Class and Quality in the Bathroom Window

I’ve been working on my first scholarly book on Spenser’s Book of Holinesse in his six book (and still uncompleted) Faerie Queene (I know; how cool am I?). I am going to publish this serious academic work before I publish my already completed satire on Art in the Age of Talk Radio, because in my satire I take aim at some of the most famous works of postmodern literature. As much as I love these works (and I do), I have always felt that they leave me with an unfulfilled promise of wholeness when the work is put down. In grad school, I had found that I was not alone; Derrida had indicated his belief that what human beings could construct could be deconstructed by the careful critic. I have always thought that he was right, but at the same time this left me feeling that he had pulled the rug out from under me, offering something unreal that could be pulled away at his will.

Everyone (including me) believed this when I was in graduate school, but it put a premium on aligning oneself with Derrida’s skepticism. Those who believed in skepticism were in the know (and what a contradiction is implied in that formulation!) and could be allowed into the academic inner circle. All my professors attempted to do with me the entire time I was in graduate school was to lecture me on my own misbehavior based on my own misconfiguration of the problem. In their minds, Derrida had solved a problem that had bedeviled a lot of the best literary critics of the previous generation. And who was I, after all, to question them or Derrida? When I continued to ask thorny question (like how it was possible to know anything in a universe in which all our knowledge of anything can be deconstructed), I was shunned as an unbeliever (another problem in a skeptical universe; who gets to call it art in a relative universe but those who are in positions of power already? I have discussed this here, if you’re interested). See 1:20 in the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY

When I was in graduate school, I had no answers to my belief that something was wrong in the graduate school universe, and I wrote my dissertation more in the spirit of inquiry into method than actually answering the questions I was raising. It wasn’t until I got out of graduate school and started reading old books in my now abundant leisure time that I found what I had been looking for all along, and in the most unlikely place. Augustine, who I had been avoiding along with Plato on account of his reputation in D. W. Roberston, Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer, had held the answer all along. I change it a bit in my work, though.

Both of my latest works are separate attempts to answer my graduate school critics by deconstructing deconstruction on the basis of my new found confidence in a world that persist in spite of academic doubts about its existence (I’m quoting myself here; weird). In my work of satire, I make the case that artists and literary critics, and not the usual scapegoat of the bourgeoisie, have placed their spears in the shifting ground of a deconstructable universe as though they had found solid ground. Within the world of fiction, I point to some of my favorite works of fiction that have led artists and critics to set up as arbiters of faith in a thoroughly deconstructable universe. Only artists and critics are exempt from deconstruction, and they get quite upset when someone tells them that they are not.

In my work, I point out as gently as I can (because I modeled my main character on myself) that his youthful dreams of transcendence are totally unrealistic. But he refuses to see the world more realistically, as my antagonist, who is also based on another aspect of myself, does. In the end, neither of those two me-based people have the answers to the question of transcendence.

Gentle Giant’s Mr. Class and Quality

As a result of my thoughts in recent weeks, the lyrics to this song, Gentle Giant‘s ‘Mr. Class and Quality,’ have been on my mind. In them, the writers give vent to their feelings about the limitations of the bourgeois “middleman” who travels within strictly restricted boundaries. Their feeling is that the “middle” is nothing more than a detour from the “end” of literary experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNzZ7RXQtM

Look around my rooms and see the prizes I have showing
Working hard to build my life and plan the way I’m going
House and car and pretty wife – they’ve all been won by knowing
All been won by knowing
All been won by knowing.

Paperwork, white collared shirts – where would we be without them
Man of class and quality – I never shout about them
Choose my friends for my own ends. You can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them.

Middleman sees straight ahead and never crosses borders
Never understood the artist or the lazy workers
The world needs steady men like me to give and take the orders
Give and take the orders
Give and take the orders.

The bourgeois man has trophies of his accomplishment (“prizes I have showing”) as the result of his “hard work” and his “planning.” But, as everyone knows or should know, life throws us curves out of left field. It is in our reactions to unforeseen events that we should measure a man, and not on the basis of how much “paperwork” a man wearing “white-collared shirts” who “never crosses borders” has managed to fill out in his lifetime.

The moral of the song is that people who think they know based on giving and taking orders have not reached true knowledge, because the path that they have taken leads one down a path without looking for or thinking about other ways of looking at the world. The bourgeois way of “knowing” is contrasted with the more open knowing of people like “us,” who embrace the very pleasures of not knowing what is coming next. This, in the 1960s was equated with freedom. And if, like me, you were alive in the 1960s and were under 30 years of age, you could partake in the new world. And if you were over 30, you could partake if you gave up your attachments to things like order and solid middle class values. But some people wouldn’t budge, and they became the enemies of right-minded thought.

My Name Is Nobody

That is essentially the plot of Sergio Leone’s My Name Is Nobody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RYq1PLdT0s

In that film, Leone pays a final tribute to his beloved Western genre, even as he kills it. My Name Is Nobody is the story of an aging gunfighter (played by Henry Fonda) who meets a young gunfighter (played by Terrence Hill). When he meets the young man, the old man takes it as a challenge. He is prepared to fight it out once more, but the under-30 Nobody (played, as I said, by Terrence Hill) has other plans for Henry. Rather than making him into a martyr, Nobody plans to make Henry into one of the greatest heroes ever by having him kill more men than have ever been killed in a single gunfight before: the 150 members of The Wild Bunch (the title of another Western by Sam Peckinpah; Leone loved Peckinpah; see this clip for Terrence Hill’s homage to him in the film). He succeeds, and this move takes Henry Fonda out of his ordinary life day to say life as a gunfighter who is constantly meeting up with people who want to kill him and transports him to the realm of heroes. Only then can he live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet.

In my opinion, Leone thought he was transporting his linear heroes of his youth into a more timeless universe of art. When I was a young man (in the 60s and 70s), I, too, want to live in that timeless universe of poetry, much as Yeats transported himself from the daily back-and-forth of existence to an existence in which he could be at one with himself as a golden bird singing songs to drowsy Emperor (see my post on Creed’s Higher), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen that such a world can only exist in fiction.

If I wanted to recreate it in fact, I would have to pretend that I, like Yeats, wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. This is my opinion of many of the most strident people in academia. It’s not that they don’t mean well (they do), but they do not acknowledge any change of state in their reconfiguring their universe from one based in reality to one based in an unrealizable fiction.

My Post-Academic Life

It was not apparent just how big a break this involved with the premises I had been working with for my whole life until I was out of graduate school school. Then I took some time to read 100 books on all aspects of business, reasoning that I knew nothing about how business works. I was stunned when I realized that the premises on which I had been working within academia were not the premises that obtained outside of academia. I was shocked, but I was also curious. Realizing that I hadn’t been all that happy in academia in the first place and realizing that there were few jobs available anyway, I decided to take my chances on becoming an entrepreneur, where the rewards were better and the pressure put on me to conform was significantly less.

I have never had a problem with my academic friends, who seem to me to have a far deeper and broader appreciation for life than someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has a more commonsense approach to money than those who believe that “others” pursue money for its own sake; but within academia, I was viewed only as the sort of person who must be lectured to. If I wouldn’t listen to reason, I would be (and should be) tossed aside for more reasonable men who had the sense to agree with what everyone was saying about artistic experience. When I got out of academia, I was subject to criticism by conservatives (and even my own dear lovely and far too liberal wife) as being too liberal on some topics. As I’ve said before, this has left me feeling as though I’m a man without a country. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with my free thoughts, and I found that within and without academia, free thought comes with a steep price after all.

My Novels and Books

I’m willing to pay that price, because I know that it is the price of freedom, and America’s greatness in the world has been fixed to our ability (until the recent death of Steve Jobs) to come up with new ideas (telephones, automobiles, jazz, airplanes, transistors, rock and roll, computers, rocket ships, rap, etc. have all been American led inventions). In my work, I want to bring America back from the artistic abyssal world of Nobody to the world of time, in which Creed can return again and again (and even again, if necessary) from the static and so impossible world of Nobody’s unity to a world in which people have to live their lives one moment in time without convenient refuge in a world of fiction that can never be in fact.

I Come Through

It has taken me years to get to the point where I feel I have a new idea that everyone is unconsciencoiusly aware of of but no one has yet expressed. Because of this this, I expect to be misunderstood by anybody who reads this far (and let’s be serious, nobody will), but my world of temporary fiction also finds its ground in the 1960s, in which Paul McCartney and the Beatles could sing ridiculous fantasies about women who came in through the bathroom windows (not as people are supposed to through doors but who did not have enough sense to know that her version of reality is distorted by an also magical silver spoon (not gold, as it was in Yeats’ poem). This version is by Joe Cocker, because, let’s face it, that guy can sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXh2gnasw0

When the young woman comes in through the bathroom window, she wanders by her own lagoon (a Spenserian argument if there ever was one) but she, like Redcrosse, is a baby in her own mind, being young enough to still be sucking her thumb and so not old enough to have discarded the silver spoon that covers her ignorance of the way the world actually works. The way the world actually works is through time, as Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, and Tuesday’s on the phone to Wednesday, all the way back to Sunday, when the whole cycle starts all over again (it never gets back to me, as Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake didn’t either). This reminds my over-trained literary mind of the reference to the omphalos in James Joyce’s other masterpiece, Ulysses in which he imagines the impossible dream of being able to get back to Eden through his mother’s mother’s mother…until he gets back to the historical Eve from whom all women sprang.

It doesn’t work; and the reason is quite clear to anyone who has never read a book in their life. It doesn’t work because it is patently ridiculous to believe that unseen things do exist (like imaginary chains that link us back through our mother’s womb to Eve) while seen things (like the beach to which Stephen closes his eyes to in order to imagine such nonsense) do not. But because they have long histories in literary history, those who dedicate their lives to reading frequently think that they indicate a deeper purpose of meaning in the universe and not just nonsense. This is because James Joyce said so, and he was a genius, and geniuses wouldn’t say such things unless there was more than a kernel of truth in what he ways. This is also the reason that the worst offenders in this respect are not the ignorant with their abundant common sense, but airy academics, who believe that what they read in texts must somewhere exist in the real world and cannot be a complete fantasy. Charlie, in the fantasy above, was right when he complains that there is no such thing as a candy mountain. For not believing his senses, he is punished with the loss of a kidney.

I obviously disagree with my academic colleagues and friends, but then who am I do contradict so many great and powerful thinkers?