Monday, September 27, 2004

Hell, Redux...

"Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven..." This seems to be one of the favorite Milton quotes of quite a number of people. This one, too: ""The mind is its own place, and it itself can make heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven." Both are from Paradise Lost.

Most people don’t know that. And, since they don’t know that, they also don’t know that Milton puts these words in the mouth of Satan, which prompts me to wonder why so many people have them at the ready to explain themselves. Curiously, I found one version of this quote on a website called "Daily Celebrations," which seems to be operating under the delusion that somehow Milton's poem "celebrated the absolute freedom of the individual and the invincibility of the mind and spirit." Such illiterate, invincible ignorance is difficult to comprehend. But to read Paradise Lost closely is to discover that it's not about these things at all (the poem is more accurately about their opposites); as well, to read it is to discover what mendacious bullshit these two popular platitudes are: it’s the same crap that got Satan tossed out of heaven on his ass in the first place. As the rest of the poem makes clear, Satan finds it impossible to make a hell of a heaven and heaven of a hell. And he's so clearly dissatisfied with reigning in hell rather than serving in heaven. The very first thing Satan does after saying it’s better to rule in Hell is leave it; he heads straight to earth with the obvious intention of fucking that up, too. In fact, if Satan as a literary character actually believed what he said, there wouldn't be any need for the rest of the poem: he wants it all, all the glory, all the power, everything, which is why he heads to earth to make it his. He seeks God-like perfection, but ends up only destroying -- kind of like, say, Totalitarian Socialism in the 20th century. I often wonder if people fond of echoing Satan’s words actually understood the context in which he utters them, and can detect the degree of insincerity attached to it. And I often wonder if people actually believe that they can, by sheer force of will, make a heaven of a hell and hell of a heaven…as if people in gulags and concentration camps in the last century suffered merely because of an improper attitude. Things were great there…if only they had simply stopped and smelled the roses, eh?

"Hell is Other People"

...My friend Dave Rockwell's latest post confirms yet again that, despite being wrong about many things, Sartre was right about that.

Saturday, September 18, 2004

Back and Blogging

Love Woodley Park. Hate Woodley parking.

I was rereading a Kingsley Amis novel recently, Jake's Thing. Protagonist is Jake Richardson, a guy in his mid-fifties, who, at the beginning of the novel, is having, er, difficulties in the sack, your classic erectile dysfunction problems. Novel is set in the late ‘70s, so the problem is quite obviously psychological and nothing else. So the quite obvious answer is therapy: we follow Jake as he's led through the unsuccessful therapy, which he attends with his wife and a female therapist, as well as through a series of escapades and vignettes in which nearly every single woman in his life (and some who aren’t) end up blaming him for their problems. At the end of the novel, his marriage, along with a number of other relationships, has disintegrated, and we see him once again in a doctor’s office (though this time it’s a different doctor than the one who had "diagnosed" his problems at the novel's start). Turns out, Jake's new doctor tells him, his problem is purely physical, and can be treated by simply taking a few pills, which his doctor offers to prescribe. Suddenly, the narrative makes us privvy to Jake's thoughts:

He did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with a noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, according to him.
What does he say to the prescription? “No thanks.”

Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis. I often wonder if Amis wasn't a precursor to the "laddism" that swept Britain and metropolitan parts of the U.S. over the last couple years, an anticipatory shot fired in the early years of the sex wars. And perhaps the "chick lit" craze is a reaction to this...

The Bloody Crossroads: the place where literature and sexual politics meet, eh?

Thursday, September 09, 2004

My Last Blog As A Resident of Northern Virginia

Yep, that's right. No more blogging from the Commonwealth. Tomorrow I move to Woodley Park. What does this have to with literature and politics? I'll figure it out once I get there.

Thanks to those of you who offered to help me move, and thanks also to those of you who emailed me to make sure that I wasn't stuck, like Principal Seymour Skinner was on the episode of The Simpsons in which Bart stood trial for killing him, under a pile of newspapers and boxes.

Again, bear with me. Internet connection through Starpower, which could take some time to connect. Know anything about their customer service? Email me (sorry, no time for linking) and let me know.

I'll be back blogging soon -- and calling for a couple of senators to represent me in Congress.