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5. I Consent to Feeling Moved by Sunsets
61 Plays1 year ago
Are all autobiographies bullshit? Can anyone really truly know themselves? Is there a "self" at all?
We fumble for answers to these questions during our discussion of Edouard Levé's experimental (anti) memoir, Autoportrait.
Also mentioned: Jean Amery, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Ulysses
Also existentially disturbing: the audio glitch around 8:05. Apologies.
Recommended
Transcript
Rebranding Capitalism
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, in saying it's completely undefinable, you no longer have any means by which to discuss it. Okay. Well, we don't have to call it capitalism. We can just call it fuck poor people.
00:00:14
Speaker
I would love, you know what? I mean, in a way I would love to have him on so that he could get not like a tongue-latching from Brendan, but like this is, this would be what I need. Yeah. Let's just, let's just call it fuck poor people. We can consult constantly volume one of Karl Marx's famous volume, Das Fuck Poor People. Oh God. Pain works on a sliding scale. Soda's pleasure in a candy jam.
Introduction: Candy Jail Podcast
00:00:44
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Candy Jail. This is Robert. I'm here with my comrade and dear friend Brendan.
00:00:52
Speaker
And today we're going to be discussing a very unique book. I was about to call it a novel, but I'm not sure it's a novel. It's sort of a memoir, but I'm not sure it's that either. I know Brendan has a lot to say about it. I certainly do as well.
Exploring 'Autoportrait' by Edouard Lévet
00:01:09
Speaker
The book is called Autoportrait. It's written by a French photographer turned writer named Edouard Lévet. I'm probably mispronouncing his name.
00:01:22
Speaker
AutoPortrait came out in 2005 in France. It was published in 2005 and was translated into English and published for an English reading audience in 2012 by Dolkey Archive Press. AutoPortrait is far and away his most well-known book. I would guess at this point that his writing has
00:01:46
Speaker
become more famous than his photographs, although I am interested in getting my hands on one of those photo books. None of them have been translated into English and they're hard to get in the United States.
00:01:58
Speaker
Part of what made Leve famous and certainly put auto-portrait on the map and his final book entitled Suicide on the Map was that after submitting his manuscript Suicide to his publisher, I think within two weeks, maybe 10 days, he took his own life.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, it just adds certainly a tragic dimension to Levy's life, I suppose one could argue, and arguably a tragic dimension to the books, but also certainly it complexifies them in ways that are not to be insensitive, but just quite fascinating and worthy of investigation.
00:02:46
Speaker
How do you want to do this, man? Let's talk about, actually, just general impressions. So I've read this thing. When we discussed Nabokov's On Inspiration, we also discussed JD Salinger, who gets mentioned in that essay. And it was in that episode that I revealed that I'd read Catcher in the Rye probably four or five times.
00:03:13
Speaker
I've probably read auto portrait now six to eight. I've read it a lot. So obviously I like it, which doesn't mean you need to like it. And my sense is you don't, which is fine. Maybe this will make for the most interesting episode we've recorded thus far because of these.
00:03:29
Speaker
such a divergent reading. But yeah, what were your general impressions of the book? Did you like it? Did you dislike it? Are you agnostic? What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? What are the takeaways?
The Unique Form of 'Autoportrait'
00:03:43
Speaker
Well, let me just describe it first. This is a slim volume that is composed entirely of declarative sentences beginning with I.
00:03:53
Speaker
It contains no paragraph breaks and there are very few logical connections between the sentences. So in the course of a few lines of text, he may mention a previous sexual experience. He may mention a trip that he took. He may list countries or cities that he's visited. He may bring up a childhood memory. Some of his sentences are
00:04:20
Speaker
you know, about serious things, big questions in life, major life events. Some of his sentences are about utterly trivial things. He recounts, for instance, how he once spilled part of a bottle of Coke on himself while walking down the street, but nobody noticed and he's never told anyone that. At another point, he enumerates all of the body parts that he has come on or in
00:04:47
Speaker
And at another point, he mentions that he didn't tell one of his parents that he loved them until he was, I think, 34 years old. So it's very deliberately constructed in a way that is random or appears random. I really have no idea of the extent to which this was a genuine stream of consciousness and the extent to which he deliberately considered the placement of these sentences.
00:05:15
Speaker
That is auto-portrait, and it is worth pointing out that it begins with a reference to two books, one book being a guide to living and one book being a guide to suicide. And it ends not in the final sentence, but in the final passages, it ends with Lave remembering his childhood friend and then revealing that his childhood friend took his own life as an adult.
00:05:42
Speaker
insofar as there's a thematic coherence, that may be it. So that's my description of the book.
Connection to Lévet's Writing
00:05:50
Speaker
My takeaway from it was that I didn't like it, but I will also freely admit that this was my first time reading it, and you wrote some very passionate paragraphs in defense of this book and what it means to you. So I think
00:06:08
Speaker
Rather than starting off with me, the first-time reader, getting overly critical, why do you love this thing so much? Why have you read it so many times?
00:06:22
Speaker
Well, first off, I want to loop back around and just add a bit more detail to the opening sentence of the book, which you referenced. So he mentions, he name drops in the first sentence that he thought George Parek's life, a user's manual would teach him how to live.
00:06:39
Speaker
And I want to linger on that for a second, firstly, to say that is another one of my favorite books, although I can't say it is as, I mean, I guess for Brendan, actually, for you, this was somewhat unpleasant. And I promise I don't think my feelings are hurt. I'll
Influences on Lévet and Experimental Writing
00:06:57
Speaker
let you know, or at least let my diary know after this recording. But Life at User's Manual, just to give you a sense of that book, and I promise it loops back into Levy and what I think he's doing with this project.
00:07:09
Speaker
Perac was part of a very specific and unique club, you could call it, of writers. Most of them were French, and they were part of a group called Oulipo. Most people have encountered the works of Italo Calvino. He wrote a number of different experimental pieces of fiction. Raymond Cuono is another member of Oulipo.
00:07:32
Speaker
And anyone who's read these books knows that they're different. Like one, for instance, was Exercises and Style, in which one Oulipo member
00:07:44
Speaker
basically creates a scene on a bus that he attempts in 200 different variations. So you can imagine... Is that Rob Grier? Yes, correct, correct. So, you know, like, I read maybe 20 of those and was amused, but you have to be a certain kind of personality to even want to buy and, you know, even read that thing. Who is a fan of that? Say that again. Who is a fan of that? Who? Nabokov. Really?
00:08:13
Speaker
That's cool. I respect. Well, I love Nabokov. I'm glad you brought that up. Sweet Nabokov. Anyway, Perak in keeping with this, and just to give you a sense of also what makes Oulipo so unique is they exerted different constraints onto their projects. So often these constraints were mathematical in nature, which is I think interesting because of the fact
00:08:39
Speaker
that the hard sciences and mathematicians are often in one camp and the humanities folks, the artists, the writers, the painters are in another. And this was that weird moment of cross-pollination where you found those qualities present in the same person or in the same people. So Perac famously his final magnum opus, I don't know if it was his final book, but I think it's considered far and away his most important was Life of Users manual.
00:09:06
Speaker
And basically what he wanted to do was attempt, they called this a knight's tour. And a knight's tour on a chessboard is essentially when you move the knight into every single position on the square, either completing a circuit ultimately around the board or not completing a circuit. And he then imagined an apartment that he could lay out on top, like a fictional apartment to lay out on top of a chessboard.
00:09:34
Speaker
and he would move the night into different rooms in this apartment and slowly build his novel around these constraints. This is an unbelievably challenging task. Before you even get into whether or not it's a good book, which some will argue it's a slog, I will admit it's a slog, but once I finished reading it, man, it took me three tries to read it. It was one of those experiences where I went,
00:09:58
Speaker
I think this is one of the most important books I've ever fucking read and it's deeply moving and it was painful to work through. And for that reason, I'm not sure I could read it again. I would like to try, but it was a hard one love, you know?
00:10:15
Speaker
So Levé in name dropping that title at the outset and then making different references to Ulyppian techniques throughout his own book, Autoportrait, is clearly I think putting himself in this camp
00:10:30
Speaker
And the book itself is, as we've described and Brendan went into detail, quite experimental in execution. It's a non, it's an unrelenting, unbroken stream of declarative sentences. Another reference to Parek. Parek wrote a book called I Remember.
00:10:48
Speaker
where it was nothing but a series of sentences that started with, I remember. Like, I remember when I was three, I went to the park and yada, yada, yada. And that goes on for 100 plus pages. An American, Joe Brainard, who was mentioned in Levy's book, copied Perak's idea
00:11:09
Speaker
and made his own book called I Remember, which has also become quite famous. And so, Levi is engaging in an olympian experiment or certainly paying direct and explicit homage to these kinds of writers. He loves them.
00:11:27
Speaker
Do I love them myself? No. Do I love the ideas sometimes more than the execution? Yes.
Escaping Consciousness Through 'Autoportrait'
00:11:35
Speaker
Do I respect that there are artists out there that do these kinds of things? Yes. Do I think that pound for pound the cumulative effect of these works existing regardless of their entertainment quality is a
00:11:50
Speaker
a positive thing for world literature, for humanity, yes. Because I think it clears the way for all kinds of new ways of thinking about approaching and producing works of art. And I think Levy is one of those. And this book counts. I think it gives people permission, even non-professional artists, so to speak, the chance to try something themselves. Okay, why did I read this so many times?
00:12:19
Speaker
I loved, I think almost immediately A, that I was feeling like I was encountering a kindred spirit. So much of the books and movies that he loves and references in this book are books and movies and works of art that I love. So I really did feel like I was encountering someone who I understood.
00:12:40
Speaker
And by the same token, someone who understood me. So there was a sense of profound identification that I was feeling between myself and the author, or at least the narrator, as the narrator was presenting himself in this work.
00:12:53
Speaker
And I happen to quite like the form. I think that stream of consciousness can be a lazy man's way of writing a book. It's not as hard as really sticking to carefully thought out and executed plot lines with characters and development and yada yada. But I don't think he's lazy. I think there are moments in the book that are weaker than others.
00:13:22
Speaker
I actually marked like page 34 to around 40. I thought he sort of lost his eye on the ball. But most of it sustains itself. And so the question is, why do I really want to be inside of presumably Edouard Levy's inner monologue? And I think what the book did for me the first time and now the eighth time is it allows you to take a vacation from yourself.
00:13:49
Speaker
I think that we all, whether we're aware of it or not, are engaged in an unceasing inner monologue and that our unceasing inner monologues and the way Levy renders it in his book is true to life, which is a big hodgepodge of
00:14:06
Speaker
I need to go get the fucking groceries because I'm out of eggs to I wonder what happens when I die and am I going to die alone? And thinking back on past lovers, it all is mixed up inside of our heads and just plays out ceaselessly like a torrent, I think, for the entirety of our lives.
00:14:28
Speaker
I guess if you could think of it as entering into a house or entering into a movie, not everybody that settles down to Last Tango in Paris
00:14:40
Speaker
likes it. Some people sit through it, others get pretty pissed and walk out of the theater. I think entering into the movie theater of Levy's mind in this book was a movie that I really enjoyed and a movie that I wanted to see. And a movie that, I guess for better or worse, spoke to certain aesthetic sensibilities.
00:15:00
Speaker
you know, that felt commensurate with my own and true to my own experience. And so in a broad sense or as a way of broadly responding to your question, that's what I can come up with for now. You know, one of the most interesting weeks of my life was a week I spent rafting on the Colorado River. And there are some unusual events that occurred on that trip, some larger than life characters that I was spending my time with and
00:15:29
Speaker
I've tried to write that story for years. I mean, ever since it happened, and it happened probably six years ago now, I've tried to write that story in essay form and I've basically given up on it. I've started at different points, I've ended at different points, I've tried different voices, I've tried different ways of dividing up the different days on the trip and the different themes that I wanted to investigate.
00:15:59
Speaker
And so that's how I approach writing about myself and talking about things that have happened to me in a way that other people will respond to. And I think that I was just left utterly cold by the fact that LaVey does not do any of that. And so as a result, the observations that he makes that I do find interesting, because there certainly are some observations that he makes that I find interesting,
00:16:29
Speaker
are so without context and so disconnected that I don't feel like that he's doing the work to communicate with me. And that to me is almost contrary to the whole idea of writing, the whole function of writing. I think in any art form when you talk about experimental stuff, whether it's experimental music or experimental visual art or whatever,
00:16:56
Speaker
you're trying to figure out which rules you can break. But there's always certain rules that you can't break because they're not arbitrary rules or genre conventions. For instance, you couldn't write a novel in which you wrote entirely nonsensical sentences because you've decided that you're going to break the rules of words having meanings, right? I mean, you could, you have the right to do that if you want to.
00:17:23
Speaker
But the result would be just ridiculous. Like, you're not writing at that point. You're kind of anti-writing. So as a writer, I found very little in Lévée to respond to, even though I totally understand the appeal that it holds for you. And I, you know, we did both read this in English and I'm always wary of what's lost in translation.
Critiques of Lévet's Personal Themes
00:17:47
Speaker
And in fact, I think Lévée himself mentions in auto-portrait that there are some things he does not read because
00:17:53
Speaker
he knows what's going to be lost in translation. But the sentences here are so simple, and I should clarify, it's not true that every single sentence begins with I, it is true that every sentence is a declarative sentence that is about himself. But I don't think, I haven't looked at the French, but I don't think that there are many
00:18:13
Speaker
places where much is going to be lost because the sentences are just too short and too direct. And in very few cases, does it look like there's really any subtlety that a translator might have had to wrestle with? You know, going into this, when I started reading it, I was like, OK, this is this might be a challenge, but this might be interesting. It might be worth it. And I got to a point maybe halfway through where it stopped being that way. And I couldn't tell you specifically, but I did
00:18:42
Speaker
I found his...
00:18:44
Speaker
frequently returning to his sexual history to be off-putting. And I want to unpack that a little bit because I am not remotely puritanical. I'm not made uncomfortable by hearing of other people's sexual exploits. And, you know, as long as everybody involved is a consensual adult, I do not judge people for their sexual exploits. Something about the way that he returned to it again and again, like there's
00:19:12
Speaker
Literally twice he points out that he's had sex with three or more women at the same time. Pointing it out once is in keeping with mentioning things about your life that come into your head. Pointing it out twice
00:19:28
Speaker
I started to get a little bit uncomfortable feeling like he was someone who was insecure, that I was just watching someone brag about their sexual conquests. And, you know, there's another point at which, like I said, he talks about all the body parts that he's ejaculated onto or into.
00:19:47
Speaker
And there's another point where he just lists places he's been and I do that sometimes like man I'm sometimes I'm in a mood like I'm trying to. I'm bored I'm trying to calm myself down whatever and I I will start I will list to myself all the cities that I've been to right.
00:20:04
Speaker
And it's kind of fun to figure out like what am I missing like I've been here I've been there I have been there you know and maybe it's maybe it's my way of like if I'm feeling down or I'm feeling disconnected maybe that's a way of me feeling better about myself like hey there man like you've had an interesting life you know.
00:20:19
Speaker
But I would never write that in something that I was disseminating publicly, unless there was a very specific purpose to it. Like, I have to prove my bona fides as a world traveler, so I'm going to list to you all the places I've been or whatever.
00:20:35
Speaker
And so it struck me in some cases as just self-indulgent, kind of masturbatory. I think he neglected to mention the fact that he's probably come on his own belly button because he jerks off a lot. So I know I'm being harsh, and it's not that I wanted to throw the book across the room. I'm just trying to articulate why I didn't walk away with the same impressions that you did. So yeah, I think that
00:21:04
Speaker
These are important details to discuss, I suppose, and he does bring things up, and I think this is part of what makes it jarring for the reader. I myself am jarred by certain aspects of the details you mentioned that he includes, but I think you can look at it from a few angles. One would be because of the fact that every single sentence is a declarative sentence.
00:21:31
Speaker
And every single sentence is theoretically a true statement about himself or about some experience he's had or a like or a dislike, whatnot. Although he does enjoy, I think, at moments contradicting himself intentionally throughout the book with certain key details.
00:21:46
Speaker
There's a kind of, by doing this, by having sentence after sentence be declarative and also non sequiturs, I think the effect is a kind of flattening where all sentences and all statements are equal in this universe. And therefore, a statement about preferring peanut butter to jelly
00:22:10
Speaker
in Levy's auto-portrait universe is on equal terms or is equivalent to not more or less important than some sexual recounting, which I think if you're going to be generous, you could say it's just an interesting technique and an interesting experiment to make all sentences equivalence in terms of the meaning.
00:22:38
Speaker
or potentially if you want to go value, the value of each individual sentence. I think the effect is, and this might be what you're resisting, and I can understand it because I think it's there, is there's a kind of detached quality to every single statement.
Trivial vs. Significant in Writing
00:22:56
Speaker
And in addition to the statements having that detached quality because of that,
00:23:03
Speaker
And because they sort of all flatten into equivalence, there's a kind of sterilization that happens, sterility.
00:23:11
Speaker
And I wonder if that coldness that you mentioned is a byproduct of flattening all of these sentences in the sense that they all wind up as equivalents, no matter whether it's saying, he only said, I love you to his father for the first time when he was 34, or that he prefers Levi 501s to any other kind of gene, you know, and that there's a jarring sort of
00:23:37
Speaker
emotional response in the reader to that, or lack of emotion, in that how can these two things not only coexist but seem to be treated as equivalents in the mind of Levy in this literary universe? Well, it's a time-honored poetic technique to, in a sense, flatten things so that every sentence carries the same weight as every other and then use that to great effect
00:24:07
Speaker
with great care by having sentences that are incredibly serious juxtaposed with sentences that seem trivial or even nonsensical, right? Like a really simple example would be the poem, We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks, where it's a series of very short sentences describing young men or teenagers in a pool hall. And then the last line of the poem is, we die soon. And
00:24:33
Speaker
you realize the cumulative effect of those minor sentences becomes much greater. But in order to have that effect, you need the poet's skill and care with how you arrange these things. And I think sterile might be a
00:24:49
Speaker
a very good word for, you know, what I saw in Aldo Portrait. I want to compare two, because we both wrote a little bit about this book, and I want to compare two things that we said to each other. I was using, I wanted to go for a visual metaphor, and this was a little bit careless of me, but I said basically it reminded me, because Lave is a visual artist, like if somebody had taken one of those paintings by Bruegel,
00:25:16
Speaker
that is this landscape that contains incredibly detailed figures in the distance. What kind of painting where you feel like you can get closer and closer and you'll see more and more. And somebody had cut that up like a jigsaw puzzle and then rearranged it like it was a collage. And then they'd gone to say a Rembrandt portrait and they'd cut up that too and rearranged it into a collage and then mixed the Rembrandt and the Bruegel into the same collage.
00:25:41
Speaker
That was the metaphor that I reached for. What you said was that this is a pointillist portrait of a man. And I think where we're differing with those metaphors is that I feel like I'm not seeing anybody really there, that it's just a jumble. Whereas you feel like you are seeing a recognizable outline of a person, or even if that is an incomplete representation of that person.
00:26:10
Speaker
Does that seem fair? It does. But I think that let's extend it a little further because where I went with it was that in his own quiet way, I don't think that it's in your face and that he's not locked and loaded and ready to destroy the genre of memoir or autobiography.
Questioning Stable Identity
00:26:32
Speaker
But I do think that in a subtle way,
00:26:35
Speaker
this entire book is a kind of indictment of the memoir genre in that the memoir and an autobiography axiomatically presupposes a stable concept of self. And the way that this thing unfolds pushes against that, not aggressively, but just in its very format.
00:27:01
Speaker
brings that very presupposition into question. And in some ways, I think it's fair to say it indicts it. And on that level, I love it because of the fact that in the act of...let's say that all of these statements are, in fact, true statements about Himself.
00:27:20
Speaker
Well, you have 150 pages of thousands of true statements about oneself, and the paradox that emerges is that in this pointless portrait that cumulatively should give me a fuller view of levy, which it does, it at the same time reveals that there is no levy. But it then extends that even further and says, what is a self?
00:27:44
Speaker
Does anyone have a stable self and then I'm forced to think back on all of the memoirs I've ever read that not only use that as their presupposition moving forward unconsciously it seems so self evident how would you even interrogate that unless you're some sort of philosopher.
00:28:02
Speaker
Yeah, these books that are conventional memoirs or autobiographies are in a way, you could argue maybe from a psychological standpoint, unconsciously doing everything in their power. These authors are doing everything in their power to shore up in themselves and for their readers a sense of stable self.
00:28:23
Speaker
And I think Levy comes into this project already suspicious, already smiling, winking at the idea that he has no stable self. And in his attempt to describe himself,
00:28:40
Speaker
He paradoxically unravels himself. And I do love that. That's I feel like that's going on in this book. So how do you feel about that? That that you could almost look at this as it is an anti book. But in a way, if we had to get specific, we could say it's an anti memoir memoir. You know, it's actually trying to in its very execution, it obliterates the category or the genre of memoir writing. Do you mind if I quote you directly?
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead. I like what you just said, and this is a very interesting sentence that you wrote. Auto-portrait's thesis statement would be something like, the end product of an honest memoir is the dissolution of the self. So I think we can go in two directions with that. One is just that idea. Like, is that in fact the end product of an effective memoir? And two,
00:29:38
Speaker
Is LaVey effectively doing that here? And is that something we should aspire to?
00:29:46
Speaker
And I think that the idea that we have multiple selves, that we do not have a coherent, consistent self over the course of our lives is a really important one, and I'm glad you brought it up. And it is something that most memoirists, I think, don't wrestle with or in some cases are just totally unaware of. And so the idea of subverting that is something I love. And I can think of ways I might try to do it if I were to write a memoir.
00:30:13
Speaker
I don't know that I want to give Lavey as much credit as you want to give him. I wonder if you're doing some of the work of making this profound.
00:30:24
Speaker
that Lavay himself was not doing. Do you happen to know anything? I did look this up, but there isn't much out there about it. Do you happen to know whether he wrote this over the course of six months or he wrote it over the course of six hours or whether there were revisions or anything about the compositional process at all?
00:30:45
Speaker
I actually need to read more about that myself. There's not as much as I'd like in terms of that kind of writing about his books and certainly auto-portrait because of the fact that he's translated from French and not a well-known name, not a household name. But I did just with a cursory reading encounter, and I'd need to corroborate this, but that when he was in the United States working on a photo project, he was, and he mentions it in auto-portrait that he would go to
00:31:15
Speaker
all of the towns in the United States that were named after foreign countries. I guess somewhere in the midst of that trip he had this feeling that his life was ending and he had a kind of panicked
00:31:30
Speaker
need to write intensely that prompted him, I think, to feverishly write auto-portrait. So my guess would be he might not have knocked it out in six hours, but I think it was a fairly rapid process. No one wants to read your catharsis. True. So you talked about this as being a way of getting outside of yourself, and also of the idea that we all have multiple selves, and Lave seems to acknowledge that
00:32:00
Speaker
Do you find it alarming or disorienting that you have multiple selves? And so to see someone wrestling with that idea is something that it brings you comfort or relief. I mean, I will say this, like one of my other favorite authors, which, you know, who is famously accused by his detractors of navel gazing is Fernando Pessoa, certainly of being masturbatory. He was like, I mean, he's a Portuguese poet.
00:32:28
Speaker
If there ever was an anti-book worth the title anti-book, anti-novel, it's his book of disquiet. But did you want to say something? I get the feeling you have one thing you want to throw in.
00:32:40
Speaker
No, I was going to make a joke about one of his books. You can make a joke. No, I mean, I was going to say that his book was called My Naval or something. Yeah. I hadn't quite worked out. I hadn't quite worked out what the joke was going to be. But The Naval of Disquiet, you know, like he he's Harold Bloom, who again, like even I read, I've looked at interviews with Harold Bloom and read some of his work.
00:33:05
Speaker
He's a piece of work. I think I can safely say I don't think I would love hanging out with Harold Bloom, and I certainly disagree with some of what he has to say. He, though, loved Fernando Pessoa, and so I feel a little bit of kinship with him. He also loved Walt Whitman. Pessoa loved Whitman. Anyway, point being,
00:33:25
Speaker
Passola is like the perfect example, in some ways, the person who created so many different personas, he called them heteronyms, with whole biographies, backgrounds, zodiac, charts, yada, yada, and he wrote from those perspectives over the course of his life. And I'm talking not like three or four, but like 50 separate and arguably fully defined, probably to varying degrees,
00:33:54
Speaker
heteronyms, personas. Now, you mentioned, I bring this up to say, one, like, Levi's working in a certain tradition then, you know, that he's not the only one. Another thing that he loves that I think Passoa does, and certainly Whitman, at different points in Leaves of Grass, and, say, Shanagon from Japan,
00:34:16
Speaker
who wrote the Pillow Book. Shanagan was a court lady during the 1990s and thousands in the Heian period in Japan. I'm probably mispronouncing everything there, but she loved making lists and kind of engaging in this seemingly non-literary, these non-literary diversions that were actually, if you like it, it's really quite fantastic and addicting to read.
00:34:45
Speaker
So I'm just trying to say like he is situated in a tradition and there's some pretty heavy hitters within it, but to your question about how do I feel about somebody wrestling with their own inward battling of multiple selves.
00:35:05
Speaker
I would actually counter that and say, I don't think that's what's happening here. I think what's happening here is not a revealing and probing of multiple cells. I think what's happening is a discovery that there actually is no self.
00:35:24
Speaker
So he takes it even further than Pessoa, if you want to look at this on a spectrum of like, if Pessoa is saying, hey, there's not a stable self, there's a thousand sort of schizophrenic selves that are interacting with each other all at once in contradictory fashion. Levy is going, actually, there's not 50 selves. There is no self. And I think that's what makes this on a different level so compelling to me because
00:35:52
Speaker
I'm inclined to agree with that conclusion. I feel like I've read novels, works of literature that have effectively advanced the idea that there is no self. But I wouldn't necessarily argue with that idea.
00:36:12
Speaker
I wonder to what extent here we're dealing with LaVey just not knowing himself that well. Like I'm not convinced that he was being deeply exploratory in writing
Lévet's Personality: Decent or Narcissistic?
00:36:24
Speaker
this. And I found myself wondering as I was reading it, if I thought based on the information I learned, if I believed that LaVey was a fundamentally decent person or whether he was a fundamentally narcissistic person,
00:36:42
Speaker
And I found myself not being able to decide, not because
00:36:48
Speaker
most of us are sometimes decent and sometimes kind of shitty, but because I felt like he wasn't giving me enough. I don't feel like he told me the most selfish thing he ever did, and I don't feel like he told me the most selfless thing he ever did, or even really got close. At one point he says, I've told five women I love them, and in four cases it was true. Now that's an interesting statement.
00:37:18
Speaker
I want more. Those women that you told that you loved them and it was true, did you treat them well? Were you a good partner to them? The one that you told that you loved and you didn't, was that for her sake or was that for your sake? It's not so much that I feel like he's arguing that there's no self as that he can't get a hold on his own self.
00:37:40
Speaker
I'm with you, but let's then extend it a little further. I'm going to give you two follow-up questions. One would be, you mentioned like, you know, what if the case is actually that Levy just doesn't know himself very well or is not really deeply in touch with himself?
00:37:57
Speaker
And that these are all sort of like superficial attempts at scraping the plumbing the depths of that mission. What does it mean to know oneself well? And how do you even know when you are encountering that? Like let's go with this possibility that
00:38:16
Speaker
What we're reading is a person who actually doesn't know themselves well at all. And my follow up is, or at least I think the implication there is that some people do know themselves well and some people don't. And I guess because we're talking about literature, like how would you know when you're reading an account of someone who knows themselves well to offset that against
00:38:44
Speaker
examples of people who do a shitty job at this, who actually reveal their hand in being blind to knowing themselves. Well, okay, so here we go. I'm about to bring up the weather underground again, but you know, you and I have talked about how fascinating it is to read
00:39:03
Speaker
interviews or memoirs by the surviving underground members looking back on their their time and what they have to say now. And we've talked about how remarkably self-aware David Gilbert is, how he seems to have
00:39:19
Speaker
really worked hard to get perspective on what he did and what mistakes he made and what he needs to take ownership for and what he doesn't. And, you know, you see somebody struggling for self-awareness. I think it's pretty clear when, you know, to the degree to which someone attains it may be impossible to judge. But I think you can recognize the signs of someone struggling for it. And one of those is when they're able to talk about
00:39:48
Speaker
Bad things that they've done are negative characteristics in their personality and they're able to do so in a way that. Shows you that they're not just casually acknowledging those things and you know part of the flattening effect that you are talking about with live a is just.
00:40:06
Speaker
I don't, he doesn't even, he just doesn't, I'm not seeing the self-awareness there or the striving for self-awareness. I will grant you that it's possible that he could sit down to write this in the hope that doing so would get him to a place he wanted to be,
Writing and Self-awareness
00:40:25
Speaker
right? If you're feeling lost and you're trying to figure out who you are, you might write down, you might sit and start writing, I am this many years old, I read this book on an airplane one time,
00:40:36
Speaker
One time I was slapped in the face through the window of an open taxi. I have been to New York City and just keep doing stuff like that in the hopes that it would get you somewhere that you needed to go. I will grant that, but I don't necessarily see the end product as showing anywhere near the level of a self-awareness of someone like David Gilbert, for instance.
00:41:00
Speaker
Okay, so follow-up question number two. Just bear with me and let's operate under the conviction that there is no self. Well then, to say that someone is lacking in self-awareness is almost a contradiction, right? Because
00:41:16
Speaker
You can't be lacking in self-awareness if there is no self to begin with. And so if the project is the exploration of self that ultimately offers up in its totality a conclusion that the self is illusory, lack of self-awareness no longer functions as a meaningful statement. Play with that for a little.
00:41:42
Speaker
Well, there's a couple different things we can mean when we say there is no self. And there is a sense in which I agree with that sentence, but there are multiple senses in which it's not true. If we're saying there is no soul, like there is no ineffable, separate thing that makes a person a person, then I completely agree with that. If we're saying that your brain changes so much over the course of your life that you're effectively a different person at
00:42:11
Speaker
35 than you were at 15, I have no problem with that. I spent a lot of time, especially recently, wondering how much of a dick was I when I was younger. Because I want to believe that I've been the same person the whole time, but I know very well I haven't been. But if by saying there's no self, we're saying there is no singular entity that perceives itself to be unique,
00:42:40
Speaker
and that is acting in the world based on a certain set of attributes, then that I don't agree with at all. You are sitting in front of me right now, you know where you are, you're thinking about things, and you're performing actions. In this case, you're listening to me speak and thinking about what you're going to say next and probably doing other things that I'm unaware of.
00:43:07
Speaker
But you're like you're there even if even if what makes robert is not a soul but a collection of genes and neurons and and cells and even if you may be a very different person ten years from now and even if
00:43:26
Speaker
You're completely different than you were the moment you came out of your mother's womb and so on and so forth. That doesn't mean the same. I was the same. You came out reading a copy of Edouard Levé because you were trying to get a head start on how all this shit was going to play out.
00:43:43
Speaker
Like, you exist, right? And, you know, you're thinking therefore you are. And, you know, for my money, that's about where it stops in terms of philosophical certainty. Like, you can get that far pretty reliably. And after that is kind of a crapshoot. But even if I think therefore I am is true,
00:44:05
Speaker
It doesn't imply anything about, I think therefore I am in 1985, and I think therefore I am in 2005, and therefore I am the same person over that period of time, right? That's a totally different subject.
Philosophical Exploration of Identity
00:44:19
Speaker
So yes, there is very real sense in which there is no self, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to vanish in a puff of smoke, and it also doesn't mean that
00:44:29
Speaker
if I treated someone like shit a long time ago, and I'm a different person now, that it wasn't me that treated them like shit. Sure, sure. So, I mean, in my head, because all roads lead back to discussions of the Nazi Holocaust for me, I mean, in a way, it's because I'm reading material constantly on that topic, and so I can't help. Go ahead, yes. I was gonna propose that we rename this podcast to Content Warning.
00:44:59
Speaker
That'd be fine. And I bring this, I'm gonna loop that in in a tangible way in a moment, but I bring it up because even I know as I'm debating this with you on some level, that there's a little bit of just like the contrarian in me that wants to sort of, what's the, let me get the right word here, mount my defense, even though I know at the back of my brainstem, I've got problems with my own defense. So let me just,
00:45:27
Speaker
Put the finishing touches on the real defense and then let me loop around and throw myself under the bus and come to your side. And these are going to be like somewhat embarrassing anecdotes or examples to bolster my defense.
00:45:43
Speaker
You've probably had the experience because I think we all have at some point, even on accident, I think it happens more frequently as young people than as adults where you might wind up or you'll find yourself repeating the same word just for fun. And after enough times of repeating that word, it literally does cease to mean anything.
00:46:03
Speaker
You do that, you say the word chocolate a hundred times and you just get completely lost in the sound that you're making with your vocal cords and the actual sound as it connects to an object in reality ceases to connect. It's just like gobbledygook. So the same can happen and you have this weird disquieting or uncanny experience with language when you have that moment. And I think we've all had that moment at one point.
00:46:32
Speaker
Another one is when you look in the mirror, and you really, really look at yourself in the mirror, not just for a fleeting couple seconds, but spend five minutes in front of that thing. It can be quite a strange experience.
00:46:46
Speaker
We often, I think, take our bodies for granted. I certainly do. And we throw our clothes on so quickly, or we're in the shower, we throw the towel. It's just, there's not much time devoted to action. I mean, this sounds like narcissism 101. But in a way, like, I don't think it's narcissism. I think there's a
00:47:06
Speaker
almost like a taking for granted how absolutely and utterly incredible and also bizarre and uncanny it is to have to inhabit a body. And when you actually like spend enough time to look at your body, even naked,
00:47:22
Speaker
which was an assignment I was given in a sociology class, not in the class, that would be an interesting experience, but at home, in the privacy of one's home, we were asked to do this. You know, spend 15 minutes naked in front of your mirror and just see what you can see. It was, as stupid as that sounds on paper, an absolutely profound experience because so much of our culture does everything to avoid.
00:47:47
Speaker
those kinds of encounters. No, I totally believe that that could be a profound experience. It was, it was. And you wind up seeing things that you've maybe never seen ever, even though you've had it on your person your entire life. What a strange encounter that is.
00:48:04
Speaker
I think that this is why I'm bringing this up and this is the final way that I can mount a defense is that when you start to say your name a hundred times, your name ceases to mean much. When you start to look at your body very, very closely, what you think you see or take to be self-evident is actually not what's there.
00:48:27
Speaker
And so you could sort of turn this all into a clever kind of negation where you go and also as a statement of truth and say, I am not my name. I am not my religion. I am not the community I grow up in. I am not the degrees that I earn in college. I am not the clothes I wear. I'm starting to sound like Tyler Durden. You are not the contents of your wallet. But I think that, you know, in that process of peeling layer after layer of your quote unquote self back,
00:48:56
Speaker
you at the very least have to acknowledge that none of these things individually explain me, make me what I am. So then I guess you say, well, I guess these individual things in their totality make me what I am, but I would actually argue that
00:49:12
Speaker
The more that you look at each of them individually, in spite of the fact that they are in constant interplay with each other, the more you notice the spaces between them, then you do the content of the individual things, if you want to call it that. And when you find those spaces, I think you realize that this notion of a stable self is being propped up by all of these pieces that in their individuality don't say shit.
00:49:38
Speaker
about you or who you are. And I think in his own interesting way, he's doing that in this book. It's a kind of Pompey do experiment where the architecture is the guts of the building are on the outside as opposed to the inside. And so there's an aesthetic choice happening, but there's also I think a deliberate
00:50:00
Speaker
I don't want to call it a philosophy, but let's say there's a red thread or even an intuition that he's pursuing and you might even say interrogating in this book. You're familiar with the ship of Theseus? No.
00:50:17
Speaker
So this is an old thought experiment. Theseus has a ship and over the years the ship is repaired and different parts are replaced. The Taff rail is replaced and the main mast is replaced and the mizzen mast is replaced and part of the hall is replaced and on and on and on until eventually you get to a point where
00:50:40
Speaker
no part of the ship is the original part of Theseus's ship. And it's an intellectual puzzle designed to get you to think about change and identity, right? It's a useful way to look at a person, right? The way that a person changes over time. And there's a sense in which the distance between you as a baby and the distance between you as an adult is the distance between Theseus's ship when he brought it
00:51:09
Speaker
out of the shipyard and Theseus's ship after everything had been revised.
Ship of Theseus and Continuous Identity
00:51:12
Speaker
I could propose a variation on the ship of Theseus in which
00:51:17
Speaker
you walk around to every part of the ship and you point at it and you say, is this what makes it a ship? You point at the mast and you say, is this what makes it a ship? No. You point at the keel. Is this what makes it a ship? No. If I took away the mast, would it still be a ship? Yes. If I took away the keel, would it still be a ship? Yes. All of the things together are what make it a ship. And so a whole bunch of things together make you you.
00:51:42
Speaker
And the way that you change over time means that you can't look at any one thing and say, this is what makes me. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a thing that is made up of all those things, if that makes sense. Like, is Theseus' ship at the beginning the same as it was at the end? Is it the same ship? I don't know. Is it a ship? Yes. Did it ever stop being a ship? No. Yeah, that's well put. That's well put.
00:52:14
Speaker
Let me now come to your side and just concede that there's an element in my argument that even I am definitely unconvinced of, and here it is. I'm reading Jean Amoure's book, At the Mind's Limits, which was a series of essays that he wrote in the 1960s upon the sort of like passionate
00:52:35
Speaker
Request of a friend of his that he speak to his experience as a concentration camp survivor because he never wrote about it never wanted to Certainly had much to say he himself was a self-identified intellectual before he went into Auschwitz one of the camps in the Auschwitz Complex complex
00:53:00
Speaker
And this is one of the most powerful books I've ever read.
Contrasting Memoirs: Améry vs. Lévet
00:53:07
Speaker
And I would say even though they're essayistic in format, there's five different essays that make up the book and they're not chronological.
00:53:16
Speaker
They are absolutely, this would count as a memoir. And for me to sit here and say, because if you take my argument with Levee to the extreme and say that what he's done is expose the phoniness of all memoirs in that because there's no stable self or even further, there is no self that renders all memoirs suspect or even false.
00:53:43
Speaker
And I just can't get with that because I've encountered too many memoirs that I've found so deeply moving and penetrating and full of just unbelievable insights into the individual's life and also into the human experience. And At the Mind's Limits counts as a book of this caliber. And so it's kind of like the Tolstoy contingency theory of history.
00:54:13
Speaker
Everything is chance. Generals don't have any control over what's happening on the battlefield. We like to think that Napoleon was really smart, but in fact, it's a bunch of chaos. Once the cannonballs fly, the smoke's in the air, people are slashing at each other. You don't fucking know what's gonna happen, and then you win, and you claim victory because of your thoughtful strategy, but in truth, it's a bunch of contingency.
00:54:36
Speaker
and chance and randomness. And I think that, yeah, he's right that contingency plays a role in the outcomes of major historical events, but to say that it's nothing but contingency is a bridge too far. I think that that's taking it to an extreme. So I would be taking it to an extreme to say, because even if I'm going to claim there is no fundamental self, therefore all memoirs are rendered truthless or useless is false.
00:55:06
Speaker
and I can come up with 100 books as a counter-argument against my own. So now I'm with you and I'm saying, also, if you put a gun to my head, I seem to love extremes, but we're talking about a book called At the Mind's Limits. If you put a gun to my head and said, which memoir, in quotes, is more valuable for humanity,
00:55:29
Speaker
Edouard Lévée's auto-portrait or Jean Amaris at the mind's limits, I would unhesitatingly take at the mind's limits. Unhesitatingly. I just, I'm in the middle of his second essay where he recounts, um, and yeah, I mean, you mentioned the name of our podcast could be a content warning. So I guess I'll say content warning before I say what I'm about to say. Um, he was on the receiving end of
00:55:57
Speaker
some pretty serious torture by Gestapo himself. He was part of the Belgian resistance. He definitely identified as being on the left, but not as a communist. He was a serious intellectual and was well-schooled in philosophy and literature. And yeah, he knew his stuff. Here's what he said.
Torture and Identity in Améry's Perspective
00:56:18
Speaker
The last thing that I read
00:56:20
Speaker
that when you're actually being tortured, and he's referring in this instance specifically to intellectuals, he is self-identifying as an intellectual. So he's basically saying when you are being tortured and specifically an intellectual,
00:56:37
Speaker
All of that Kant that you've read, all of those Beethoven symphonies that you loved, all of those books that you sucked down on, you know, the French Revolution and the rights of man, all of that disappears. And all you are is a body that is in direct contact with unfathomable pain that cannot be described.
00:57:04
Speaker
And what I thought was interesting about that, he goes further in a previous essay and I'm sure he continues in this vein and to say that of all of the types that wound up in these camps, the sorriest folks in terms of their ability to push back and survive the literal and figurative blows of the camps were the intellectuals.
00:57:30
Speaker
None of that training, none of those debates that they engaged in regarding the origins of evil, regarding ethics, regarding the good life and what it means to live it, had any utilitarian value for them in those environments. And I wanted to just add those asides to say that he gets at
00:57:53
Speaker
rather explicitly that you think you know who you are, and then you're thrust into a situation where you're forced to confront the fact that you don't know who you are.
00:58:07
Speaker
he, in his own way, I don't think that's the purpose of his project or his essays, but I think it winds up being one of the insights that he offers up to readers, especially those of an intellectual cast that
00:58:25
Speaker
He had to contend with the fact that none of that could help him, and in fact, it got in his way when he was in this extraordinary circumstance. And so just to riff off of this notion of identity,
00:58:40
Speaker
and this continuous question that we're probing as to how do you know if you know yourself and what does it mean to know yourself well? What happens when you're thrust into experiences that force you to re-examine what you felt to be self-evident presuppositions about yourself and how well you purportedly know yourself? And so anyway, it's like,
00:59:09
Speaker
It is a staggering series of essays. Well, I know from just glancing at the jacket that Améry says at one point, whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. And I would argue, obviously without in any way minimizing the fact that he experienced torture and I so far have not,
00:59:36
Speaker
that anyone who has internalized the existence of torture can no longer feel at home in the world. And I know that under torture I would be broken down and that all the things that I love or most of the things that I love in the world would cease to matter to me, would seem like illusions or dreams. And I know that under torture I could be turned into a different human being
01:00:06
Speaker
And I'm aware of that intellectually. And I don't know that that would help me if I were to be tortured to know those things. But I do know those things about myself and about the world. And I think about them from time to time. But I don't know that any of that changes my fundamental idea about self.
01:00:32
Speaker
I am who I am right now, and there are many things that could happen to me that would change who I am. Torture is one of those things that could change who I am, but that doesn't mean there is no self. It just means the self is malleable, and we are wired so that pain drives everything else away.
01:00:57
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that the good things that we experience when we're not in pain therefore have no value or no reality. And here's the kicker, and I don't think he would have called himself an atheist. He refers to himself as agnostic when he's engaged in his resistance work and throughout his time in the camps. But he meets, he wound up being in a camp with
01:01:22
Speaker
essentially religious and political dissidents. So he's encountering a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses. He's encountering a lot of Marxists. And this is what I thought was so, this is the mark, I think, of a very intelligent observer.
01:01:38
Speaker
He says, even though I myself, for different reasons based on my own thought process and what I arrived at philosophically, could never subscribe to religion of any variety or political projects that were as convinced of their rightness as Marxists, he said that he was bearing witness to the fact that they fared oftentimes infinitely better
01:02:08
Speaker
than the intellectuals that were either atheists or agnostics. Something about those convictions fortified their identities and their ability to withstand the very blows that he was receiving, but in a way, at least from the way he describes it, didn't break them in quite the same way it broke the non-believing intellectuals. I find that fascinating. That makes total sense to me.
01:02:37
Speaker
I've thought a lot about how, you know, we've had these conversations about revolutionaries and I can imagine myself and look, this is all hypothetical, you know, but I can imagine myself participating in a revolution or leading a revolution and being willing to risk my life. I can imagine it right now. Maybe when the first bullets were flying, I would realize I didn't have it in me.
01:03:04
Speaker
I can imagine it. It seems possible to me that I would be willing to put my life on the line as part of a cause. What I cannot imagine doing is risking life imprisonment, solitary confinement. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. My whole brain shuts down. Yet there are so many people who did risk those things and are risking those things.
01:03:30
Speaker
And you try to get your head around, you know, like Nelson Mandela would be like a, you know, obvious example, like the years of solitary confinement that he spent, he had that conviction that those great leaders have to have in order to endure the extremities that they have to endure. And I know about myself that I do not have that conviction and I am not willing to risk certain things.
01:03:58
Speaker
And so his observation makes sense to me.
01:04:02
Speaker
And that somehow the convictions are the very vehicles that allow people going through intense experiences to salvage their personalities, to salvage their selves. And those that are, I don't want to say lacking in conviction, because that makes it sound like there's some that are like undeveloped or something. It's just different people land in different places. Those that for whatever reason don't subscribe to something as
Preserving Identity Through Conviction
01:04:32
Speaker
life explaining, that's probably the wrong way of putting it, that have a way of explaining reality to themselves that fortifies their sense of self. It does seem to provide a kind of protection even at the point of death. Did Lévée come out with, and not Lévée, did Jean Améry come out from his experience with a deepened sense of self? I don't think
01:04:59
Speaker
He would characterize it that way, but I think he knows himself and I think he knows human beings in ways that are deeper and more intimate than most of humanity ever even grazes. And so there's paradox aplenty, right? I don't think there's any way to nail this down cleanly.
01:05:22
Speaker
Well, where does that leave us with this whole enterprise of autobiography and self-examination? What do I need to understand here, man? Do I need to understand myself or do I need to understand the world?
01:05:38
Speaker
Let's suppose that I'm lucky in a way that few people are, but many are at the same time. Let's suppose I'm lucky and I live to be at a decent age without any serious health problems and then I die peacefully without any pain, right? Certainly many people do have that experience. And I leave behind a beautifully written memoir
01:06:02
Speaker
you know, detailing all the interesting things that happened to me in my life and investigating, you know, my philosophies and my beliefs and everything. Is there value in that or is it just, I was lucky that I wasn't captured by the Gestapo and tortured and that's really the brutal truth of the universe is the Gestapo torturing people and that's all there is to it and we need to stop deluding ourselves with all this talk of self-examination because
01:06:31
Speaker
all the self-examination in the world isn't going to change the fact that that'll happen to me if I'm unlucky and it won't happen to me if I'm lucky and that's all there is to it. You know, I wish I had a clear answer for that. I think that
01:06:47
Speaker
If I were being uncharitable to the genre of memoir writing, it's probably the most common amateur writer genre. You know, people retire and it's become a cliche to say, well, I guess it's time to write my memoir. But I'm not sure that the question has been asked before you've made that declaration as to whether or not your life is interesting enough that if you were to write the memoir of your life, that people would actually want to read it.
01:07:16
Speaker
Um, but I also don't want that to sound like you have to go through something as grueling of as genre Marie to justify one, a decision to write a memoir, because I think there's plenty of men like say Shana gone the pillow book. She was a, I guess the equivalent of an aristocrat.
01:07:34
Speaker
in ancient Japan. So she was different in that regard from an everyday Japanese laborer, but she wasn't beyond that particularly special. And she decided she wanted to write her thoughts down, you know, and I'm glad she did. And so I think an accountant
01:07:58
Speaker
I don't know why I'm using an accountant. I feel like poor accountants always get shit talked for having the driest profession ever. It's probably unfair.
01:08:08
Speaker
I don't, I mean, Pessoa essentially was an accountant. He was a bookkeeper and a translator for law firms while he wrote this stuff on the side. And so, and he basically never left Lisbon for the entirety of his life. He basically confined himself probably to like nine square miles, you know? So he wasn't a world traveler. This wasn't Odysseus, you know, in 1930, 1930s Europe.
The Value of Memoirs
01:08:36
Speaker
God damn, I'm really happy that Pessoa wrote his book. There's shit in every genre. There's bad TV, there's bad movies, there's bad fucking memoirs. And I think you don't need to be Odysseus to write a memoir, but how you establish in yourself whether you actually kind of have something that's interesting to say, maybe you don't know until you try. But I know there's a mountain of crap
01:09:06
Speaker
and there are a few diamonds in the rough, you know? Yeah, no, I don't think you have to have had an interesting life to write a memoir. I started writing one when I was in my early 30s, and I didn't finish it, but I didn't burn the pages or something. And I casually mentioned it to someone, I think, because they were probably like, are you writing anything these days? And so I told them, and they were like, you're writing a memoir, you're 33, and nothing has happened to you. And I was like, so?
01:09:36
Speaker
It's about how you write. Can I write in an engaging way? Do I have insights that I think I can offer? Yes. So to me, so much of it is about how the person is telling the story, whether they lived an incredibly adventurous life or whether they never left Lisbon.
01:09:58
Speaker
I'm going to keep reading because of how they're writing and the way they're telling the stories they have to tell. And I think there's a part of me as a writer that is just a little bit pissed off at LaVey or just dismissive because I'm like, you got to earn this man. Like you got to earn it and you're not earning it because you're not a writer. And
01:10:20
Speaker
Go ahead. No, well, I can't help it. Like there's I don't know if you ever had that Simpsons book. I'm sure there's like that. That's like saying, do you have that Star Wars book when like what what fucking Star Wars book? There's a million Star Wars books, but there was a Simpsons book that came out in the 90s. It was like a fanfare book, you know, and it had a like a diagram of Homer Simpson's brain.
01:10:44
Speaker
and it shows like what the main preoccupations were and based on the size that it occupied within the skull, like it indicates how important it was to get food, sex, yada, yada. And I think what you spoke to is in a way even if you don't like Levy's execution or the book on a whole, you've touched on something important which is listen,
01:11:06
Speaker
love, sex, death, immortality, life after death, all of the angst that comes with being mortal. There's only so many topics that we're all preoccupied by, but they're universal, I think. And he
01:11:26
Speaker
by sharing this inner monologue shares our own, right? And the same way that when I looked at Homer Simpson's, I went, that's right. As dumb as that is, that's exactly right, you know? And let me, I'm trying to think about the moments in my life when I have been the most miserable, when I've been bedridden,
01:11:49
Speaker
feverish desperate for the fever to break so that I could get some kind of rest moments like that and I know that that's a far cry from being tortured but it's all I've got to go on for personal experiences the times in my life when I've just felt the shittiest and I've been suffering and I've wanted the suffering to end at no point
01:12:10
Speaker
at those periods in my life did I wish that other people were also suffering and that good things did not exist in the world.
Beauty and Suffering
01:12:18
Speaker
So it may be that when I am suffering, the ecstasy of a Beethoven symphony will seem hollow and pointless to me.
01:12:30
Speaker
But I don't think I would want Beethoven symphonies to cease existing or for other people to live lives where they could not experience a Beethoven symphony or a U2 song or a Kendrick Lamar song or whatever it was. And I think there's something important there about the truth of the world, but I don't know that I know exactly what it is.
01:12:52
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that, you know, you haven't read it. I have. So it's hard to talk about it. But I think you're right. Also just an intuiting like he might be making more of a comment about Maslow's hierarchy of needs than he is about the value less ness of something like Beethoven's ninth or great music or literature or art in general in that you're just not that is not the priority in that moment. The priority is survival.
01:13:17
Speaker
And when the priority ceases to be survival, and those things are now sort of tended to again, then you can bring back Beethoven's ninth. But that in certain circumstances, those things cease to be not only enjoyable, but even part of reality, because your mind is taken up with so much other stuff.
01:13:43
Speaker
But I wanted to just before we run out of time end with one final question because you brought up the self-indulgent nature of Levy's book and I will concede it is definitely self-indulgent. But we could also make the argument like think of James Joyce as Ulysses, which, you know, some people can't fucking stand.
Art and Self-indulgence
01:14:03
Speaker
I read that thing. I can't say I loved it. And I can't say I read it closely because a lot of it is a slog, I felt. But
01:14:12
Speaker
You know, many folks make the argument it's one of the greatest novels ever written. And I think there are people that genuinely love the book and they're not just like trying to impress people, you know, and so what how do you just like.
01:14:28
Speaker
factor in or make sense of or make room for this idea of self-indulgence with art. Because I think you could actually make the argument that we need mountains and heaps of self-indulgence in order to actually produce, at times, staggeringly incredible works.
01:14:53
Speaker
if we didn't allow for maybe a certain degree if not out and out total self indulgence we wouldn't get. Other things that even if you don't like levy i think we could point to something else that was the byproduct of i think what we could turn self indulgence so how do you,
01:15:14
Speaker
If we're going to level the charge at levy that this is a self-indulgent, narcissistic, masturbatory, naval-gazing, cathartic expression that I didn't need to be privy to, what of the other works that we could probably say with confidence were so glad exist and that wouldn't exist if that particular person didn't allow themselves this kind of almost obscene degree of self-indulgence?
01:15:45
Speaker
Let me think this through. When you were talking about your experience with Parek, I was thinking about my experience with Moby Dick. That is a book that took me three times. Third time I finished it. And each of the three times I was aware that I was reading a masterpiece.
Reflecting on Challenging Literature
01:16:04
Speaker
That is a great book. I will probably never read it again. Ulysses,
01:16:11
Speaker
I have tried multiple times and I made the decision I'm just not going to ever try again. I don't care. And there are many people I admire who love that book. And I have read other Joyce and quite admired it. So I know he had the chops as a writer. He started making choices around the time he wrote Ulysses that he just never recovered from as a writer. And I don't know that self-indulgent is quite the right term because I think Moby Dick and Ulysses are both self-indulgent.
01:16:41
Speaker
And I think Moby Dick is an incredible work of art. And I think Ulysses is innovative and perhaps it's important with a capital I, but I don't think it's a good book, which is often the case with things in any genre that are innovative, like the first people who do it maybe necessarily aren't doing it very well.
01:17:06
Speaker
So it's not so much self-indulgence, it's if you're able to self-indulge in the service of some kind of truth that is worth drawing people's attention to. Lave himself in auto-portrait mentions how he can't stand people who don't know how to tell a story because they leave in too many details even if the story they have to tell is interesting. I'm exactly the same way in my personal life and
01:17:34
Speaker
The essence of all art, the essence of all communication is knowing what details to leave in and what details to omit. And I think the essence of art that fails because it's self-indulgent in the negative way because it's narcissistic is because it's doing a poor job of deciding what details to leave in and what details to omit and therefore is not directing me to some kind of truth that
01:18:05
Speaker
is worth looking at. To take an example from Ulysses early on, we see one of the characters on the toilet, I believe actually in the outhouse in his backyard because he does not have indoor plumbing. And I'll grant you that there at that time in Western literature that showing a man taking a shit was a risque thing and there's absolutely no reason why a writer shouldn't be able to do that.
Art as Communication
01:18:33
Speaker
and that therefore there is value in establishing that as precedent and saying, no, no, no, like it's okay. People take shits and that's part of their daily routine and novelists should be able to write about that and painters should be able to paint it. I agree with all that.
01:18:47
Speaker
Uh, I didn't like, I just didn't want to read about that guy taking a shit because within the context of the story, it's not helping me in any way. It's not exciting me. It's not bringing me joy. It's not making me curious. It's not teaching me anything. I think that all the essence of all art is a form of communication. And I think people who produce great art and then say, it's, it's just for me, I don't care if anybody reads it or watches it or listens to it or whatever.
01:19:16
Speaker
I don't think they're being honest with themselves. The essence of great art is communication. And when you are unable to communicate because you're too far up your own ass or because you can't separate what's important from what's unimportant or because you don't have the technical chops in whatever field you're working in, then that's when accusations of self-indulgence become damning criticisms rather than merely descriptions, neutral descriptions.
01:19:44
Speaker
Well, you mentioned if you don't have the chops to be working in the area you're working in. I mean, that's that is an important detail. And you did maybe without realizing it, change the frame from the work itself to the artist. And I would say let's just linger on that as my final question, which is.
01:20:03
Speaker
in order to produce any book. I don't actually know the background of Melville's working life, but like I know, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way towards Cormac McCarthy, but I happen to know a little bit about his creative process and that he did spend years not employed and basically just sitting in front of a typewriter for hours and hours and hours.
01:20:31
Speaker
I think that we both feel that he did have the chops and then some. It would be pretty crazy to claim otherwise, even if you don't like the books, the command of language is unmistakable. But we could make the argument that the artist as a character type is intrinsically self-indulgent. You know, if everyone was sitting around for 15 hours a day,
01:20:57
Speaker
hammering out their novels, as you, I think, correctly point out, you'd have very different qualities of novels coming out, not all equally great. But just the fact that you've decided you're gonna do this is a kind of self-indulgence, painters, writers, et cetera. I'm feeling like I'm now becoming like the sort of like conservative, like mainlining Protestant work ethic, Fox news-watching,
01:21:27
Speaker
like monster that's like get a job you fucking bum you know what I mean but you could almost extend it out and just say hey if you take the frame and you pivot it from the work to the worker in this case the artist how does any art
01:21:45
Speaker
get made, if not by a kind of self-indulgence. If we're going to allow ourselves to define self-indulgence in part by, I need a lot of fucking time. And a lot of that time I actually need to be able to waste to some degree in order to make room for the work to emerge. Yeah, but when you're
01:22:14
Speaker
When you're a person who's not engaged in any kind of self-indulgent creative endeavor and you come home from work and you say to your husband, well, you know, so Julie did that thing again today that I can't stand and, you know, I don't want to have to report her to HR, but I might have to. And.
01:22:33
Speaker
you know, then on top of that, we keep telling Tommy not to microwave the fish and he microwaved the fish again today. And you know, I'm really thinking like, I'm just going to buy an entire fish at Trader Joe's and just like nuke the entire thing in the microwave, just so he'll stop doing that. And you just talk about your day, you know, and you just go on and on and on. And you just socialize like a normal person. And then your husband socializes back to you. How is that not self-indulgent at the same time? Like we, we do what we have to do for ourselves. That's part of,
01:23:03
Speaker
being able to do for other people what you need to do for them. Like, you know, you have to take care of yourself. And so, you know, I learned a long time ago that selflessness itself is selfish because if I have a conscience and I fail to do something I should for someone else, my conscience will then make me feel bad and I don't want to feel bad, so I will selfishly do the selfless thing.
01:23:28
Speaker
Eh, that's a nice little intellectual fact to know, I guess, but it doesn't change the fact that I don't want to treat people like shit.
01:23:36
Speaker
And that I think that I sometimes can be very selfish and there are other times I can be less selfish. And so I guess this, I'm saying everything to a certain extent is self-indulgent. Certainly this podcast is self-indulgent. How dare you? How dare you? Well, you know, if I didn't have to be here being social with you, I could probably be downstairs writing my novel, but of course my brother's here right now. So I have to go be social with him after this. And really like all of you, other human beings are just taking away from my self-indulgence right now.
01:24:04
Speaker
We don't, we don't. But like everything is self-indulgence to a certain extent. And so what? Because some self-indulgence can can lead to great good and bring great joy to the world.
01:24:19
Speaker
And some of it does not. Now I want to read Marx's son-in-law's book, Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy, because I think he's going to mount some arguments that are consistent with what you've just said. We need to read that. But I also thought what we could do as our musical tie-in or whatever, like cultural, you know, blurb that you, wow, I'm like so old. I can't even figure out the language you use to say,
01:24:49
Speaker
cut and paste, a line of dialogue from a film. But anyway, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, when was it Patti Duvall? Shelley Duvall comes in three quarters of the way into the movie and goes,
01:25:05
Speaker
Would you like some, like, are you hungry? I could make you some sandwiches. And his response is like, you bitch, like, can't you see I'm fucking working? And then, of course, we see what he's working on. But I love that as like, as like a cartoonish example of of what I'm speaking to.
01:25:24
Speaker
Well, yeah. And you know, what's here, here's maybe we can end here. But so the payoff of that scene, of course, is eventually she looks at the pile of typewritten pages and he's written all work and no play makes Jack a doll boy thousands and thousands of times. And I thought that he actually the ending was that she got it published and he became a multi multi-millionaire. Well, that's kind of where I'm going with this. Like, what if
01:25:53
Speaker
Part of that story was that she came in and offered him a sandwich and he screamed at her and called her a bitch and was verbally and emotionally abusive to her. But then at the end of the winter, he'd written a great American novel that won the National Book Award and made him an intellectual heavyweight.
01:26:16
Speaker
there are many, many people in the world who would say that that trade-off would be worth it. I certainly am not one of them, but it's an interesting thought experiment to think about how that movie would have handled that because I don't know that Kubrick, I don't know that Kubrick would fall into the category of someone who didn't think that that exchange would be unfair. In other words, I guess what I'm getting at is the self-indulgence
01:26:42
Speaker
that leads the character of Jack Torrance to be misogynistic and abusive in that scene is often in society explained away by their genius. And the fact that he is not a genius because he's gone crazy in the movie kind of bypasses the most interesting question that that scene raises, if that makes sense.
01:27:06
Speaker
You should watch. There's a documentary on Kubrick where they show him filming his son's five-year-old birthday party. And the kid's just having fun. He's five. He's just eating cake, opening presents.
01:27:21
Speaker
but Kubrick the dad is filming the birthday and he cannot drop the directorial persona and he literally at moments at the birthday screams at the sun like get back in the frame like do it differently like do it this way and I'm going like
01:27:40
Speaker
Holy shit, man. Like as you're pointing out with, in a way, what was lost in the actual movie and the shining between Jack Nicholson's character and Shelley Duvall is lost in reality between Kubrick and his son, arguably, as evidenced in that scene. That's horrifying. Like what a fucking dick, man.
01:28:01
Speaker
And I'm being a little hyperbolic. It wasn't quite that bad, but he does raise his voice and sort of like demand that the sun do it again. And you're like, wow, you've just missed, seem to be missing the boat here as to what, what this event is for, you know, and who it's for.
01:28:43
Speaker
Well, I have to say I did watch that final cut of his son's fifth birthday party and it was shit, man. So I don't know. I know. I know.