Commentaries
I am The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms, he said, drinking his beer. And he told me of the characters he had observed in the pool. He told me of the woman who swam by flapping her arms and kicking her little legs, like a duckling escaping a predator. And of the man he compared her to, who’d impossibly glided through the pool. He said: As it is in water, so it is in life, and claimed that from this gliding alone, he knew a great deal about the man’s conduct in life, and likewise of the woman’s, from how she thrashed in a panic through this medium in which she happened to be in. He spoke too of the muscle man, who stood beside the pool flexing his muscles. He said that it seemed as though this man looked out of his nipples, for the man, in his pride, was located in his chest, and so the eyes in his head had sunken away, his head being useless to his muscles. Having heard a variety of descriptions of characters at the pool, I believed him when he said he was The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms.
I asked him, a Nietzsche scholar: What is the point of the dionysio-appollonian experience, which Nietzsche speaks of in his Birth of Tragedy? Suppose, I asked, the Greek man goes to a festival and attends the tragic theatre in which he has this experience – so what? Isn’t it like when people now claim to have transformative experiences on drugs at festivals, and then…nothing happens, and they return to their lives, apparently unchanged? So how, I asked, does this inner experience change the life of the Greek, and if it doesn’t, of what interest is it to us?
He said that I had “entirely missed” the point. He said that I was thinking of culture instrumentally, whereas Nietzsche thought that the very possibility of tragic theatre – and of this dionysio-appollonian experience in tragic theatre – is expressive or symptomatic of the culture that produced it. Nietzsche saw Greek culture in the time of tragic theatre as a vital culture, in which there existed the desire, courage and strength to come face to face with life (as the Greek saw it), its suffering and everything in it. This desire became formalised in tragic theatre, and individualised in this dionysio-appollonian experience. Our own festivals and our own experiences are symptomatic of our own culture, which, he, the Nietzsche scholar, said Nietzsche would likely diagnose as narcotic and escapist, not vital.
From the Nietzsche scholar’s discourse, I understood the following: that Nietzsche is not suggesting that we, in our own dark times, adopt the Greek way. He is not interested in a course of action to obtain a result. Rather, he is describing how to read a culture, in this case a vital one, from tragic theatre. He is not interested in what the Greek theatre did for the Greek man when he left the theatre – whether or not it ‘changed his life’ – but in what that theatre says about the culture of which it was a part. And there are, I understand him to be saying, multiple internal relations between the culture, the theatre and the Greek.
In our rooms, as decorations, we keep reminders of our humanity. Coloured pencils, family memorabilia, books, and such like. They remain, by and large, untouched, as our lives are consumed by forms of work. These decorations in our rooms take on a melancholy aspect, static reminders of what we could be or have been, or what we have lost, or left behind, or not cultivated, and what perhaps has withered. It seems important for us not to forget them, not to deny them, so we put them all around us as symbols.
It is left for the next generation to cultivate themselves; they will really live, we will just survive – for them. In this way, we rob ourselves of our promise, or make of it an obligation falling on the future (as it did on us, for which we feel guilty).
‘Life is suffering,’ it is said, and the common way out is through the production of more life. So now there is more life....which, given that life is suffering, must now do the same…. This is life as a Ponzi scheme. If it is like this, with whom or what does the buck stop?
This connects to our sense of guilt towards those with whom we cannot reciprocate what is given to us; gifts like those between parent and child – of life and love – which, because they are impossible to repay, become loyalty or guilt. It is said that because such gifts cannot be reciprocated, all that can be done is to recreate a mirror of the same situation, in which the gift can be given again, through the production of more life and more love.
But what accumulated guilt would fall on the last man in the chain, or would it not work like this?
Lucian Freud said something like: that you can depict someone else directly, whereas with oneself, you work only with an image, that is to say, a mirror image. This painter’s thought could be extrapolated: you can know others better than yourself, for with yourself, you have indirect knowledge, while with others, it is direct. (He thought that to see yourself as someone else, that is, to see yourself as you see someone else, is how we obtain a richer self-conception, which the mirror helps, showing us not as we want, or are used to.)
Contrast with Descartes, for whom self-knowledge is direct, while knowledge of the outside world, including others, is indirect, as it is essentially inferred, and consists of images, and is as doubtful as images are. To reconcile the two views, you could say that Descartes and Freud are speaking of different objects of knowledge: one of the external, of the outside of bodies, and one of the internal, of the mind. But this seems too easy.
Both, after all, want to know who we are and what our predicament here is. Clearly, Freud believes he is working towards knowledge of the human being, not merely towards the image of one; he wants to know and depict the soul of the person. He is not interested in a reductive idea of the body or in the image of it alone. Likewise, Descartes thinks that what he can grasp through a priori thought is the human being, which he characterises as an essentially thinking thing. So there appears to be a genuine conflict.
Freud’s paintings can be seen (not correctly) as portraits of his own relation to his mother; a relation in which he is her, violating the private world of his sitters beyond what they could want or imagine; noticing everything, not only on their skin but under it, and whatever is inside it too. You can also think of the sitter as him in relation to his mother, who (he thought) did this to him. Each sitter turning away, averting their eyes, covering their face from this penetrating scrutiny. (The sitters often roll over and open their legs before him, like dogs (and also the dogs).) In the paintings of his mother, she also looks away from him, and in these paintings, he can penetrate her soul as she did his, and he could find her privacy as she found his; he could be her, and she could be him in this painting theatre, in which he could invert and play with these roles. So it can’t be said of him exactly that all his portraits are self-portraits.
We cannot see a nude without thinking of Eden. They point back there (or to Greece, but in Freud, it seems to be Eden). Even Freud, in his godlessness, paints the dignity of the human being. Though here it is revealed through (or despite) the flesh and what is inside of it. It is not God but Freud who sees and knows all. His paintings can be seen as an argument with God, a rebuke to the God who created us corporeally – that we possess this dignity despite this. Or that we can give ourselves our own dignity by a choice to see things in this way.
But if his sarcastic thought were: Could this body be the image of God?, his own paintings and capacity to reveal (or decide on) this dignity itself can cut the other way, and turn into an argument for the very God he doesn’t think he needs. For if this dignity exists through (or despite) the body, or in our capacity to choose it, how deep it must be – and so perhaps it really is the image of God.
We suppose that nature has a nature, that the differences between willows and oaks, or dogs and cats are explained by the different things having different natures. As parts of nature, it would follow that we too have a nature, presumably, a human nature. But what it is no one seems to know, either because there are no such facts, or because we haven’t yet discovered them, or because any facts we can point to don’t appear to be determinate. An unclear picture of ourselves presents itself, and we fill it with our ideas. Unlike our ideas of the nature of other animals – perhaps because we can look at them with detachment, without the hope we invest in ourselves, or shame for not being the way we wish to be – our ideas of our own nature reflect how we think we are, or believe we are, or want to be, or some other purely psychological relation we have to ourselves. You could write a history of human nature, which would consist in the various changing ideas of who we are, a history of the various ways we posed for ourselves in the mirror.
I said that I cannot help being this way. She said: The most you can say is that you are this way, the cannot is a theory you apply to yourself, for some purpose – a mental addition to an unprejudiced description of yourself. She said: You choose to think of yourself as determined. She said: And once you think of yourself this way, there is no need for you to take responsibility for yourself, so it is useful to you, you don’t have to change. I said: It doesn’t seem like that to me at all, it seems to me that I recognise limits, and see what I can and cannot do. She said: Your mind is not a machine, it can do more or less anything, there are no broken pumps or levers in your mind; it is fluid, and light, but you think of it as hard and fast.
Her choice system was total; her idea that you are free to choose all things was a total idea in the sense that any idea you offer to the contrary is taken as itself an instance of a choice. You cannot argue with a total system, which is why we don’t argue with totalitarians and fanatics.
But what is the meaning of saying everything is a choice when it seems that not everything is a choice? And what metaphysical or psychological basis is there to support her choice ideology? It seems to be a dogma of a particular line of thought, just as it is a dogma of the opposite line of thought that we are essentially determined, and so have no choice.
Connected to her choice ideology, she believed that whatever happened in the mind could be attributed to a secret reason, to a purpose or a function. This made the mind out to be some kind of functional conspiracy, in which everything has a secret purpose beyond our ken, appearing at times to work against us, at times in our favour, and we never know which it is. Left out of this theory – purposefully excluded from it? – was the idea that some things might happen for no reason.
But I believe that, in the end, she found it useful to think that everything is a choice and that everything in the mind is there for a sufficient reason. She found it more useful than any other way to think. Perhaps she found that it helped to push against our natural tendency to think that the limits of our world – that is, our interpretation of the world – is the world. And to think of our world as a choice is a more fruitful idea than to think of it as determined and unchangeable.
Each extreme position falsifies reality, but as we anyway tend towards extremism in our thinking, she thought that the choice ideology was best, and chose to interpret things in this way.
I, on the other hand, believe the so-called choice of her choice ideology is the result of her prior experiences and character, that it is something received or inherited, or is a reaction against this. And I don’t choose to believe this, I happen to believe this.
False inference: from x is an interpretation to You can interpret it differently and choose how you interpret the world. This Victor-Frankl-school-idea trades on an ambiguity about possibility. Just because it is logically necessary that a given interpretation implies there are other interpretations, this doesn’t mean that it is psychologically possible to change your interpretation. We may even be able to see that there are a variety of available interpretations on the menu, but be unable to choose any but one.
Not seeing what is false about this line of thinking can lead you to think that you are guilty for not altering your way of thinking of your life (or of life) to a better (by some standard) interpretation.
He, the performer, explained to the audience before the performance of how he found a note of hope at the end of the rather sombre piece he was about to perform, which was the composer’s final piece. This performer went on about hope, and of how it was of great importance that this piece, the composer’s last, whose final note he wrote as he was dying (literally!), contained as its final note – so the very last note the composer wrote – a note of hope. Even if the instruction for the performance of this final note was morendo, with the o trailing off as he died composing.
But why did it matter to the performer that the composer deposited a lump of hope at the end of this piece, and so of both his composing and human life? He seemed to think that it mattered that the piece ends on a major note, but why? Would this mean, for the performer, that the composer believed there to be life after death? Or did it mean to him that the composer took this life to be redeemed or at least redeemable? It said a lot about the performer that he was on the hunt for notes of hope, and believed we would share this with him. Why did he think it would matter to us, in the audience, that he thought this composer wanted to communicate a note of hope as his final note? It reminds me of the comfort some devotees of Wittgenstein find in his last words, in which he said that he had had a wonderful life.
I suppose we tell these stories because we are looking for comfort in the fact that these men, who publicised their tortured lives, could say at the end of them that life was good. And perhaps this gives us hope that we might one day be able to say the same of ourselves. Or perhaps it is that we think the judgment of these greats on their lives is also at once a judgement on life as such, and so also on our lives too, something which, in the midst of them, we cannot see. We want, then, to fall in with their judgement, and so we think that because they think that their lives contain this note of hope, we don’t have to determine if such a note exists in our own lives.
Clearly, we care not mainly about them, nor about the end of our lives, but about our lives now. And any importance we give to the composer’s or philosopher’s judgement is something that we make use of here and now. For there must be other greats who have the opposite judgement, but we select these ones for our comfort.
The advantage of expressing a character in writing means that you don’t have to live it in life. It is like attacking a therapist, so you don’t have to attack your wife or mother. Dostoevsky could be the underground man in words, so he didn’t have to be it in life. His underground man might have otherwise wormed his way into his life. This can be a way of separating oneself out and living multiple lives in a single life, or appearing to.
Like an actor, the writer’s thinking is preoccupied with the lines of others. Often so occupied with these others, the writer doesn’t have to think of their own life. But of course these characters are the writer’s own characters; they reflect their life, or their own thinking about it, for it all comes from the same source. An attempt to get out of your own head and into another life is just a way of seeing, or enlarging, your own thinking.
He said to me: Look at the state of your life! I replied: But look at the state of my mind! He thought my life was in poor shape, but I saw my real life as my mind – ‘The life of my mind is my life,’ I protested – and my outer life, which he was looking at, as secondary at best. Who was right? Is there a right? People would say, I think, that the outer life was the real one, and that to say otherwise is self-deceptive. But I – my thinking mind – am not so sure.
I am fascinated by the man who stares out of his nipples