Postprandial

Scene in an American cafe, Elko, Nevada, November, 4, 2024. Photo by author.

Thinking is action, a serious activity previously identified by ancient Greek philosophers. If this is so, the activity of thinking that is, then it would seem that the whole project of liberal humanism has been replaced and instead of humanists we now have a new breed of foot soldiers, so many of them wealthy and riled up, appearing to be at least two people in one, as ordinary citizens and as a worked-up mob.

I start to take little walks at night, alone. By 3 am it becomes clear that I know nothing, even more than nothing which is nothing times 2. I can’t seem to make a painting now and words won’t do. I’ve missed another autumn; it’s come and gone without me. O well!

I did have a vital, burning question at the very beginning of our national festivities when Kamela first got going: What will the Right do if they win and what will the Left do if it loses?  I do wonder too: is regression typical of behavior in the animal kingdom? No! But something is afoot that is far more primal than I first thought, in the smelly outcomes of our most recent history.

Philosophy has to meet people’s needs; I believe it was once meant to do so, i.e. a tragedy occured and the information gathered from it often took the form of a solution so that people could relate to it in some way in order to understand what had just happened, at the very least, to accept the consequence the hero or heroine suffered from, whether it be a vicious battle-wound or a rape. A drama would be written, meant to be performed in the amphitheater, principally to encourage some sort of catharsis in the spectator…

…this current American moment is a phase we seem to be going through, not one that meets our real needs but instead saps the energy of our ability to understand one another. The creation of the culture of celebrity will never rise to a height worth rising to. We’ve been sold it and sold it again, and we seem to buy it every time, the promises, the pretty pictures, the big lies the people seem to have a weakness for.

Far keener analysts than I are holding forth. “There was a quality about the bourgeois life of the last century all too easy to forget—its essential dignity. There was an effort—diseased and destined to collapse, to be sure—to make distinctions between realms of experience, and thus to wrest some form out of a society of enormous disorder and appearance…For all the liberating of our sexuality, we are within the orbit of self-justification which defined the Puritan’s world. Narcissistic feelings often focus themselves on obsessive questions. When a society mobilizes these feelings, when it deflates the objective character of action and inflates the importance of subjective states of feeling of the actors, these questions of self-justification in action, via a ‘symbolic act’ will  come systematically to the fore.” Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1974.

Robinson Jeffers too, from his last book of poems, a small book, The Beginning and the End, begins a poem, “To The Story-Tellers”, with the line—

Man, the illogical animal.