American genius extraordinaire. Highly unusual for his time and place. Nietzsche, reading his early, immature, unconsolidated thought in his first book, Nature, admired him. A strange acquiescence. In Emerson's awkward, unindoctrinated thought, Nietzsche found something genuine. More accessible and acceptable. Pure joyfulness, zest, passion in his scholarship and playful, unpredictable development of thought. A breath of fresh air probably impossible in Europe. Nature was published anonymously because he thought it would be ridiculed.
It was.
His early work, though, stands out among the mature, a true mark of original thinking. The originality comes from the way he puts his studies together and presents them. Although the ideas are not unique, his interpretations of them are. He takes the best from the best and points out the way. Every American artist, no matter what platform, will read him and take something from him. He gives without recompense, instructs the hardline American myth of self-creation. Art comes from the land so discover it, locate the ultimate imagination of it, transcend. With an untraditional approach and unorthodox presentation, he’s hard to place on the intellectual grid. Most of his later work was presented by him as lectures so it reads well, like a grandparent who actually has something to say. But with zeal and enthusiasm, no frustration, no confusion, no harking back to the good old days. He never looks back. Even his ramblings coalesce into something greater: good clean thought. It comes from a methodical examination of books, views and affairs. If the ideas are scattered-brained or happen-stance, the presentation saves them, making it something more worthwhile.
To say nothing of Whitman and Thoreau, who adored him and took up his calling (Melville – dark, brooding, infinite – made fun of him but still accepted the challenge), I think Emerson's questions remain unresolved, the American myth yet to be explored. His questions run deep and require more than superficial answers, simplistic solutions. He’s the great lumberjack, a true marksman, the first environmentalist. Take the “Napoleon” essay. You’d think a true republican, one who believes in a democratic republic, would have nothing to do with a despot. But there’s an enlightening essay about him. Napoleon could get things done. There’s always something to learn. Take “Swedenbourg,” the obscure but influential mystical religious thinker, Blake’s inspiration. With Emerson he becomes meaningful and accessible. And there are countless other examples.
He leads the way.
The first prominent American philosopher.
Our intellectual founder.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Champlain
Here was a real man, a true power, an originator. Compare him with any explorer and see them pale. Within Champlain there is vivacity, veracity, true visionary strength. More of an overall force than any particular type of brilliance. There is no secret to his success, just an overwhelming drive to discover, become, validate New France, an imaginary kind of place in the beginning, a wilderness without boundaries, a window so many other windows, infinite possibility, a door through which to dream up space. “But how carefully he had noted every island, every tree almost upon the way and how his imagination has run west and south and north with the stories of Indians, surmising peoples, mountains, lakes, some day to be discovered, with the greatest accuracy.” A sort of scientist bent on calculation and measurement. A new kind of American.
His father was a sailor, (supposedly) an admiral in the navy of Henry of Navarre. So he was bred on the sea, born into it. Prepared by birth to navigate the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to find the link between the Great Lakes and grand continents, to communicate openly and honestly with natives, to trace the flowering course of wanderings – “penetrating as far as the location of the city he would found [Quebec], trading, making maps, charting the coast and drawing colored pictures of everything.” This would have been 1603.
He knew the North Atlantic seaboard better than anybody; moving through Boston Harbor, noting islands, the trees that grew on them, the wildlife; passing Plymouth before the Pilgrims arrived. An extraordinary energy. Charts, maps, colored renderings, the future.
Exclude the splendors of Tenochtitlan, the vision of the Panama Canal, the power and wonder of Niagara Falls. Having studied the West Indies, Mexico and Panama first-hand around 1600, the Caribbean was not enough for him, his vision. New France would have to be north where game thrived, where the cold was enough to put anybody down, where Cartier was running around. America would really be the embodiment of his imagination. What he believed he created. What could be more beautiful?
An American in the perfect sense, to say nothing of his relations with natives, the Algonquin and Huron. Becoming, in a way, a part of them, learning their languages, trusting their resourcefulness, their approach, adopting it, the way they lived, making it his own. Fighting with them against the Iroquois. The continent opened itself up to him to set precedents. Nietzsche chose Frederick II, “the first European according to my taste” (Beyond Good and Evil 200). I choose Champlain, an American of the first order. The ashes of Tenochtitlan still fresh with the founding of Quebec.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt he said, “all great thing come from the East.” What he meant was that the West benefited and prospered tremendously through the centuries in the cultural interchange with the East. The synthesis of this exchange resulted in developments with everything from architecture to religion. A perfect example of this synthesis would be Frederick II, 1194 – 1250. King of Sicily from 1198, king of Germany from 1212, “emperor of the West” from 1220. He took part in the sixth crusade and conquered Jerusalem without bloodshed by negotiating with the Muslims instead of fighting them. His court in Sicily was the most cultured place in Europe. Although the “German Christian emperor,” he was more Muslim than Christian, and more Italian than German. He spoke seven languages, encouraged the development of poetry and sculpture and wrote a book on falcons still used by experts today. He established the University of Naples and made the University of Salerno the best school of medicine in Europe. A true innovator of his time.
There is less to be said of the cultural exchange between the West and the Americas. Culturally, native North Americans inspired Europeans more than what has generally been admitted. The history of this synthesis is yet to be written really, but it is there. And Champlain, if anything, took part in it with an open-mind. He embraced the divide and showed the ages a way to settle, explore and discover, without bloodshed, enslavement and exploitation. Human understanding.
His father was a sailor, (supposedly) an admiral in the navy of Henry of Navarre. So he was bred on the sea, born into it. Prepared by birth to navigate the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to find the link between the Great Lakes and grand continents, to communicate openly and honestly with natives, to trace the flowering course of wanderings – “penetrating as far as the location of the city he would found [Quebec], trading, making maps, charting the coast and drawing colored pictures of everything.” This would have been 1603.
He knew the North Atlantic seaboard better than anybody; moving through Boston Harbor, noting islands, the trees that grew on them, the wildlife; passing Plymouth before the Pilgrims arrived. An extraordinary energy. Charts, maps, colored renderings, the future.
Exclude the splendors of Tenochtitlan, the vision of the Panama Canal, the power and wonder of Niagara Falls. Having studied the West Indies, Mexico and Panama first-hand around 1600, the Caribbean was not enough for him, his vision. New France would have to be north where game thrived, where the cold was enough to put anybody down, where Cartier was running around. America would really be the embodiment of his imagination. What he believed he created. What could be more beautiful?
An American in the perfect sense, to say nothing of his relations with natives, the Algonquin and Huron. Becoming, in a way, a part of them, learning their languages, trusting their resourcefulness, their approach, adopting it, the way they lived, making it his own. Fighting with them against the Iroquois. The continent opened itself up to him to set precedents. Nietzsche chose Frederick II, “the first European according to my taste” (Beyond Good and Evil 200). I choose Champlain, an American of the first order. The ashes of Tenochtitlan still fresh with the founding of Quebec.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt he said, “all great thing come from the East.” What he meant was that the West benefited and prospered tremendously through the centuries in the cultural interchange with the East. The synthesis of this exchange resulted in developments with everything from architecture to religion. A perfect example of this synthesis would be Frederick II, 1194 – 1250. King of Sicily from 1198, king of Germany from 1212, “emperor of the West” from 1220. He took part in the sixth crusade and conquered Jerusalem without bloodshed by negotiating with the Muslims instead of fighting them. His court in Sicily was the most cultured place in Europe. Although the “German Christian emperor,” he was more Muslim than Christian, and more Italian than German. He spoke seven languages, encouraged the development of poetry and sculpture and wrote a book on falcons still used by experts today. He established the University of Naples and made the University of Salerno the best school of medicine in Europe. A true innovator of his time.
There is less to be said of the cultural exchange between the West and the Americas. Culturally, native North Americans inspired Europeans more than what has generally been admitted. The history of this synthesis is yet to be written really, but it is there. And Champlain, if anything, took part in it with an open-mind. He embraced the divide and showed the ages a way to settle, explore and discover, without bloodshed, enslavement and exploitation. Human understanding.
Kafka, the Enigma
I’d rank him right up there with anybody in the twentieth century. Nothing could be funnier. He couldn’t finish reading the first part of The Trial to an audience of friends without laughing too hard. Everything with him is ridiculous, impossible, incredible, fantastic. From both novels, one of which is incomplete, to his short stories, there is a persistent humor and systematic theme unrivaled by anyone. He compared his own work to “a new secret doctrine, a cabbala,” and it is. Most of his work revolves around the same thing: a pathetic individual struggle against a bureaucratic, invisible, authoritarian machine or petty, insignificant social structures and customs. The individual is always in some awful, phantasmagorical, intolerable, impossible situation. Thomas Mann views his work in relation to the divine. He calls Kafka a religious humorist, but there's more to it. In his detailed explanations of the trivial and banal, the morbid fascinations and low seriousness, there is a spark that illuminates the unknowable and transcends the basic human predicament.
An atheist would find religious significance in Kafka. And even though he has been categorized as fantastic literature, through the most commonplace circumstances Kafka elucidates the modern experience precisely and imaginatively without being suffocated by literary transparency like other modern writers. He passes on classical references and arrives at the center of the dilemma right off the bat. Meaning supersedes little, detailed explanations to such a degree as to be intuitive and forthright. Like real life, there is almost no suspense. We know what's happening, where it's all going.
I don't particularly like “The Metamorphosis.” It seems too contrived, perfectly serious and suitable for publication. But publication was not his goal. He wasn’t that kind of writer. He was trying to make sense of his own situation, our situation, so you’ll find a real struggle there, a genuine pursuit. Take “The Great Wall,” an unfinished story whose ending is so obvious it need not be written and works on its own independently. The terrifying nightmare of his creation is revealed within a few paragraphs. It’s so futuristic as to be almost telepathic. It’s this kind of breakthrough that muscles past modernism, his own the era, and puts him almost in another category altogether.
There is a charm in his incompleteness, real value. The absurdity is too much to bare. I like the fact that he was not obsessed by fame, publishing or output. The fact that he was of regular means and worked a regular job, composing in his free time, permits an indubitable significance and refinement. Dead at 41 years of age, a boyish face like he didn’t have to shave. But it’s his message that remains relevant. Was it Orwell or Richard Aldington who said of Joyce’s Ulysses: those little immaterial quasi-conscious half-thoughts running through the mind one hardly pays attention to? Joyce wrote a book composed of them! No one before thought this would suffice for fiction. But, artistic integrity and psychological discovery aside, what is accomplished by it? In a more general sense, what is the function of art? You get a good sense of it in Kafka; he works on many multi-faceted levels, with other dimensions.
His small output was extraordinary. He chose fiction as the vehicle for his message. The message could not be related any other way. It wouldn’t (couldn’t) make sense in a philosophical essay. Here it is more meaningful, more humorous. Novels like McCarthy's Blood Meridian should be considered more fantastic than Kafka. The circumstances surrounding Blood Meridian are more surreal than anything in Kafka, almost implausible in real life. In his criticism of violence in America and the modern world, McCarthy glorifies it at times to the point of gratuity. Violence is not present in our daily lives unless you’re a soldier. The same thing happened when Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers came out in the nineties; a criticism of violence by over-exaggerated presentations of it. What’s accomplished? With Kafka you are in real life. The problem is right there in your lap, your existence. You understand the parameters.
Now what?
An atheist would find religious significance in Kafka. And even though he has been categorized as fantastic literature, through the most commonplace circumstances Kafka elucidates the modern experience precisely and imaginatively without being suffocated by literary transparency like other modern writers. He passes on classical references and arrives at the center of the dilemma right off the bat. Meaning supersedes little, detailed explanations to such a degree as to be intuitive and forthright. Like real life, there is almost no suspense. We know what's happening, where it's all going.
I don't particularly like “The Metamorphosis.” It seems too contrived, perfectly serious and suitable for publication. But publication was not his goal. He wasn’t that kind of writer. He was trying to make sense of his own situation, our situation, so you’ll find a real struggle there, a genuine pursuit. Take “The Great Wall,” an unfinished story whose ending is so obvious it need not be written and works on its own independently. The terrifying nightmare of his creation is revealed within a few paragraphs. It’s so futuristic as to be almost telepathic. It’s this kind of breakthrough that muscles past modernism, his own the era, and puts him almost in another category altogether.
There is a charm in his incompleteness, real value. The absurdity is too much to bare. I like the fact that he was not obsessed by fame, publishing or output. The fact that he was of regular means and worked a regular job, composing in his free time, permits an indubitable significance and refinement. Dead at 41 years of age, a boyish face like he didn’t have to shave. But it’s his message that remains relevant. Was it Orwell or Richard Aldington who said of Joyce’s Ulysses: those little immaterial quasi-conscious half-thoughts running through the mind one hardly pays attention to? Joyce wrote a book composed of them! No one before thought this would suffice for fiction. But, artistic integrity and psychological discovery aside, what is accomplished by it? In a more general sense, what is the function of art? You get a good sense of it in Kafka; he works on many multi-faceted levels, with other dimensions.
His small output was extraordinary. He chose fiction as the vehicle for his message. The message could not be related any other way. It wouldn’t (couldn’t) make sense in a philosophical essay. Here it is more meaningful, more humorous. Novels like McCarthy's Blood Meridian should be considered more fantastic than Kafka. The circumstances surrounding Blood Meridian are more surreal than anything in Kafka, almost implausible in real life. In his criticism of violence in America and the modern world, McCarthy glorifies it at times to the point of gratuity. Violence is not present in our daily lives unless you’re a soldier. The same thing happened when Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers came out in the nineties; a criticism of violence by over-exaggerated presentations of it. What’s accomplished? With Kafka you are in real life. The problem is right there in your lap, your existence. You understand the parameters.
Now what?
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