Gotham Diary:
How Would You Like It?
September 2015 (III)
Monday 14th
“I love listening to you talk,” said Kathleen. “Except… except when you get on one of your tangents, like Hannah Arendt or Joan Didion.”
Hannah Arendt I understand. How long did that go on? The first half of last year (2014), or nearly. But Joan Didion? Two weeks tops. It wasn’t until we returned from Fire Island that I got my hands on Tracy Daugherty’s biography. Until then, I had no reason to talk about Didion. Perhaps Kathleen was anxious that something protracted might develop. It is true that, having done with Daugherty, I read through After Henry; and I have Play It As It Lays in my pile. At the moment, though, I’m reading A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford’s first book (published by Gollancz under another title, in 1953). Given the new rules, I can’t say anything about it, except that it is crammed with instances of embedded, understated hilariousness that can’t be retailed without a lot of setup.
Consider:
“You wouldn’t want to make that trip twice.”
“Not under ordinary circumstances, no.”
There is absolutely nothing funny about those two lines; you have to have read what comes before for the quiet riposte to explode. As indeed it does, slowly, quietly, but with so much force that you cannot laugh. You can only put the book down, and wonder if tears are going to burst.
Both Didion and Bedford are harsh, in incidental passages, about New York City. “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s long essay about the “Central Park Jogger” case, contains a denunciation of Gotham that begins (more or less):
What is singular about New York, and remains virtually incomprehensible to people who live in less rigidly organized parts of the country, is the minimal level of comfort and opportunity its citizens have come to accept.
and ends (more or less):
It was only within the transformative narrative of “contrasts” that both the essential criminality of the city and its related absence of civility could become points of pride, evidence of “energy”: if you could make it here you could make it anywhere, hello sucker, get smart. Those who did not get the deal, who bought retail, who did not know what it took to get their electrical work signed off, were dismissed as provincials, bridge-and-tunnels, out-of-towners who did not have what it took not to get taken.
I am sure that if Joan Didion were to apply the critical skills that she brings to bear on California in Where I Was From to New York, she would find the “criminality” of the city to be the consequence of change outrunning comprehension: just how do you regulate the flow of a Niagara of money? Or a Niagara of immigrants? Both at once?
Bedford’s complaint has been answered, pretty largely, by air-conditioning.
Through the day a grey lid presses upon the City of New York. At sunset there is no respite. Night is an airless shaft: in the dark the temperature still rises; heat is emanating invisible from everywhere, from underfoot, from above, from the dull furnaces of saturated stone and metal. The hottest point is reached in the very kernel of the night: each separate inhabitant lies alone, for human contact is not to be endured, on a mattress enclosed in a black hole of Calcutta till dawn goes up like a soiled curtain on the unrefreshed in littered streets and rooms.
Perhaps, also, our clothes have gotten lighter; we certainly wear fewer of them. I did not spend a lot of time in the City when I was a child, but I do remember it as stuffy, always stuffy. Bedford is right about this:
In spirit and in fact, in architecture and habits, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States remains harshly northern, a cold country scourged by heat.
These snippets of Bedford come from the very first pages of A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Odyssey; they describe what Bedford is about to leave behind. So it’s okay to mention them. (I’ll have more to say about that rather bogus-feeling subtitle when I’ve finished the book — tomorrow, almost certainly.)
***
I’ve ordered a couple of books about the Industrial Revolution from Amazon. One of them looks to be the standard college text — it’s certainly priced like one — and the advantage of that is that I’ll be reading the party line, the received academic wisdom, about a very complicated business. The book’s story begins in 1760. I’m interested in much earlier developments, the pre-history of the Industrial Revolution really, and the other book that I’ve sent for is a history of Western technology that runs from 1000 to 1700.
Why am I interested? Because, the more I think about it, the more it seems that the values of Western humanism — individual conscience and voluntary commitment — are most persistently challenged not by their pre-modern antagonists, ecclesiastic and sovereign authority (think Putin), but by side-effects of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the allure of automatic efficiency. You’re familiar with “physics envy,” the pressure in the “human sciences” to establish rules of gravitational predictability, a pressure that has eroded the study of human behavior that can’t be measured. I fear that this envy has spread to every public discourse. Politicians rattle on about the high ideals of the Founders, but then they try to sell implausible programs for retooling Americans with skills for the Information Age — a pipe dream rendered frankly silly by the widespread fear that robots are going to take over all the jobs. Economists are the worst, for in their view, the robot has taken over, in the form of “the market,” which works, according to them, precisely because nobody is managing it.
What made the Industrial Revolution so exciting for those with the leisure to think about it was the miracle of producing so many goods without lifting a finger. The owner of a factory, unlike the artisan who preceded him, made nothing. Other people, of course, had to lift their fingers, and more than their fingers, but they were not really workers, either, only temporary extensions of the machines, to be replaced as the machines became more sophisticated. This is where Marx came in, and it is where he made his greatest mistake (“workers”). Before the mill or the plant starts turning out widgets, however, a great many decisions have to be made, and made correctly: business decisions, engineering decisions — and political decisions. We have gotten rather passive about the political decisions. I’m not talking about political control. I’m talking about decisions about the right way to live in a society. Ought there to be a guaranteed living wage? Affordable, or perhaps even free, health care? Education? Sustainable environmental practices? And, if there ought to be these benefits, how do we pay for them? In a humane society, one that prizes the values that I mentioned, political decisions such as these must attain widespread assent in order to be effective. It is difficult to think about them in the climate of political anxiety that has fallen over not just the United States but all of the states that were formed by the inspiration of Western humanism. As usual, I look to history, to what we can make out about how we got here, for security.
We are not machines; we shall never be machines. Considered as machines, we shall always be defective. We must also understand, however, that the idea that human beings are defective is as ancient as anything about us. It owes to our imaginations: we can so easily imagine being better. (It is even easier to imagine that other people could be better!) I will not claim that these imaginings have produced divinities, but they have certainly colored our ideas of divinity. Western humanism emerged when a significant number of men grew impatient with analyzing human beings as defective something-elses. They wanted to grasp men and women as such. We are still learning. We have almost thrown off the wishful delusion, half humanist, half proto-Industrial, that “man is a rational animal.” (A great deal of classical Greek philosophy is hopelessly confused in just this way.) We are trying to understand the differences between men and women — without assuming that men are normative — so that we can minimize the risks of sexual assault without resorting to purdah. We are trying to learn that sexual practices that do not attract us need not revolt us. We are trying to reconcile our deliberated belief that, for society to work at all, each member must be treated as an equal member (for otherwise we descend into bullying) with the dizzying differences among us and the sheer peculiarity (the “uniqueness”) of each. Sociological studies will provide information that is useful in framing our questions, but it will never begin to answer them.
***
Tuesday 15th
Here is my hypothesis.
The introduction of firearms into Western warfare (in the Fourteenth Century) brought about a double, simultaneous revolution. In order to prevail over cavalry (mounted warriors), infantry required numbers of soldiers firing numbers of weapons. Both soldiers and weapons posed problems of coordination. The soldiers had to be trained to organize their shooting (to maximize effectiveness against the enemy as well as to avoid firing upon each other), and the guns had to be produced in such quantities that standardization was at a premium. The effectiveness of firearms, in short, depended on the availability of replaceable parts (men and matériel).
Perhaps not for the first time ever, but this time foreshadowing an overhaul of the world of work, human beings were reduced to the role of adjuncts in a mechanical organization. Of a well-drilled troop of riflemen, it is interesting to ask which, of the man and the gun, is the tool, and which is the user. That the soldier uses the weapon’s ammunition to defeat his enemy is obvious, but it may also be said that the gun uses the soldier’s eyesight to defeat the enemy of the generals who have put the weapon into the soldier’s hands. From the general’s point of view, soldier and weapon are one, and the more easily replaced the better.
Cavalry charges required teamwork, at least to get started. But they devolved into exploits of individual courage and dexterity. Cavalry no longer fought head-on, but became a kind of mounted police, surprising and harrying groundlings from the rear. The aristocrats who rode into the battles that it was their born duty to fight slowly ceased to be forces of domination and became forces of upset. Increasingly, they stood for resistance to the organizing tendencies of the centralized state.
Why have I worked out this hypothesis? Because I’m looking into the history of the idea of productivity, a concept that reduces human beings to the status of easily-replaced tools.
We usually regard the Industrial Revolution as something new, as something that burst upon the European scene toward the end of the Eighteenth Century. But here is the late Carlo Cipolla, sometime professor at Berkeley and author of Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy 1000-1700:
The world in which we live and the problems we face cannot be understood without referring to that momentous upheaval known as the Industrial Revolution. Yet the Industrial Revolution was only the final phase, the coherent outcome of a historical development which took place in Europe over the first seven centuries of our now expiring millennium.
The final phase. The Industrial Revolution was as much the outcome of developments as the cause of others. But what developments? I know a enough about the new inventions of the old world — the water- and windmills, the fleet Nederlander boats that ferried the bulk trade in commodities from the Baltic, the gunpowder and the printing, the clocks, the horse-driven mining railroads, the pumps and the looms — to understand that the Industrial Revolution rested on centuries of tinkering with gadgets without which the steam engine would have been neither imaginable nor reliable. But I sense that the historians have missed the factor that ignited the Industrial Revolution. This was not a matter of inventions or technologies but a profound shift in the view, among élites, of the relation between man and nature (as it would have been put then), between men and human nature (as I should like to put it now). Let me make it clear that I regard the Industrial Revolution as a force for the good overall. But, like its formidable steam engines, it harnessed explosive forces less than perfectly. It is the relation between men and human nature that will determine the revolution to come in the world of work, and that, not the technology of robots, is what we ought to be studying right now.
I shall do my best to keep Carlo Cipolla from becoming a new Hannah Arendt.
***
Wednesday 15
According to the colophon of the Eland edition of A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford’s first book was published as A Sudden View in 1953, and then under its present title in 1960. No mention is made of the subtitle that appears on the jacket, but not on the title page: A Mexican Odyssey. I have a hard time believing that Bedford would have applied “Odyssey” to her long sojourn in Mexico, if only because the Odyssey, and by reference any “odyssey,” is a homecoming. It is not just a trip with lots of stops. Mexico was not on the way to wherever it was that Bedford was ultimately headed.
The journey was decided at the last moment. I was not at all prepared for Mexico. I never expected to go to Mexico. I had spent some years in the United States and was about to return to England. I had a great longing to move, to hear another language, eat new food; to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible. I longed in short to travel. Surely there was scope in the Americas, the New World that had touched the imagination of the Elizabethans. Canada? One did not think of Canada. The Argentine was too new and Brazil too far. Guatemala too modern. San Salvador too limited. Honduras too British. I chose Peru.
But of course she does not go to Peru: the flight, we’re told, was too expensive. Bedford could not afford it. What could she afford? We are never told. Unanswered questions litter the opening chapters so thickly that Don Otavio ought to be unreadable. Who is “E,” Bedford’s traveling companion? (This one is easily dealt with; she is Esther Murphy Arthur, the book’s co-dedicatee.) Is E also Bedford’s lover? (An impertinent question, admittedly.) Why has E joined Bedford, when she seems to dislike the prospect of Mexico so? If Brazil is “too far,” why is Argentina even considered?
What was Bedford doing in the United States? Why was she “returning” to England? (She grew up, mostly, in France.) We are told nothing. It emerges much later that both Bedford and E are writers, because they’re lugging typewriters, but what do they write?
These questions do not actually oppress the reader at all, because Bedford is both busy and lucid about describing the moment. There was one question that did beguile me: what sort of person, with what sort of freedom, decides, “at the last moment,” on the verge of a return trip, to detour into a third country for an indefinite term and with no worked-out plans? In the teeth of any pecuniary wants, this liberty makes Bedford a very free woman indeed. She cannot afford the air ticket to Lima, but she can wander around Mexico for almost a year: not being obliged to reconcile those two propositions is a freedom all its own.
Who is Don Otavio? Is a visit to Don Otavio planned from the outset? Here we have the crowning freedom, the freedom of an author to shape material. When I came to the end of the last page, I sighed and laughed, remembering outrageous inconveniences and hooting anecdotes, and felt as if I had just returned myself from the trip that Bedford had taken (deeply grateful that I hadn’t actually had to); but presently I was imagining Bedford at work on her book. She drifted into Mexico with few plans and even fewer letters of introduction; she departed not only with plenty of stories but with an encounter around which she could render her aleatory junket in terms of almost foreshadowed coherence. Further, she could use this narrative arc as a restraint, so that she would disclose no more of herself than was necessary. She and E would carp and complain and even, every now and then, bitch, but they would remain ladies of a certain age and privileged background: unfamiliar. Their very elusiveness would become the most familiar thing about them, while all the time the focus was on what they saw.
What you don’t know about the travelers creates an unobtrusive negative force, a sort of vacuum, that pulls you from page to page no matter what Bedford is writing about. There are occasional chapters of background — about Mexico of course, not about her. She is especially intrigued by the 1860s folly that put Maximilian von Hapsburg on an imperial throne in Chapultepec Park, and the consequences that swept him off it (and into a painting by Manet that illustrated his execution). Her treatment of this chaos-as-usual episode in Mexican history is a sort of book within the book, but its drily tragic sense of life informs all of A Visit to Don Otavio. It argues against plans and projects, or at least for a suppleness that makes it possible to change plans to fit changed circumstances. (Plans are tragic because we are so unwilling to recognize changed circumstances.) The memory of Maximilian is a kind of guardian angel, seeing to it that Bedford’s occasional obstinacy about the itinerary does her no real harm.
In short, Sybille Bedford lays out A Visit to Don Otavio to impose upon the reader the same veil of ignorance about what’s to come that confronted her from day to day in Mexico, while at the same time patching her load of stories into a narrative that could only have been conceived retrospectively. The result is that you are never annoyed by not knowing what’s next. There is one thing that you can sure of: whatever is next, it will be wonderfully presented by Bedford.
Were I to stop here, I think that I should written a few words that other readers of this book would agree with, even if they’d never thought of it “that way”; but I doubt that anyone unfamiliar with Bedford’s first book would be inclined to pick it up. I want so much to keep the book’s surprises! But I recognize that there must be the irresistible temptation of well-chosen corroborative detail. Here’s hoping:
One-third of the way in, S (as Bedford refers to herself) and E are joined, in Guadalajara, by E’s younger cousin, Anthony. Anthony is a tolerably callow youth, recently graduated from Princeton. Quite unintentionally, Anthony, who is mostly out for a lark, makes the connection that will give the book its second, superior title.
He had also met, in barber shops and bars and without benefit of grammar, some Guadalajarans, male members of the jeunesse dorée, the sons of the gentlemen in silk suits at the Glass of Milk [the top restaurant, apparently]. They took him to the French Club and a rodeo, engaged him in versions of gin rummy played for high stakes, and he ceased to wear his Mexican hat.
E and I were full of curiosity. “What do you talk about? Do tell us what they’re like,” we said.
“They’re all right.”
Later he said, “They talk about sex all day, but they don’t seem to know any girls.”
One morning, he said, “We’ve had a bust-up. You see there was this night club. It didn’t amount to much in the first place. And there were all these whores. It wasn’t any fun. I mean who wants to dance with a lot of whores? Some of them just kids. I mean what’s the point. So I said to Don Orazio and to Don Joaquím, now if we had some nice girls to take out, haven’t you boys got any sisters to introduce to a fellow? Then didn’t they get mad. They said their sisters were at the True Cross in England and the Sacred Heart at Seville and my suggestion was an outrage and they guessed I didn’t know any better. They were sure my intentions were not dishonourable, but I ought to have realized that as a Protestant I wasn’t eligible and where was I brought up. So I said to Don Orazio and Don Joaquím, in the first place I was an Episcopalian, and not to be such boobies, and all the men in Princeton asked one another’s sisters down to the proms; and they said they’d rather die and they expected I believed in divorce too and I was lucky I was their guest. And then they all started jabbering to each other in Spanish.”
“Poor Anthony.”
“I was right, wasn’t I? What would you have done?”
“Never ask for a member of the family that isn’t on the table,” said E.
“What happened finally,” said I.
“Well, the father of Don Joaquím came in. And he said it was the best joke he had heard in a long while, and I was a Yankee but a good boy, and they all calmed down. So I said, let’s forget about it, and what about a round on me. Then they got mad again and acted as thought I’d insulted them. Jesus, what a night.
“Poor Anthony.”
Nevertheless his touchy new friends seemed to love him well enough… (113-114)
And so one thing leads to quite something else.
The foregoing passage conveys something of the culture clash that pervades A Visit to Don Otavio, providing much of its often exasperated but rarely condescending humor. The clash is manifold, not simply a matter of Anglophone ladies trying to make sense of Catholic Mexicans (and vice versa). There are the three levels of Mexican as well, the fewer than a hundred thousand blancos, the seventeen million mestizos, and the two or three million Indios. (This is more than sixty years ago, remember.)
After some hundreds of years of living together, neither Indians nor Spaniards were quite what they had originally been. In some ways they have become like each other; in others, they share nothing at all. The gulf between conqueror and conquered has settled into the gulf between class and class. Each still draws from a different tradition; neither has tried to learn consciously from the other’s. When they are on good terms, they call each other niños, children. There they live side by side, in domestic proxmity, familiar and remote, trusting and aloof, like so many frères de lait, boys, one from the village, one from the manor, who shared the same wet nurse. (208)
But for everything that Bedford tells us, we sense something larger, left unsaid.
***
Later the same day
Why not go to the movies, I thought at lunch. I checked the schedules. Grandma had arrived uptown, as I knew it would, so I went to the 4:30 show. It’s a short feature, at 82 minutes, but there is nothing rushed about it. I assume that it is set in Los Angeles, the vernacular city where there is little worth looking at, as if a comfortable climate made vision superfluous. It was hard not to see, in the background, the darker Los Angeles of Joan Didion’s prose. Los Angeles has always felt to me, on the few occasions when I’ve been there, like a moraine on which everything broken or no longer honest about American life has beached. Not that that’s all there is out there.
It was also hard not to see Grandma as a project, as a script that was pitched to producers and agents, read by actors, and passed around. In other words: “Hollywood,” that strange place where glamour is confined to red carpets and valet parking. La publicité! I kept looking around, as it were, and conjuring the crew. I imagined the set when no one was shooting. There’s a late scene, I think at the abortion clinic, in which Lily Tomlin’s hair, for the first time in the picture, looks done. I thought about how that happened; it was almost a lapse in continuity. Tomlin looks better and better as the film approaches its final scenes, a more muted version of the metamorphosis undergone by Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. Tomlin’s voice gets softer, too; she becomes more like the woman that one imagines she actually is. This is very agreeable, because her character is hopelessly rebarbative, at least until that moment in the abortion clinic.
Is there a genre name for the movie whose action is confined to a day (or to two days, in Julie Delpy’s case)? I can think of plenty of examples, from The Long Good Friday to The Day Trippers; the curious thing about these films is that they seem so leisurely, so full of extraneous encounters. Take Henry Jaglom’s Eating, perhaps the longest movie ever made, in terms of perceived duration. The closer the action gets to real time, the slower it is. Why is that?
There is usually an adventure in these pictures, something relatively straightforward that must be accomplished within twenty-four hours or less. In Grandma, Sage (Julia Garner) has scheduled an abortion, but her boyfriend hasn’t come through with the money. Now, on the morning of the appointed day, Sage turns to her grandmother, Elle (Tomlin). Elle is a once-famous poet whose long-term lover, a woman called Violet, has been dead for about a year. Elle, as luck would have it, has just paid off all of her bills, including a medical item for $27,000, and cut up all her credit cards, leaving her with only $43. The terms of the adventure are thus established: Elle and Sage must raise $600 by a quarter to six.
They try this and they try that. Seeking to raise money by selling some feminist first editions a shopowner called Carla (Elizabeth Peña, in her last role), they run into Olivia (Judy Greer) the much-younger woman with whom Elle breaks up a four-month relationship at the start of the movie. Elle literally melts down with embarrassment. (Peña, Greer, and Laverne Cox, playing a tatoo artist, are all divine.) Writer/director Paul Weitz spares us the tedium of spending too much time in the car, although he does give Grandma a snappy vintage sedan that usually runs. What he lingers over is the personal stuff. A long scene with Sam Elliott, who plays Elle’s one great heterosexual fling, consists of a string of peripeties that seems altogether free of the artifice of such chains; it also enables Elliott to widen his character far beyond the usual Marlboro Man limitations of his roles, showing us some bitter, unattractive pain and teary, but not self-pitying, regret. You would have no idea how this scene would play out, if you hadn’t seen the trailer, and known all along that, eventually, Elle and Sage will have to resort to the one person from whom they want to keep news of the pregnancy, Judy, Elle’s daughter/Sage’s mother (played, with great interest as always, by Marcia Gay Harden). (Is there a genre name for the kind of movie — The Blackwater Lightship, Georgia Rules — in which a transgressive granddaughter enlists a transgressive grandmother in opposition to a conformist mom?)
Julia Garner, playing Sage, has a face the likes of which haven’t been seen in the movies in my lifetime. It’s the kind of late Victorian face that was still alluring at the beginning of the Depression. Big eyes, tiny cupid’s-bow mouth, porcelain skin. It’s a look that is simultaneously childish (as in baby dolls) and very adult. Sage is a lost young thing whom nobody has ever tried to teach anything really serious. Whatever. Unexpected pregnancy makes her thoughtful, but she has little to think with beyond comic-book morality. Elle has plenty to think with, but the death of Violet has left her even more sour and difficult than she was. “Why did you stop writing?” she is asked. “Because people stopped reading,” is her angry but evasive answer. Judy is a lawyer (I think), which is movie-speak for too busy to have normal family relationships. All three women are in some kind of mess, but although immediate crises are sorted out by the end, at least enough to spare the audience the futility of a “foreign movie,” there are no epiphanies, no indications that tomorrow will be better. The fetus is aborted, but as Elle tells her granddaughter at the start, “This is something that you are going to think about at moment every day for the rest of your life.” The critical is replaced by the chronic.
Grandma made me laugh out loud, not that that’s hard to do; but it left me marveling at the ability of a movie to capture the lengthiness of life in little more than an hour. The message from Lily Tomlin’s face was, I may not be particularly old, but I have been around a very long time. So long, that something about her — Lily Tomlin or Elle Reid — is cinematically transcendent. In the end, Hollywood is escaped.
***
Thursday 17th
Another box arrived from England yesterday, and in it was another book by Sybille Bedford — a novel, A Favourite of the Gods. I read a few pages, then realized that I must put it down for a while. I’m not ready to efface the impressions of A Visit to Don Otavio. What I must read next, I realized, was Nostromo. I must go back to that. I was reading Nostromo — when? last year, I’m afraid — when something came up; perhaps it was the Penelope Fitzgerald craze. I remember also being very keyed up, very concerned about the safety of Martin Decoud, the doomed intellectual drenched in Eau de Stendhal. (I have read Nostromo before.) The long night on the silver-laden lighter, drifting around the awful Golfo Plácido, was too oppressive to read, at that time anyway. I picked it up last night and finished the chapter that I had been on the point of beginning. It was just right, somewhere between Bedford and Didion.
When I was a boy, the standard one-word epithet for the Latin-American Weltanschauung, viewed from a Yankee perspective, was Mañana. “I’ll get to it mañana” — if ever. “Mañana” was always accompanied by a rueful laugh, at the thought that this philosophy of indefinite procrastination could ever work. Well, of course it couldn’t: consider the proposition. Work. Work was not the priority in Latin America. Living was the priority. We gringos were the fools. We were the ones willing to be robots. We could have our progress. I thought about this all through Don Otavio, as the sensible ladies from the North ran up against irregularities and breakdowns. Against, as at the Guadalajara railroad station, a Möbius strip of ineffectiveness. (The man with the forms who cannot fill them in.) Individual Mexicans were usually quite competent and willing to do what was asked of them, but when the coordinated effort of several Mexicans was required, outcomes became uncertain. The railroad, an institution requiring the coordination of the greatest number of people, inflicted upon our travellers the ghastly ordeal of a nine-hour stall in the middle of a buggy swamp.
These problems did not arise out of laziness, but rather out of a profound disinclination to be part of a mechanism. A mechanism is a physical system of moving parts, and it functions with conditional necessity: if this, then that. That must be ready and able to perform whenever this occurs. Some mechanisms are made up entirely of human beings. Sports teams and performing arts companies depend upon mechanical coordination. Effective bureaucracies are highly mechanical. Vehicular traffic is viable only when most drivers respond mechanically to most situations.
In a flurry of notes exchanged with Ray Soleil, on the “man is a rational animal” business, I arrived at a different conclusion: man is an unstable animal, particularly in society. I’ll say more about this in a moment. Our tendency has always been to regard our instability (everywhere acknowledged) as a defect, as a problem to be solved. But it is no more a problem than our inability to drink salt water: it is simply who we are. Just as it makes more sense to desalinate water for drinking than to try to create a drug regimen that would allow people to drink salt water, so it makes sense to think about society as a composition of unstable members, rather than trying to force all the members to be stable. I put this observation here because the suppression of instability required for mechanical performance (dancing, driving, &c) is exhausting: you can’t keep it up forever.
Consider a school, an American public school, where bureaucracy and party line (both essentially mechanical) effectively prevent most genuine learning from taking place. (Learning requires the destabilization of the mind). Consider the school in Dallas where Ahmed Mohamed is a gifted student. Ahmed made a clock, and brought it to the school to show to his engineering teacher. This teacher, whatever his or her name is, ought to find another line of work. The teacher admired the clock (said it was “nice,” according to the Times), but advised Ahmed not to show it to other teachers. What the teacher ought to have done was to keep the clock in his or her office. Failing that, the teacher ought to have taken Ahmed and the clock to the principal’s office, in order to defuse the problem pre-emptively. The teacher foresaw the potential for massive instability (among colleagues and the police, responding to an apparent terrorist threat), but took no steps to prevent it, save cautioning the poor student. A flash of insight smothered by mechanical breakdown: not a problem confined to Mexico.
The instability of human nature has always been salient wherever men and women are granted some degree of freedom and autonomy. It’s called “choice.” What will you choose? What do you want? Desire, like learning, is destabilizing: if posits a world that does not yet exist. Imagining non-existent worlds is one of the things that marks as unstable beings. Will you vacation on the shore or in the mountains? There is no rational (mechanical) way to answer this question, hard as we try to confect one. If the decision is to be made by a family of five, and why not throw in an aunt or a grandfather, then any attempt at rational solution will create a lot of frustration and disappointment. Assuming that conditions do a reasonable job of living up to expectations, the happiest trip will be the one that is sold by an ardent and persuasive member of the family, because the pitch will have created a corresponding desire in all the others.
If the family were too poor to take a vacation, the problem would not arise: poor people have few everyday choices (which may be why their explosions are so violent). Very wealthy people are often jaded, blown by the scope of their choices. They think that they have seen and done everything, but in fact they have stuck around for very little, and so seen and done practically nothing.
The pursuit of productivity in the modern world is an attempt to put employees in temporary equivalence with very poor people — people with no choices. Why would anybody want to do this? Because another little characteristic of human nature is the tenuousness of empathy. In Before the Industrial Revolution, Carlo Cipolla quotes the saw that we regard what we consume as necessary and what others consume as superfluous. Similarly, we tend to imagine that our lives (meaning, our choices) would be more agreeable if other people were more predictable. We are eager to see others as unstable, but not ourselves. It seems to me that a much better job could be done teaching children to avoid these misjudgments.
The accent on productivity, moreover, mutes the attention that ought to be paid to what, in fact, is being produced.
I read somewhere that a trading desk at a financial firm was reorganized in a surprising way. The managers were all retirees, or semi-retirees. They had had their halcyon days as traders; they had made their pots of money. Now, without the material need to work, but with an undimmed desire to be engaged in something they knew, they served as disinterested overseers, advisers, and mentors to the rising generation. It was to be hoped that the undesirable symbiotic relationship of sponsor and protégé would be avoided, if only by the managers’ structural lack of influence. The somewhat diminished importance of the bottom line might well cut the risk of imprudent gambles. Did I make this up?
At first, I couldn’t see what this last paragraph had to do with all that preceded it, but now I do, although I shan’t dilate. I wrote that dancers, among others, depend on mechanical coordination. But great dancers transcend that by introducing a measure of instability. I don’t like putting it that way, because it suggests a formula (how much instability?) where none is really possible. How much simply depends. The dancer figures it out in the moment. The dancer resolves the tension, if only for a moment, to create a feat of mechanical prowess that is transfigured by imaginative insight. The ability to shoot through general skill to personal expression generally develops with age. It requires a lot of experience. That’s what the trading desk managers have. They know how things ought to be done, but they also have better intuitions; and they are not distracted by thoughts of personal advancement. Neither is the great dancer, who has only to live up to herself.
***
Friday 18th
Every now and then, after I’ve written something here, I’m stung by a sense that it is mistaken, or that I’ve left something important out. Usually, the swelling begins about half an hour after posting. I have the option to go back and fix what bothers me, but, except in cases of plain error, I usually leave what I’ve written and go on to write more, as I’m going to do now. (And while I observe no statute of limitations on correcting typos or clarifying punctuation, I otherwise refrain from altering entries after the earth’s turn.) Yesterday, the phrase “the tenuousness of empathy” got stuck in my mind, like some unwanted pop song. For I’m not really sure that I know what empathy is.
I know what sympathy is. It’s what you feel when somebody dies. Not for the somebody but for the people left behind. I remember when it was all right to feel sympathy for people who were sick, or to whom bad things had happened. Actually, I don’t really remember any such thing; what I remember is when it ceased to be all right. What we were supposed to feel instead (this was the Sixties, natch) was empathy. We were not to feel sorry; we were to feel what the former object of our sympathy was feeling. This sounded plausible at first. What a fine thing to do, to imagine the pain of another! Over the years, though, it began to look more like a spiritual exercise than something helpful. The important thing is to stay in touch and to ask if there’s anything that you can do (and then to do it). This is not as simple as it sounds, because illness and divorce and job loss induce many people, therapeutically, to retreat from social contact. Whether to go along with that or not is a fine question for the answering of which there are no general rules. Someone I’m very fond of is doing that now — she’s quite ill, and chooses to be alone with it — and I’ve decided to write a chatty letter. (And now I have to do it.)
I was troubled by having used a term that I suspect of being somewhat bogus. When I tried to rethink what I was trying to say, however, I saw that the problem with “empathy” is not the nature of the feeling. The important difference between sympathy and empathy is not a difference in point of view. It’s that sympathy is occasional: you take it out of the drawer when something bad happens to someone. It is a way of honoring a sad occasion. Empathy is not occasional. It’s a habit of mind, permanently at work. And, if that is so, it has even less to do with sympathy, because we cannot go around trying to imagine everybody’s feelings all the time. Not in New York City, anyway.
Empathy is more focused. It takes the form of a question: What would that person think if he knew what I’d like him to do? How would I feel about it if I were he?
This is Jesus 101, I know. But I still think it’s terribly practical, at least in the world we live in. The world we live in is a world without servants.
Is it something about men, or just something about men today that leads so many men to respond to this servant problem by withdrawing from human intercourse? Is that what makes fiddling with games and apps so preferable — that they do what you tell them to do? I worry about it. The destructive power of disaffected males vastly exceeds the worst that our nuclear arsenals can do; in fact, the only way that our nuclear arsenals can do any harm at all is by falling into the hands of disaffected males.
The call for empathy provokes a lot of troglodytic responses from exponents of the traditional command structure: That’s just the way it is. I came up through that system, and it was the best thing that happened to me. This is a workplace, not an encounter group. We’re being paid to get something done. Well, we used to live in caves. We used to endure cholera-prone water supplies. That’s just the way it was. The particular modest improvement that I have in mind for today is the replacement of a habit of mind that willingly or unthinkingly regards employees (human beings) as adjuncts of their tools, instead of the other way round.
This is the fork in the road that leads, one way or the other, to a world full of robots. Do the robots assist human beings, freeing them for jobs that we can’t even imagine? Or do the robots replace human beings, cutting people out of the world of work and, with it, remuneration?
***
As I’ve already spent much of this week thinking out loud here, I might as well wrap things up by doing a little more. I read something yesterday that illuminated an unexpected connection between two things that are much on my mind. The first will not be a surprise to regular reader: it concerns the variety of human experience — and the variety of human beings that experience things differently. Rebecca Solnit has a piece in the current issue of Harper’s, “The Mother of All Questions.” The prompt on the cover of the magazine says, “Solnit: Why I Don’t Have Children.” But although Solnit does answer that dreadfully impertinent question, she laments its thoughtless ubiquity. The editors of the magazine are no better than the others whom Solnit complains about; they, too, showcase the question. What Solnit really goes on about is the circular futility of current thoughts about happiness. Surely everybody wants to be happy. Surely motherhood is the one way in which a woman will certainly find happiness. Therefore: why aren’t you having children, when it would make you so happy?
Solnit doesn’t say this, but nobody “has children.” Women do give birth, yes. And that is precisely the end of possession. Nor do “children” really exist. There are infants, toddlers, kindergartners, Boy Scouts, sweet sixteens, undergraduates, and adults with in-laws. Many mothers have a favorite phase, only to watch their child pass right through it without leaving a trace — only memories. Most children do not begin to imagine their mothers’ fierce love until they have children of their own; parenthood is not reciprocal but endlessly giving. (Most mothers whom I know wish they could give more.) The very idea of “having children” is so lumpy and clunky that there is nothing to do with it but let it rust in the sun and rain.
To pick up a theme of this entry, however, there is something adjunct about motherhood, at least in the eyes of others. This is one reason why Solnit did not have children. She did not wish to become (no more than) the generator and support system for a troupe of offspring. We do not think of motherhood as mechanical, but it can be just as numbing as tending to a machine or standing on an assembly line. Nothing ever “gets done” — the aspect of parenthood to which most men seem allergic. As if getting through the day alive and well were not an accomplishment.
The thing at the other end of the connection is something that I need to talk about more, and from several angles. For a few years now, I have been asking myself “Why didn’t you become a journalist?” I knew very early on that I did not want to be a journalist, even if I didn’t know why. Certainly it had something to do with the offhand way journalists have of talking about what they do. But even though no one has ever really pressured me on this point (perhaps it’s obvious to anyone who meets me that I could never be a journalist), I go on asking the question, because I’m still not sure that the word that I have for what I became instead — critic — is the right one. What I need to talk about is journalism. It connects to Solnit’s problem — almost explicitly, in her piece — because journalists take the place of moralists in the modern world.
Journalists tell us what is right and what is wrong. The problem is that, to make sure that they’re read, and paid for what they write, they tend to tell us what we want to hear. They reinforce the conservative notions of their readers, whether those readers are libertarians or Marxists. They uphold the party line and defend the status quo. The best of the bunch know how to be thought-provoking and reassuring. They sustain the pleasing illusion that to read about a problem is to do something about it. Well, who would read them, otherwise? I’m quite serious. But so is the problem of journalism.
I’m describing a moment. Journalism wasn’t always as weighty as it can be these days, and who knows what will follow it. Also: what kind of journalist is Rebecca Solnit? I should say that she isn’t one at all, even if she does a good deal of plain old reporting. I should say that she, too, is a critic.
Bon weekend à tous!