Surface Notation

An artist is making something exist by observing it.

― William S. Burroughs

The Independent on Sunday once asked John Updike to describe a writer that affected him.

He responded by naming Proust, the writer who opened Updike's eyes to style―to "prose not as the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations."

[Note to English teachers: point out how Updike's use of mathematicians' terms ("agent dynamic," "surface notation") bolsters his comparison between observant writing and science.]

Learning to paint has revealed how irresistible "lazy surface notation" can be.

I'm in a continual―losing―battle with my painting teachers, God Bless 'Em, over surrendering to the temptation to describe only the surfaces of objects, and never the atmosphere in which they dwell; what you might call the deeper reality of their "dance in space."

It's a temptation worse than sugary snacks.

The good news? 

Everyone struggles with lazy surface notation.

Paul Gaugin once wrote in his journal, "I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer."

Promise to watch over myself. 

That's about the best I can do.

Painting "Social Distancing" by Robert Francis James

Weeds

Once in a golden hour, I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower, the people said, a weed.

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

My war against the weeds is going slightly worse than Afghanistan.

Ecologists defend weeds as nature’s way of nourishing the soil and protecting it from erosion. But weeds' spiky proflicacy spooks me―nearly as much as bugs do―and so I engage in an endless ground war against them.

A costly and unwinnable war.

I'm also fighting another unwinnable war: the war against critics. 

While I sow the web with words, hoping like Tennyson they'll flower, my critics see only weeds.

It's easy, of course, to trash an act of creation; much harder to attempt one. I take comfort in the thought. I take comfort, too, in the fact that critics have sometimes been splendidly wrong.

Chicago Tribune critic H.L. Mencken called The Great Gatsby―today considered a literary masterpiece and F. Scott Fitzgerald's definitive work―"no more than a glorified anecdote" when the book appeared in 1925. Mencken thought Gatsby was a "clown," and the other characters worthless and boring. Although Fitzgerald's writing is stylish, Mencken conceded, "this story is obviously unimportant."

Nearly 30 million copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold since 1925.

Critics also sneered at these novels when they first appeared: As I  Lay Dying, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, The Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, On the Road, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Catcher in the Rye.

“I've been all over the world," Leonard Bernstein said, "and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” Nor have I.

Now, back to the weeds.

The Peril of Positive Thinking

Disease is an impudent opinion.

— Phineas Quimby 

Superspreader-in-chief Donald Trump can't take all the heat for the 4.5 million coronavirus cases in the US. He shares the blame with Phineas Quimby.

Quimby was a New England watch-repairman who in the Gilded Age spread the gospel of "New Thought" (also known as "Christian Science").

Told by a country doctor he had incurable TB, Quimby decided "doctors sow the seed of disease, which they nurse 'til it grows to a belief." Determined to heal himself, Quimby set out to study animal magnetism, concluding from his readings that the mind is all-powerful and alone can cure any ill. It can also make you rich.

Quimby's New Thought is still with us; today, we call it "Positive Thinking."

And Trump is Positive Thinking's poobah. 

Like many a wealthy American, he grew up imbibing this swill at the dinner table (Positive Thinking was rich Republicans' rejoinder to FDR's New Deal). He also imbibed Positive Thinking at church: the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking, was the Trump family's pastor. Peale even officiated at Trump's first wedding.

Despite warnings by scientists, Trump continues to call the virus' effects "fake news," flouting facts most intelligent people accept.

He's deep in the grip of Phineas Quimby.

Christmas in July

We need a little Christmas, right this very minute,
candles in the window, carols at the spinet.

— Jerry Herman

Happiness among Americans has reached a 50-year low, according to a new survey by the University of Chicago.

Although the nation's prospects were bleak, by comparison we were happier when JFK was shot and when the Twin Towers fell.

We're abjectly unhappy now—and worried our children and our children's children will never be happy, as well.

But do Americans deserve happiness? I'm not sure many do. 

Its pursuit might be, as Jefferson believed, an "unalienable right;" but what have Americans done lately to earn happiness? Stockpiled more guns? Denied hungry families food stamps? Locked migrant children in cages?

And what is happiness, anyway?

The Enlightenment thinker Kant defined it as "getting what you wish for."

Simple enough.

But there's a problem: what do you wish for? A pink Cadillac? The Hope Diamond? A seat on the stock exchange? A guest spot on The Bachelor? A house at the beach? A mansion in St. Louis?

"While every human being wants to attain happiness," Kant said, "he can never say decisively and in a way that is harmonious with himself what he really wishes for."

You cannot know what to wish for—what would make you truly happy—because you cannot know what the future may bring. "Omniscience would be required for that,” the philosopher said.

Kant's advice: don't chase after happiness; instead, pursue virtue. 

Act morally—be of good will—and at least you'll become happiness-worthy. You'll find that you never treat other people as the means to happiness; you'll treat them, instead, as fellow human beings. And when you treat other people as fellow human beings, it ceases to matter whether what you do, or don't do, increases or decreases the supply of happiness in the world—yours or theirs. All that will matter is you've added to the world supply of good will—and perhaps made yourself a bit more worthy of being happy.

Acting morally is like pausing to buff a diamond you can never own. 

"A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, it is good in itself," Kant said. "Even if by utmost effort the good will accomplishes nothing, it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something that has full value in itself."

Done anything virtuous lately?

If not, maybe, like most Americans, you don't deserve happiness; don't deserve Christmas in July.

Excused

In 2007, University of Colorado psychologist Frederick Coolidge asked five historians to take diagnostic personality tests on behalf of Adolph Hitler.

The results showed Hitler was clinically insane.

More specifically, they showed der Führer was a schizophrenic who suffered from psychotic thinking and extreme paranoia.

Not only did he have delusions of grandeur, but Hitler was chronically anxious, angry, argumentative, aloof, patronizing, narcissistic, and sadistic.

Followers, nonetheless, excused him.

"Dangerous leaders typically have apologists who discount their destructive methods in favor of viewing their behavior as consonant with 'laudable' goals," Coolidge wrote.

Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, an American filmmaker and magazine correspondent, interviewed Hitler on March 5, 1933, the day he was elected Reich Chancellor. The interview took place in a backstage corridor of the Berlin Sports Palace, at the start of a Nazi rally.

Although he spent less than a minute with Hitler, Vanderbilt sensed he was in the presence of a madman.

“Tell the Americans that Adolf Hitler is the man of the hour," Hitler told him. "Tell them he was sent by the almighty to a nation that had been threatened with disintegration and loss of honor these last fifteen years.”