When life is but disappointment, and nothing seems amusing...

...we struggle to find the joy that life is haunted by/but what ends when the symbols shatter? What happens to hearts?

I'm aware how there is a very real fear in our culture of how the social death can precede the physical death. Loss of employment or retirement loom large for many men, and suicide or the development of addictive behavioural patterns can be reactions to the loss of public recognition, and hence personal identity. There are other management techniques of course: how else to explain the seeking of refuge in spaces that are deliberately furnished to appear as non-domestic (i.e. non feminine) as possible? Think of the strictly utilitarian, as opposed to decorative, stools etc in your typical pub or workshed, for example. Many rural communities in Australia have taken this onboard to the point of establishing The Men's Shed on a permanent basis, as a place where some men, who would otherwise be at a loose end, can gather free of charge to use hardware on assorted building projects, thereby circumventing any excessive need to carouse, gamble, fuck or fight...each of which may be symptomatic of boredom and depression. It goes without saying that some effort is also expended to promote suicide prevention initiatives.

It's like my mother has always told me: "many women get used to invisibility fairly early in their lives, while more than a few men struggle to accept not always getting a parade". I hope this is changing over time. I'm able to recognise this palpable sense of dread from the perspective of the female character in the opening sequence of Safe that I've posted here: the mobile privatisation of the car winding its way through the dark labyrinth of suburbia to the accompaniment of an eerie synth score. Julianne Moore's character is basically swallowed by space. But I also get what my mum was trying to tell me: Age eventually unmaketh the man too. To drive the point home further, just look at how no one has yet written the white male middleclass equivalent of Betty Friedan's pioneering feminist work, The Feminine Mystique.

Other than Douglas P, whose lyrics I've quoted, perhaps it is not surprising how more forthcoming the New Queer Cinema has been about some of these dilemmas. I've decided to put up here some of my favourite scenes from movies by Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant that capture entrapment, abjection and invisibility particularly well. John Hurt's character in Love and Death in Long Island is a case in point of someone who is reawakened by finding something beautiful where he least expected to find it. Many people can relate to this as this is surely part of the appeal of falling in love: a form of contingency that reminds you how life still has hitherto unknown possibilities, sometimes even for the most lowly, unappreciated self, who otherwise holds out few prospects for redemption. This brings my mind back to lyrics. Sadly, either possibility was ultimately too overwhelming for poor old Ian Curtis to handle, and he detailed this struggle in almost every song he ever wrote. For example, who can forget that Joy Division's debut album was called Unknown Pleasures, and what about this line too from the song "Twenty Four Hours" featured on Closer, "I never realised the lengths I'd have to go/all the darkest corners of a sense I didn't know/just for one moment I heard somebody call/look beyond the day at hand/there's nothing there at all".

You know it's strange, I started thinking about this stuff last night as I was watching the new series of Doctor Who. I'm sure many people dream of having the Doctor's lifestyle: just like a cowboy, he is a free agent who can travel but still periodically enter communities to perform good works, before departing again. Nirgal was similar in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series: he was a loner, but he wasn't a hermit. I find much to agree with too in Houellebecq's observation (in his Lovecraft book) that people who like to read and write are generally not that enthused about life in other respects.

These proclivities can be distinguished from the extremes I've posted here. I'm someone who likes pathos, and there is plenty to be found in the clips which follow. But I'll also never forget the guy at university who could only [read: exclusively] listen to Closer, who worked as a toolmaker. His other obsession was the tragic life of Jean Seberg. What I look back on most of all though is the stories he used to tell about growing up and the people he had encountered at work. So I'll recount my personal favourite about his working life: he had a workmate who used to get up early every morning to read Proust ("struggling to find the joy" perhaps). Anyway, one morning the workmate was talking continuously about the dilemmas faced by Raskolnikov (i.e. the anti-hero of Dostoyevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment). He disappeared into the bathroom at lunchtime, eventually re-emerging with a shaved head. His scalp was bleeding profusely as he'd used a very crude razor. Everyone just stood there in silence, uncertain how to react. What would be his next move? The man placed one of the workstools on the bench and sat himself down: "Now that I've got your attention, let me ask again: does anyone remember Raskolnikov?" Why be so demonstrative to try to get across a point? I won't pretend to understand, and suspect I'm not alone in that respect. So you might reasonably expect that psychiatric treatment would follow and this man would be certified as unfit for work, but according to my friend, that is not what happened. Perhaps these struggles are more common afterall than many of us realise, and people are sometimes able to find ways to manage their suffering more effectively than they're usually given credit for by so-called "experts" in mental health?

That's a pretty important point, so permit me to say something more about it. I don't claim any sort of superiority here because I've always preferred to think in terms of an anecdote Lacan related. A specialist in "ego psychology" informed him that she felt she was a good therapist thanks to her "strong personality". Lacan confessed that he felt the exact opposite: it was because he could empathise so closely with his patients' distress that he was able to treat them. In a manner of speaking, "there but for the grace of God go I".

Seeing I've posted the opening of Last Days here, it is fitting to close this post with lyrics by a band from the days of Seattle's grunge scene: the song is called "The Birds", and the band is Skin Yard. It's such a great summation that there is little I can add. It's worth watching the rest of the film too as there is another great scene of a door to door salesman meeting Blake at his isolated mansion. Blake is preoccupied by his own problems to the point he can barely communicate. To his credit, the salesman is not fazed by Blake's demeanor, or his disheveled appearance (Blake is also wearing women's clothing at the time).

I'm sitting in a rather small room
My walls have nothing to say
I memorize every hole
Squinting eyes all day

Fold me up and bring me home
With the night I cannot stay!

Violence surrounds my house
I'm a loco loser
Springing the noose, stay rather far

I rest from the fact
The birds cover trees on my side
Violence surrounds my house
So I sit on the side
These birds are mine, together
The friends of your blood
I smile, then divide
The birds all take mine

Fold me up and bring me home
No I will not stay
These birds surround my house
I cannot stay

I'm sitting in a rather small room
My walls have nothing to say
I memorize every hole
Squinting eyes all day

Resting from the fact the birds
The birds cover the trees, my side
Violence surrounds my house
So I sit on the side

These birds
My mind
Together
They fly

On the side I hide my eyes
Stole my mind
I feel my flight

The milkman passes through today, on his way
He's bringing home the noose of mine
The birds are his tree
I'm sitting in a rather small room
My eyes of nothing left to say
I can remember a time I was
As pretty as the day!

"Loneliness as a Way of Life"

I read the description of this book and I could immediately see how it would differ from the kind of approach I tried out in my earlier "The Quiet Men" post. Here's the blurb:

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds.

A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower.

Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

To be sure, it's a difficult subject to talk about without sounding mawkish. It's a brave thing then for a political scientist to do; willingly taking himself out of his "objective" comfort zone by writing about personal experience. I regard Dumm as working in a tradition of critical humanism. His recourse to literary models is also suggestive of a divergence from a sociological approach to theodicy though, insofar as "the human condition" is represented as a universal state of affairs. Not least of all, I'm certain that feminists could be justified in taking him to task for the emphasis the book places on "the missing mother". This blog has consciously avoided those kinds of metaphors, enquiring instead whether, for example, Furries and Realdolls may be construed as substitutes for intimacy, or if they are more symptomatic of a postmodern blurring of public/private space and time:your work friends feature in the afterhours production line, as your free time is used to network for the sake of career advancement. The workplace itself is increasingly decorated with pictures and trinkets from home. Television becomes dominated by stranger intimacy, and couldn't the same be said about the blogosphere acting as a confessional mode?

It is a very curious phenomena how under conditions of individualization it becomes necessary to work out if and when new collective forms of action take shape. The key question is how the bubbling, contradictory process of individualization and de-nationalization can be cast into new democratic forms of organization. This does not presume a denial of increasing inequalities, but rather the complicity of individualization as one of the problems to be addressed. Apparently, the more people are individualized, the more they produce de-individualizing consequences for others. We can infer from this why Dumm's "missing mother" may be drawing a very long bow: consider a woman who files for divorce and whose husband feels he's left facing the void (and please note that this hypothetical example is not attributing blame to either party). In the ensuring tussle over custody of the kids, each tries to impose on the other the dictates of their respective lives. Following Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck Gernsheim's thesis of "the normal chaos of love", it is possible to discern both a positive sum game of co-individualization and a negative sum game of contra-individualization. In the words of the former, "It would seem reasonable to suppose that the irritation caused by the other's resistance strengthens the urge for a new, and perhaps seemingly 'democratic', authoritarianism."

I smiled when I read that as it really captured the paradoxes of the character type I tried to describe in "The Quiet Men". Here was someone advocating some kind of neo-anarchist communitarianism on a very small scale, who also proclaimed himself to be a "Left Anarchist" (but when did he last show solidarity with anything/anyone?). The ideal in question was the organisation of everyday life around fairly intense, interpersonal relationships, because the impersonal buffer provided by the state and large chainstores was absent (I'm no apologist for liberal capitalism, but the subject in itself of the cold intimacies of capitalism will have to await a future post). I could see the contradictions, so I did some more research. Eventually I came across another book called The Loner's Manifesto. One anecdote was a real standout for me, as it graphically illustrated the seeming inescapability of the aforementioned "democratic authoritarianism". The author described how her friend, a music student, was not really a "people person". This friend had developed a romantic notion that life in less developed countries would be somehow less "phony" than what she was accustomed to at home, so she organised to study through an exchange program. She soon discovered though how this meant that even the smallest interaction involved bargaining. She thus felt pressured to always actively display "presence" because she was unable to just sleepwalk through social engagements by using the blase attitude that had served as a protective device back at home. Suffice to say, she was unable to continue her studies, and returned home as soon as possible.

I can only say this because there have been times when I've understood how it feels to exist in a liminal state: as a student (poised between study and graduation to something else), and an un/underemployed person. A lot of the music I listened to during these periods appealed to me as it seemed to address my concerns. I discovered how the inherent limitations of the lifestyle could foster identification with the sense of living through an interregnum, as described by Death In June for example: "then my loneliness closes in/so I drink a German wine/and drift in dreams of other lives and greater times." It already felt like I had an intuitive foothold on the recurrent themes in Joy Division's songs: "but if you could just see the beauty/of things I could never describe/these pleasures a wayward distraction/this is my one lucky prize". I still believe that Ian Curtis' most fully realised statement about this temporal/spatial ordering was Colony:

I can't see why all these confrontations
I can't see why all these dislocations
No family life - this makes me feel uneasy
Stood alone here in this colony
In this colony

Over time I became more discriminating- particularly once I understood how scary it really was when personal dilemmas are projected onto a much larger scale- thereby lending new meaning to Beck's paradoxical formulations. Small wonder then perhaps that many of the groups following in Joy Division's wake, such as Death In June, became more authoritarian, or rather, "martial industrial", in tone. This sensibility was already implied, of course, to some degree by Joy Division's choice of name, which referenced the use of prostitutes in Nazi concentration camps...no need to negotiate intimacy in that context and risk incurring reciprocal demands...or by the same token, authoritarianism was tragically inevitable, proceeding apace with the process of individualization. "Isolation" specifically mentions, "Surrendered to self-preservation
/From others who care for themselves." But just in case anyone still missed the point, the well known posthumously released single was called "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

The imagery of later album covers chosen by martial industrial/neofolk groups, typically featuring marble statues and monuments, gradually transmuted into an elegy for a dormant Europa (here I acknowledge Roger Griffin sending me a related article previously referred to in my "Fascism & Electronic Music" post)- whereas Joy Division's swansong, Closer, had intimated the horror of "the normal chaos of love" (making it consistent with the rest of their oeuvre). Notwithstanding these differences, it would clearly be a mistake to ignore how each exists on the same continuum (and Death In June still managed to produce the odd song about doomed romance e.g. "Hail the White Grain!").

FROM THIS:

TO THIS:


Speaking for myself, thinking a way out of these states has in effect meant remaining mindful of Bachelard's maxim: "a creature that withdraws into its shell is preparing a way out". During my student days I certainly tried to avoid becoming a victim of the book. I never entertained fantasies of anything like an altruistic suicide being tantamount to a "democratic authoritarianism", in which "dead people are all on the same level" (if you've seen Badlands, and read about the case on which it's based, you'll know what I'm talking about). Read Mark Seltzer's description of Dennis Nielsen in his Serial Killers too and you'll better understand this crazy idea of the authoritarian "exterminating angel" burning his victims in a funeral pyre; the intermingling of their bodies/identities is facilitated by their reduction to ash and smoke, thereby paradoxically attaining a ["democratic"] commonality denied them during their lives (shades of Bataille at work here too). I can safely leave it to Death In June to betray a hint of desperation in their self-appointed role as keepers of the flame:

And, when the ashes of life
Fall down from the skies
Rose clouds of holocaust
Rose clouds of lies...

Prospects for any escape from the interregnum must be slim indeed if this is the most realistic remaining option, right? It's true though, I have on rare occasions had a [superficially] comparable fantasy about how great it might be hear the title track (which heavily samples the climax of The Wicker Man) from Blood Axis' The Gospel of Inhumanity at my funeral, particularly as the coffin is lowered into the ground. Just imagine the voice of Edward Woodward's character substituting for mine from the coffin, while Christopher Lee et al are orchestrating the proceedings above ground ("Prepare the sacrifice!!" orders Lee, only to be admonished in turn by Woodward/me, "Awaken thee heathens!!!!!"). There's some black humour for you, but it's probably the kind of sendoff I'd deem most appropriate for myself. Then and again, I could even marginally prefer Wooden Ships by David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner (not that I am planning a departure anytime soon):

Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy,
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be,
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be,
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy...
Horror grips us as we watch you die,
All we can do is echo your anguished cries,
Stare as all human feelings die,
We are leaving - you don't need us.

Go, take your sister then, by the hand,
lead her away from this foreign land,
Far away, where we might laugh again,
We are leaving - you don't need us.

And it's a fair wind, blowin' warm,
Out of the south over my shoulder,
Guess I'll set a course and go...

But I digress...The bottom line is that I before I go, I should really bring this all back home. Dumm imbues his writing with considerable pathos, and that is most of all what this posting does not want to lose sight of, because it undoubtedly breeds some of the best and worst characteristics of modern societies. It can be generative of many voluntary forms of association in civil society, and as such constitutes a viable alternative to the problems Beck chronicles. But this kind of success is not always the case, and I believe many examples could be pressed into service to buttress my point (even after making allowance for any cultural differences):