I enjoyed this, as I was reading I kept thinking of anon’s commentary on the Hermit in Meditations on the Tarot about how one must maintain a constant awareness of being being between two darknesses—the darkness of knowing too much, that of knowing not nearly enough.
Relatedly, I led an online reading group of Ulysses for a bunch of strangers from a wide variety of backgrounds a few years ago. Everyone had their own editions and reading companions, and at the time I was nervous about ensuring I kept our discussions trained on Ulysses itself. But the discussions we had about the various annotations, companions, facts, exegeses, Joyce’s life and mind itself, whatever, etc., were always so good and so fun—and so necessary, particularly since no one in the group had read him before. And everything always did lead back to the text itself anyways.
Thank you! (I really need to read Meditations on the Tarot, can't believe I wrote a book called Major Arcana without it, but these are the limits to knowledge....) Ulysses is often derided as a book you have to be in some kind of "class" to read, but if you learn communally to enjoy the process it's so pleasurable! I suspect he wanted to bring communal reading back, or into a secular context.
Great stuff! Regarding footnote 4, I find no pleasure in the prospect of a months-long parliamentary debate about the exact bureaucratic hoops to jump through to be put down like a dog - it certainly reinforces the picture of Britain as a post-industrial liberal dystopia where one is hounded by the police for non-crime hate incidents until the only thing to look forward to is state-sponsored death. I just don't think a reverence for life can be maintained by a prohibition against dying.
Thanks! I do agree about abstract reverence for life. I was more pro-assisted suicide on pragmatic grounds until I saw how it's gone in Canada and the Netherlands; I don't take the hardline Catholic position and certainly understand why a person wouldn't want to grind out the last agonizing months of certain illnesses. But the way it's gone in Canada and the Netherlands suggests that something needs to be rethought, possibly what a person (or maybe what a state) is.
Rethinking what a state is, reminding ourselves what a human is seems important to me. Sorry this comment is too long, I’ll probably write my
own post about it, but I’ve been circling these thoughts (and my own panic/grief about my death) for a while. Of course, on an intellectual level and as a political being, I am deeply concerned by the idea of the state weaponizing assisted suicide practices against members of society that it deems unworthy of life. This is similar to the way I am deeply concerned with the way industrial medicine handles the pain and trials of labor and giving birth, how overly medicalized, state-regulated practice holds higher implications of violence and mortality for certain members of society—Black, trans, and disabled women in the US, for example--than others. Not to mention the spiritual concerns I have about the rote, technological ways in which we approach pain, suffering, and the body under enduring periods of stress. Professionals within medicine, science, and government should absolutely not be leaving these questions of care around birth and death unacknowledged and unaddressed.
At the same time, as someone who is facing childbirth here any day now, followed by a long battle with a difficult cancer prognosis, I feel so deeply exasperated by the lack of honesty in these debates around individual experiences of pain and suffering in processes of (birth and) death.
To try to speak honestly and personally without getting too tragic: I cannot know what I will want or, more to the point, truly need someone else to provide for me in moments of extreme pain when it is clear that my “normal” relationship to a sense of a future isn’t going to cut it anymore. My hope is that I will be able to have a “natural” childbirth, unimpeded by medical intervention. My hope is that I will be able to die “well,” by which I mean that I hope my suffering and my death will hold conscious meaning for myself, without extreme medical intervention, for as long as possible, as well as for my family members and loved ones well past the point of my dying.
But when I am in the thick present of these experiences of suffering, who can say? When I’m dying, will I or my family really be able to consign my body to more suffering because that aligns with a political value about the uses and misuses of the state in a moment where that political value clashes with and disappears in the face of another, which is to do as little harm to my children, my spouse, my caregivers in the face of my death as possible? What happens to such a choice in the moment when it is clear that I am not “me,” as such, that my consciousness is only that of matter-in-pain, Weil’s walking dead, Agamben’s muselmann?
In our time, those on the left (myself included) advocate for as many choices as possible around reproduction, pregnancy, and birth, knowing the availability of those choices means that both individuals and collectives—doctors offices, the state, etc—will try, at times, to abuse such choice, even for what we might call evil ends. But isn’t that the responsibility and burden of human choice in the first place? Shouldn’t we also advocate for the same around dying and death?
At some point, of course, the way this whole debate is playing out is a distraction from what those with state authority should be doing: ensuring people have the ability to live well rather than fixating its legislative attentions better served elsewhere on an individual’s final moments, which are increasingly impossible to experience as “good” or “ok” for vast majorities of people, who are dying younger, in more pain, and with less dignity precisely because the state has not fulfilled its obligations to them throughout their lives. I don’t think, like Rose Lyddon thinks, that the legalization of state-assisted suicide is going to enshrine a cultural shift that threatens the sanctity of human life. I think that cultural shift has already happened given how the everyday policies of the state are in full-tilt service of abandoning the welfare of its people for the power of a few, and have been for a long, long time.
As someone whose been teaching writing and leading groups for other cancer patients and sick people over the last several years, I’ve been close to plenty of people who’ve died, young, old, “ready,” not, under hospice care. As a reporter on the crime beat in the South, I saw nearly every kind of death. It is somehow never comprehensible, except on the most minute of terms. What makes it OK? What makes it good? These are important conversations to be having, but, at the end of the day, these are questions that are largely unanswerable by any collective. They have to be faced in the particular—not necessarily alone, but certainly in the terrible dimness that is the personal. We can face them better, personally, if we are afforded the opportunity to live well, collectively, before they insist themselves upon us. The state is pernicious in the ways it misdirects and hijacks our attention in service of its own pomposity about roles, which, even with codified law, it can never truly or entirely assume.
Thank you for this! I completely agree about the necessity for candor about the individual experience of difficult and sometimes unknowable realities, as opposed to resorting to philosophical-religious abstractions or "rules." I also sympathize with your advocacy for as many choices as possible in making these particular decisions.
I suspect if this debate were only about the dilemma you point to of "matter in pain," if it were only about the terminus of physical illness, the rhetoric around "the sanctity of life" would be less extreme and more attuned to contingency, pain, and difficult and inevitable choices. I think what worries Lyddon, Frawley, and even me most is the increasing subsumption of (presumptuous definitions of) mental health under rubrics where state-assisted death could be seen as a "cure." The state encroaching not only on the body but directly on the psyche or soul.
Interesting stuff. Does Kenner say what kind of renaissance modernism could have been? Does he think it was the first or the second war which did it in? I was just talking about the subject of footnote 4 over lunch, it's a true conundrum as far as I'm concerned, because that original genuine problem is a very real one, even if I do have some of the same apprehensions about the eugenic stories one hears. That said, with Pound and his age in the background, it should perhaps be gently said that "sentimental great man kitsch" has at points in the last century very much walked hand in hand with eugenics, and could easily do so again. Thanks as always!
Thanks! He thought it was a literal Renaissance II in that the ancient world had been rediscovered anew through philology and archaeology, as well as the modern discovery of the cave paintings and the European discovery of Chinese, African, Oceanic art. All of this pointed, according to Kenner, to an objective road out of the dead end of 19th-century mimesis which had ended in Browning's, James's, Pater's, Whistler's, etc.'s subjectivism and obscurity and vagueness. It was destroyed in World War I.
Interesting. One sees sort of what he means on the cultural level in Pound Elliot, etc. It’s enormously long and I’m not finished with it, but the discussion of archaeology and philology reminds me of Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, which tries to situate the Joseph narrative in an archaeologically grounded Bronze Age near East.
I went back and read the NetGalley reviews. Granted, there are only 4 so far, but going by this tiny sample, I predict:
1. People will either love or hate this book.
2. One reason the haters will hate it is because the characters are "unlikeable." This is a fundamentally immature response to serious fiction, and unfortunately, it's a response that's extremely common!
You're probably right! This is too revealing and I shouldn't say it, but I am sort of surprised at people describing the characters as unlikeable and self-absorbed (other than Simon Magnus, who is meant to be alienating). I didn't find them particularly self-absorbed when I was writing them. And who could dislike Ash del Greco?
Simon Magnus is very egotistical and self-absorbed, but he's funny! I felt great sympathy for Ash del Greco, a complex and questing character. The character I found most repulsive was a minor one - Anne Alterhaus.
I'll have to reread that section. Based on a first reading, I got an impression of her as a chilly and malevolent social climber. Which of course doesn't preclude her from having some positive qualities.
The comment about the "strange plot" reminds me that strangeness was one of Harold Bloom's criteria for greatness, so you're in good company.
I enjoyed this, as I was reading I kept thinking of anon’s commentary on the Hermit in Meditations on the Tarot about how one must maintain a constant awareness of being being between two darknesses—the darkness of knowing too much, that of knowing not nearly enough.
Relatedly, I led an online reading group of Ulysses for a bunch of strangers from a wide variety of backgrounds a few years ago. Everyone had their own editions and reading companions, and at the time I was nervous about ensuring I kept our discussions trained on Ulysses itself. But the discussions we had about the various annotations, companions, facts, exegeses, Joyce’s life and mind itself, whatever, etc., were always so good and so fun—and so necessary, particularly since no one in the group had read him before. And everything always did lead back to the text itself anyways.
Thank you! (I really need to read Meditations on the Tarot, can't believe I wrote a book called Major Arcana without it, but these are the limits to knowledge....) Ulysses is often derided as a book you have to be in some kind of "class" to read, but if you learn communally to enjoy the process it's so pleasurable! I suspect he wanted to bring communal reading back, or into a secular context.
Great stuff! Regarding footnote 4, I find no pleasure in the prospect of a months-long parliamentary debate about the exact bureaucratic hoops to jump through to be put down like a dog - it certainly reinforces the picture of Britain as a post-industrial liberal dystopia where one is hounded by the police for non-crime hate incidents until the only thing to look forward to is state-sponsored death. I just don't think a reverence for life can be maintained by a prohibition against dying.
Thanks! I do agree about abstract reverence for life. I was more pro-assisted suicide on pragmatic grounds until I saw how it's gone in Canada and the Netherlands; I don't take the hardline Catholic position and certainly understand why a person wouldn't want to grind out the last agonizing months of certain illnesses. But the way it's gone in Canada and the Netherlands suggests that something needs to be rethought, possibly what a person (or maybe what a state) is.
Rethinking what a state is, reminding ourselves what a human is seems important to me. Sorry this comment is too long, I’ll probably write my
own post about it, but I’ve been circling these thoughts (and my own panic/grief about my death) for a while. Of course, on an intellectual level and as a political being, I am deeply concerned by the idea of the state weaponizing assisted suicide practices against members of society that it deems unworthy of life. This is similar to the way I am deeply concerned with the way industrial medicine handles the pain and trials of labor and giving birth, how overly medicalized, state-regulated practice holds higher implications of violence and mortality for certain members of society—Black, trans, and disabled women in the US, for example--than others. Not to mention the spiritual concerns I have about the rote, technological ways in which we approach pain, suffering, and the body under enduring periods of stress. Professionals within medicine, science, and government should absolutely not be leaving these questions of care around birth and death unacknowledged and unaddressed.
At the same time, as someone who is facing childbirth here any day now, followed by a long battle with a difficult cancer prognosis, I feel so deeply exasperated by the lack of honesty in these debates around individual experiences of pain and suffering in processes of (birth and) death.
To try to speak honestly and personally without getting too tragic: I cannot know what I will want or, more to the point, truly need someone else to provide for me in moments of extreme pain when it is clear that my “normal” relationship to a sense of a future isn’t going to cut it anymore. My hope is that I will be able to have a “natural” childbirth, unimpeded by medical intervention. My hope is that I will be able to die “well,” by which I mean that I hope my suffering and my death will hold conscious meaning for myself, without extreme medical intervention, for as long as possible, as well as for my family members and loved ones well past the point of my dying.
But when I am in the thick present of these experiences of suffering, who can say? When I’m dying, will I or my family really be able to consign my body to more suffering because that aligns with a political value about the uses and misuses of the state in a moment where that political value clashes with and disappears in the face of another, which is to do as little harm to my children, my spouse, my caregivers in the face of my death as possible? What happens to such a choice in the moment when it is clear that I am not “me,” as such, that my consciousness is only that of matter-in-pain, Weil’s walking dead, Agamben’s muselmann?
In our time, those on the left (myself included) advocate for as many choices as possible around reproduction, pregnancy, and birth, knowing the availability of those choices means that both individuals and collectives—doctors offices, the state, etc—will try, at times, to abuse such choice, even for what we might call evil ends. But isn’t that the responsibility and burden of human choice in the first place? Shouldn’t we also advocate for the same around dying and death?
At some point, of course, the way this whole debate is playing out is a distraction from what those with state authority should be doing: ensuring people have the ability to live well rather than fixating its legislative attentions better served elsewhere on an individual’s final moments, which are increasingly impossible to experience as “good” or “ok” for vast majorities of people, who are dying younger, in more pain, and with less dignity precisely because the state has not fulfilled its obligations to them throughout their lives. I don’t think, like Rose Lyddon thinks, that the legalization of state-assisted suicide is going to enshrine a cultural shift that threatens the sanctity of human life. I think that cultural shift has already happened given how the everyday policies of the state are in full-tilt service of abandoning the welfare of its people for the power of a few, and have been for a long, long time.
As someone whose been teaching writing and leading groups for other cancer patients and sick people over the last several years, I’ve been close to plenty of people who’ve died, young, old, “ready,” not, under hospice care. As a reporter on the crime beat in the South, I saw nearly every kind of death. It is somehow never comprehensible, except on the most minute of terms. What makes it OK? What makes it good? These are important conversations to be having, but, at the end of the day, these are questions that are largely unanswerable by any collective. They have to be faced in the particular—not necessarily alone, but certainly in the terrible dimness that is the personal. We can face them better, personally, if we are afforded the opportunity to live well, collectively, before they insist themselves upon us. The state is pernicious in the ways it misdirects and hijacks our attention in service of its own pomposity about roles, which, even with codified law, it can never truly or entirely assume.
Thank you for this! I completely agree about the necessity for candor about the individual experience of difficult and sometimes unknowable realities, as opposed to resorting to philosophical-religious abstractions or "rules." I also sympathize with your advocacy for as many choices as possible in making these particular decisions.
I suspect if this debate were only about the dilemma you point to of "matter in pain," if it were only about the terminus of physical illness, the rhetoric around "the sanctity of life" would be less extreme and more attuned to contingency, pain, and difficult and inevitable choices. I think what worries Lyddon, Frawley, and even me most is the increasing subsumption of (presumptuous definitions of) mental health under rubrics where state-assisted death could be seen as a "cure." The state encroaching not only on the body but directly on the psyche or soul.
Interesting stuff. Does Kenner say what kind of renaissance modernism could have been? Does he think it was the first or the second war which did it in? I was just talking about the subject of footnote 4 over lunch, it's a true conundrum as far as I'm concerned, because that original genuine problem is a very real one, even if I do have some of the same apprehensions about the eugenic stories one hears. That said, with Pound and his age in the background, it should perhaps be gently said that "sentimental great man kitsch" has at points in the last century very much walked hand in hand with eugenics, and could easily do so again. Thanks as always!
Thanks! He thought it was a literal Renaissance II in that the ancient world had been rediscovered anew through philology and archaeology, as well as the modern discovery of the cave paintings and the European discovery of Chinese, African, Oceanic art. All of this pointed, according to Kenner, to an objective road out of the dead end of 19th-century mimesis which had ended in Browning's, James's, Pater's, Whistler's, etc.'s subjectivism and obscurity and vagueness. It was destroyed in World War I.
Interesting. One sees sort of what he means on the cultural level in Pound Elliot, etc. It’s enormously long and I’m not finished with it, but the discussion of archaeology and philology reminds me of Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, which tries to situate the Joseph narrative in an archaeologically grounded Bronze Age near East.
I went back and read the NetGalley reviews. Granted, there are only 4 so far, but going by this tiny sample, I predict:
1. People will either love or hate this book.
2. One reason the haters will hate it is because the characters are "unlikeable." This is a fundamentally immature response to serious fiction, and unfortunately, it's a response that's extremely common!
You're probably right! This is too revealing and I shouldn't say it, but I am sort of surprised at people describing the characters as unlikeable and self-absorbed (other than Simon Magnus, who is meant to be alienating). I didn't find them particularly self-absorbed when I was writing them. And who could dislike Ash del Greco?
Simon Magnus is very egotistical and self-absorbed, but he's funny! I felt great sympathy for Ash del Greco, a complex and questing character. The character I found most repulsive was a minor one - Anne Alterhaus.
Interesting! I wouldn't want to hang out with Anne Alterhaus, but I do believe she did what she genuinely thought was best.
I'll have to reread that section. Based on a first reading, I got an impression of her as a chilly and malevolent social climber. Which of course doesn't preclude her from having some positive qualities.