My Dinner with André

In my last post, I mentioned the 1981 film My Dinner with André. It's an almost two-hour film which consists of two old friends having a long conversation. It sounds like a gimmick film, and I suppose it is, in a way. But it's also very absorbing and entertaining. I actually wish there was a whole genre of such films.

Additionally, some of the subjects touched on have become even more relevant in the intervening decades, as a thousand clips circulated on social media attest.

You can watch it all on YouTube here, at the time of writing. Actually, the film has been freely available on YouTube for years, which I always take as an indication that the copyright holders don't really mind too much.

It's also the film that introduced me to one of my favourite pieces of music, Erik Satie's Gymnopédie Number One.

What Should We Talk About? What Should We Think About?

This increasingly seems to me like a major and timeless human problem. Human beings need activity-- they need something to do. They need a focus. They also need something to talk about. We require interaction with other human beings, for its own sake as much as for any purpose we might put it too. So what form should those interactions take?

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that modern man is "distracted by distraction from distraction". It's a valid point, but...surely people need some kind of distraction, or at least some kind of occupation. What is it we're supposedly being distracted from, anyway?

The Christian might say "worship". The socialist might say politics, or the improvement of the human species. The hippie (I think that we still have hippies even if they aren't classic hippies) might say "love" or "human connection" or some such thing. Or perhaps we come down to the ideal of pure being-- whatever that is. Whatever anyone might say, people who complain about modern distractions must believe we're being distracted from something.

I'm very sympathetic to the argument made by Wally in the wonderful movie My Dinner with André, when he reacts against his rather hippie-ish friend, who is talking about various workshops he's led and which seem similiar to Sixties "happenings" or modern mindfulness exercises.

Wally says: "The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

"And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it’s our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and…and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but…but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I’m saying?"

I tend to agree with Wally. We all have moments of pure euphoria or contentment or contemplativeness. But...we can't live like that. We have to do something, to think about something, to talk about something.

(And honestly, for me, those moments have been moments of plenitude rather than moments of pure simplicity.)

No matter how much you believe in the primacy of some particular activity, there's still inevitably lots of time left over. It's impressive and moving to read about great Christian saints who could spend hours on end in prayer. But few of us have that kind of purity, and even those saints seemed to have time and energy left over. Similarly, even the purest aesthete can't really live just for art, even the purest workaholic can't live just for work...

Besides, most art needs to be about something, all work needs to be about something...it has purpose inherent to it. So it can't really be its own purpose, ultimately, although it can to some extent.

And then there's the other problem, the one I started with. What do we talk about? And where can that talk go?

It seems reasonable to me to hold this belief: we should organize society and organize our lives in such a way that there's more rather than less to talk about. We should deliberately avoid simplifying and rationalizing things in such a way that there's less to talk about. Or think about.

(One of my personal bugbears in this regard is the "live and let live" philosophy of life. It's tolerant, yes. But it's very boring. Surely there's a happy medium between the Salem witch trials and all those depressing modern proverbs: "You do you", "Whatever floats your boat", "It's all good"...I don't want to be ruled by bigots. But I'd rather have coffee with a bigot than the sort of person who extends the zero aggression principle to not even criticizing anybody else's choices.)

Ironically enough, I have a great deal more to say about this, but that might be enough for now.

"We're All Adults Here"

This phrase is an interesting one because it's only ever used because people aren't behaving like adults, or because we anticipate that they won't behave like adults.

So how "adult" are adults if the phrase is such a common one?

Sources of the Sublime

This morning, I watched this discussion between Peter Hitchens and a pantheist philosopher. Peter Hitchens has settled firmly into his "grumpy old codger" phase and now regularly turns up to interviews but refuses to defend his beliefs, insisting that he's not trying to convince anybody of anything. It reminds me of Fr. Fredrick Copleston's famous retort to Bertrand Russell, when Russell denied that the universe needed an explanation: "If you refuse to sit at the board you can't be checkmated."

But that's by the by. The part of the inteview that prompted this blog post was where the philosopher claimed that various highly secularized society have been shown to be the happiest, while many religious societies are less happy.

This is the sort of statistic that used to bother me when I was an agnostic seeker. It doesn't really bother me anymore, for several reasons:

1) I'm increasingly sceptical of these findings. Social science is incredibly ideological and I simply don't have faith in its claims. I would have to examine the methodology of every single study to accept them, and even then, how can I know that the results weren't faked? Should the citizens of the Soviet Union have believed the social science produced by their universities?

2) Even if it's true, what is happiness? It's a big question. Hitchens opposes happiness to pleasure in his own answer. That's one criticism. I think there are others.

I like Nietzsche's line: "Man does not seek happiness. Only the Englishman does". (This was  swipe at English utlitarian philosophers.)

Obviously, misery is not desirable and people need a base level of happiness for any kind of human flourishing to be possible. But I think that there are a lot of things which we believe we would be happier without, but whose loss would actually grieve us-- over time.

Which brings me to my actual point-- the sublime. I think that many conservatives (myself included) are motivated by a desire for the sublime-- for themselves and for others.

(The sublime is actually difficult to pursue on your own. The achievement of the sublime is generally collaborative, both in the present and over generations).

I think that many of the things that liberals are now seeking to erode are sources of the sublime:

1) Organized religion, even for non-believers. Liturgy, feasts and fasts, hymns, ceremony, hierarchy, religious taboos, the sense of the sacred, all of that.

2) Masculinity and femininity.

3) National traditions and national identity (as well as ethnic traditions, regional traditions, etc.)

4) Marriage and the family.

5) Childhood innocence.

6) Inconvenience. Society is, in many ways, becoming ever more convenient and the gain in convenience is often outweighed by the loss of the sublime, even if it's a mild form of the sublime. Think of how people get nostalgic about camping and all the discomforts attendant upon that. Or how some streaming services have gone back to releasing TV series through weekly episodes, rather than all at once, to retain the pleasure of a communal experience rather than individualized binge-watching. (Admittedly, it's not really liberals who are pushing for this one, and they are often on Team Tradition in this case.)

7) The reading of poetry, and the enrichment of ordinary language and thought which is brought about by lots of people being familiar with a substantial corpus of poetry. (Again, conservatives are just as much to blame as liberals here.) 

Here's a simple example. In old books one frequently comes across this line from Browning: "But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". It's one of dozens or perhaps hundreds of lines of poetry which it was simply assumed the reader would recognize.

Another example. On a long-ago episode of The Late Late Show, Ireland's oldest TV programme, I remember the host Gay Byrne talking about some old department store and saying: "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod." He could simply assume that a large amount of viewers would recognize this was a quotation from Hopkins. It added a certain elevation to his patter. I can't imagine the current host doing this.

Is it possible I'm projecting my own sensibilities onto other people? Yes. But I'm increasingly convinced of the opposite: that everybody really does care about the sublime, and become very nostalgic and regretful when one of its sources are removed.

A Lame Joke

A: Have you heard of the Mandela Effect? It's a phenomenon where people swear they remember something differently to how everybody else remembers it.

B: Wait, isn't that called the Gorbachev Effect? It was yesterday.

Personally, I think the Mandela Effect might explain artificial intelligence "hallucinations". The timeline is being altered too quickly for humans to notice it but computers are quick enough to catch it.

Favourite Poems: "Autobiographical Fragment" by Kingsley Amis

Which is better: a life of ease, or a life of exertion? This is an old theme in poetry (and art and mythology) but it's never been tackled more wittily than in this little-known poem by Kingsley Amis.

It has a remarkable resemblance to the famous poem "Toads" by Philip Larkin, his best friend. Aside from the theme, they both have the same slack metre and loose rhymes, not to mention the same basic structure. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if there's a story behind it.

Autobiographical Fragment by Kingsley Amis

When I lived down in Devonshire
The callers at my cottage
Were Constant Angst, the Art Critic
And old Major Courage.

Angst always brought me something nice
To get in my good graces
A quilt, a role of cotton-wool,
A pair of dark glasses.

He tore up all my unpaid bills
Went and got my slippers.
Took the telephone off the hook
And bolted up the shutters.

We smoked and chatted by the fire
Sometimes just nodding
His charming presence made it right
To sit and do nothing.

But then-- those awful afternoons
I walked out with the Major!
I ran up hills, down streams, through briars
It was sheer blue murder.

Trim in his boots, riding-breeches
And threadbare Norfolk jacket
He watched me, frowning, bawled commands
To work hard and enjoy it.

I asked him once why I was there
Except to get all dirty.
He tugged his grey mustache and snapped:
"Young man, it's your duty".

What duty's served by pointless, mad
Climbing and crawling?
I tell you, I was thankful when
The old bore stopped calling.

If this theme interests you, you might like my previous post "My Fondness for Death, Sickness, Grief, and Melancholy."

A Source of Human Dignity

Very often, I get excited about things that nobody else seems to get excited about, or maybe they just don't talk about them.

Recently I was telling somebody a story about something dramatic I saw on the street that morning. Even though the story was about an event that was unpleasant in itself, I realized that I took tremendous pleasure-- disproportionate pleasure-- in telling the story, and in my listener hearing the story

There's something very magical about stories, even rather mundane stories. One person is recreating, in their imagination, something that another person experienced. They inevitably add details and colouring of their own. And-- is it fair to say they add something else, at least sometimes-- "the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration, and the poet's dream"?

Each time a story is told, this magic is heightened-- so, when we get to a story such as that of Archimedes jumping out of the bath, it has attained the status of legend, the atmosphere of legend.

I found myself pondering why I get so excited about this, and it led me to a thought that has occurred to me many times.

It is, in my view, a great source of human dignity that every person's experience is utterly unique. Everybody sees and hears things that nobody else hears or sees. Obviously, this applies to internal experiences as much as external experiences.

You can learn everything about everything but you will never know what it's like to experience the same things as somebody else. Memory is irreducibly personal.

And the great thing is that this uniqueness applies no matter what you do. It reminds me of the Waterboys song:

I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon.

Somebody who spends their whole life in bed, perhaps an invalid, experiences something that a globe-trotter doesn't.

Does anybody know what I'm getting at here, and do you agree? I must admit that recently I'm getting very self-conscious about the things that excite me and don't seem to excite anybody else. (And no, I'm really not humblebragging that I'm so unique and deep and misunderstood.)

P.S. This fascination with stories, and even stories within stories, has been much on my mind this week because I've been rewatching Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a Canadian-American horror anthology for young teens. The framing device is the Midnight Society, a gang of kids who tell spooky stories around a campfire in the evening-- although they don't seem to meet at midnight.

The series is remembered very affectionately because it didn't lower the bar just because it was aimed at kids. The stories are often very high quality, and even feature twists you might not see coming. And they can be quite scary. You can see it all on YouTube if you want.

Anyway, stories-within-stories have fascinated me all my life. My favourite part of a Sherlock Holmes story has always been the client calling into 221B Baker Street and briefing Holmes and Watson on the details of the case. Similarly, I love horror films such as Dead of Night with the same format.

I've tried reading The Arabian Nights, the Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales is the only one I finished. I found the others fairly tedious, to be honest-- shame on me, no doubt.

And I even found The Canterbury Tales tough going, but I read it a long time ago. I do remember enjoying parts of it.

Anyway, here are two freaky coincidences that happened to me this week.

1) I asked a colleague if he had ever seen Are You Afraid of the Dark? He said: "I was just talking about it two minutes ago with C----", another colleague.

2) I'd already been thinking about giving The Canterbury Tales another go when I went to meet a friend who I meet every week. We always meet at the same spot, a book exchange shelf. As soon as I went to meet him, my eye was struck by The Riverside Chaucer on the exchange shelf. I picked it up. "Yeah, take that", he said. "I just put it there."

(But if I do give The Canterbury Tales another go, it won't be that edition, which is in archaic English. That's how I read it before. I think I'll try a modern English translation this time.)

Any suggestions of other works of fiction (on screen or page) which involve tales-within-tales are most welcome. I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell recently, looking for just this. It was very good, and it is indeed full of tales within tales-- but there's no actual frame narrative. Each tale randomly breaks off and is succeeded by another, and so on, until the second half of the book when each of them are concluded in turn. Interesting in its own way, but not what I was looking for.

(As with all such fictions, the most boring story is the longest. This seems to be an iron law of fiction.)