Reading Note:
Modern Hygiene
2 December 2014
What is the structure in this picture? A block of cement, topped by two pairs of I-beams, in between which — what? Why was it built? More to the point: how long will it take to demolish? It fills at least two lanes of Second Avenue. Presumably they won’t finish it with ramps at the short ends. The curious thing is that the cement part looks brand-new, while the metal bits show signs of severe wear and tear. What purpose did the yellow railings serve? Was there a third? What is this thing?
The last bit of repaving the sidewalk in front of the building is taking a while. First, it seems, the workmen must jackhammer out of existence the narrow strip of walkway that we had to live with for several years (or so it seems), and keep on digging down to a depth of three feet or so. Why? One branch of the driveway was properly paved today; it may be in use tomorrow or Wednesday. Then it will be the turn of the other branch, which was very roughly paved a while ago.
Soon, it seems, the work will be done — around the driveway and the substructures of the station entries, two elongated U-shaped walls of cement, about a yard high, opening out in opposite directions away from the driveway. There remains the corner of 86th and Second, the most degraded patch of pavement that I have ever seen in Manhattan. There is no curbing; the boundary between road and sidewalk shifts from time to time. Actually, the opposite corner, outside Gracie’s on Second (the former Viand), is worse, because pedestrians are forced into narrow areas in which they are put at cross purposes. People trying to cross 86th Street get stuck behind a mass of other people backed up to cross Second Avenue. Moms texting while pushing prams make for extra delight. In the process of restoring all four corners of the intersection, pedestrians will be tortured into abattoir-like pens — I’m sure of it. And then the two roads will have to be repaved. Such fun.
You won’t be surprised to learn that older locals are often heard to swear that they will never use the new subway. Never never never, not after all the inconvenience. You won’t hear me saying that. I’m going to use the damned thing as much as I can.
***
I’ve come back to Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books. When the book arrived, I opened it to the title essay (actually entitled “When I Was a Child”), which begins on page 85, about halfway through. When I got to the end, I took up John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, which I finished last week. By Thanksgiving, I had consumed more food for thought than my up-in-the-air housekeeping could handle. It wasn’t until this morning that the prospect of further intake did not oppress my cogitive digestion. So I resumed Robinson, at the beginning.
Why am I telling you this? Because it’s the only way I can begin to make sense of the deep concord that I sense between Robinson and Carey — or, perhaps, that I project upon them. They don’t write about the same things, and they don’t score the same points, or even the same kind of points. And yet they strike me as writers exploring two phases of the same argument. It’s an important argument against modernism. Both are aware that objecting to modernism in this day and age makes the objector look either stupid or reactionary or both. But they are not making the kind of argument that was attempted when modernism was new, exciting, and unknown. They’re not alarmed by the modernist dismissal of the classical rules of harmony. The only thing that alarms them is that so many smart people appear to be unaware that modernism is an elitist stinkbomb, largely intended to repel the uninitiated, and to convince them of their ineligibility to participate in cultural deliberations.
This is not to say that everything created under the aegis of the modernism aesthetic is depraved or worthless. Some artists can’t help creating beauty no matter what intellectual program they’ve subscribed to. Rothko and Twombly, Pollock and Still all discovered paths to the beauty of brooding. But it remains slightly improper to talk about the beauty of their work. Say anything but that! Modernism is supposed to be rebarbative, or at least to make you think. (This intellectual emphasis on the unpleasant, I see now clearly, is the only way that so-called conceptual art could ever be considered as art.) But the modernist aesthetic is not exciting anymore; its function as a means of oppression is only too familiar. We have seen the end of modernism’s rainbow, and instead of a pot of gold we find the black hole of Mein Kampf. (Carey’s most bracing pages, at the finale of The Intellectuals and the Masses, insist that we regard Hitler as a full-fledged modernist. However corny the pictorialism of his “art,” his political ideas were austere.) Perhaps there is an alternative understanding, having nothing to do with modernism, that explains, say, the success of Cézanne or Klee. And if there is, I’ll bet that it depends on perceptions of sheer beauty.
It would probably be more accurate to regard modernism as an anaesthetic, a deadener of feeling. At this point in my entry, I’m aware, I ought to regurgitate the passages in Carey (and in Robinson) that support the assertion that I have just made. But I should prefer to leave it stark, “obviously” wrong-headed. Irritating readers into examining their feelings about modernism — not their thoughts, but their feelings — might be the only way of snapping them out of the trance of modernism hegemony.
Modernism began as affliction of the arts. Then, having wasted that host, it moved to politics, provoking totalitarian regimes and a Cold War that corrupted the political vitality of both contenders. Now it rules from the folly of free-market economics. Its devastations in all three fields share an identical contempt for individual human variety. Its undying objective is the reduction of the multitude of egos in the world to a bestial, undifferentiated mass. But while this objective can bring about unimaginable harm, it can never succeed.
It will be objected that my preference for feeling over thought is anti-intellectual. In the narrow sense of John Carey’s title, I am indeed anti-intellectual. I should prefer, however, to declare that what I’m opposed to is ideology, the imposition of systematic constraints upon the lively human mind. I should like to reclaim the notion of the “intellectual” for the working of happier minds.