On Humanitism: Quincas Borba to Bras Cubas, from Epitaph of a Small Winner

He explained to me that Humanitism was akin to Brahmanism in one respect, to wit, the distribution of men through the various parts of Humanity’s anatomy; but what in the religion of India had only a narrow theological and political significance constituted in Humanitism the great law of personal value. Thus, to descend from the chest or from the kidneys of Humanity is to be a strong man; it is a very different thing to descend, say, from the hair or from the tip of the nose. Hence the need to cultivate and to temper ones’ muscles.

Machado de Assis, translation by William L. Grossman

Starting Point

6 wide-grip chinups

25 pushups

35 situps on swiss ball

2 mile jog in 20 minutes 55 seconds

From Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee

Seven o’clock, the sun just rising, and he and his mother are on their way to the airport.

‘I’m sorry about Norma,’ he says. ‘She has been under a lot of strain. I don’t think she is in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one could say the same for me. It’s been such a short visit, I haven’t had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.’

She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. ‘A better explanation,’ she says, ‘is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.’

‘I don’t follow. What is it you can’t say?’

‘It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.

‘It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka—100% human stearate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?

‘Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?’

She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?

They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. ‘There, there,’ he whispers I her ear. ‘There , there. It will soon be over.’

Book Review Digest: Sontag’s Last Stand

At the Same Time, a posthumous collection of Susan Sontag’s essays and speeches, just came out and is showing up in review columns. Does Craig Seligman live in Seattle? Because it sure seems like he looked to Mount Rainier for metaphorical inspiration in describing the book.

The rage in these last speeches is controlled rage, frosty and sublime — a snow-capped peak of rage that towers over the landscape that is the political and critical discourse of today.

In The Nation, Jeremy Harding is less poetical, but makes up for this deficiency by deferring to Sontag for much of his review. Thus we get a sense of the melancholy that informs this book.

In an essay on Beauty,

we’re brought smoothly forward into Sontag’s present–her own time and place–to reflect on a set of values that have evolved for centuries but that are rapidly degrading, she believes, under the pressure of late capitalism in America.

The deterioration of values, the corruption of essential culture, the loss of beauty and virtue–maybe liberals and conservatives have more in common than is usually thought. Apparently these concerns are common to left and right.

Both traditional society and the modernist critical reaction to it are undermined by postmodern apathy. On one hand we have pseudo-traditions–fundamentalisms which ignore the diversity, intelligence, and complexity of real tradition. (For example Joel Osteen vs. Emerson or William James.) On the other, we have the novel eclipsed by the memoir (reflection by reportage) but neither read very much unless picked up by Oprah.

Thus the vastness of postmodern consumer choice has made us a myopic society. The thoughtful reader has been replaced by the passive viewer. Understandably, Sontag seems nostalgic for the days when letters carried more weight.

“Literature was mental travel,” she says in the same lecture. “Travel into the past…and to other countries…. And literature was criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.”

That “better standard” is common to both tradition (religion) and modernism (analysis) in their best aspects, and sadly absent from the postmodern scene. Without it–without some sense of ideals or principles–can we hope to make a better world?

The kind of writing [Sontag] most admires may be a dying art, stifled by “our debauched culture,” which “invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom.” The picture she paints is extraordinarily bleak. … If fiction has a duty to “enlarge and complicate,” she can’t see it surviving for much longer. And a world without literature–”criticism of one’s own reality”–is sure to lose what’s left of its moral bearings.

I wonder, did Sontag utterly despair at our situation or did she perceive some hope, some light in the world before she left it? I guess I must read the book to find out.

Exciting Experiments in Ethics: Korean Robot Edition

“In the 21st Century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with - robots…
It will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems.”

South Korea is approaching a future in which robots will be commonplace.

every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.

Hoping to head off any Matrix-like situations before they come to pass, some folks are developing an ethical protocol for human/robot interactions, which will in all likelihood go some pretty strange places:

“Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,” Park Hye-Young of the ministry’s robot team told the AFP news agency.

Wow.

I can’t think what that might be like for the men, but the image of thousands of women, cheering and thronging the streets of Seoul is extremely vivid.

Key considerations would include ensuring human control over robots, protecting data acquired by robots and preventing illegal use.

Obviously there are still a number of wrinkles to be smoothed out. I mean, “robots as wives” and “human control over robots” are pretty much mutually exclusive propositions as far as I can tell.

Best Band Ever?

This morning I listened to “The B-52s” and after doing all sixteen dances, I’m inclined to say, “Yes.”  (Not to mention, they’re rumored to be vegan!)

Western civilization seems to have been in decline since 1979.

“the shaming of belligerents should continue”

Imagine dragging Bush, Blair and Howard in chains through the streets of Kuala Lumpur. Ha, ha, ha.

Another reason to love Malaysia (besides the charming Singapore/Malay accent): trying Bush & Co. for war crimes!

Bookworms’ Digest

• On The Notebooks of Robert Frost:

Two preoccupations stand out. First, there is the poet’s obsession with epigram and aphorism, which at its most condensed brings to mind Pascal’s “Pensées.” “Politics is an honest effort to misunderstand one another,” Frost writes. “Progress is like walking on a rolling barrel.” And: “To be quite free one must be free to refuse.”

Second is Frost’s extensively developed theory about what he called “sentence-sounds.” In his view, poetry was less the craft of images — of vision — than the craft of sentences.

• On The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert

I am trying to resist my craving for this book.

Perhaps what Herbert is trying to say in these final poems is not that God forgot about His suffering people, but that people forgot they are surrounded by innumerable holy things.

• Why do books and lists go together so well?

• Big books have many pleasures (I recently experienced this with Mason & Dixon):

…there are other, perhaps more infantile, pleasures to be had from the long read. If you’re as slow a reader as me, the things can be around the house for months, and there is a possibly soppy sense of developing a strange kind of relationship with the book. Travelling alone, or on one occasion, stuck in hospital for a long stretch after an accident, they offer a welcome kind of virtual company: one gets to enjoy spending time with the same authorial voice.

Happy Valentines!!

In languorous tones, Eve to Adam said,

“Take this apple, darling, and be mine.”

He did, and they were thrown out on their heads.

And that was the primordial Valentine.

More Radio Serendipity: ZNH on NPR

I caught the last half of “The Life and Times of Zora Neal Hurston” today and was nearly moved to tears hearing about her poverty and ignominious treatment in later life.  She died just down the road a ways in Ft. Pierce.  As was customary at the time, all of her personal effects were burned.  A particularly astute law enforcement officer noticed the smoke rising from behind her shack, rushed over and doused the flames, thereby saving handfuls of manuscript pages, including an entire novel!  As I said, this story really moved me and I’d like to try and make a poem out of it if I can.

In a similar, if less heroic, act of literary salvage, I picked Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God out of the library’s dumpster the other day.