hello. this is a short post on my current preoccupations. it’s been some time since i felt a need to write anything at all on the internet. the circumstances that underpinned my online life no longer exist, and my ideas and interests have shifted. now that things have settled a bit, though, i feel compelled to look around and examine the new shapes that have emerged, to probe at my own assumptions again. So I am writing. Apologies if this is more diaristic than informative — I no longer use twitter, so this is my diary now.
I have been thinking about the process of coming to meaning or understanding with some irritation and even cynicism. It is a pleasurable process — some potential glimmer of revelation appears on the horizon, a mystery unfolds, one situates oneself in it, seeks to thoroughly map the terrain, then one either fails or (perhaps worse) has to live with one’s new knowledge. Repeat ad infinitum. In previous blog posts I’ve scorned people who orient themselves around utopia or apocalypse without realising that my enshrinement of ‘understanding’ might work the same way. I’ve seen this as I’ve started to write my PhD — things that seemed like untouchable, entrancing edifices to me in the past, like Greek, or narrative, are now workhorses that I use every day with some skill and even expertise. I’m living in my utopia, a paradoxical situation which negates that utopia — now what?
The absurdity of the situation fully came over me during a somewhat frantic phrase during which I read a lot of John Fowles. I read The Magus, A Maggot, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. These are all books about coming into being, about passing over a threshold into a new, more enlightened place — the difficulty and agony of this process. I found these books very enjoyable to read, but in retrospect, I think my obsession with this writer mostly came out of the fact that I wanted to experience this passage over the horizon, this shedding of ego and assumptions which leads one to a better world, over and over again. In short, John Fowles is my YA, and I have indulged in the same impulse that drives adults to read novels set in a supernatural high school.
Fowles is a much better writer than that, though, and to read him without gluttonous, self-serving motivation would reveal that he is not so much preoccupied with the moment of initiation as the laborious and granular everyday activity which truly facilitates the passage into that space of greater knowledge. Perhaps there is some lesson in the fact that his characters vacillate, and are only occasionally able to see the new worlds that they are trying to incarnate. Often, in the moment, their choices are driven not by an ideal but a passing emotion, or societal pressure, or — this is the important one — by personal taste.
Alongside Fowles I have also been reading Mansfield Park. This is a quiet book, audacious only in the fact that it dares to make and thematize a connection between taste and morality. A character will make a judgment of aesthetics or decorum which prefigures a more fundamental capacity to make good or bad judgments in situations with real moral weight. Watching the novel’s plot play out on these terms made me wonder if there is something to this, if taste is a repository of small value judgments made every day. How do these little value judgments interact with the big ones? Can paying attention to taste, the most mundane engine of choice, help me decide what is really important? Could it be a way to escape the seductions of the revelation pattern?
I have formulated a new set of questions which I will try to answer over the next months:
— What ways of experiencing meaning or understanding are there that don’t rely on a coming into being (even coming of age) threshold model? What comes from paying attention to these experiences?
— What is good taste? What is bad taste? Is this a useful concept, or is it too tied to societal norms to be significant?
— Is it finally time to read the Nicomachean Ethics?