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3. No One Wants to Read Your Catharsis
65 Plays1 year ago
Why does inspiration arrive, where does it go when it leaves, and how do you get it to come back?
We discuss Vladimir Nabokov’s 1972 essay “On Inspiration.”
Also mentioned: JD Salinger, Walt Whitman, Charles Bukowski, David Lynch, Keith Jarrett, Lana Del Rey, Saul Friedlander
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Anecdotes
00:00:00
Speaker
That's funny that you showed me that because I took a nap this afternoon which I almost never do anymore and as soon as you showed me that I realized that I had a dream during my nap that I was like at your house staying with you and you were actually going out to hang out with Bill Ayers but you weren't letting me come with you.
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome to candy jail. My name is Robert and I'm here with Brendan. And today, well, Brendan, I'll let you take that away. What are we doing today? Well, after we had such a.
00:00:42
Speaker
conversation about such an intense thing. Last time I thought we should maybe handle something a little bit lighter that also ties into a few things we've talked about on the show. So this is a very short essay by Vladimir Nabokov, usually just called Inspiration or On Inspiration, that was written in 1972 for the Saturday Review in response to the prompt, What is inspiration?
00:01:07
Speaker
And this is not a significant entry in Nabokov's bibliography.
Nabokov on Inspiration and Art
00:01:12
Speaker
And it is, in fact, so short that it almost doesn't even qualify as an essay. But nonetheless, Nabokov had very, very strong ideas about what was and was not art and the business of art. And yet when it came to explaining that, he sometimes struggled to find the right words, which I think is understandable.
00:01:36
Speaker
We're all familiar with the experience of having a reaction to something that's been created and not being able to put into words the way that it makes us feel. And I think there are some art forms where it's a little bit easier to do that and somewhere it's a little bit harder. There's that famous saying that
00:01:52
Speaker
writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which is a little bit ridiculous but has a grain of truth in it. So rather than trying to address exactly what art is, although he does do that elsewhere, he writes about inspiration and he concludes the essay by simply providing some
00:02:08
Speaker
Short examples from then contemporary writers he admired illustrating what he believes inspiration to be so I've mentioned before I found the back of at a very formative time in my life and some of his ideas both right and wrong have hung over my life for you know the 20 some years since I first encountered him.
00:02:29
Speaker
you are much less familiar with his body of work than I am. So this is my, you know, 10th time or something reading this, but it's really your first time. So what were your initial thoughts on reading this?
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, I have to say at this point, I did my homework and I read this, this is I think my third read through. So I've had some time to read it, have a first impression, but then really try to familiarize myself with the piece and hopefully upon multiple readings gain deeper insights into what Nabokov was driving at. And I actually do think upon my third and final reading,
00:03:06
Speaker
that I have gained more insights into what I think he's getting at here. So I'll just say this. My first reading was this does not A, inspire me at all, which is not necessarily the point. It's an exploration of inspiration rather than a catalyst to inspire someone. Although it is, I feel like interesting in that
00:03:32
Speaker
you'd almost hope that an essay on inspiration would be inspiring, and I suppose actually in kind of like a cerebral way it is, but not in like, let me grab my pen right now and start tossing off some poems. But I will say that things began to come to the fore upon the third reading
00:03:53
Speaker
that I thought and that I thought but thought that Nabokov didn't get at in his own essay. And again, upon this final reading, I actually feel like I was just a bad reader. And now that I've let it sink in more, I can see that much of what I began musing over, he was already getting at pretty explicitly
00:04:17
Speaker
And somewhat systematically, keeping in mind, this is basically a two-page essay. So we could come at this from a number of different angles, Brendan. I feel like my college seminar mind is saying, why don't we just go at this? Not paragraph by paragraph, but I could share with you the first thing I highlighted. Sure.
00:04:42
Speaker
So, in the first paragraph of the essay at the bottom, he writes, conformists suspect that to speak of quote-unquote inspiration is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the ivory tower, yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks. And I found this curious in some ways because
00:05:10
Speaker
I really love Walt Whitman. And if I were to think of any poet, certainly North American poet that holds the heavyweight championship prize for at least on the face of it
00:05:26
Speaker
producing what looks like a very inspiration-driven piece, specifically Song of Myself.
Whitman, Salinger, and Academic Criticism
00:05:35
Speaker
I also learned more about Whitman's reception at the time that Nabokov was probably at the height of his fame or certainly moving towards that. And
00:05:47
Speaker
And essentially, the ivory tower rejected Whitman because they thought it was too loose, it was too informal, it didn't have that, maybe not academic, but polish that the folks in academia were accustomed to, and therefore were kind of beating up on old Whitman. And this was coming from, I learned about this from, what was the poet's name? The Black Mountain Poets, Robert Creeley.
00:06:16
Speaker
So Creeley in an essay said that that was essentially his encounter as an undergrad with Whitman was people mocking him. And he took that same smug position until he actually grew older, reread the poem and was absolutely, you know, just fell in love with it. And so that's just where my mind went immediately upon reading that curious statement, you know, in the final portion of that opening paragraph as
00:06:46
Speaker
how academia has related to poets that I would characterize as inspiration-driven in that their approach is more free-form, at least on the face of it, looser and as a consequence outside of the academy or outside of institutions of learning in that they're not adhering to forms that
00:07:13
Speaker
You'd probably have to learn with rigorous study and probably mentorships from teachers or professors.
00:07:24
Speaker
fantastically snobbish, but not necessarily snobbish in an ivory tower kind of way. I would have to go back through all of his writings to remind myself if he ever really speaks to Whitman specifically, but my suspicion is that he would not have liked him, not because Whitman was outside of any kind of
00:07:45
Speaker
academic tradition, but I think he would have found his verse sloppy. But one of the writers he cites here as admiring is Salinger, who he was a huge admirer of Salinger's writings, and Salinger was also rejected by the ivory tower or the academic community. I think that Nabokov's snobbishness was not academic in nature or classist or anything like that. His snobbery was purely artistic.
00:08:10
Speaker
and in line with his very deeply held, if not always, articulable ideas about what art is. We talked about Walter Benjamin and I kept raising, when we were discussing his essay,
00:08:26
Speaker
the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, I kept suggesting that I thought that maybe Benjamin didn't understand something fundamental about why people create things. And then last week we talked about a movie that I was deeply moved by, which I also thought contained some sort of political commentary, even though I didn't want to say that the political commentary is what made it good. But because it was good, it was therefore able to have a political commentary attached to it.
00:08:56
Speaker
Nabokov, of course, was famously opposed to any kind of union between art and politics. So I guess I'm wondering, does it seem fair to you to say that there's a distinction between the way that someone like Nabokov seems to understand art, capital A, art, art in quotation marks, whatever, and the way that someone like Benjamin seems to understand it?
Art, Politics, and Inspiration
00:09:20
Speaker
I think most definitely, but I also think I am not qualified to make an informed statement regarding Nabokov's take on art and its purpose just because I haven't surveyed his work extensively.
00:09:39
Speaker
I think I've read Lolita twice, a big fan of that novel. I think the end of it, although again, this is truly a masterpiece, so who am I to say, but I think there were moments in the end where it fell off for me, but I also just registered pretty much immediately the same way that I registered with J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, probably from the opening lines, like this is
00:10:03
Speaker
a really incredible book and it hooked me immediately. So I could speak much more extensively about Benjamin's feelings about art and what its purpose is and what would constitute good art in Benjamin's mind, probably to some degree. I don't know if I could do that with Nabokov beyond what I've encountered in this essay.
00:10:28
Speaker
Let's go back for a second to the idea of the ivory tower and your example of Whitman as someone who was excluded from or rejected by the ivory tower, by which I think we mean the relevant critical establishment for whatever medium is being discussed. In my mind, Harold Bloom is the
00:10:50
Speaker
quintessential American gatekeeper of the ivory tower. Who loves Whitman, by the way, which is I think is great. Interesting. Yeah. And we'd have to go like dig into which literary
00:11:06
Speaker
theory or American literature professors in the United States, probably in the 50s and 60s, were down on Whitman. But he's clearly won the battle in the end. I think even if he was rejected by the establishment,
00:11:23
Speaker
for decades he's now firmly and rightfully I think designated one of the greatest North American if not one of the greatest poets of all time and a testament to that being how many poets all over the world that encountered his work even in translation recognized immediately that there's something here that they can't shake but just I just wanted to point out that Bloom actually writes extensively about his love of Whitman so
00:11:49
Speaker
So you mentioned Whitman a minute ago as an example of, I don't remember your exact phrasing, an inspired author or something like that. But the first thing that I think of when I think of Leaves of Grass is the fact that, as I understand it, he revised that work continuously after it was published and he lived to be an old man. So he spent decades going back to that and rewriting it. So was that
00:12:15
Speaker
And I guess we should clarify here that Nabokov in his little essay does not settle on what inspiration is.
00:12:23
Speaker
He says that there are several different kinds of it and he likens it to the prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack. And he distinguishes it from the froth of a fit as well as from the humdrum comfort of the right word. So Whitman, do you see that as like, is he being struck by inspiration?
00:12:50
Speaker
whatever the fuck inspiration is, is he being struck by it over and over again? Or is he trying to sort of trim away the fat from maybe the initial burst of inspiration and then in a more calm and reflective way, like all born perfectionists, he just goes back and tries to perfect and perfect and perfect. From what I've read,
00:13:11
Speaker
I can't remember where Bloom landed on this, but I think many feel that with each subsequent revision, Whitman actually made the thing worse. And so I find that interesting and curious. I also haven't read any of the subsequent versions. I've only read the original and I love the original.
00:13:33
Speaker
even if I recognize for myself that there are patches of the original that I feel, I don't know if sloppy would be the word, but that lose me. So what's going on there with Whitman's preoccupation with writing and rewriting that thing and arguably making it worse and not simply letting it go upon the, maybe not the first burst because I'm sure there were revisions upon the first burst, but
00:14:03
Speaker
You know, this question bifurcates in different directions. One avenue we could go down would be the illusion of art. As you've pointed out at different points with other art that you love and other artists that you love, like Lynch for instance. David Lynch constantly seems to be drawing our attention to the fact that movies are a magic trick.
00:14:27
Speaker
And he does it both explicitly by sort of musing on the medium of film, but also implicitly by using characters that actually can do magic tricks. And I think like bring us to those kinds of questions about art. And so with Whitman and what happened, what's going on in that poem, I feel inspired while I read
Truth in Art and Personal Reflection
00:14:51
Speaker
it.
00:14:51
Speaker
And by feeling inspired in the act of reading it, I then sort of project my inspiration as reader back onto Whitman as inspiration as writer, and just assume in my mind's eye that he wrote it in a Zeus-like lightning bolt flash of total inspiration.
00:15:12
Speaker
And that might be a magic trick. I might be fooling myself or romanticizing what's going on there. I'd need to learn more about the history of the construction of that poem. But he certainly presents it as if, I think. I think he presents it as if.
00:15:31
Speaker
Whitman was rolling around in a field full of grass intoxicated with the blue sky and the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds and he happened to have his pad and pen on him and out comes this outpouring of greatness. But I have no idea how close that is to reality. It's interesting that you bring up Lynch and his preoccupation with magic tricks because
00:15:59
Speaker
Nabokov was preoccupied with exactly the same thing. He often referred to artists as magicians or conjurers. And in fact, there's an early, I wouldn't call it a proto version of Lolita, but an early novella that was not published in his lifetime that deals with somewhat similar subject matter, which is called the conjurer.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so there's definitely an element of trickery, which I think has a couple elements. One is that you are making it seem to the audience as though what you're doing is effortless.
00:16:30
Speaker
And that applies not just to art, but to, say, sports. If you watch a professional athlete playing at a high level, they make things look effortless that, in fact, are the result of incredible talent and years of practice. But then there's also just the sense of what you are trying to create in your audience, I think, is some combination of awe and emotional engagement and intellectual exhilaration.
00:16:57
Speaker
If you do it right, I think your audience is left feeling those things without understanding how they have been made to feel them.
00:17:05
Speaker
I think that's well put. Which I think partially explains why Nabokov in his little essay goes to examples so quickly. He says examples are the stained glass windows of knowledge. And then he concludes his little piece by citing from a series of, like I said, then contemporary short stories, The Country Husband by John Cheever, The Happiest I've Been by Op Dyke, A Perfect Day for Banana Fish by Salinger, Death in Miami Beach by Herbert Gold,
00:17:35
Speaker
Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz. Do you have any kind of relationship with any of those pieces? I've probably read Catcher in the Rye maybe four or five times, and I did reread A Perfect Day for Banana Fish in preparation for this episode. I didn't get to the others. I aspired to get to the others, but I wasn't inspired, I guess.
00:18:03
Speaker
So yes, Salinger is definitely far and away the author I am most familiar with on that list. So what he cites from Banana Fish is a single phrase stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy collapsed castle, which comes in the middle of a description of a little girl running down a beach
00:18:27
Speaker
in search of the protagonist of the story who's Seymour Glass. And so he doesn't even quote the entire sentence, he just quotes that phrase. Does it make sense to you, as someone who's familiar with the story, why he singled out just that clause to try to get his point across?
00:18:45
Speaker
Yes and no. I mean, I think that if I were in a creative writing class and I had a professor that had us read this and then he or she lingered on that line, I would then expect them to say note the
00:19:02
Speaker
natural and elegant use of alliteration in this sentence, which it is really nice and it rolls off the tongue and the image is really crystal clear. But I'm not sure like what Nabokov himself is driving out by isolating that particular line. Did you have a thought with that?
00:19:23
Speaker
I do. I think that your point about alliteration is well taken and that is it's a pleasing arrangement of words, which I think we could agree that that's part of an author's responsibility is to
00:19:34
Speaker
construct words in some kind of pleasing way. But it's the image itself that here's this little girl running down a beach and children have a particular way of interacting with the world. They don't notice the same things that adults notice. They don't act on their impulses or restrain themselves from acting on their impulses the same way that adults do.
00:19:56
Speaker
So a little girl running down a beach, there's a soggy collapsed castle. I'm betting that if either you or I were walking down a beach and we saw a soggy collapsed sand castle, we wouldn't think anything of it. We certainly wouldn't be driven to investigate it. We certainly wouldn't be driven to touch it or interact with it in any way. It wouldn't really draw our adult attention. And if it did, it would probably be in the way of, you know, maybe our imaginations would imagine the family that had been there early in the day and
00:20:23
Speaker
And something like that, but a child wanting, noticing the castle, you know, it's a sand castle was on her wavelength. Those are her people who built that thing. And to then want the tactile sensation of just putting your foot in that wet sand and watching the
00:20:41
Speaker
you know the remains of the castle wall collapse around your foot that's something that is so vivid that that character immediately becomes a real person to me and most people would never think to most people don't just aren't observing the right things in order to be able to summon that from
00:21:01
Speaker
wherever artists summon such things. And I do, I should point out that it became obvious in the years at the end of Salinger's life and since his death that he was an extremely disturbed person who had a deeply problematic relationship with young women and teenage girls. And I don't know how much farther that went. And so there's a part of me that can't ever read Salinger the same way ever since
00:21:30
Speaker
Some of those revelations came out and I don't want to get into that because I don't really think that's what this episode is about. But since we are talking about him, I thought that I just wanted to point out that I'm aware of that. But so to answer your question, yes, it's the combination of the way that he says it that is putting together the pleasing sentence and then
00:21:50
Speaker
It's true, it's a true observation and the truth of it makes that character real in a way that just most adults writing little kids would not be able to accomplish.
Separating Art from the Artist
00:22:05
Speaker
Well, I think we should do an episode actually separately about the conundrum that I don't want to say consumers, but I guess consumers is the word. The consumers of art face when it comes to whether or not they should separate the art from the artist. And I think there are arguments that can be made in favor of and against learning about the artists themselves.
00:22:35
Speaker
And also why some people are I don't want to say I keep saying I don't want to but maybe I do want to say pathologically compelled to learn as much as they can about the artists whose works they love and others who are really not interested at all and not in any kind of any kind of
00:22:59
Speaker
pretentious or labored way, but genuinely are just like, I don't care what their background is. If it's a good movie, if it's a good painting, if it's a piece of music that moves me, that's what I care about. Spare me the details. But, you know, let's let's actually put a pin in that, so to speak, and maybe create an episode where we grapple with that question. I'd love to do that. And I agree with you about putting a pin in it, except that I think I can
00:23:29
Speaker
There may be a nice little transition there because there's a passage in one of Nabokov's novels, Pale Fire, which for my money is his best, where the main character is obsessed with his neighbor, who is a famous poet. And there's a passage where the obsessed neighbor is looking at the poet and trying to imagine the inspiration that is happening in his head.
00:23:54
Speaker
And I think that part of what happens when people do get obsessed with artists is that setting aside the aspects of parasocial relationships, which we can get into in another conversation, is there is this sense that you wouldn't know how the magician did the trick. And you feel like if you gather enough information about the magician,
00:24:16
Speaker
you will somehow then have some insight into the trick and perhaps then you will be able to do the trick yourself or perhaps there's an element of like, well, have you ever read something or listened to something or engaged with any kind of art in any way where you almost, a part of you almost gets angry?
00:24:37
Speaker
Like, because it's so good, you become, you feel a part of you is resentful of the fact that someone was able to pull this off or that you now have to find a way to incorporate this thing into your personal canon of what human beings are capable of producing and that's really, really good. That was an awkward way to ask that question. Hmm. I'm gonna take that as a no.
00:25:04
Speaker
Not necessarily. I think that those kinds of feelings for me would constellate around jealousy or a kind of competitiveness or an envy and a feeling then sort of the flip side of that coin would be a feeling of inadequacy or insecurity or self-doubt about my own ability to produce something that's worth a damn. And I think probably if everyone's being honest, including Nabokov, although I haven't read about his personal life,
00:25:33
Speaker
there's always some degree of self-doubt. And actually, I'm not even sure I want to hang out with the person that's completely absent of self-doubt. I mean, think of Kafka being, I know he came up in our Speak No Evil episode, so he clearly looms not large, but he's in my consciousness. And he's like, you know, the famous example of totally wracked with tormented self-doubt and look at what
00:25:57
Speaker
kinds of masterpieces he churned out. And so I'm going to say, number one, I think it's natural to feel that way in the face of great works of art. It doesn't always have to be jealousy or anger or envy directed in an aggressive way towards the maker of the art that you envy.
00:26:19
Speaker
where that you just you recognize has produced something great but there might be then i think more that introspect it that negative self introspection that turns into rumination where the,
00:26:32
Speaker
The aspiring artist is so wowed by a master that instead of that producing inspiration in themselves, like, let me go pick up my instrument because that was incredible. I'm going to try to make my own music. It turns into, why should I even fucking try? Look at how good these people are. And I know that with pianists, like concert pianists, that has definitely happened. Thomas Bernhard wrote,
00:26:56
Speaker
a very funny and just bitter novel called The Loser. And it's about, what's the pianist's name, Gould? I can't remember his first name. Glenn Gould. Glenn Gould. And then there's another character. They're loosely based off real musicians. And that's a great example of the negative impact of encountering greatness.
Inspiration in Creative Processes
00:27:19
Speaker
So I would say, yes, I have felt that. And I would like to say, and maybe this is too charitable towards myself, but I'd like to say it usually shakes out into some kind of self-doubt rather than rage directed towards the so-called master artist.
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. Nabokov notoriously said, I divide books into two categories, those I've written and those I wish I'd written. And I think people sometimes read that as a sign of his arrogance, but I don't really. It was his formulation, it was his way of
00:28:04
Speaker
only wanting to focus on the positive. And of course he also famously attempted to destroy the manuscript of Lolita because he had a complete crisis of confidence in it and it was his wife who persuaded him not to do that. So yeah, I think you're... I think that's fair enough. Well I wanted to jump in really quick because there's a part in the beginning where it talks about a dog and you can actually get a dog to howl if you howl near its face. Where is that?
00:28:34
Speaker
Well, it's, he begins with quoting several things that could be read as, that are, or could be read as definitions of inspiration. And one of them I believe is translated from the French, a writer named Buffon who claims that wolves and dogs howl only by inspiration. And he continues to say that one can easily ascertain this by causing a little dog to howl close to one's face. Okay. So I wanted to use that as a nice,
00:29:04
Speaker
concrete, explicit reference in Nabokov's own essay. This is an opening quote in the essay, one of four. And I bring this up, man, because I think it does
00:29:18
Speaker
connect to exactly what you've been discussing, which is that kind of inspiration, you howl near your pet dog and the dog is, in so many words, inspired to howl as well. When I see a musician like David Berman, obviously at this point, I think he's come up maybe in every episode, at least the last one,
00:29:41
Speaker
You mean in the podcast we have that's named after one of his songs? Yeah, exactly. It's obvious one of us is obsessed and another one is probably obsessed, but it's on a spectrum. I'm at the far left end of totally obsessed with David Berman as a human and as a musician. But I bring this up to say I had the good fortune of actually seeing him play live in 2008 in Echo Park.
00:30:09
Speaker
And he didn't perform live very much at all in his life. It was actually the first year he toured. And I think he did go anyway. We'll double check, but it was close to the first year, if not the first year.
00:30:25
Speaker
I remember watching him perform and my immediate feeling was, wow, not all rock stars are like Mick Jagger. Not all rock stars are slick and badass and
00:30:41
Speaker
perfectly charismatic. He was not that, he was kind of goofy. He wrapped a mic cord around his arm and inadvertently slapped himself in the face with his own microphone. Then I bring this up just to say that was inspiring for me because I went, oh man, if
00:30:59
Speaker
Berman can do this and be willing to be goofy and just be himself on stage in front of people, maybe I can do this. And that turned into 15 years later, I've picked up a guitar. And because since his passing, I think there's been lots of things that connect to my wanting to play the guitar and relating back to Berman. But
00:31:22
Speaker
in part just to commune with him on some level or be in conversation with him. But I do feel on a certain level like I am howling, like the owner and the dog are howling in that I experienced Berman's music recorded and also live. And now I'm howling back. It's a form of mimicry. It's a form of imitation. But the imitation is obviously, in many ways, the highest compliment to the artist. I want to
00:31:51
Speaker
get inside works of art that I love. And I think that we might have something to go off of there just in that there is some art that we can recognize as truly great, but it doesn't deflate us. It compels us maybe even to imitate it, and that somehow in the act of imitating it,
00:32:15
Speaker
intensely, we find our way to our own voice after many, many years of hard labor that no one sees behind closed doors. And I'm not saying I'm going to be a famous musician, but I think we've heard enough biographies and just interviews with other famous musicians who speak to this, you know, that they find their people, they find their bands, they play those songs obsessively. And that is a kind of howl mirroring a howl.
00:32:44
Speaker
And then, but it's not their howl. But somehow in the act of imitating the howl that immediately hit them, that lightning bolt of inspiration from another artist, that was what they needed. And the imitation was what they needed to ultimately get to their own howl, their authentic howl. I once knew a dog that literally howled at the opening notes to the song, Yellow Led Better by Pearl Jam.
00:33:12
Speaker
And the dog was not known to howl under any other circumstances, but you put on that one Pearl Jam track and the dog would howl. And anyway, I think fondly of that dog from time to time because that song makes me want to have the same reaction. But I do think that there are maybe.
00:33:30
Speaker
a couple different kinds of inspiration in here. What you're talking about is a sort of generalized inspiration that makes you want to create. You see David Berman, and either in the moment or long term afterwards, that gives you motivation and confidence to go explore your own creativity, learn the guitar, write your own songs, whatever it is.
00:33:54
Speaker
then there's the kind of inspiration that properly channeled, I guess, allows you to actually write a good song. Is there a relationship between those two things or are they completely different? Can you just reframe the second part of that question? Are you saying do you need a certain degree of just bare bones practice, practice, practice learning the fundamentals to get at or position yourself for inspiration?
00:34:24
Speaker
No, let me let me just take a really simplistic example. Like, let's say young William Shakespeare reads a poem or goes to a play and is inspired and thinks
00:34:37
Speaker
Oh shit, I want to do that. I wonder if I could do that. I got to try to do that. And flash forward, you know, 20 years and Shakespeare, the established poet is sitting at a desk somewhere writing, you know, one of his famous soliloquies, channeling whatever he could channel that allowed him to do that. Those are both the result of some kind of inspiration. But are those two kinds of inspiration in any way connected to one another or are they totally different species of things?
00:35:06
Speaker
I don't know. I think it's hard to answer that. I think that when I reflect back on being 19 years old, so let me put it this way. My first inspiration to write, and I mean really write, and I hope that it's fine with me saying that you also are a writer, and I mean that non-pretentiously, but you're someone who takes writing very seriously and has committed hours and hours to it, correct?
00:35:31
Speaker
Far too seriously in far too many hours, yes. There you go. Okay, me too. So, except not as much as you in recent years. But when I was 19, I found a poetry book in a local bookstore by Charles Bukowski, who I knew nothing about at the time.
00:35:49
Speaker
I pulled it off the shelf, it was the flash of lightning behind the mountain, which are posthumous poems, and the opening stanza, or it was basically on the opening page before you get to the first poem, was I watched the old ladies in the supermarket angry and alone.
00:36:08
Speaker
And I read that and I registered. This is true. I have seen those old ladies. I want to read more. And this is not a reading list. No one's putting a gun to my head to read this thing. I want to read this. So I pulled it down and I just started consuming him intensely.
00:36:26
Speaker
And I was totally uninhibited, at least the way I remembered it, in those initial stages of exuberance of like, whoa, I forgot. I love reading. The act of reading is deeply pleasurable, and no one's making me do it. It was one of those identity-forming moments where you're like, oh, this is who I am.
00:36:45
Speaker
not on Bukowski, but, oh, I'm a reader. I want to be around books. That became immediately clear. And I was like, I'll just read whatever the fuck I can find. I didn't even have interest, per se, at that point. Nothing as defined as they are now. I just knew that reading was feeding something really, really deep. And so from there, I started writing poetry because Bukowski's method is very similar, at least on the face of it, to Whitman's, which was A,
00:37:12
Speaker
He didn't even make it through community college. There's photos of him with newspapers on his face, passed out drunk on the lawn because he just was probably bored, but also anti-establishment for lots of different reasons.
Artistic Courage and Expression
00:37:24
Speaker
But he just never adhered to that, let me write like Byron, let me write like Shakespeare. He just said, I have things that are true that are in me. I might not be a good writer yet, but he trusted that there was plenty there. And if he could just get it out and do it,
00:37:42
Speaker
at high volume that that it would happen and he did and so again that inspired me to do the same and i wrote a bunch of really shitty poetry very uh juvenile from 19 to probably 20 probably 22 was just really bad but but
00:38:02
Speaker
I think it is different from the inspiration that I encounter now at 34 because I'm more inhibited, and I'm not exactly sure why. It could be because of my being in a 9-to-5.
00:38:18
Speaker
Being older having a little more perspective being a little less bold and cavalier and there's a double-edged sword to it for me man cuz on the one hand I Really relished the experience of like I don't give a fuck
00:38:36
Speaker
I'm sitting down, I'm writing, and this is pure ecstasy. And the boldness and the, yeah, the ecstasy of letting yourself, giving yourself permission to do that and be that is exhilarating. And I don't get that as much. But now that I'm older, I think I'd like to say when I'm inspired, better stuff comes out, but I actually don't know if that's true. So
00:39:04
Speaker
Well, your old ladies in the supermarket example is exactly the same as Nabokov's Salinger example. That is, your response to that, your words was this is true. Sorry, your words were this is true. And that's exactly, I think, what Nabokov was getting at with the Salinger example and every other example.
00:39:25
Speaker
he uses in the essay. Can we do it? Can I wedge one thing into this? Because I feel like the word that I was searching for in that monologue there, man, was fearlessness. And I feel like inspiration, genuine inspiration, has a fearless quality to it. It almost has to. And I think we all respond to that because we all inwardly want to be fearless ourselves.
00:39:51
Speaker
Is it fearlessness or is it the overcoming of fear that we use the word courage to describe?
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think it's courage. I think it's confidence. Confidence that your experiences, that you have had true experiences and you can articulate them, convey them, communicate them truly and that there's merit in that and that other people can connect with that if only you can pull it out of yourself before the self-doubt sets in again.
00:40:23
Speaker
Let me do this, if you don't mind. I'm going to read through, I actually would like to give you what I highlighted, and I only highlighted stuff on the first page. There's only a few, if you don't mind. Can we work through that? Please. Okay, so we started with the conformist suspect that to speak of inspiration is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the ivory tower.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tasks and i thought it was also noteworthy that he said that inspirate first he puts inspiration in quotes and then he says it's basically become tasteless and old fashioned to discuss it and i think what he's implying in that or what i'm inferring from that combination is that somehow it's embarrassing.
00:41:09
Speaker
to talk about inspiration. It's something you're kind of bashful to mention. And I think that does relate back to Whitman in that I think that if we're going to be a little bit harsh towards the professional, academician, you know, literature department professors,
00:41:28
Speaker
They are, well, geez, man, here I go with some stereotypes, but I imagine in my mind's eye a stuffy, tweed jacket-wearing, neurotic person who is bashful, not only in exploring the word inspiration, but the reason they're bashful is because they're a little uptight.
00:41:51
Speaker
They're uptight about sexuality and sex in general. They're uptight about what it actually means to experience ecstasy. They're uptight about what it means to be exuberant. And I think Whitman was one of those minds or one of those artists that I don't think it's an American thing. It's not a nationalist, you know, there's not a
00:42:12
Speaker
surplus of inspiration in the United States and the poets in the United States in relation to poets anywhere else in the world, I think there's just the recognition that the being of Whitman had an uninhibited relationship to
00:42:32
Speaker
being human being, which includes sex and joy and pleasure and at times ecstasy, at times depression, at times excitement, at times grief. And he was willing to go into those spaces and put it on the page and present it in such a way that made people who are not just able to do that uncomfortable. I think that's the majority of humanity, or at least the majority of
00:43:02
Speaker
people living in this country. And so I think he just makes them uncomfortable because of their own hangups more than any kind of legitimate critique they could level at the poetry itself. I mean, I guess I just don't want to read that shit either. When I'm inspired by something, that's the other thing I think we've been getting at that I don't really want to analyze it. I mean, not really. I mean, there's a difference between wanting to talk about it in excitement and analyze it.
00:43:28
Speaker
And it'll be interesting if we do do episodes on musicians that we love, how we walk that line. So there's that. I just wanted to say that. Do you have a follow up before I go to the next highlight?
00:43:40
Speaker
My only follow-up is that one of Nabokov's more forgotten or overlooked works is something that was actually published as an appendix to his multi-volume, heavily annotated translation of Eugenio Niegin, the epic poem by Pushkin that Nabokov deeply admired that he translated into English. And as part of that, because Eugenio Niegin is written in meter, he conducted a study of Russian meter versus English meter.
00:44:08
Speaker
One of the things about Russian is that however long a word is, only one syllable will receive any kind of accent. Whereas in English, we have all kinds of wonderful secondary and tertiary accents in long words.
00:44:24
Speaker
That appendix was published separately as a book called Notes on Prosody, which is a very detailed analysis line by line, syllable by syllable of Pushkin and Tennyson and Wordsworth and Metrical Verse in English and in Russian. As a young man, I studied that very, very deeply. It's very, very dry.
00:44:46
Speaker
I don't know that I've ever done anything that taught me so much about poetry as doing that. So there is a place for that very dry analysis, but I know exactly what you mean. That's my only comment. What else did you highlight?
00:45:04
Speaker
type of inspiration like an aura before an epileptic attack. And we discussed in Benjamin, you know, obviously the centrality of the term aura and how it's being used in the work of art essay. And so, yeah, it's just interesting that aura is here again in a different context. But he goes on to say, this feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red
00:45:30
Speaker
and the blue and the picture of a skin man under circulation. And I was able to freely associate that tickly well-being feeling into, what do they call that, ASMR? You know, when your head... Yes. Yes.
00:45:49
Speaker
It's a bizarre phenomenon that I'm not going to say my experience of it is everyone's experience, but when you're encountering someone speaking to you and that all of a sudden comes over you, I don't even know if it has to do with deep listening.
00:46:04
Speaker
But there's something happening in the cadence in which the language is unfolding, the tones and the rhythms of it from the person sitting across from you, or maybe farther away if you're in an audience listening to someone on a stage.
00:46:21
Speaker
that is absolutely unmistakably unique and doesn't happen that much for me but when it does I absolutely know it because I feel it and I think that is a facet of inspiration and I like that that's in here because
00:46:39
Speaker
I have experienced ASMR as a non-cerebral experience, even if my actual skull is tingling. It's physical. It's not intellectual. And I just find that worth noting that when you enter into a state of inspiration, your body might be responding faster than your mind, or maybe they're responding simultaneously. And I just like the idea that it's not just the brain.
00:47:08
Speaker
that's having a response. And it's not just a cerebral response that is producing an inspired piece of art, that there's actually something almost sub-intellectual happening. Yeah, for sure. I think I know pretty well what you're talking about and the feeling of needing to fuel your body often in an unhealthy way so that you can keep up with what your brain is doing, I think is why there are so many stories of, you know, writers who
00:47:39
Speaker
Either people who just sit there and chain-smoke the entire time that they're writing and drink cup after cup of black coffee or people who reach for cocaine or barbiturates or something because their mind is moving faster than their body and they're trying to get their body to keep up.
00:47:54
Speaker
Yeah, and maybe also like to add to that, but to also say it from a different angle, because I'm not sure I got it exactly what I meant. I think what I mean is you might at times fall completely into a trance in the act of being in the in the throes of inspiration.
00:48:13
Speaker
And so when I've reflected back on these moments for myself, and I think you've had them too, I think anyone who has written and dedicated themselves to that, or probably any art form, is going to have these experiences at some point.
Immersion and Physical Experience in Art
00:48:28
Speaker
That it's so...
00:48:31
Speaker
encompassing, you are possessed by it to such a degree, I don't even know what I'm writing to some degree. And that also doesn't mean that it's good. I might be done and go, Jesus Christ, time to turn on my oven and throw this thing in or whatever, just like, get this thing away from me. But sometimes it's incredible. And sometimes it's good or it's really good and it needs revision. And I think that's another thing we haven't discussed, of course.
00:48:58
Speaker
We could argue that, on the one hand, you have first thought, best thought in the words of Jack Kerouac, I think actually taken from Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Lama, who basically said, stop futzing, just let it come out. Bukowski puts it, it's a beer shit.
00:49:14
Speaker
It's let it come out. And, you know, of course, Bukowski would say it's a beer shit, but but don't mess with it. If it's if it's got problems, leave the problems. Others are going to say, no, maybe that's when Nabokov comes in and says time to roll up your sleeves, buddy, and fix this thing. But I just wanted to point out that that quality of possession.
00:49:34
Speaker
that is really like you're so in it. You're so in the experience. There is no Brendan watching himself from the third person. Robert aware of himself in the third person in the act of writing. You are so in it. Like I'd like to believe someone like Miles Davis is in it when he's playing his instrument that you you're lost in it in the best of way. It's like totally eternal now.
00:50:04
Speaker
Every moment, eternal now. There's a story about Tolstoy, which is probably not true, but that's fine. It doesn't need to be true because it could have happened. When Tolstoy was an old man, he walked away from his writing career and his life as a libertine and his life as a wealthy man and took to wandering. And supposedly he visited a friend during his wanderings and his friend left him momentarily in the library while he attended other business.
00:50:34
Speaker
Tolstoy took down a book at random and opened it up and began reading it and was thoroughly engrossed in the story and when his friend came back in the room Tolstoy was interrupted in his reverie and out of curiosity he looked to see what he was reading and it was a book called Anna Karenina by someone named Leo Tolstoy. Even if that didn't happen things like that definitely do happen and it's partially a result of what you're describing which is that I could easily understand Tolstoy having no memory of having written
00:51:02
Speaker
Anna Karenina. That is, he might remember that there was a year of his life that he had devoted to writing a certain book, but the moments in which he created that story and the scenes in that story are moments in which he was perhaps experiencing that kind of, like you said, there was no third part of him that was aware of what he was doing. He was just doing it, and when he was done with it, he was done with it.
00:51:28
Speaker
Yeah, it reminds me of, I don't know if you've listened to the music of Keith Jarrett, a concert pianist. Sure. Okay. I'm sure he's a master in many different kinds of piano playing, but I've mostly encountered him just playing jazz piano. There's one, the album that he recorded at the Blue Note,
00:51:51
Speaker
in the song is called I fall in love so easily the fire within it's a 20 plus minute song and he has this bizarre tendency when he's playing improvisationally to actually sort of do this guttural throat singing and
00:52:08
Speaker
not aware that he's doing it obviously, but it's coming out and it doesn't get in the way of my enjoyment of it. In some ways it enhances it, but I bring this up just to say for someone like a Keith Jarrett or a Miles Davis or a Charles Mingus, any of these people that master their instruments to that degree, I think it really is true that the instrument becomes an extension of their arms or themselves. There's really no distinction at a certain point.
00:52:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's an incredible thing to bear witness to, you know.
00:52:38
Speaker
I will never be able to bear witness to it firsthand with Keith Jarrett because he is famously an absolute asshole about the way his audience behaves at concerts. And if you, for instance, cough or clear your throat, he is likely to ostentatiously stop playing or even ask you to leave. And given the fact that I am a compulsive throat clearer and fidgeter of ill repute, me and Keith Jarrett are never going to share the same physical space.
00:53:07
Speaker
Well, I feel about as bad for you in theory as I do for that poor schmuck whose cell phone went off at the Met and the conductor stopped the symphony. That is like a nightmare scenario for me. Well, yes, of course. To watch that, however, is the greatest thing that ever happened. I should check that out again. It's incredible. You wouldn't necessarily think that the
00:53:35
Speaker
Like just to be the person whose phone is obviously ringing in the Metropolitan Opera and to stonily sit there with your face more and more determined to deny the fact that your phone is ringing and then your phone just somehow like keeps ringing and you think well maybe they're like whoever this is maybe they're gonna stop calling but then somehow they don't stop calling.
00:53:56
Speaker
And, like, the fucking conductor is turning around and looking at you, and everybody within eyesight of you is turning and craning their head and looking at you, and you just sit there looking straight ahead, pretending it's not happening. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. That, I'm sorry to say, I know that Speak No Evil is a legitimate, seriously scary and very serious movie, but that might be scarier than Speak No Evil for me.
00:54:18
Speaker
is a cell phone going off in the middle of a major symphony at the Metro Hall. Oh, I went through a period. I remember being in a lecture in college one time in an auditorium where it was a guest lecturer, so they were being treated with a special reverence. And I had this thought like,
00:54:36
Speaker
What if I just stand up right now and start yelling like this fucking sucks? Like I wasn't going to do that, but I had this sudden terror that I would. And then, of course, you know, then you your brain immediately imagines the aftermath of all of that. You're inspired. And also, I think everyone has that thought or maybe I'm just so messed up myself that I'd like to believe that's
Empathy, Catharsis, and the Role of Art
00:55:00
Speaker
true. But I'm sure Freud, it seems like a perfect Freudian like taboo
00:55:04
Speaker
thing, taboo pathology, taboo fear, that we imagine the worst thing you could do in a given social situation. And then it plays out in the imagination, of course. So
00:55:17
Speaker
Yeah, they're intrusive thoughts and they're normal. Intrusive, that's it. Yeah. And that does kind of tie back into the idea because you brought up Whitman and his lack of repression, his enthusiasm for life, his carnality, but also his sort of intellectual hedonism. And I do wonder if there's an element of, even if we move away from the idea of Americans in general having a problem with sexual repression.
00:55:46
Speaker
All of us live lives in which we try to compartmentalize certain things that we don't want to think about or we don't want to feel and so. The idea of the inspired artist being someone who is tapping into those things in a way that we ourselves are not willing to tap into them but we need to. We need to partake of them at second hand from time to time in order to get a kind of catharsis that allows us to.
00:56:10
Speaker
So if you're in a humdrum marriage and you go see a tale of passionate star-crossed lovers like Romeo and Juliet, you need that on some level. But I don't know if there's a connection between that and the subjective feeling of being inspired and moving past your fear. On some level, I guess,
00:56:36
Speaker
opening up a blank document and starting to write is maybe ideally a little bit like standing up in an auditorium and yelling, fuck you, this sucks. But it's it's ideally it's the positive productive version of that.
00:56:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that, again, the themes that emerge from your last piece there, we could devote 45 minutes in 10 different directions. But I'll just stick with one being that, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I mentioned the final scene in our Speak No Evil episode where the character, by the name of Chief, throws the water fountain through the window and escapes.
00:57:21
Speaker
And all of the patients watch him with just such, what's the word? Inspiration is a word, actually. I think they're inspired by his act, not just because it's defiant, but because it's almost like the closest moving image that I can think of in my mind that renders a aspiration towards freedom.
00:57:49
Speaker
literal and metaphorical. Freedom from the prison of your mind and freedom from actual prisons or asylums which those characters were inside of. And so if we use Candy Jail, the name of our podcast, as another beautiful image here, I think we
00:58:08
Speaker
really desperately need not just people to show us that it can be done. You can throw that thing through the window and get out, but that we need artists to render those experiences for us as well.
00:58:26
Speaker
We're living, obviously, vicariously through those real life and imagined examples. But beyond that, we are, I think, hoping to summon the courage to do what our heroes have done, whether real or imagined. We want to break out of jail.
00:58:45
Speaker
And, you know, Nabokov on more than one occasion was asked what the origin of Lolita was. Lolita, of course, is a story about a 40-something-year-old man who's a pedophile and is sexually and emotionally aroused by prepubescent girls. And, of course, it's told from the point of view of this pedophile.
00:59:06
Speaker
People asked him what the origin of that was and he said that he could trace the origin of it back to a newspaper article he read about a gorilla that had been given paint brushes and a canvas in a zoo and the first thing that the animal painted was the bars of its own cage.
00:59:28
Speaker
And whether or not that's true, I don't know. But again, it doesn't matter. Nabokov was making a point with it. And I wonder if... So the way I've always understood that is that Humbert, the main character of Lolita, is the gorilla in the cage. He is in the cage of who he is and his debased desires and his narcissism. And the story is told from his point of view because he's the one in the cage.
00:59:54
Speaker
And I wonder if we need, you just said we need to feel like we can get out of the cage. I think sometimes we also need to be reminded that we are in a cage. Because all of us are to some degree or another regardless of how happy we are. And maybe the catharsis a lot of the times comes from first of all being reminded that you're in a cage and then secondly that in theory at least you can break out of it.
01:00:23
Speaker
And what does it actually mean to break out of it? You know, because for any artist, you know, for you, it might be, um, obviously you need inspiration in theory or one hopes in order to produce an inspirational book, not like a self help book, but a book that inspires a reader as they're reading it. And so.
01:00:42
Speaker
You need to have the courage to actually believe that you kind of have something to say that's worth saying. But then you need the additional courage to put it out there. And it takes courage to try to publish. It also takes courage to get on a stage in any capacity and put your mouth behind a mic and talk to people. So whatever those things are for us. And of course, I'm now haunted by
01:01:07
Speaker
I love Spectres of Plato. That'll be the name of my self-published memoir, volume one. But I bring this up to say he gets at this idea of, well, the shoe cobbler is the shoe cobbler because that's what they're able to do. And the country musician is the country musician because they've got this particular voice. And he has it all neat and tidy in his republic.
01:01:34
Speaker
People do what they do based on what they're capable of, and it creates this sort of, I think, artificial but natural hierarchy of talent, ability, and it then, you know, like, I'm fucking this up. I'm sure anyone who's really read the Republic would be like, you dumbass. But
01:01:52
Speaker
I don't want this to sound like you just need to have courage to go after that thing you've always wanted to do like become an olympic swimmer because let's face it not everyone can do that just you're not it's not within the range of possibility for all people based on their physicality based on their ability to run faster than anyone else in the world right that's a very small group of people.
01:02:15
Speaker
but I do want to try to figure out how to turn this not into a everybody gets a medal and more like everybody has a courageousness
01:02:28
Speaker
present inside them to break out of the prison of fear that gets in the way of them expressing their authentic self and expressing what they're authentically just fucking good at. So maybe I'm trying to get it like, God, I want to believe everyone is good at something. It doesn't mean everyone gets a medal, but everyone is obviously striving to
01:02:54
Speaker
achieve the highest expression of themselves and what's inside them that they can. And that takes lots of different forms. But obviously, the prerequisite for any expression like that from any human being, you need courage. You need to be willing to get out of the cage of yourself doubt to do it. Yeah, I think that's well said. And the word I would use is empathy, like the
01:03:23
Speaker
getting out of the cage of yourself doubt is getting out of the cage of yourself in a way. And whatever art is, I think the essence of it is empathy on some level. And Nabokov did try to define art elsewhere. He said that art is beauty plus pity, which is never a definition that I've been particularly happy with, but I think he's using the word pity in the way that I'm using the word empathy. And
01:03:52
Speaker
this goes back to the idea of a cage. Either the artist who is creating characters through empathy or the audience who is relating to those characters or believing in those characters through empathy, there's the idea of putting yourself in someone else's shoes, feeling the cage, and then longing to escape from the cage. Empathy, I think, takes
01:04:18
Speaker
courage. I think that's a fair statement to make. I think a lot of people, generally speaking, are lacking in empathy because they are cowards on some level. I live in a part of the country right now where I'm largely surrounded by a right-wing, small-town kind of people who have odious opinions and that's not me.
01:04:40
Speaker
projecting onto them, that's me reacting to what they've actually told me or what I've actually seen them do or heard them say. And if you're a white person living in a largely white area in this part of the country, you may have a fear of empathizing with a person of color or with a trans person or with an immigrant.
01:05:01
Speaker
And your fear of empathy leads you to be unable to empathize, which in turn kills your curiosity, which in turn makes you close-minded and judgmental. And art, and I think this is something where I would agree with Nabokov that art is one of the greatest things that we've ever created to combat that tendency.
Violence, Sensitivity, and Misinterpretation in Art
01:05:23
Speaker
That you sit down and you open a book or you turn on a movie and what you are looking for is to be entertained. But
01:05:31
Speaker
if you're open to it and if the artist knows what they're doing, on a certain level, what you're receiving is that you're being taught to empathize, I think.
01:05:41
Speaker
There's a really wonderful opening in Saul Friedlander's magisterial study of the Nazi Holocaust, the second volume. It might be actually, yeah, I think it's the second because things get just, I think that was 1942 to the conclusion of the war. And he basically says, listen, I'm going to expose you to scenes of extreme violence. And they're completely grounded in reality.
01:06:09
Speaker
They're grounded in intense historical research, and I'm letting you know that I'm doing this, first and foremost, not to desensitize you, but to re-sensitize you. And that if I'm going to take you to these places that are unfathomably nightmarish and violent, and truly it's just you're a bearing witness to atrocity, if I expose you to this and it numbs you, I've failed.
01:06:39
Speaker
If I expose you to this and it sensitizes you, even in the moment when you say, this is so crazy, it is so divorced from my normal experience, I can't believe it's true, and yet I know it is. And that in the midst of that, the hope is, I think, his modus operandi was
01:07:06
Speaker
I'm trying to cultivate and deepen my reader's sense of empathy. And this is where it gets tough, because I'm like, I don't want to go Bob Dole over here and say, oh, those video games and violent movies are ruining the youth. But there might be some truth in that a movie like Kickass, which I think is supposed to be making a commentary on superhero movies by engaging in gratuitous violence, but actually,
01:07:34
Speaker
makes you feel sick a little bit and relishes in the nastiness of it all and the gratuity. I think it dulls and it blunts that sensitivity that we so desperately need and authentically possess if we're in touch with ourselves. And so I agree with you that great works of art, even if we're going to designate a monumental historical work on the Holocaust as a kind of artistry,
01:08:03
Speaker
to pull off something like that, that at bottom, the goal is not names and dates and that kind of trivia, or even to sort of roll around in the mud of gratuitousness, but to go, Jesus, look at what human beings do to each other.
01:08:22
Speaker
How do I let that really hit me in the heart so that it's something I never forget in the most humane and humanity-oriented way? Well, I guess people know who we are by now because here we are again talking about Holocaust historians and this could easily be part of our discussion about speak no evil.
01:08:51
Speaker
I love the way, was it Friedlander who formulated it that way? Yeah, I love that formulation. And I also think it's worth pointing out that he said, if I desensitize you, I failed. I understand what he means, but sometimes the failure is not through the part of the creator.
01:09:11
Speaker
Jamie Loftus did a wonderful podcast about Lolita, just called the Lolita Podcast, which people should check out if they haven't heard it. And she goes very deep into the cultural legacy of Lolita, its effect on everything from the music of Lana Del Rey to Broadway performances and
01:09:30
Speaker
the fetishization of young girls and the fact that so many people read Lolita and seem to miss the fact that the protagonist is a terrible, terrible person and that the writer knows that he's a terrible, terrible person.
01:09:47
Speaker
I don't understand that at all. I read that book for the first time when I was probably 19 and I was a callow and self-absorbed, inexperienced teenager in a lot of ways, but it would never have crossed my mind. You could have just said teenager. Yeah, that's a fair point, yes. Not totally fair, but almost. Yeah, almost.
01:10:11
Speaker
It would never have occurred to me to read the book that way as though he were anything other than a monster and a rapist and an abuser. And so the fact that sometimes an artist or a writer or creator of any kind may do their best to urge empathy, foster empathy, sort of do the magic trick of making the audience empathize without realizing they're empathizing. And yet there are just going to be people who are just totally not fucking going to get it no matter what you do.
01:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's the risk you run, I guess. And that's a whole other avenue to go down of intent versus impact. The writer of the work might intend the work to be received or understood in X, Y, or Z way. That far from guarantees, that's how it's understood or run with. And there's plenty of funny and also horrific examples of this.
Timeless Artistic Expression
01:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, and it's, you know, when we talked about the Benjamin, I criticized him for what I thought was his simplistic understanding of like stone age art, right? But I love the idea that why ever that, you know, the cave paintings in Lascaux or in, what's the cave system that Herzog visited for Cave of Forgotten Dreams? Was it the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard?
01:11:33
Speaker
Oh, did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard with mosaic ceilings and painted tiles on the wall? I actually have been listening to that song on repeat almost. I know, so have I. It's a fucking incredible song. Shove, Shove Cave.
01:11:49
Speaker
I love the idea that whoever those artists were, whether they were men or women, whether they were solitary geniuses or whether they were sort of guilds of like-minded talents, that if there was any element of spiritual summoning of the gods kind of thing the way that Benjamin thinks there was, that really at bottom those people were
01:12:16
Speaker
thrumming with some feeling that they could not articulate, and they were in the zone in the same way that Tolstoy was when he was writing Anna Karenina. And probably even within their society, there were people who would look at those artworks and just not get it. And now here we are
01:12:34
Speaker
20, 30, 40,000 years later, lacking all of the context for the culture that they had, and we're the ones who don't get it. And yet it still, it stirs in us, I think, some kind of deep empathy.
01:12:49
Speaker
So just to round off our discussion and get at one piece that connects to what you've just said and then loop back around to, I think, something we brought up a few minutes ago or something that has been nagging at me. So as you were discussing the cave paintings and just thinking about whether you're living in prehistory or in 2023,
01:13:17
Speaker
When someone feels compelled to make a painting or strum on a guitar or write on a piece of paper,
01:13:28
Speaker
There is that feeling of like you are actually fumbling around in the dark of yourself. You know that you need to get something out. You even kind of can taste it, feel it, see it in your mind, but what is in your mind and what comes out on the canvas on the page is often painfully at odds with each other. Not at odds necessarily, but it just doesn't come out the way that you know
01:13:54
Speaker
you feel it inside yourself and so that experience i kind of love in that it might tie us to prehistoric you know human beings humankind and that that impulse that that spark where you go there's something in here that hat that really does need to come out and i'm gonna really try to get it out and i don't know what it is yet and i don't know how to translate it but fuck i'm gonna give it my all and i hope
01:14:20
Speaker
Maybe not in this attempt, but in a year, in five years, in 50 years, finally this thing I've been groping for finally comes out.
01:14:30
Speaker
There's something there, you know? And then 50 years from now, when you're an old man, you'll be wandering the world as a mendicant and you will come to my house and I'll show you in and settle you in my library and while I attend other business and you will take a volume down from the shelf and read it with great interest and then I'll come back in and you'll close the cover of the book and glance down to see what it is and it will be Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
01:14:59
Speaker
Final, final thought from a few minutes ago. So we were talking about the prison of our minds, breaking out of the various prisons of our cultural conditioning, what have you, sexual hang ups, inhibitions. What is going on there, man? Because I also feel, and I say this not in a, from some kind of privileged position, I'm saying like,
01:15:27
Speaker
not just artists feel that way. That's a human aspiration to break out of those various prisons inside of ourselves. And how do you say this not to the aspiring Nabokovs? Because not everyone wants to be Whitman or Nabokov or fill in the blank. And that's good. That's fine. But
01:15:50
Speaker
And also, most of our lives are not that. Most of our lives we are engaged in, if not monotonous activity, because that sounds wrong. I think that you could be interested and remain curious in any situation, truly. I don't just say that theoretically. But if the goal of the artist
01:16:11
Speaker
is almost one in the same as the goal of any human being, which is to shed the skins of our conditioning, to break out of the prisons of our inhibitions. How do you do that when you're not playing the guitar, or picking up the pen, or aspiring to write the next great novel? What does that look like just on a day to day? What's the word? Unsexy.
01:16:40
Speaker
version of this.
Artistic Ethics and Human Contentment
01:16:42
Speaker
I think that's a fantastic and perhaps unanswerable question, but I can tell you that I think there are poles in two opposite directions. One is the artistic losing yourself or the transcendence or the exhilaration that we've been talking about.
01:17:02
Speaker
Not that long ago, I read an article by a woman who had somehow, I think she'd been assigned to interview Bono, the lead singer of U2, and she'd been invited to ride with him literally right after a concert, like the band finishes playing and they walk out of the arena and they get into their cars and they're driven away.
01:17:23
Speaker
and she was in the back of the car with Bono and they did not know each other very well at all. He took her hand and just sat there holding her hand and he was vibrating the whole time because he was trying to come down from that sense of exhilaration and transcendence that performance is for him.
01:17:43
Speaker
That's the thing that the artist is in search of on the one hand. The other thing that you're talking about I think is just normal human contentment. Like the thing that is most likely to make me not want to sit down and create is just getting really high. And I can get really high and I just I feel this overwhelming sense of like everything is fine and I have nothing to worry about and
01:18:07
Speaker
You know, I was gonna sit down and watch that Kurosawa movie tonight, but I think I'm just gonna turn on Netflix and watch a true crime documentary until it's time to go to bed. And...
01:18:18
Speaker
I think people who are lucky enough to feel that way sort of as their status quo without having to resort to something like marijuana are, I think, sort of the way that we are designed to be as people. And it's no fault of yours and no fault of mine that if we find it difficult to be those people. But it is an interesting question to say in looking for that kind of artistic transcendence.
01:18:44
Speaker
are we looking for something that is ultimately very, very human, or are we trying to escape the most human parts of ourselves, I guess? I would never say that it's a bad thing, but it may be more pathological than we realize in some way. Okay, so let me just conclude. I think in a way embedded in those tensions is a fundamental question, which is this. How can this book
01:19:13
Speaker
that I love, that millions love, that we recognize as an absolute masterpiece be produced by a piece of shit.
01:19:25
Speaker
And I think why we struggle with that, or why I struggle with that, is I want to believe that in order for the artist to be able to produce a masterpiece, they have to have gone through the hard work of actually becoming a decent human being.
01:19:45
Speaker
and that a decent human being is no small task. That takes a lot of fucking work. And by decent, I mean self-possessed, ethical, is firm in their convictions and lives their values, and doesn't need to be a saint. Of course, they're human, but they're deeply, deeply grounded and deeply empathetic, as you brought up, deeply humane,
01:20:11
Speaker
and they're wise. They actually have real wisdom and the wisdom finds its expression in large part through the expression of empathy towards oneself and towards other people. So when we encounter artists that produce things that move us to the core
01:20:28
Speaker
and are so utterly lacking in empathy as evidenced by how they treat people that's on the historical record, you just go, how the hell does this work? This shouldn't be that way. And yet it happens. And so then I'm forced to go, well, I guess great works of art can be produced by not so great human beings. But there's another part of me that goes, actually, at the end, maybe a great human being who doesn't create a great work of art
01:20:58
Speaker
is a much greater work of art than an asshole who produces a great work of art, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. I think that's very well said. Maybe at some point, there's an essay by Chinua Chebe that I really like, where he gets into some of this stuff with his opinion of Conrad, both as a person and an artist, but that might be a conversation for another time.
01:21:22
Speaker
I just think we need to go there because I want to discuss that and I want to grapple with, you know, I think for both of us, we really maybe, I don't want to say to a fault to make ourselves sound cool, but just like we really worry about wanting to be a good person. And we try to do that. And I, we, you know, we're not perfect, just like everyone else. And I'm, I got, I got a ton of work to do, but
01:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know now, actually, now that we're discussing this, how I feel about—I was actually agnostic before we landed here in, for instance, Woody Allen, enjoying a Woody Allen film and basically ignoring some of the other stuff. And now I'm going
01:22:06
Speaker
Um, I don't know. I don't know. I'm feeling these, these, these twinges of that might be wrong. And actually what even might be further wrong is that we put those people on a pedestal because they're famous or because they have produced something great. Whereas the unknown, unsung, real adults, capital R, capital A,
01:22:29
Speaker
who were few and far between and that possessed genuine wisdom that might not produce anything that goes down through the ages might arguably be much more impressive than some of these other characters that are going to be with us for much longer, at least in name and in the works that they've produced.
01:22:49
Speaker
I think that's true. I, however, am going to continue to just be an asshole with a podcast.