Month: March 2013

Thirty years after Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos was published, Alan Jacobs ponders what Percy was trying to get us to see:

People—people in their role as viewers—are receptive to cults of personality because such cults distract us from the dislocations of our very selves, and from the suffering those dislocations cause. The kind of literate, educated person who might pick up a book by Walker Percy can see how that works in the case of the Phil Donahue Show, which is why “The Last Donahue Show” comes fairly early in Lost in the Cosmos. It’s a savagely funny parody, but it also flatters our sensibilities. That Carl Sagan’s cosmic meditations, shown in primetime and on PBS, might work on its viewers in the same way is not so easy to see, and not so comforting to realize; but it’s true. Cosmos was not about science, but about allowing us to observe a scientist with an attractive personality as a substitute for thinking scientifically.

Those in the audience for Phil Donahue’s final show are distracted from themselves by watching Penny, the pregnant 14-year-old who thinks “babies are neat”; those who watch Cosmos are distracted from themselves by thinking about “our place in the Cosmos,” that is, by reverting to abstract categories that evacuate personhood from human beings and fail to imagine contact with extraterrestrial intelligences in terms other than those of an utterly decontextualized “wonder.” Donahue, Sagan—not really a dime’s worth of difference between them.

Jacobs goes on to argue that Percy was trying “to prod and provoke each of his readers to ask the uncomfortable questions that our preferred entertainment media help us avoid.”

Claire Barliant highlights an art installation:

The Turkish artist Meriç Algün Ringborg, who is now based in Sweden, temporarily appropriated hundreds of books from the Center for Fiction’s library and relocated them to Art in General’s main gallery. These books share one thing in common: they have never been checked out. There are no due dates stamped on the inside covers. Most of the books were published during the golden age of book design, between the forties and seventies, suggesting that their selection was aesthetically motivated. This makes for fun browsing. I have never heard of Judson Jerome or his book “The Fell of Dark,” but the cover is bewitchingly gorgeous: a watercolor of an orange sun tumbling into umber waves, on the verge of being overwhelmed by a swelling dark mass. While I browsed I found myself searching for flaws in the books that might have made them undesirable to library patrons—too many autobiographies thinly disguised as fiction?—but the little-known authors were mixed in with masters: books by Theodore Dreiser, Denis Johnson, Charles Dickens, and Franz Kafka are included in the show.

(Meriç Algün Ringborg, The Library of Unborrowed Books, 2012. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger)

Cynthia L. Haven explores how Polish-born poet Czesław Miłosz’s appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and four subsequent decades living in the state, influenced his writing:

With its dramatic coastline and deserts, [California] anticipates a landscape that will endure beyond the last breath of the last man, the endpoint where American energy and aspirations are as negligible as a candle raised against the relentless California sun. As Irena Grudzinska Gross put it, “Here, in California, space is the greatest enemy: too much space imprisons as much as too little of it.” Miłosz responded this way:

I did not choose California. It was given to me.
What can the wet north say to this scorched emptiness?
Grayish clay, dried-up creek beds,
Hills the color of straw, and the rocks assembled
Like Jurassic reptiles: for me this is
The Spirit of the Place.

California gave him space, and a vantage-point from the end of the world. The passionate poet who longed for detachment, a more objective place from which to see himself, found it on the Pacific coast. Distance, emotional or geographic, is hard to come by in Poland, where he was an insider. No one is an insider in California.

Jason Resnikoff traces the evolution of the word “indescribable” – first used by Jefferson describing Virginia’s “Natural Bridge,” and used repeatedly by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein:

Obviously, words can describe the shape of a natural bridge; they can describe the shape of a monster. But they cannot describe the shape of the soul, changeable yet persistent, overwhelming but subtle. Feelings, Shelley and Jefferson agree, render words puny and inadequate. So yes, Shelley can tell you about feelings and their physiological manifestations, as can Jefferson, but neither can tell you the feeling itself.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, English speakers discovered that the word, the work of humanity, the fashioning of significance to sound, could not be conflated with reality. The name of the soul was not the soul, despite John and his Gospel. The discovery of the psyche coincided with the discovery of humanity’s powerlessness to control the universe by naming it, as Adam did in the Garden of Eden, or for people to understand their feelings by naming them. Mary Shelley could describe neither Frankenstein nor his monster, and the failure was magnificent.

Jerry Saltz praises an exhibition at The Frick Museum gathering seven works by the the 15th century painter Piero della Francesca. Saltz was especially stuck by the painting “Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels” (detail above):

Mary isn’t looking at her child and looks instead at the rose he reaches for. You begin to glean the revelation she is having. The flower represents love, devotion, and beauty. It also symbolizes blood and the crown of thorns Christ will wear. This child who will suffer a horrendous death reaches for his acceptance of fate. Mary does not pull the flower back. You sense an inner agony, noticing her deep-blue robe open to reveal scarlet beneath, symbol of outward passion and pain to come. In the dead-center vertical line of the painting is Christ’s right palm that will be nailed to the cross.

Walter Kaiser steps back to find the core of Piero’s brilliance:

[W]hat, in the end, is most idiosyncratic about Piero is the essential nature of his mind, which was molded both by artistic and by mathematical, geometric perceptions—a perfect union of art and science. When Piero looked at the world, he ineluctably perceived its geometric forms and mathematical perspectives, and it is this uncommon mental capacity that caused Roger Fry and others to see him as a precursor to the formalism of Cézanne and Seurat.

The Dish is delighted to announce the debut of The Mind Report, a collaboration with Bloggingheads.tv and a team of cognitive scientists at Yale University. Each week, one of these leading-edge thinkers will find someone whose work they consider important and provocative and interrogate them about it. The goal is to bring you the latest thinking on how humans think – and how we feel and behave and navigate the social landscape and make sense of our universe.

This week features Kiley Hamlin of the University of British Columbia, who has used puppet shows to demonstrate that infants have a basic sense of right and wrong. Hamlin considers humanity’s innate morality and why we naturally judge others with Jonathan Phillips of Yale:

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You can watch the entire video here, and subscribe to The Mind Report here.

Sixty years ago Isaiah Berlin published his famous essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” in which he declared, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Robert Zaretsky believes the philosopher should be counted among the foxes:

His landmark essays in political thought, particularly on the notions of negative and positive liberty, as well as his critique of historical determinism, reveal Berlin’s attachment to the values of pluralism. Not only do the variety and density of historical and human experience undermine any effort to reduce them to a solitary truth, he declares, but there is also a variety of ways of attempting to understand those experiences. In his essay “Historical Inevitability,” he is categorical about the wrongheadedness of believing that there is just one legitimate category: “The same facts can be arranged in more than one pattern, seen from several perspectives, displayed in many lights.”

Levi Asher complicates this argument:

[W]e can be foxes and hedgehogs on many levels at once, and I think Zaretsky calcifies the distinction when he suggests that a pluralist must be a fox. I think the determining factor between a hedgehog and a fox has more to do with a person’s style of thinking than with their metaphysical beliefs. … In one sense, as Zaretsky emphasizes in his article, a hedgehog is a monist and a fox is a pluralist. But in another sense, a hedgehog is simply single-minded about something, anything, while a fox exists in a passive mental state, observing and reacting rather than projecting a strong vision of reality.