’s the simplest thing you’ve ever heard. Socrates asks if the existence of light and night do not prove we’re cared for by something intelligent, and one has to wonder at why the argument is so simple yet so complicated. Its simple surface is for the interlocutor, who isn’t the brightest Socratic pupil, not by far. But the more complicated teaching makes me feel like I’m estranged entirely from another line of thought; nothing feels intuitive about it as I read and reread. Light is scarce, after all.
Nov
27
Happy Thanksgiving!
Filed Under lincoln | 4 Comments
My plan for today is to go comatose in front of the television - I hope your day is just as joyous.
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation is interesting reading: it is very difficult to conceive how anyone in the US could have been in a celebrating mood in 1863. The question is, what is the relation between Providence and the nation? He openly says the nation is being punished for its “sins.” The goods in the first paragraph which seem pettier, i.e. border expansion, population increase, seem to point to the hope for “peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union” mentioned near the end. I suspect a call to a higher notion of justice is implicit in the proclamation, which is post-Gettysburg, post-Emancipation Proclamation: the domestic production, the fact life is going on in the Union despite the Civil War, divorces this country from martial virtue and its attendant notions. “Sins” indicates a still greater concern.
Nov
26
My November Guest
Filed Under frost, personal, poetry | 3 Comments
Just contrasting moods with Frost. Robert Frost, “My November Guest:”
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
The trees are bare, but not quite withered yet. It is damp and getting darker, but there is a crispness outside that I wish to match in my work. Winter is coming methodically, working in clearly defined increments.
I’m anxious, not sorrowful.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
Anxiety doesn’t talk. She just stares at you, and once you think your mind is off her, she’s still there, staring.
In a way, she’s comforting. It feels at times like you’re loved, held to some higher standard. Even when worrying about one’s immediate security, there’s the concern of doing the best one can now, showing gratefulness for all that’s been given and will be given.
It’s not the worst thing to know someone is watching.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Anxiety takes no solace in Spring; her solace is in the certainty of decay. Fear is her motivator: maybe this desolate, faded, weighted condition can be transcended for a moment, and if so, then you’ve accomplished something. If not, all goes to rot anyway.
In this, anxiety is linked with sorrow: both deny the whole purposefully. And they think they have something to teach us.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Those more attuned to the whole - those of us who are human - know implicitly the importance of “my sorrow,” “my anxiety.” They’re parts of a whole we’re trying to piece together. In Sorrow’s case, she should be allowed to speak: she’s only articulating what would weigh too heavily otherwise.
I think anxiety needs to be spoken to, but not badly. Anxiety may deny Spring initially, but she doesn’t deny hope. She’d like to be resolved, and the only question is how. The trick is to move her away from fear towards something rational. Small victories, then, matter far more than bigger accomplishments. Thanksgiving wasn’t about conquest in the New World, but more about getting through the harshest of times.
Nov
23
In Defense of “The Big O” Finale (anime)
Filed Under media | 4 Comments
Spoilers galore ahead; this is a meditation on the last episode of the series
“The Big O” has come under fire by people that initially appreciated it. To quote Wikipedia:
For some reviewers, the second season “doesn’t quite match the first” addressing to “something” missing in these episodes. Andy Patrizio of IGN points out changes in Roger Smith’s character, who “lost some of his cool and his very funny side in the second season.” Like a repeat of season one, this season’s ending is considered its downfall. Chris Beveridge of Anime on DVD wonders if this was head writer “Konaka’s attempt to throw his hat into the ring for creating one of the most confusing and oblique endings of any series.” Patrizio states “the creators watched The Truman Show and The Matrix a few times too many.” The reviewer at Japan Hero does not think the payoff was worth it, writing “the audience had been waiting on pins and needles for so long, and practically every episode upped the tension and suspense at least a little bit, if not a whole lot, and then we come to the big IT-moment, and… well, there it is. For me, it was honestly a little of a disappointment.”
Any anime/sci-fi work has to be examined in terms of the counterfactuals it develops and the questions it raises. The counterfactuals - “what if” questions - arise from the strangeness in any given story.
1. In “The Big O,” Paradigm City lost its memory forty years ago and seems to be the only viable place left on Earth. Our hero within the city is Roger Smith, a “negotiator” who acts like a lawyer and a private investigator rolled into one. The character is clearly patterned after Bruce Wayne, complete with an “Alfred” type butler, a mansion, and an expensive toy few know he pilots: a giant robot (”Big O”) used to combat threats the military police of the city cannot handle. Roger handles cases for people in tough spots, and is drawn into the quest for the truth of what happened forty years ago only by outside forces, including various memories that come back at the wrong moments with full force and paralyze him.
The technology of the robot determines the entire series. Smaller, regular human-sized androids act - and as we learn through R. Dorothy Waynewright - feel just like people. The larger robots, not just Roger’s but the others that appear throughout the series, we come to realize are sentient, and also struggling with fragments of memory.
Moreover, it is said explicitly by the fascist (literally - he owns the Paradigm corporation that runs the city) ruler, Alex Rosewater, that the power of the robots allows one to determine what is just and enforce that notion. The series continually refers to giant robots having the power of God; the three major robots, Roger’s, Schwartzwald/Gabriel’s, and Rosewater’s, all pass judgment on their owners: “Ye Not Guilty,” “Ye Guilty,” and “Ye Not.” We can assume the robots have some fragmented notion of what is just, at least: in acting with a pilot, they represent something more, even if what they represent is failed or incomplete.
2. The technology of the robots determines everything. If you can create a destroyer of worlds that is sentient, what else can you create? A lot of fans object to the ending of the series, where we discover the world is one big set, and that the reason why people are having hell with memories is that the memories were prerecorded using sets and TV cameras for maybe all of them. It seems like postmodern absurdity: can’t we just get back to big robots fighting? After all, we have a series of Communist robots (3 from the “Union”), a fascist robot (Rosewater’s), one that symbolizes the tyranny of public opinion (Schwartzwald) and is modified later to represent a base desire for power (Gabriel’s). Big O itself is explicitly repaired by a team of Paradigm’s own citizens at the end, and defended by those same citizens when appearing to lose the final battle. Why did we have to get smarter than the political metaphor?
The answer is that Paradigm City is an entirely man-made world, with men having crafted other men. The crudity of just giving people memories - roles-in-life - like you would give trick-or-treaters candy is precisely the point. No amount of human foresight in the series can respect human freedom generally: one of the funniest things about R. Dorothy is her initial disdain for religion, and yet the series continues with religious imagery even up to its final moments. In an entirely man-made world, God matters that much more: the fact people suck at playing God demonstrates His necessity, the fact people can prevent others from destroying everything His Providence.
So the postmodern imagery isn’t postmodern, in my book: the Phoenix, the Big Robot that can do as it will with the template of the whole, is the ideal robot the other ones are shadows of. The generic cast of the series - the city is “Paradigm City,” the characters are intoduced to us in one sequence as “negotiator,” “android,” “butler,” “officer” - makes it clear this is the situation we’re in. We may not have giant robots, but we have nuclear bombs. If we want a civilization to disappear entirely, we can do this. We also have, through mass media, the ability to shape memory however we want.
Roger’s existential crises, which seems to occur at the most annoying times, are the key to unlocking him as a hero. He’s engaging in self-reflection despite the fact he only displays a fairly mindless andreia - being courageous, being a “real man” in Greek - most of the time. Reason is almost exclusively the province of R. Dorothy. But she falls in love with him first: in a world without a history, literally constructed by technology, there is no “nature” to contemplate except through the noble. And Roger, for all his faults, is very noble.
3. The entirely man-made world still has Providence within it because of a memory that all share. The character known as “Angel” is utterly useless, unable to commit any act of violence (save one) even though she’s an agent for the Union. The initial creator of Paradigm calls her a “memory” at the end, and says she’s not human. She ultimately gets to determine what the next city will be, even as Alex Rosewater tries to destroy it all for his own gain.
She’s completely head-over-heels in love with Roger, but it is pretty clear that Roger is in love with R. Dorothy by the point she’s really hitting on him. If she is a memory - and certainly Dastun feels a kinship with her, and the coldness of the Union towards her might consist in its never having truly existed - then she’s in a peculiar situation. Her arising - I submit she is the memory of “being loved,” nothing less - is precisely because Roger and R. Dorothy have feelings towards each other. Yet she has to be spurned because of that very fact. In the final shots of the series, she’s behind a smiling, probably human Dorothy in watching Roger drive away for the day’s work. And yet she truly held the power of God.
Playing God isn’t as much fun as it seems to be for many of us: if you do it right, you don’t get to be anything. If you do it right, what you get is to watch others do right.
Nov
20
Lament.
Filed Under education | 5 Comments
At the bookstore yesterday I read a chapter or two of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, which is much livelier, forceful reading than his blog. His most important claim, that our unparalleled access to knowledge is coeval with a culture of decadence which allows the construction of entire worlds around our purely adolescent selves, has enormous ramifications for me. He makes this point: when surveys ask what the significance of 1776 was or what the 25th letter of the English alphabet is, and 90% of young adults, say, get that wrong, we have to consider how much effort it takes not to know such a thing.
The questions for this blog are as follows:
- Can students be simply divided into those that want to learn and those that don’t? I actually don’t think Plato would countenance such a division: that would only account for the rational and appetitive elements, if we took the account of the soul in the Republic seriously. Seth Benardete, in his commentary on the Republic, is fond of the word “thumoeidetic” - thumos: “spiritedness,” “heart” & eidos: “image,” “form.”
- Given that we have decided in the United States that populism is a good thing with no qualifications whatsoever - today my Dad said that one party rule by the Democrats would ensure a just, efficient government (my Dad watches/listens to 7 hours of news each day) - is it possible to work with the voters who voted for Obama in droves but couldn’t tell you which party controlled Congress at the time of the election? (this link is Republican as all hell)
- What can be done on a practical level? Should I write an article on the Jonas Brothers and Nietzsche? Should anything be done at a practical level?
I feel that if I keep writing, something is bound to break through. The trick is to not dumb it down, not one bit: people need to be challenged, and that’s not the same thing as the competitiveness which drives us in school. Fighting hard for a grade on a piece of paper is not the same thing as wondering what Heidegger could mean by “Dasein” when he says it is “openness to being.”