Adam and Whitman

"And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many" (Moses 1:34, Pearl of Great Price).

"I am large....I contain multitudes" (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, ll. 1316).

I wonder out loud if when God calls the first man Adam, if that is in reference not only to progeny, but also to the near-countless multitude of identities, both extant and potential, that every man contains within himself (for "I am made all things to all men" (1 Cor. 9:22) writes St. Paul), of which Adam would be but the archetypal first example.

William Gaddis on Self-Help Books

"...prescriptions of superficial alterations in vulgarity read with excruciating eagerness by men alone in big chairs...[they] swung keys on gold-plated monogram bearing ("Individualized") key-chains, tightened their arms against wallets in inside pockets which held their papers proving their identity beyond doubt to others and in moments of Doubt to themselves, papers in such variety that the bearer himself became their appurtenance, each one contemplating over words in a book (which had sold four million copies: How to Speak Effectively; Conquer Fear; Increase Your Income; Develop Self-Confidence; "Sell" Yourself and Your Ideas; Improve Your Memory; Prepare for Leadership) the Self which had ceased to exist the day they stopped seeking it alone" (The Recognitions, pp. 285-6).

Also:

"The means, so abruptly brought within reach, became ends in themselves. And to substitute the growth of one's bank account for the growth of one's self worked out very well...
for as long as the means had remained possible of endless expansion, those ends of other ages (which had never shown themselves very stable) were shelved as abstractions to justify the means, and the confidently rational notion of peace, harmony, virtue, and other tattered constituents of the Golden Rule would come along of themselves was taken, quite reasonably, for granted" (The Recognitions, pp. 290-1).

Culminating with:

"Everything wore out. What was more, he lived in a land where everything was calculated to wear out, made from design...with only its wearing out and replacement in view, and that replacement was to be replaced. As a paper weight...lay a ceramic fragment from the Roman colony at Leptis Magna in North Africa...valueless as objet d'art...and little else, except that it had been made to last" (The Recognitions, pp. 319-20).

The Recognitions comes to Deseret Book

In The Recognitions by William Gaddis, a gifted artist is recruited by an unscrupulous art dealer to paint forgeries in the style of old Flemish Renaissance masters, and then pass them off as "lost" originals to wealthy art patrons.

But, the protagonist is such a dedicated artist, that his "forgeries" are actually as passionate, detailed, nuanced, and in many ways "authentic" as the old masters whose style he is imitating. He doesn't "copy" them so much as paint with their same feeling of religious devotion.

When I recently read this portion of The Recognitions, I was reminded of a recent conversation with a friend, who told me of this new promotion at Deseret Book wherein they are selling reproductions of 1830 Book of Mormons specially constructed to look 180 years old--they are bound in leather chemically treated to look well-worn, certain pages are strategically "water-damaged" and torn, or made to look like the original scriptures of Porter Rockwell, etc, etc.

These are not mere 1830 facsimiles (I admittedly own one of those), no, these are custom built to appear as authentic, 1830 editions that have survived the ages as a family heirloom. Retail price: $500-$1,600.

I wondered aloud to my friend who this product's intended market is. "Wealthy Mormons who wish to appear extra spiritual to their friends," he quipped. "Yeah, you see why I have a problem with it!" I quipped back.

And now that I'm reading The Recognitions, I've been able to localize further what my problem is--for Gaddis's title is a direct allusion to The Clementine Recognitions, a first-century Christian text by St. Clement. Like St. Clement's Recognitions, I've found that Gaddis's is as concerned with religious--specifically Christian--authenticity and forgery, as he is with artistic.

That is, what does it mean to be authentically devotional, whether in religion or art (and for Gaddis's protagonist, these are the same thing), as opposed to plagiarizing this devotion to impress others?

When I visited Deseret Book's flagship store and checked out for myself these faux-1830 editions, I was suitably impressed with the sheer craftsmanship that went into each replica. Nonetheless, these acts of religious and artistic devotion are being produced, a la The Recognitions, in the interest of forgery and in-authenticity, for a faux-religious and faux-artistic sensibility.

For if we truly valued art and beauty for its own sake (and not for how cultured it makes us appear), then Gaddis's artist could produce his paintings and sign them by his own name; and if we were truly committed to our faith, than those $700 would be going to the sick and afflicted, the poor and widowed and orphaned, and our LDS artists could at last commit to making original art on their own terms.

I initially thought the premise of The Recognitions to be fanciful, until I began to see it among those professing my same faith. It had been my most recent Recognition.

William Gaddis on writing

...and as about a good an explanation as any for why I long ago quit enjoying "fluff reads" or "fun reads" (whatever those mean).

"Most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is, when really...it takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises." (The Recognitions, pg. 113).

Ghostbusters Tonight!

A trio of academics on enforced sabbatical turn to the private sector to practice their most peculiar research! A budding young romance is threatened by the spectre of past devilry! A childhood memory of merriment and mirth turns to mayhem! And streams are crossed in reckless acts of gallantry, bravery, and daring-do!

We should be pleased by your company for our viewing of that cinematic masterpiece, the incomparable "Ghostbusters," for we fear none such phantasms!

Everything's Better Than When You Were 15

Sometimes I look at my near-prehistoric, 5-year-old iPod with a mere 30 gigs of hard-drive; or note that my itunes library doesn't even reach into the quintiple digits; and I sigh that it's been nearly 2 whole months since I last got new music; and I start to think, Man, I'm tired of listening to the same old thing, I need to get some new tunes--

That's when I recall the National-Lampoon-style Drive Across America my family took in '98, and my parent's garbage-sack full of cassette-tapes--all soft-pop of the '70s--which they popped in one after another, after another, after another, an endless Moebius strip of magnetic tape and Barry Manilow.

And I remember that mine only refuge during those 8-hour cornfield drives of Kenny Rogers, Loggins, and Chesney was my walkman and grand-total of 5 CDs, which I likewise listened to on constant loop. I basically memorized The Beatles Revolver that July.

I then glance back at my current itunes library, and I say, Man, don't get greedy, don't get greedy--

Why Did No One Tell Me That Wittgenstein is Hilarious?

About a month ago, I read David Markson's haunting Wittgenstein's Mistress, which is the fictional first-person ramblings of a woman who is apparently the last living person on earth after some unnamed cataclysm. She travels the world, living inside famous museums such as the Louvre and the Prado, burning the frames for heat, while carefully nailing the original paintings back onto the wall. The book itself is written in the terse, austere style of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus--or at least so I'd been told, so I decided I should actually read the original Wittgenstein to see for myself.

I'd heard Wittgenstein quoted before, and it's easy to see why: Witty's terse style (that's what I'm gonna call him, cause he's so witty--see what I did there?) lends itself to easy one-liners, yielding such jems as "the world is the totality of facts, not things," "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity," and "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

But here's what I wasn't expecting about Witty: just how frickin' funny this guy can be! I'm willing to bet money this point is rarely if ever made. Take for example the following line, coming at the tale end of some relentlessly logical proposition: "But in fact all the propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit, nothing."

I near 'bout cracked up when I read that.

Then a couple pages later, I lost it again at: "And surely no one is going to believe that brackets have an independent meaning." I mean, brackets, really? This guy's hilarious, I'm not even being sarcastic!

I truly believe that all this is intentional humor, cause he finishes his own introduction with: "...the value of this work consists in that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved." That should've tipped us all off to his dry sense of humor.

Seriously, I might just buy Tractatus just to mark all the funniest lines.

9/11/11

Where were you when that first solar 1 was a 0? (Appropriate, given how rigidly binary have become our ideologies since).

I was on the verge of my freshman year of college, rolling over in bed, sure that Mom was yet again concocting wild stories to wake me up before 10.

Post that bench-mark, my peers began to consume the news far more voraciously, as one should hope they would. I, however, who had trained so dutifully as a responsible-citizen-in-training growing up, cutting my teeth on news-columns, Newsweeks, and CNN (I may in fact remember the Clinton administration better than Bush 2.0), actually receded in my news consumption.

Not that I retreated, mind you--far from it; in fact, I dare say my interest in current-event-commentary decreased precisely because my total view increased. I almost say it became eschatological, a ten-dollar word signifying the study of how it all ends.

For it is one thing, you see, to read of Joseph Smith describing "destruction writ large on everything we behold," but quite another to actually see it collapse before your very eyes, and that on nationally-broadcast TV. One begins to realize that such is not an aberration--that even among the best of circumstances (a phantom if there ever was one), we should be beholding all we hold as most immutable and eternal crumbling before our very eyes. 9/11 was but the most obvious display of what we should be noticing all around.

Becoming increasingly eschatological, I took up the moniker of the Latter-day Saints, and served as a Mormon missionary in Puerto Rico barely a year later. One swiftly became aware of how much more correct, how much more real, is this broader view than whatever passes for news-coverage, when the older missionaries became perplexed and confused at the announcement of the invasion of Iraq--"I thought we were hunting Osama bin Laden," they expressed cogently--while those brand-new (at least the American ones) confirmed their love of America and hatred of France.

So I missed the whole of the Democratic primaries, the euphemistic Patriot Act, and the "Mission Accomplished" PR debacle whilst on that eschatological mind-set, and good thing I did, for I beheld far more clearly the "destruction writ large"--for though we watched no news, the newspaper-stands declared quite loudly to all passers-by the number of killed Puerto Rican soldiers of each passing week. The disgraceful Abu Ghraib torture photos, buried in State-side publications, were not similarly hidden in Latin-America.

It wasn't just sound physical structures we beheld collapsing.