The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the one you’re never going to see again.
And four hours north of Portland, the radio flips on. And some no one from the future remembers that you’re gone. Armies massing in the dusky distance, ghosted in the ribbon microphone. Leave a little mark on something negative, take the secret circuit home. Nothing’s in the shadows but the shadow hands, Reaching out to sad young frightened men.
The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the one you’re never going to see again.
Some things you do / just to see / how bad they make you feel
I love the song - and the new Mountain Goats album, oh my - but this music video doesn't really live up to my expectations for Mountain Goats music videos.
On the one hand, all the ingredients are there - from the obviously symbolic, like the rat poking its way around the dollhouse/maze (and at one point freaking out in the 'bathroom', I have no idea how they got that shot) to the completely impenetrable, like John Darnielle reciting lyrics to a silent child in a tiger mask. There's the child researching and performing his Satanic ritual, echoing The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton. There are even strains of the lapsed Catholicism that informs so much of Darnielle's efforts. But they don't fit together very well. What's the significance of the pregnancy test? Why does John Darnielle get killed by Peter Peter Hughes?
Thematically it's a jambalaya, a mix of all the elements in the music of the Mountain Goats, thrown together in the hope that it will work. It sort of does, like the music video for This Year. Still, it's got nothing on the best Mountain Goats music videos, which pick one visual theme - pictures in pictures, say, or dynamic text - and run with it.
At Balloon Juice, Bernard Finel writes on the increasingly likely prospect of war with Iran:
There has been some debate in strategic studies circles about whether
this represented a warning against war or whether it was an effort to
diminish expectations of catastrophic consequences in order to justify
an attack on Iran. It sounds bad—war on “multiple fronts,” “hundreds of
rockets and missiles”—but when you get right down to it, a month of
conflict and 500 deaths could easily be seen as a small price to pay to
end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Finel quotes Israeli defense minister Matan Vilnai:
Vilnai said the government has prepared for the possibility of
hundreds of rockets and missiles falling on Israeli population centers
each day, with the expectation of 500 deaths. “It could be that there will be fewer fatalities, but it could be
there will be more. That is the scenario that we are preparing for
according to the best experts,” he said. “The assessments are for a war
that will last 30 days on a number of fronts.”
Five hundred deaths could easily - easily! - be seen as a small price to pay. Five hundred Israeli deaths, of course, using Matan Vilnai's estimate. There's no need to think about the Iranian casualties, or the victims of hundreds of Israeli rockets and missiles. No, the price of ending Iran's possible nuclear ambitions is five hundred deaths, more or less, depending on the breaks. What other deaths could matter?
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
This is a poem I've liked for quite some time. In high school I wrote it all over my books, copying it out again and again. It's hard to explain the attraction: there's no particular technical skill, no turn of phrase or flowery language, and yet the whole thing turns on itself so that any word replacement would seem to destroy the effect of the poem. Crane's genius here is in the idea he expresses. I won't be able to express it half as well, but perhaps I can make a little headway.
Picture this 'creature' - not human, but a thing - who is naked. He is unprotected, uncovered, and surrounded by a great empty desert. Still worse, he is bestial, he squats. He is removed from you and I culturally, physically, by his nature and by his actions. What he is doing is cartoonishly horrible: holding his own (presumably still-beating) heart in two hands and tearing it with his teeth. It is hard to imagine a more terrifying creature, or a being more Other.
And what does the poet say? "Is it good, friend?" Friend! It's a shocking word, 'friend', identifying the poet (and, by extension, the reader) with this self-cannibalising beast. It is the first turn of the poem, where we realise that the poet is in the desert too, along with us, and that the creature in the poem is closer to us than we think. It is not such a hard thing, after all, to find a desert. Many people manage it without ever leaving the house.
"Bitter--bitter," the creature says, and of course eating your own heart is a bitter thing. It carries connotations of buried desire, of self-pity, of thanatos. But then we have the second turn of the poem: the creature likes it. He finds pleasure in its bitterness, in the fact that it belongs to him and him alone. This is a true drive to self-destruction, thanatos expressed cleanly and simply. It's the same idea expressed in many Mountain Goats songs - "I hope I never get sober", "I'm going to kill everyone in this room", "if anybody comes into our room while we're asleep / I hope they incinerate / everybody in it".
Is that so strange, really? If you are in the desert, and if you are in pain, then even if you are causing the pain yourself it is still yours. Were Crane to try and snatch the creature's heart away, the creature would kill him, understandably so.
Over at From Wine To Water, Ivan takes another stab at addressing the problem of evil. His main argument, simply stated, is this: the Bible doesn't depict God's love as anything like our love (in fact, it's alien and dangerous, it provokes fear) and therefore to say "how would a loving God allow [Auschwitz/cancer/the cancellation of Firefly] is to misunderstand the concept of love. I won't tackle the hermeneutic question of whether the Bible does depict God's love as sufficiently alien - that would be a pretty mammoth effort - but I will give another objection to Ivan's argument.
In his post, Ivan asks "What job are you expecting God to do? And how do you justify that expectation?" The implication here seems to be that there's no biblical justification for expecting God to make everything happy and easy. But I contend that there's a clear moral justification! In the words of the great philosopher Parker, power is directly proportional to responsibility. The more you can do, the more you ought to do. If, like God, you can do almost anything, you've got a near-infinite obligation to act all the time to help people. Imagine you gained the powers, not of God, but of Superman - you'd have to help out with natural disasters and suchlike, at the very least. How much more, then, ought God to do?
The only way out from this argument that I can see is to propose that God is already acting to help people, and since He's omnipotent you shouldn't second-guess Him. This is the position ridiculed by Voltaire in the character of Pangloss, and it's not a very good one.
Of course, it doesn't follow from this that there's no God - simply that if there is a God, he doesn't conform to our standards of morality. In Ivan's words, "there is not some God who acts toward you exactly like your loving Dad did, or exactly like you think a loving Dad should." [1] But this presents a huge problem for believers. If your God is infinitely loving and kind in a way that I can comprehend, however dimly, then I've got a reason for believing in the face of huge odds. If your God, on the other hand, is 'loving' in the sense that somebody who is born paraplegic is loved, then my reason vanishes. I don't want to be in God's love for eternity if it's the same kind of love He showed the Auschwitz dead. You can bite the bullet, like Ivan, and dismiss the problem of evil - but in doing so, you dismiss the main intuitive attraction of Christianity.
[1] The word 'exactly' there bugs the hell out of me, by the way. Would you tell a victim of child abuse that they haven't been treated 'exactly like you think a loving Dad should'? No, of course not. That word trivialises the very real, very horrific reasons that many people have to doubt the concept of a loving God.
I've been reading Hume's essay 'On Suicide', where he tries to dispel the notion that suicide is a sin in the eyes of the Christian God. His argument seems to run (very roughly) like this:
People claim that suicide is a sin because it unnaturally counters God's will for us. They say it counters God's will for us because only God can take human life and death into His hands. But when we act to unnaturally preserve our life with medicine, we're not sinning. Moreover, God causes the situations in life that make us want to commit suicide in the first place. Therefore suicide does not inherently counter God's will and is not automatically a sin.
This aligns pretty well with my long-standing suspicion of claims that modern science and medicine is somehow 'unnatural'. If you're going to call human artifice unnatural, you've got to call all animal artifice unnatural, including bird nests and anthills, or justify a meaningful distinction between human and animal artifice.
Still, I find I prefer Schopenhauer's argument for why suicide is morally permissible (that we have ultimate rights to our own body; and that suicide is inherently and obviously a brave act.) It's a delight to read, like Hume's argument, but only deals with religion at the very end when it tries to explain why Christians decry suicide as a terrible sin.
'Modern' Christianity - or 'weak Christianity', Kierkegaard's false 'Christendom' - poses a loving God and a world that is essentially benevolent. Suicide is the ultimate refutation of that position, a person's whole life put behind the claim that the world is harsh and unfair. This, Schopenhauer says, bothers followers of the One who looked down at the world and "saw that it was good".
The rituals of the Church are meant to draw us out of our usual lack of
focus and into a focus that sharpens our blurry edges and makes us more
ourselves.
In the rituals of addiction, we seek to do the opposite: to sink
ourselves and lose ourselves so that we don't have to think too hard
about what we're doing. I'm not entirely sure if this is the language I
want to use, but provisionally I'll say that there are ecstasies of eros
("the paradoxical desire for union with what is different")
and ecstasies of thanatos, self-destruction; and addiction rituals draw
us into the latter. Addiction rituals are meant to fragment the self,
muffle the conscience, and blank out the mind.
That's from Eve Tushnet, via the excellent Cigarette Smoking Blog. Thanatos is my new favourite concept - the fascination with destruction, especially the destruction of the self. For some people I imagine it serves as a refuge from anguish; for others it is the unavoidable source of anguish; for some it is the source of creative endeavour; for some it shuts down all creativity, and so on. Certainly I don't understand it, not fully.
But I do not trust anybody who hasn't in some measure touched the ecstasies of thanatos. Kierkegaard, the great Dane himself, talks in Fear and Trembling about "a person who has grasped the horror of life, has grasped the meaning of Daub's statement that a soldier standing alone with a loaded rifle at his post near a powder magazine on a stormy night thinks strange thoughts". Now Kierkegaard is talking about somebody who has achieved an understanding - or at least a recognition - of the skull behind the skin, and so on, which is difficult. Few people do this and, like I said, I certainly haven't. But I can touch it at least. Like Helen Rittelmeyer at CSB, I appreciate the desire towards self-destruction. Anybody who doesn't harbour a similar desire (to some extent or other, at some time or other) is alien to me.
Ecstasies of thanatos and addiction rituals are common themes of the Mountain Goats' music. I contend that the primary theme of the Mountain Goats' work is love as thanatos, an all-consuming, destructive addiction. Look at the images of the lyrics: empty gin bottles, stick pins and cotton, cigarettes stubbed out against walls, and so forth. When John Darnielle sings I hope you die, I hope we both die, or I hope the stars don't even come out tonight, I hope we both freeze to death, it's not hatred or self-pity so much as an attempt, as Eve Tushnet says, to "fragment the self". It's like a sailor clinging to the mast of his ship as it rounds the whirlpool who decides what the hell, if I have to go I may as well go, and swan-dives into the center of the swirling waters.
I've rambled on long enough in this post, but here is an excellent (and hilarious) example of this kind of art, in comic form. And here's an example of the Mountain Goats' embrace of thanatos:
I think that love of thanatos stems, as Kierkegaard suggests, from existentialism and the recognition that we are, in all important respects, fucked. Correspondingly, the lack of such love goes along with self-deception, Sartre's bad faith, and the belief that everything is, of course, going to turn out pretty well. I can get on board with hope, or with thinking that all will be well against all odds, but I find the 'of course' alternately pitiable and disgusting.
If we conceive of politics as a struggle between the forces of liberty and the forces of authoritarianism, political events become transparent. This is perhaps the primary advantage of anarchism over standard liberalism or conservatism: it more accurately accounts for the tendency of politicians to accrue more power to themselves. Every time the citizen's right to autonomy is defended, we score a small victory; every time the State enforces another restriction or corporate subsidy, we suffer a defeat.
Let's not shit ourselves, then: we lost. The State isn't winning, it won centuries ago. Is there any route by which we might extricate ourselves from involvement in its bloody machinations? Well, no. Can we meaningfully impair its ability to imprison people and kill people? Again, no. Can we defend ourselves against it, or ensure that we won't be caught up in its next wave of violence? Of course not.
In fact, if we want to involve ourselves in politics at all, we are forced to do so along statist lines: by voting for political parties that, to put it mildly, are not compatible with an anarchist position. I contend that we actually have an obligation to vote according to small differences - slight improvements in domestic policy, like abortion rights, gaymarriage - and ignore the rest. It makes me almost physically sick to recommend this.
Some people argue that we ought not to vote, and that by doing so we lend legitimacy to a dreadful institution. The only appropriate response to this, of course, is a hearty laugh. The dreadful institution will not be legitimized or de-legitimized by our voting; it gains its legitimacy by the simple fact that it has all the guns. If you vote for a political party that goes on to start a war, you are at best only symbolically responsible. Actual responsibility presupposes a chain of cause and effect that, where foreign policy is concerned, is totally absent in the electoral process (as many of the same anti-voting anarchists will happily tell you.) This is the final victory of the State: it restricts our moral choices so that voting for the slightly, slightly less evil party is the right thing to do.
