Getting Rid of "Nothing Buttery"

Roger Scruton on the fundamental human need for the sacred:

"Atheists [...] tell us that the ‘self’ is an illusion, and that the human person is ‘nothing but’ the human animal, just as law is ‘nothing but’ relations of social power, sexual love ‘nothing but’ the procreative urge and the Mona Lisa ‘nothing but’ a spread of pigments on a canvas. Getting rid of what Mary Midgley calls ‘nothing buttery’ is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things — sex, pictures, people — we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step towards understanding why and how we live in a world of sacred things."

I think getting rid of "nothing buttery" is the true goal of art and literature as well.

The Chemical Life

The Irish-born poet Paul Muldoon, poetry editor for the New Yorker, believes artmaking is a drug:

‘We see a connection, and endorphins or whatever go nuts. So I’m sure that a certain amount of art-making has to do with chemical dependency…that feeling, that extraordinary buzz that may be akin to a drugs buzz or an alcoholic buzz or a chemical buzz. Auden, as you know, referred to it as the chemical life.[...]Basically, I think all artistic lives are chemical lives. Why do people keep on doing this? Why do they keep on going back for more, more of the same, when there are so few rewards? It’s a drug. Art-making is a drug. I’m sure what keeps me going back for more is the particular ecstasy that one feels when — and of course it may be completely misplaced, that’s the problem with it — something comes together.’

Actually, when Auden referred to "the chemical life," he was not talking about art-making as a drug, but the drugs he took in order to produce his art: Benzedrine (an amphetamine) to activate his mind in the morning and Seconal (a sedative) to make him sleep at night. This reportedly went on for twenty years. And he wasn't alone. Graham Greene, Ayn Rand, and Jean-Paul Satre used amphetamines regularly, too. Auden said they were one of several "labor-saving devices in the mental kitchen," along with alcohol, coffee and tobacco.

And All That Stuff

Hercules First Labor: wrestling the Lion of Nemea
Athenian red figure stamnos, ca. 490 B.C.

Smart review of Hollywood's latest take on the HERCULES myth from writer Spencer Klavan at a cool new blog, The Forum. He concludes:

"We’ve forgotten how to tell these stories — we drain the life out of them. We did it when we erased the gods out of the Iliad in Troy, and we’re even doing it to Superman, who now fights for “truth, justice, and all that stuff” because the American Way is too bourgeois. And that’s at the heart of it all: we’re afraid of valor, patriotism, heroism, because they feel unsophisticated and gauche. They’re not “realistic.” But obviously hero myths were never about what really happened, not to the Greeks. They’re metaphors for what it feels like, when the glory of fighting evil becomes so much larger than life that it’s as if you could fly, or see through walls, or wrestle a lion. If you don’t believe in that story, why tell it? Why not just talk about some big strong guy — why tell the legend of Hercules at all?"

Read the whole piece HERE. 

Happy Birthday Mr. Chandler

Raymond Chandler
July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room." (from Farewell, My Lovely)

Magic Squiggles

The Tentacles of Consciousness

"Tentacles" by Steve Ball

"In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members."  ~Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

Ah Wilderness!

Following 4-hour flight from LA, 16 hour drive north from Chicago, flew into Latreille Lake from Red Lake, Ontario for a week of fishing. Some pix (click to enlarge):

The puddle-jumper -  built in 1946.

My Native American guide - no sense of humor. And nasty habit of chewing tobacco and spitting it out--constantly.

The Lodge -- hell on earth.

Glad I had the guide.

Two of these Americans claimed to be doctors, another a dentist, the fourth a lawyer. Yeah, and I'm Ernest Hemingway. No doubt they're all on the dole.

The guide's evil children tormenting a desperate moose.

Guide snags a big Northern--would've been lost without his expert net man.

Fishing in Canada: Hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer sublimity--