Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (17 page)

It is perhaps no accident that at the high tide of physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great revolutionary physicists—e.g., Faraday, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein—were also men of remarkable integrity and exultant wholeness of character, of generosity and benignity. Compare the lives and characters of the comparably great in literature at the same time: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway.

With the disappearance of the old cosmological myths and the decline of Judaeo-Christianity and the rise of the autonomous self, science and art, one the study of secondary causes, the other the ornamental handmaiden of rite and religion, were seized upon and elevated to royal highroads of transcendence in their own right. Such transcendence was available not only to the scientists and artists themselves but to a community of fellow scientists and students, and to the readers and listeners and viewers to whom the “statements” of art, music, and literature were addressed.

But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of
Light in August?
Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing
The Idiot?
Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

The only exception to this psychic law of gravity seems to be not merely the great physicists at the high tide of modern physics but any scientist absorbed in his science when the exaltation of science sustains one in a more or less permanent orbit of transcendence—or perhaps the rare Schubert who even during meals wrote lieder on the tablecloth or the Picasso in a restaurant who instead of eating bread molded it into statuettes.

But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers. They, especially the latter, seem subject more than most people to estrangement from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solitariness, depression, violence, and suicide.

Question:
Is this the case because

(a)
Genius is close to madness (Plato)?

(b) Modern society, especially American, is crass, materialistic, money-grubbing, and status-seeking, a nation of Yahoos and Babbitts, and the artist who is in pursuit of truth and beauty is entitled to be alienated (Gauguin, Flaubert, Lewis, et al.)?

(c)
Art is an expression of sublimated libidinal energies (Freud)? Since the artist is presumably either oversupplied with such energies or overly repressed, it is only to be expected that he or she might also be subject to the various maladies attendant upon repressed sexuality.

(d)
Art, unlike science, is a kind of play (Dewey)? Therefore, artists are expected to behave like children.

(e)
Both art and science are ways of knowing and as such are the greatest pleasures of which man is capable (Aristotle, Aquinas)? So great, in fact, that the ordinary pursuits of life are spoiled by contrast and so the artist must go to heroic lengths to render life intolerable outside his art. What Einstein said of science might be said of art: I went into science to escape the intolerable dreariness of everyday life.

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CHECK ONE
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Art, like science, entails a certain abstraction from its subject matter, albeit a different order of abstraction. And the better the artist, the greater the distance of abstraction. Thus, writers like Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins are as much in the marketplace as any other producer or seller. But writers like Joyce, Faulkner, Proust are able to write about the marketplace and society only in the degree that they distance themselves from it—whether by exile, alcohol, or withdrawal to a cork-lined room.

Like scientists, artists make general statements about the world, not about forms of energy exchange but what it is like to live in the world—statements which reader or viewer confirms by his assent and pleasure (where else does the reader’s pleasure come from but the reader’s recognition of and identification with the artist’s work?), just as the scientist confirms scientific statements by tests and reading pointers.

Although science and art are generally taken to be not merely different but even polar opposites—the one logical, left-brained, unemotional, Apollonian, analytical, discursive, abstract; the other intuitive, playful, concrete, Dionysian, emotional—the fact is that both are practiced at a level of abstraction, both entail transactions with symbols and statements about the world, both are subject to confirmation or disconfirmation. The pleasure of reading Dostoevsky derives from a recognition and a confirmation. The dismay of looking at a bad painting or reading a bad poem is a disconfirmation.

For a writer to reenter the world he has written about is no small feat. At the least, it is a peculiar exercise, even uncanny—like Kierkegaard going out into the street every hour during work and blinking at the shopkeepers. At the worst, it proves impossible, issuing in the familiar catastrophes to which writers fall prey.

Thought Experiment:
A deductive-empirical exercise, something like Mendeleev’s project of deducing the periodic table of the elements, then looking around to see if there are actual elements which fit in the table.

This enjoyable exercise is the deduction of the various possible reentry modes of the artist-writer or reader-viewer from the semiotic options theoretically available to any person so abstracted from the world.

The experiment: Start with the
world,
that is, the same somewhat deranged place which everyone experiences in more or less the same degree. The
world
is the aggregate of your perceived environment encoded by signs: other people, family, house, marketplace, culture, myth, TV, past, future, and God as more or less real depending on whether you are an unbeliever or a believer, and even if the latter, then God as more or less problematical.

Next, there is the self, the individual conscious artist-writer reader-viewer self, the movable piece in the world, like a token in a Monopoly game.

The problem for the movable piece: How do you go about living in the world when you are not working at your art, yet still find yourself having to get through a Wednesday afternoon?

Note: This game can be played by artists and writers or by non-artists and non-writers, in fact by all true denizens of the age, that is, any person in the culture who feels himself orbiting the world, out of the here-and-now, out of life in a place and a time, and experiencing difficulty with reentry into such a life.

In order to understand the purpose of the exercise and be instructed by it, let us make the following assumptions which are probably more true than false but which at any rate I will not take the trouble to defend: that the present world is in some sense deranged, the center is not holding, that the plight of the self of the artist-writer is at least in part a historical phenomenon and not an essential property of being an artist-writer; that there may have been other times and other places, whether one wishes to call them an age of faith or an age of myth, in which men perceived a saving relationship to God, the Cosmos, the world, and each other. In such times the self did not feel displaced, or if it did, it understood its displacement. The artist-writer did not, presumably, feel the same compulsion to assert his individual genius-self as would the artist today. It did not, presumably, occur to the Chartres sculptor to sign his name on the toe of an apostle he had finished on the West Portal. (Or to the Lascaux Cave painter.) Though he was a sinful man like other men and subject to certain whims and antics, he would not, presumably, have understood the nineteenth-century English poet who utters a cry: “O world! O life! O time!” and sails out in the Bay of Naples to a suicide by drowning. Or the twentieth-century American novelist riding trains through the haunted towns of America and writing: “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

Options of reentry into such a world are: (1) reentry uneventful and intact, (2) reentry accomplished through anesthesia, (3) reentry accomplished by travel (geographical), (4) reentry accomplished by travel (sexual), (5) reentry by return, (6) reentry by disguise, (7) reentry by Eastern window, (8) reentry refused, exitus into deep space (suicide), (9) reentry deferred, (10) reentry by sponsorship, (11) reentry by assault.

Object of experiment: to discover (1) which option you prefer and (2) which option is in fact open to you.

Explanation of Options:

(1) Successful and uneventful reentry, self intact. Theoretically, it is possible for the abstracted self to reenter the world as easily as a doctor leaving his office for Wednesday afternoon golf or the Chartres sculptor going home to sup with his family.

Was this not in fact the case with William Faulkner, doing a morning’s work, then strolling in the town square to talk to the farmers and have a Coke at Reed’s drugstore? Not quite. Though Faulkner went to lengths to pass himself off as a farmer among farmers, farmer he was not. A charade was being played.

Was it not the case with Sören Kierkegaard, who, every hour, would jump up from his desk, rush out into the streets of Copenhagen, and pass the time with shopkeepers? No, because, by his own admission, he was playing the game of being taken for an idler at the very time he was writing ten books a year.

Only one example comes to mind of a writer who, though performing at a very high level of twentieth-century art, nevertheless manages to live on one of the few remaining islands of a more or less intact culture, in the very house where she was born, to enter into an intercourse with the society around her as naturally as the Chartres sculptor, to appear as herself, her self, the same self, both to fellow writer and to fellow townsman: Eudora Welty. Perhaps also William Carlos Williams.

If you do not think this remarkable, imagine that you have lived your entire life in the house where you were born. For an American, an uncanny, even an unsettling fantasy. (2) Reentry accomplished through anesthesia. One can simply render the intolerable tolerable by a chemical assault on the cortex of the brain, generally by alcohol, and generally by writers. It has been observed that artists live longer and drink less than writers. Perhaps they are rescued from the ghostliness of self by the things and the doings of their art. The painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art, the writer is the Protestant. The former have the sacramentals, the concrete intermediaries between themselves and creation—the paint, the brushes, the fruit, the bowl, the table, the model, the mountain, the handling and muscling of clay. The writer is the Protestant. He works alone in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but a Scripto pencil, like God’s finger touching Adam. It is harder on the nerves.

Why Writers Drink

He is marooned in his cortex. Therefore it is his cortex he must assault. Worse, actually. He, his self, is marooned in his left cortex, locus of consciousness according to Eccles. Yet his work, if he is any good, comes from listening to his right brain, locus of the unconscious knowledge of the fit and form of things. So, unlike the artist who can fool and cajole his right brain and get it going by messing in paints and clay and stone, the natural playground of the dreaming child self, there sits the poor writer, rigid as a stick, pencil poised, with no choice but to wait in fear and trembling until the spark jumps the commissure. Hence his notorious penchant for superstition
^*
and small obsessive and compulsive acts such as lining up paper exactly foursquare with desk. Then, failing in these frantic invocations and after the right brain falls as silent as the sphinx—what else can it do?—nothing remains, if the right won’t talk, but to assault the left with alcohol, which of course is a depressant and which does of course knock out that grim angel guarding the gate of Paradise and let the poor half-brained writer in and a good deal else besides. But by now the writer is drunk, his presiding left-brained craftsman-consciousness laid out flat, trampled by the rampant imagery from the right and a horde of reptilian demons from below.

(3) Reentry accomplished by travel (geographical). The self leaves home because home has been evacuated, not bombed out, but emptied out by the self itself. That is, home, family, neighborhood, and town have been engulfed by the vacuole of self, ingested and rendered excreta. What writer can stay in Oak Park, Illinois? One leaves for another place, but soon it too is ingested and digested. One keeps moving: from Illinois to Minnesota to Paris to Italy to Paris to Spain to Paris to Africa to Paris to Key West to Cuba to Idaho. From Nottinghamshire to Australia to Mexico to Taos to France. If one can keep moving and if the places retain sufficient form and decor, the places may not run out before one’s life runs out. Hemingway ran out of places. Lawrence did not.

An extreme case of a frantic and failed attempt to enter a habitable world, only to consume it and move on, is Kerouac in
On the Road.
In the course of one book he careens back and forth between New York and California six times—with one Mexican detour.

The road is better than the inn, Cervantes said. True, but he did not reckon with ghostly travelers like the Flying Dutchman.

Note, however, that reentry by travel and also exile (see below) nearly always takes place in a motion from a northern place to a southern place, generally a Mediterranean or Hispanic-American place, from a Protestant or post-Protestant place stripped by religion of sacrament and stripped by the self of all else, to a Catholic or Catholic-pagan place, a culture exotic but not too exotic (Bali wouldn’t work), vividly informed by rite, fiesta, ceremony, quaint custom, manners, and the like. This is by no means a Counter-Reformation victory because the attraction is not the Catholic faith— which is absolutely the last thing the autonomous self wants—but the decor and artifact of Catholic belief: the Pamplona festival, the Taxco cathedral, Mardi Gras, and such.