House of Bamboo

Things that make you feel nostalgic even though you never experienced them. This song is from a few months before I was born. I'd never ehard it before today.

When and why should we care for other people's feelings? Or, for that matter, our own feelings?

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood both have cultivated feelings. That is to say, they have put a lot of effort into their feelings. They both believe their feelings should be taken seriously and the proof is that both have taken their own feelings seriously, albeit it in different ways. We see this most clearly in an odd section well into the novel when Marianne becomes very ill and Willoughby shows up to see her. He does not speak to her but he does meet with Elinor. It's very important to Elinor that Willoughby actually loves Marianne. Later, when she has recovered physically, it will be terribly important to Marianne that John Willoughby really loved her, that he, in fact, still loves her even though he has married another. And Elinor, sensing this, makes certain that she does know.

This novel, to a degree we never see again in Austen, takes the view that the validation of feelings is terribly important. People have behaved badly but all is okay if, in the end, feelings can be validated. John Willoughby really loved Marianne even though he tossed her over in order to get financial security. He ended up having to do that because he's been a first class shit in seducing, impregnating and abandoning Colonel Brandon's ward Eliza.

Here's a thought: another way for the novel to end would have been for Willoughby to go to his aunt, admit that he behaved abominably towards Eliza and say that he is willing to make all right now by marrying Eliza. That doesn't happen for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that Willoughby is a shit and he'd never do anything so honourable. And he gets away with being a  shit because he's highly attractive to women. Marianne's vindication, to the very limited degree she has one, is that Willoughby, while married to wealth, isn't in love with his wife.

Which sounds rather like the mirror image of her own situation doesn't it?

In the meantime, Marianne has been rather worthless as a sister. She has been rebuking Elinor for what she perceives as Elinor's lack of feeling. When she finds out that Elinor was actually suffering terribly because of her own frustrations in love, frustrations that Marianne was utterly oblivious about, she apologizes. We need to note that all Marianne's fine feelings did not make her any more perceptive.

We think of feelings as a kind of sensitivity. Someone sees something, hears something or touches something and they are moved. Feelings are supposed to be connected to something on this model. But Marianne's feelings are remarkably disconnected. Her feelings for Willoughby come even though she has no understanding of his character. Her feelings for her sister are absolutely useless in helping her figure out what Elinor is going through. Her feelings have nothing to do with her judgment. Or, as Austen would put it, her sensibilities have nothing to do with her sense.

That's puzzling for us because the word "sense" seems to be related to the senses. It seems like a purely mental thing. For that matter, so could judgment.  We think of these things as being "in our heads". We believe that you have to have sense or good judgment and then you act on it. On this model, it's possible to conceive of someone who has sense, who makes very good judgments, and yet never acts on them. And that's kind of odd for how could anyone know that this person has good sense if the only place that sense existed was in her head.

A thought experiment

Let's imagine that Elinor is actually a sneaky little bitch who is only out for her own happiness. She has very little real power. Her mother is a ditz, the family has no money or influence and her sister is younger and hotter than she is. She is, for all intents, a helpless mouse who can only achieve happiness if others go along with her plans. Any one of a number of people could crush her dreams simply by not playing along.

Worse, her only chance for happiness is a longshot. She and Edward have connected. She senses that and she is probably correct. Why do we know this? Well, we do. This is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Everyone has had the experience of meeting someone and feeling that a real connection has been made. We don't know this with 100 percent certainty, so we wait until there have been a number of conversations. Elinor has done this. There have been a series of conversations and she now knows that Edward feels something for her and she for him.

Unfortunately, this is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Other people have noticed too. (And this ought to be a reminder for us that whatever sense, sensibility, feeling and judgment are, they aren't things that happen inside our heads but things that show up in our behaviour for anyone to see provided they are willing to pay attention.) One of the people who has noticed is her ditzy mother and the other is the evil Fanny Dashwood. Elinor has no power in her relations with these people. She is a helpless mouse.

We might also note that one person who has not noticed is her sister Marianne who only finds out by being told  by her mother. It's interesting that Marianne, who supposedly loves Elinor, cannot even be bothered to pay enough attention to notice what this sister she loves is feeling. She's more aware of her own (negative) feelings towards Edward than of Elinor's.

And Edward has not declared his love. He keeps showing interest in her but he never comes out and says it. There is no actual promise, no commitment. She hopes him to be a good man but she doesn't know. Her sense/judgments manifests itself in her reticence. She holds back. She will not risk the same sort of disaster that Marianne courts and finds.

And then she finds out that Edward, like Willoughby, has a prior attachment. Unlike Willoughby, he's not a complete shit about it. He has a real sense of responsibility towards Lucy Steele. He doesn't love her anymore but he made a promise and he's not going to break it. He doesn't know that Lucy is after him only for the money he will come into. No one could know and it's entirely possible that Lucy herself is unaware and her feelings or sensibilities towards him aren't going to help if she doesn't understand own motivations.

Elinor sees a shot at happiness but it's an outside chance. All she can do at this point is to limit the damage that others with more power—Marianne, her ditzy mother, Fanny Dashwood and Lucy Steele—can do to her hopes and the only tool she has available to her is her ability to manipulate these people through her understanding of THEIR feelings. It's not her ability to feel anything herself that works for her but rather her ability to sense what others are feeling and to direct, assuage and soothe these feelings.

We might get distracted by her behaviour towards Colonel Brandon here. He seems a genuinely nice guy who acts for the benefit of others and Elinor really seems to care about his feelings. On the other hand, he turns out to be incredibly useful to her. He sets Edward up with the living that makes her happiness with him possible. He also takes Marianne off her hands by marrying her and thereby freeing Elinor to concentrate on her own happiness.

And so too we might say of her being surprisingly understanding towards Willoughby when he shows up during her sister's illness. For it is essential that she can tell Marianne that her feelings for Willoughby were valid because he really did love her. Otherwise, Marianne might have crumbled completely and Elinor would have been stuck with a helpless basket case on her hands instead of w woman willing to make a (probably loveless) match with Colonel Brandon so that Elinor could stop worrying about her.

Okay, maybe the sneaky little bitch in this scenario is actually Jane Austen plotting her novel to achieve the desired end and not Elinor who is simply hoping for the best and merely has to wait until her creator gets all her ducks lined up for her. In the end, though, I think the moral conclusion we should draw is the same: we shouldn't care about other people's feelings. We might notice them and respect them because not this person will be more likely to cooperate with us but the feelings themselves have no moral significance for us. If someone loves me, I will see that in their actions and not their feelings. If someone consistently fails to deliver, they don't love me no matter how intense their feelings for me may seem. Those feelings don't, on their own, mean anything at all.

They can have tremendous consequences and that is why we have to be very careful about how we cultivate them. We should not just let them grow. And we should not trample on the feelings of others, even when those others have shown that they don't particularly care for our own feelings. But the moral significance of feelings is zero. They are just something we need to manage in life.

This is particularly true in love. There are feelings that go with love but to love someone is to deliver and to keep delivering. If you don't do that, then you don't really love.

Exotica and the comforting presence of primitive religion

"No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others."

That's Roger Scruton from An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Casanova made more or less the same argument against Voltaire. He believed, and told Voltaire, that rather than abolishing superstition a proper philosopher would have remained silent on the subject. Wittgenstein made similar aruments.

The opposing view, popular since the Enlightenment, is that it is an act of bravery to shed our sacred rites and stories. This idea has been subject to relatively little scrutiny however. In any case, there are no knock-em-down arguments on either side. The best we can do, as Wittgenstein said, is a sort of propaganda in which both sides seek to remind the other of past weaknesses and failures. In this respect, the Enlightenment view is particularly vulnerable as all past attempts to strip the world clear of the dreams of superstition has tended to produce nightmares much as sterilizing a surface tends to prepare it for new and massive bacterial growth.

So let's put aside conclusive arguments for a while return to the album cover we were looking at yesterday.

Here's what it says about that cover in Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi:

The splendid album cover designed by William George portrayed a couple dancing among "threatening pagan idols."

But are they threatening? A lot would depend on how you looked at it. For millions of Catholics, the image of the crucified Christ is a source of comfort. That's a bit odd when you consider that it shows us a spectacularly cruel form of capital punishment. It's odd to see the torture and brutal murder of the person you place your hope in as comforting. And the Catholic seeing the crucifixion portrayed knows this. They would insist, in fact, that the spectacular cruelty and seeming hopelessness of the situation portrayed is the very point.

Something similar is happening with this cover. It's an altogether more commonplace instance and the deliberate use of the pejorative term "idols" above tells us that this is intentional. (We don't know who originally said or wrote "threatening pagan idols" as Adinolfi doesn't tell us where he gets this from or why he puts it in quotes.)

And we can grasp the real point of both the cover art and the music if we take the trouble to notice that the couple isn't dancing. It shows us something rather ambiguous: a man who wants to kiss a woman and a woman who isn't certain whether to refuse or accept his kiss. That's something like dancing and virtually all dancing is a ritualized encounter meant to recall such situations.

What will the woman be agreeing to if she accepts his kiss? Well, sex for starters. Perhaps not full sex that night but some sort of sexual interaction is being proposed. But what exactly? This could lead to some more kissing, hugging and squeezing and then never again. Or it might lead to sex. Or it might lead to love or even marriage.

And it's ambiguous both ways. She only knows that he wants to kiss her. She doesn't know what he hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what he'll settle for.  She also doesn't know what she really hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what she'll settle for.

Think of how a woman kisses her husband and then think how the same woman, about to begin an affair, kisses the man she will have that affair with for the first time. She might tell herself that the second kiss is "just about sex" but is that ever true? Conversely, she might give her husband a kiss and think to herself, "this is about love and not sex", but is that ever true?

No matter how you cut it, the possibility of a kiss is never the purely rational interaction that Enlightenment thinkers of all eras want us to believe it is. Something more is going on and, if we see things that way, the pagan idols surrounding the couple make perfect sense. They fit the situation not because they bring a threat with them but because they allow us to recognize a threat that exists in the very situation and which threat it is that makes the whole thing so enchanting.

To return to Scruton:

The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.

Scruton, however, is guilty of the very thing he accuses the sexual revolution of doing. We see this in his use of the term "the reproductive process". Is there anything more disenchanting that a process? Imagine the couple above thinking to themselves, "I'm engaged in the reproductive process?" As Wittgenstein once said, the parsons are equal partners with the philosophers in doing the "infinite harm" that Enlightenment disenchantment has caused.

Since I must stop somewhere, I'll simply note that Exotica and Tiki culture were an act of rebellion more profound than the rock and roll that followed. What we see here is a movement not to re-enchant the word, for the world can not be disenchanted. Rather, it's a movement to recognize the primitive enchantment that never goes away. It matters little what the original context those "pagan idols" were taken from, nor does it matter who has an authentic right to invoke them. All that matters is what anyone can see in that picture if they are open to it.

Exotica

The roots of Exotica was something I wondered about, but didn't do much about, on my previous blog. There is a lot of good writing on the subject by Sven A. Kirsten. His works, however, are mostly about the pictures that accompany the writing. There has been one academic work on the subject that I know of, Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi, but it's an intellectually lazy, sloppy work (anytime you see the term "the other" playing a big role in analytic writing, you can be sure the writer has turned his brain off so he can better spout the reassuring clichés that modern academic writing traffics in).

Adinolfi's work does, however, give us a notion of how not to go about looking into Exotica and Tiki. For starters, it's just too broad and sweeping in it's approach. It also places far too much emphasis on Romantic sources for Exotica and gives not nearly enough scrutiny to modernism and, more specifically, to modernist primitivism.

That should be an obvious move given the subtitle on the album cover above. If exotica started anywhere, it began with this 1951 Les Baxter album. "Le Sacre du Sauvage" is a pretty clear homage to Stravinsky. Baxter loved and was much influenced by Stravinsky and Ravel.

He was far from the only twentieth century popular musician to be influenced by modern music turned out by what we sometimes confusingly call "classical" composers. The most influential of whom was, although he gets little credit for it, Paul Whiteman. Through him, everyone from Bix Beiderbecke to Frank Sinatra picked up on a kind of jazz modernism.

The other big jazz influence, and this very much acknowledged by Baxter, was Duke Ellington. Ellington also used some of the harmonic ideas of the European modernists but more importantly for my purposes here, he also trucked in a certain kind of "exotica", by which I mean fantasy stories of western men going to exotic locations and finding love.



Ellington didn't invent this type of song but he certainly trafficked in it and his efforts were called jungle music at the time.

I could go on about that but I prefer to return to a little discussed aspect of Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps and that is that the ballet itself was rarely performed. It received a handful of performances in 1913 but was soon abandoned for audiences simply did not like the ballet. The music, however, was considerably more accepted. It was as program music—stuff you listened to while imagining images "suggested" by the music—that Sacre du printemps had its influence. And that is what influenced Les Baxter.

Primitivism

Ethnography didn't play much of a role in the fantasies that Stravinsky peddled. We can't distinguish the modernist primitivism of the early 20th century on the grounds that it was more authentic or better researched than that of the 1950s. The difference was more a matter of intent; the early modernist primitivism was meant to be disturbing.

The subjects of "civilization" are trapped in an alienating, inauthentic culture, but can escape by cultivating the "primitive" hidden within themselves: grotesque, even terrifying, but authentic in its drives, desires and relationship to the world. Known as primitivism, this diagnosis of cultural failure and its purported cure profoundly influenced modernist artists.

By the end of the 1950s, primitivism was literally the stuff of theme parks, a fun-filled escape. This shift is usually cited to the disadvantage of the 1950s but I think it points to a fundamental failure of the early modernists. The primitive simply isn't grotesque or terrifying. It's fun, familiar and harmless seen with modern western eyes. We fully appreciate that life would be nasty, brutish and short in a genuinely primitive culture but that's not where we live. The post-World-War-2 generation, correctly saw that primitivism is not alienating or threatening but fun.

And how could it be any other way? This stuff is open to anyone and, for that reason, comforting and familiar even if you've never experienced it before. After the horrors of modern technological warfare and the brutal oppression of modern socialism, who wouldn't want to escape to the Quiet Village?

Commonplace Book

An image from John and Willian Atkins' Book of Boats.

That's a type of boat called a Canoe Yawl. These started off as sort-of canoes. A Scotsman named John MacGregor went back to Britain from North America and described a kayak to a local boatbuilder who built his best approximation*. It wasn't anything like a kayak and nothing like a typical canoe used by North American aboriginal people but it became incredibly popular. The original one built for MacGregor was powered by paddle and was under 15 feet long. But others experimented with the type and added sails. And then they started to make them bigger. Eventually they became yachts.

* Something similar happened with the loafer which is a European shoemaker's effort at making something from a description given him of a moccasin.

To cultivate absurd dreams

I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be . . . permanent historical seasons of our lives . . . remaining children for eternity, leaving responsibilities for others, living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you . . . and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams. 

Frederico Fellini

The modern world is prone to fascism. As Fellini notes, it grows out of an adolescent worldview and adolescence is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It ought to worry us especially now as we live in a world where adolescence has run wild; the generation that currently obsesses about microaggressions and trigger warnings and that has already embraced a cult of personality in Obama is ripe for fascism.

At the same time, we too easily look outside ourselves for someone or something to blame. Fellini looked to the Catholic Church. He wasn't crazy to do so. There was a lot about the Catholic church, especially in the period of high Mariology that culminated with Pius XII, that lent itself to an adolescent worldview and the sort of immature fantasies that fascism grows out of. But it didn't have to be that way; the people aren't responsible for the culture that they inherit but they are responsible for how they respond to it. You are responsible for the sort of soil you provide for the seed that is sown.

Today, we might just as easily blame the universities and there is no doubt that a lot of appalling nonsense seemingly designed to churn out adolescents who forever put off growing up, who comfort themselves by letting others think for them and wallow in empty freedom where they cultivate absurd dreams. Ultimately, however, they still have the power to embrace responsibility.

Shame that manifests as anger

This is a pretty commonplace phenomenon but, as sometimes is the case, is really quite strange if you think about it. I saw an example of it a while ago in someone who momentarily seemed intensely angry but, I later realized, was actually feeling intense shame. I suspect everyone has done this at some time; I know I have.

But ... why?

I think it's a habit more than something specific to the situation. Googling around, I see that puts me at odds with professional opinion which tends to the view that deep analysis is the way to figure it out. My guess is that it starts in childhood when adults, especially our parents, shame us into doing things. We start to respond to feelings of shame with resentment. It's resentment and not anger because we can't act on our resentment.

But one day we lash out in anger and, to our surprise, it works. The adult is fully aware that they are manipulating might shame and they cave when we explode.

The problem is that we never learn how to process shame and guilt properly. We have to teach ourselves this skill as adults. We do things we feel badly about but know no way to achieve reconciliation. As a consequence, the feeling of shame is always there below the surface. When something happens to remind us, it feels like a rude invasion of our privacy and the anger flashes up because that is way we have trained ourselves to feel and to act. We have no notion. All we think we're feeling is shame but our face shows repressed rage to everyone else in the room.

Nothing good can come of this but, as I say, we have no idea how to fix it. We think we are faced with a series of individual problems that we cannot fix. But it's not really those things but our general habit of responding to bad feelings about things we have done.

I think that's it.