Watching.....
My brain hurts. A lot. (Lost my original pictures)((((((( Again. this one I took.
I just realized I never said what the post's subject is: Jean-Paul Sartre's
Nausea.
How blind to the obvious can I be?/\
It just occurred to me that I have had the general concepts of existentialism and JPS down for quite some time, but the meat and gristle has been out of my mind for a time. I need a refresher--so I am rereading (***
Nausea***), or reading again in more depth--hopefully not just surface noise. (I can't believe I'm tackling this post of all posts, when I have been over tired, sick of other people's voices, annoyed and overworked--stressed to my maximum on my always busiest day--T'ursday.) Que sera--when the spirit moves.
"I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side."
Up to us, our own interpretation.
I am so glad I have written pieces of this book here to come back to, because I swear the ideas just evaporate into fast-moving mist otherwise. Untenable. Ephemeral. I can't remember what I read 10 minutes ago or yesterday in this book, so it's good to have record.
I'm just trying to sort these ideas out--speaking to a pretend you, who is really me.......................
Sartre:
“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
“Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
Hmm. That last one. Dreaming: There's two kinds, and how tightly are they connected?
Type 1: Dreams as fantasies, visions of your future self, that might tend towards the positive? " I wanna be a singer in a rock'n'roll band, man--I can picture myself onstage." Or " I wanna be a writer ."
One of the problems of this kind of dreaming is how blurry it is--the more vague, the more wrapped in mists and confused with other, ancient faces-- people who already did it and succeeded, or crashed and burned -rather than rust--- the more impossible it might seem. Mere voyeurism. Can you picture how you look in a clear snapshot? Read the words you'll write or sing? Hear the music? Recognize the emotions you are drawing from?
And when I say you, I, of course, mean me.
And if "you" can't, is that what Sartre means by disenchantment? The spell breaks.
Or like Dali, (and Bunuel) you can envision the worst possible scenario, the future nightmare, where your eyeball gets sliced and you watch someone run over by a car (made weirder by the vaguely unconscious notion that you willed it because your mind's eye pictured it, in the repulsive thrill of wondering what it would look like). Done--turned into the broken wing of a bird--splintered bone and dirty, oil-imprinted feathers.
Then the nightmare creates the paralysis, "The Angriest Dog" syndrome (old David Lynch cartoon, below), where you become so angry at yourself for being afraid to walk toward fate, that an alternative rabbit hole opens up and swallows you.
The comic consisted of 4 panels, all the same, with this image of a dog tied up and restrained in a typical American suburban yard. The sound bubbles from his family, never shown, come from the nearby window. In the last panel the only difference is it is night with a fan of light coming from the open window. The last panel rarely has words, and seems to always represent the existential trap that time has put us all in:
In one, the first panel reads,
" Bill, Do you know of any sections in this four dimensional space-time continuum which represent 'now' objectively?"
The rest are radio silence.
The disenchantment occurs sometimes when you realize this isn't an automatic system: not magic. You can't be like God saying"Let There Be Light" (shouldn't God always speak in capitals, heh,heh) and then there, suddenly, was light, separating the day from the night. The Bible doesn't specify the difficulty in the mechanics in that separation. So you might think well, the hell with that dream; it was ridiculous anyway. (And the Bible's fulla lies.)
But you might become the Angriest Dog In The World then.
"The dog who is so angry, he cannot move, he cannot eat, he cannot sleep. He can just barely growl...bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis."
These #1 types of dreams do seem like they should be more under one's control somehow--walk toward them, will them into existence, and they will materialize in concrete form. Won't they? One step at a time? Doesn't it at least release the agony of the paralysis? Does it have something to do with Blake's "Proverbs of Hell": "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire." Go ahead. Shoot the Arab. The aftermath will be.....?
Type 2: But then enters type 2 dreams, the seemingly unwilled, subconscious, where your own mind seems to take you prisoner and trap you in a vision from unknown origins. They most happen at night, but not always--concrete forms, chance meetings, can trigger them spontaneously. Is it merely my overwrought imagination that seeks and finds slender threads between the two types of dreams? Or are those threads part of the confusion of truth Sartre writes about.
Oh yes, and that word disenchantment. I can't help but think in the world of the existentialist it implies, no, --necessitates-- the existence of its polar opposite: enchantment- often to me the product of this spontaneous, unsought state that comes in what is more classically considered, dreams. In Russian, CHbl. They feel mystical, from a romantic source(Enchanted)--I mean that in the late 18th Century, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth meaning of the word--otherworldly, intuitive, from Mother Earth, the gods, and tricksters.
I have had dreams that have profoundly shaken the foundations of my waking world. One in particular is still vivid to me. It must have been around 1987 when I had it, but I can still see some of its pictures in my head. It lead me to a decision I honestly hadn't even seriously considered--I have never said this to anyone who knows me, but it was this dream that turned the direction of my life from a comfortable, unsatisfied place to a temporarily terrifying, even deadly, but ultimately more soulful existence. The weird thing is the dream included the people in it that pushed me in the direction I needed to go--freaky.
In the dream, I was obligated to go to a wedding with my then husband. I didn't wanna. So I snuck off. Never told him, never saw him. I went out into the street which was lined with cars going to the wedding, crouching down behind bumpers and tire wells: I specifically remember hiding behind one of those ranch style station wagons with the wood paneled siding when I bumped into my partners in crime. They were also hell-bent on helping me escape. I remember this being an intensely pleasant dream, like I was experiencing a burst of freedom--akin to what I imagine of people who say they have dreams of flying (I never have, BTW). I doubt if I have to explain much the implications of this dream and its fallout. It became a moment of epiphany for me. Only because of my intense happiness about my escape in the dream.
The Romantics increase on moments like these. This is a moment in my life where a mere thought became concrete--because it seemed so true I couldn't ignore it. And I walked towards it and made it take form, made a man out of formless clay and breathed life into it. It was a bit scary, and messed with my head, but I got over it.
Like Coleridge, I can vividly recall a dream in which I wrote. An entire novel, in fact. In the dream of course, it was a brilliant, earth changing work. I always wonder..how long was this goddamm dream..I only seemed to become conscious of it towards the end, but it seems like it had been going on for months. And like Coleridge, it evaporated on waking..shoulda written it down right away! I can picture the words in my handwriting on the page, however, just can't read them. It's like that dream effect where you can't run or move when you desperately need to. And would opium have helped the recall? Of course, I never share this experience with my students when I teach "Kubla Khan" to avoid looking like a flake. I have a hard enough time acknowledging these resonant dreams to myself.
Sartre's narrator debates whether or no the subject of his studies, Rollebon, participated in an assassination of a Czar simply by making the idea concrete, by miming it( to the perpetrators of the crime). Same as a dream? Does a dream walk toward something, towards its concretion a.k.a. creation? Says T.S. Eliot: "Between the Desire and the Spasm...lies the Shadow"... What the hell is in that shadow??? It's the whole secret to life. Somehow I believe more in the ripe connection between my dream and my consequent action than I do between Rollebon and the assassination, even if he was the most seductive bastard in the universe-only because it was my own emotions in play. Those I can readily assess, if I can access them, admit to them. I don't think it was any sort of magic, however.
I think it was a message from myself, to myself. As in Socrates: "Know thyself". Your dreams are messages from yourself to yourself...telling you when you are fucking up. Why you have missed the most obvious--perhaps because your conscious self recognizes that the acknowledgement may not send you down a particularly easy path, particularly if you've wedged yourself in good, like I had. Soooo Happy...
And...
Are thoughts "real"?
Sartre's Nausea could possibly drive me insane.
I can't read it like a normal book, feel like I'll never finish it. Instead of going forward, I keep flipping back to previous pages, rereading where I've already been, and getting something completely different than I saw yesterday..ten minutes ago...possibly what I saw twenty years ago.
It reminds me that there was a news story today, winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics, or Chemistry, can't remember which. The winners isolated nano particles of some sort in two polarly opposite states, simultaneously. That's Sartre, bound in a nutshell. And therefore back to God, divining the Light:
Does the light exist simultaneously with the dark? Science is starting to head that way, with black holes, dark matter, a potentially multi-dimensional universe, string theory.
Do your dreams follow you around during your day, waiting, like Guildenstern says, in the Tom Stoppard play--(brilliant)--
"All your life you live so close to the truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque."
The grotesque/truth/blur, I think, may be these dreams following you around, everyday.Submerged in your subconscious, making minute record of your day and adjusting, so that it can send you a clearer message--during the R.E.M. time of night, when it comes out to play.
It doesn't mean you will always immediately understand.
That dream producer "you" is really something. Lives in Eliot's "Shadow" where all the secrets are hidden. Knows things. It's where you are god-like, maybe even god. It's definitely where all the art is hiding. Hamlet's philosophy. It knows what is beautiful. What is sick. What will happen again. What the next step is.
The duality concept makes life more understandable to me in one way: it means you can love someone and not love him/her simultaneously. Even people from the past. Why be forced to choose?
I can't write about or read this anymore.
It's not helping like I thought it would.
The part about the narrator looking at himself in the mirror . I feel every moment of that, especially the rejection of conventional thought of what is pleasing to the eye. Isn't a pimple fascinating in its own way, bursting with life and disease?
So Our ironically Fearless Narrator, Roquentin, looks into the gaping yaw of death, and sees nothing. I sometimes see this, too. I understand , even empathize, when people feel this way. He is here to tell us that he has recognized this essential element of life, and it makes him feel ill, causes him to relinquish his purpose, his research, everything. For a time he convinces himself the past holds value--his old love, but that ,too, is eventually shattered.
I'm going to have to ask my daughter about Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or the Re-Searching of Memory-- or whatever they are calling it nowadays in English--(I guess it's actually In Search of Lost Time) this is apparently being alluded to here and she's something of an expert on it--
Here's what I found out about Proust on my own--a running theme of "Recherche.." is about involuntary memories, how an ordinary, daily experience can transport you back to the past, hence Proust's association with Madeline cookies, those little delicate scalloped vanilla things.
For me one of those involuntary memories would have come with the combined smell of cigarettes and roses, which reminds me of my Grandma Lou and Grandpa Fred's bathroom, which had peachy pink tile, an ashtray for Fred, and some sort of ubiquitous rose spray my grandma used to cover up the smoke smell. To me a totally pleasant smell because I loved them and their house--which probably made me instantly like Mary because she wore rose perfume and smoked. Her house smelled exactly like theirs, and now I associate that smell with both memories. Hah! My favourite house had a bathroom with peachy-pink tile, @1930's, just like my grandparents'. Summoned the goddess of memory...
My dad's club, the Knights of Columbus, smelled of cigarettes and deep fried fish--not such a bad smell to me either.
It seems that Proust was a bit nostalgic for the past--days of aristocracy especially, so I'm guessing Sartre is poking at him here.
Oh, my God. I love my beautiful daughter. I jokingly asked her to summarize Proust for me in 25 words or less, and she sent me this:
Yes, we have very nice posture and we are the girls with the biggest...
Oh, wow. I just realized the waitress at 5:30 is named Madeline. The air tastes of sugar. And it's when he hears her speak, this is when the Nausea seizes him. That's got to be meant as a counterpoint to Proust?
I like that music is one thing that makes Nausea stop. R says, "I feel strongly that there it is, that something has happened."
Silence.
And the song sings: Some of these days/ you'll miss me honey.
someone seems to think this is the one^, but the other Poster is right. The last part of the book that mentions this song talks about a saxaphone which this doesn't have. I noticed I miswrote the title: assuming the cliche. But " Some of these days" is much more poignant than "One of these days", which I originally put down.
This one is modern but beautiful, with the sax:
I also like this line:"...our time...No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years." But time is too large? P. 32 is involuntary memories again. Towards Anny. "I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps..."
So we are back to dreams-now another type where memories become dreams.
The stuff about the purple suspenders puts me off.
Ok, Sartre--you are starting to lose me on the whole adventure section: starting Friday 3pm . (@p.30) So...nothing is an adventure. That sounds like someone in the fog of a depressed funk, not someone looking at life with any kind of clear perspective. But then, the lighthouse: an adventure. Harmonic: I'm learning a song on piano one of my students taught me--called "The Lighthouse."
The pages in the 40's in my book, where he observes people in a cafe, in particular the section on blonde, plump Mariette and her husband, I wonder if they are the inspiration for the scenes of bourgeois banality in Harold Pinter's plays. Is that all there is? All the stuff about Tuesday, no, Thursday..
The 60's pages: Anny. Deal breaker for me, J.P.
If...you had made a love interest so supreme, so worthy of love, and then showed it to be a lie, sham , you just might have gutted me. Forever. But it's this then, eh? Anny. Who sucks as a lover, in my opinion. She's so sensitive, she wants to pose you, like Victorian tableau, in images of perfection. Fuck that.
This is what Roquentin yearns for? Her "imperious and charming magic: humming between her teeth".
"Do You want to make an effort? Don't you see how beautiful this moment could be?...I have on my green dress..I'm quite pale. go back,go and sit in the shadow, you understand what you have to do? Come on! How stupid you are! Speak to me!"
This is a sympathetic love interest? I'm already done. Roquentin, you are a dumbass. I don't need to read the end when you have your epiphany about her fat unworthiness. (Which, of Course, I mistook in anticipation.) She's already unworthy before it finishes. (Still true). This isn't a universal story that can cross time and miles. These are two screwed up people without a notion. They do not stand in for the human race. Thank God. She criticizes him for things out of his control, like his hair color. Flat out bitch. The sex better have been 4 dimensional.
It's the only explanation. or else he was crazyyyyyy But, asymmetry can be loved.
All right.. THIS is goddamned crazy. It's late, and I'm nodding off as I am writing this. But I swear to Jesus on roller-skates I did not write that line above.."or else he was crazyyyyy" I wasn't even thinking that. Maybe I did it subconsciously when I was half-asleep. Can someone else write on your blog when you're in edit mode and while you're not paying attention? It's not even my style, and...holy shit. A glitch in the Matrix. I'm going to bed. This book is making me lose it.
Oct 21:
Better now. Here's a fantastic passage from the scene on the reading library, after he's agreed to have lunch with the Self-Taught Man. He has already lamented, "The inconsistency of inanimate objects!" and is feeling the world around him turn to cardboard scenery (what an evocative description). The Nausea is coming.
" Frightened, I looked at these unstable beings, which, in an hour, in a minute, were perhaps going to crumble: yes, I was there, living in the midst of these books full of knowledge describing the immutable forms of the animal species, explaining that the right quantity of energy is kept integral in the universe; I was there, standing in front of the window whose panes had a definite refraction index. But what feeble barriers! I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen."
This is why I can love Sartre (even though I can simultaneously hate him, or dismiss him as a fool). What an amazing passage. My favorite it the part about the laziness of the world--since he's being obliquely scientific in this passage I imagine he is referring to the laws of inertia--except it seems about more than that. And then. There is the seeming possibility of change. That's what I feel. I've read much of the Chestnut tree scene, but that one doesn't hit me like this one.
In the next part he goes back to the Cafe Mably, seeking catharsis on the state of M. Fasquelle--alive or dead? And finds nothing. He goes around reassuring himself that various ordinary objects exist--as if he's willing them to exist, in a concrete state: "I tried to reduce them to their everyday aspect by the power of my gaze." Doors of houses frighten him, as they may open of their own volition. Out of his control? Is free will then an illusion?
A commercial break--
I'm guessing that T.S. Eliot borrowed the fog "that comes in on little cat feet" from this book. Prufrock and his ennui. He also wrote a poem called "Hysteria".
S she laughed I was aware of becoming
involved
- in her laughter and being part of it, until her
- teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
- for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
- inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
- in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
- the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
- with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
- a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
- green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
- gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
- if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
- tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
- shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
- the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
- and I concentrated my attention with careful
- subtlety to this end.
-
- Now back to our show in progress--
- Eliot's wife was crazy, like Fitzgerald's. As the Walrus said, "I deeply sympathize."
Here's a good line for my partner in crime:
" On a day like this you don't speak to just anyone."
Ok, I'm finally back to the museum, this time in context. Page 82.
afternoon . Will it seem different? Of course it will.
The context of M. Fasquelle helps, and the letter (somewhat) , but I could have still seen the significance of The Bachelor's painting, of his death painting. His dreary, not senseless,
unremarkable, death. So unfelt his lover/mistress counts his money rather than care for or cry over his green remains. Poor choice of lover, apparently, or cynical painter . But like Gertrude, if we saw her weeping, would it prove anything? It is in counterpoint to the grave men's portraits. But I don't think I registered that as deeply earlier this week, regardless. Logically, yes. But not as much emotionally. I can remember having similar thoughts myself when I first considered having children...if I don't feel connected to hardly any other human beings, maybe I can create my own: Mommy's little Frankenstein monsters! Feed them books, art, and music at regular meals...
Oddly, as horrible as it sounds, it kinda worked. My children are interesting, worthy of conversation, of time, lots of time: intelligent, outside -of-the-box thinkers, more sensitive than some of their ancestral genes might indicate--better than Bourgeois Americans--and we care about each other. They are people I want to know and have around. I know I will not die the horrible bachelor's death, unless all the people I care about die before me. I have made it so....albeit with mental anguish and sacrifice. (Solomon's story of the true mother.) And I didn't have to sell my soul to get that. Just pain. And now I know a few more demented people that make my life worthy--who'da thunk? But yes, the painting is a last warning....
We know the bachelor died a dried up cockroach's death. The grave men of the portaits are more slippery. They are the family men who seemed to be loved by their families. It could be as it appeared. Yet, something is not right. Except perhaps in the case of Olivier Blevigne , whose beauty and penetrating confidence makes the narrator feel unworthy. Yes, this is an intense, a powerful scene:
Men who appear to be the pinnacles of humanity, with grave, all-seeing eyes, respected and majestic , are mere dead paintings on a wall--possibly the reflection of others' deceived respect and sense of purpose. Their worth can be measured, as T.S. Eliot says, in coffee spoons (in this context, unloaded coal-- Lotsa numbers in this passage). No. This may be no better than the green bachelor.
We are to applaud Mssr. Roquentin his honesty, his willingness to speak truth, to power and all else sacred. Love, family, friends, art, work, knowledge (the self-taught man)-- nothing is what it claims to be: reality is more fluid. A fraud. As Hamlet says, "Seems! I know not seems!" But if I am remembering my Aristotelian logic correctly, "Some B's are not A " does not necessitate a universal truth, and the potential hollowness of these particular men does not make a universal experience for all men. A's exist, possibly even with purpose. Olivier may be that exception, the one who took the leap of faith, but how can we know? Why does Roquentin feel unworthy in his presence--so challenged about his very existence? Where lies the fault? He shouldn't want to dominate inanimate objects!
And the same with Roquentin's inability to find a worthy love--i.e. the disappointment of Anny, does not prove the lack of existence of worthy "true" loves. He just illustrates lack of faith--Sartre's man of bad faith. The portrait of Olivier Blevigne maybe proves the opposite: a beautiful, worthy man whose true value --essence-- was captured by the painter, which intimidated the unworthy M. R.
Now it seems I jumped the gun because around p. 92 the portrait of Blevigne becomes negative, at least to me--and I'm assuming Sartre, with all the elitist smack he's spouting about the noblesse oblige of the ruling class. So, now I'm lost again. Now he "purses his little fleshy mouth," and the portrait annoys our narrator. He remembers an entire issue of a satiric magazine devoted to Blevigne, and points out he is only five feet tall. Is it significant that in a picture of Sartre and Simone on Wikipedia that she is a good five inches taller? This forced the artist to play with proportions and distort reality in the portrait--which is the source of Roquentin's discomfort. Reduced to one of the lily bastards. This book is maddening in its twists. Should we agree with his perspective?
No way. P.95. "Care had been taken to spread the most sinister rumors"--drying on a pad of white paper. 8 short paragraphs later, Roquentin swears he doesn't remember writing it. My "or else he was crazyyyyy" moment? Could I have possibly dredged this idea out of my subconscious from the first time I read it? God damn, this book gives me the creeps about every 20 pages. But I didn't get Nausea afterwards...I just went to bed.
"I watch with satisfaction..this tiny pool of blood which has at last stopped being me."
I just got finished reading about Roquentin's lunch with the Self-Taught Man, which temporarily added to my confusion. Do I agree with R's repeated assertion that everything the Self-Taught Man says is derivative drivel? I see what he is saying, but I can't help thinking it is Roquentin who is posturing, not thinking. He just seems to be playing devil's advocate with no real underlying message--pointing out all that is potentially "untrue" in STM's statements. It seems like STM is trying to engage R, but he's having none of it. Also, I find this interesting--One of Sartre's works: Roads to Freedom,(mentioned by Mrs. Premise),L'existentialisme est un humanisme, where he said "existence precedes essence" is essentially drawing clear connections between existentialism and humanism, the philosophy the STM claims and R. rejects. Seems to imply once again that R. has "bad faith". He proves it more when he goes outside the restaurant and feels all the eyes on him and becomes " a crab running backward".
Hamlet's Insult to Polonius -"you shall grow as old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward."
I read an interesting blog on No Exit (Fr: Huis Clos) that seems to relate to this section and puts a new spin on the famous quote, "Hell is other people". The blog author claims this is a slight mistranslation that weighs big--"L'enfer, c'est les autres," .
Even with my limited French knowledge, I would agree with his tighter translation, "Hell (L'enfer) [it] is (c'est) the others (les autres)." Hell is the others. In other words, what causes all our anxiety (nausea) is all that is outside ourselves, and not just people, the inconsistent "inanimate objects", the eyes on our backs, the general judgement we feel from the outside when we feel uncomfortable with ourselves. This makes good sense to me with all I've ever understood about Sartre's philosophy. R feels the STM's judgement and freaks.
Also the title in French has a legal echo of judgements made behind closed doors--which adds some layers. Why do English translations seem to often fall short?? The author, Kirk Woodward goes on to say, rather astutely,
"It [No Exit] says, with Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, that 'Which way I fly is
hell; myself am hell.' We construct a hell for ourselves, Sartre says, when we
refuse to take responsibility for our own actions".
Only 50 more pages to go. Feel like I smoked 10 packs of gitanes in a day. I know I already wrote the end--just hope I don't have to change it. I will if I have to!
Finally to the section where he meets Anny. She is interesting. He definitely is still intrigued by her--even calls her beautiful at one point. My jury is still debating. 30 more pages.
I should not pay attention to outside sources, as I will definitely disagree, this time, with someone's consensus that he rejects her "because she's fat and bourgeois". It's not entirely like that. First, it's pretty obvious that Anny does the rejection at the end, not Roquentin. He definitely would have
taken her back if she was willing, which she IS NOT. He doesn't seem to notice her fatness much, until after she is gone, and she conducts the scene--while they are together.
He is still trying to impress her as must have been in their former relationship/
life. But c'mon, Sartre paints her as such an insatiable bitch--she doesn't really have much sympathy from readers, does she? Yet, she is interesting. There's something true and sympathetic about her perfect moments, and her desire to insert herself in them ,control them in existential fashion.
But why does she give up? And why is she so mean and self-absorbed? He remembers her being this way as well, so she hasn't changed in that. It disturbs me when she tells him to Shut Up and Listen, how she expects him to concentrate fully on her perceptions while bullying him about the lack of worthiness in his own. So the one thing that makes Roquentin seem weakest, to me, is him being so enamored of this bully, who shouldn't cause him to lose his raison d'etre.
I recalled incorrectly, that he rejects the one connection he imagined or misunderstood as real because he is disappointed in his girl on several counts, including an absorption into the bourgeoisie, physical and moral corruption, or what he perceives to be. I must have projected my views onto him in my memory. The reading audience sees this decadance, but does he? He just decides to imitate it. He chooses to fall into the bourgeoisie, as he perceives she has, as if he is copying her. Poseur! But is this his singular failing, (not a universal truth/ philosophical stance of the author's?). The failing of a man of "bad faith", the "angriest dog." However, the story doesn't stop there. We go back to the music scene, which I like very much, and seems to redeem the narrator--he will write and make art, in spite of what he's said.
But yes, I have at times felt every inch of his despair. But he is a bit of a fool for letting someone like Anny influence his view of his own worth. However, I myself have a tendency to overlook the negative in people with unusual perspectives--and then get waylaid.
Here is how Hamlet would have answered this challenge, as he does when R&G foolishly try to gut his higher purpose and drag him, kicking: threats of madness, banishment, and oblivion lurking in the wings, into a bourgeois mentality. He resists, and turns G's weak game back on himself:
Hamlet: ...why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil? (oh, Christ, this is one of my favorite scenes, apart from "At Supper". So much truth.)
Guildenstern: O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly.
Hamlet: I do not understand you well. Will you play upon this pipe?
Guildenstern: My lord, I cannot..
Hamlet: I pray you.
Guildenstern: Believe me. I cannot.
Hamlet: I do beseech you.
Guildenstern: I know not the touch of it, my lord. (Too right!!!)
Hamlet:It is as easy as lying;
govern these vestiges with your fingers and thumb, give breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
Guildenstern: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony, I have not the skill. (Pfft.)
Hamlet: Why look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'SBlood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
(Beauty of a speech).
.
I so love this scene I would make love to it as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do to their mission. It is the full-on stance of a man who knows, deep in his soul, that he is right. That he sees truth. (A cherub that sees...)
Was there ever, ever, more evidence as to the purpose and beauty imbedded in the DNA of this universe than these lines? Any more proof that poor old Roquentin is meant to seem more neurotic, than even our dear cousin, Hamlet? Hamlet, I think, it is obvious--knows the score. Knows where the treasure is hidden.
And for fun, let's reduce it to the question game: Hamlet- 3, G- 0.
Therefore: to England. The readiness is all.
Like Hamlet, I will delve below these intellectual devices, of Sartre's, and blow them (ironically Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, existential twits!) at the moon! So, follow my logic: yes, sad creature--M. R, can say he will wallow in a life of meaninglessness, turn into a metaphorical cockroach, if you will. It does happen. Does the writer , M. Sartre, use this for an exemplum, how-not-to? Here's the man in existential crisis, isn't it more cool, more modern , more educational and nonconformist, to show this side? That's how most of the existentialists make their point(s). Is Sartre merely considering himself to be stating the barren facts of life? Of course, not: the final music scene shows the truth. As a student of literature and existentialism I have been trained to follow a man's actions, not his words. Regardless of his negative experience with Anny, and what he says, he has purpose--somedays you'll miss me. The music.
Here's my further evidence, incomplete as it may be, of Sartre's true position in the great existential debate. Of course it could prove nothing but desperation, living for nothing but the bone in a skeleton of idealism. Or for lack of anything else. But, oh how I love how this circles back to my title, an allusion to the Monty Python skit, about Mrs. Conclusion and friend going to visit Simone and the great man. And I swear, just like Cobain swears that he doesn't have a gun, that I did not plan this. It just happened:
In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous.
So. There might be something between people. Very rarely. But does that mean anything? Something in the lifelong companion bit.
Knew I'd have to. An itch I've been trying to resist scratching, but, oh, merde--so much crazy irony in this :
Love the images of soiled, flushed budgies swarming up and out of the sewers per Mrs. Essence.
I cannot for the love of me figure out why they call "Madame S" Muriel in this skit--I can find no biography about Sartre that alludes to any serious paramore other than Simone. It must be some sort of inside Python joke, like Mr. and Mr. Genet (who was gay, as were some of the Pythons).
I may be crazy, but I prefer Hamlet to be true over Roquentin. And in my sequel, we find Hamlet, with Ophelia, in heaven--where nothing ever happens.
But the real answer is this: It is. You can't explain it in words. Some things just matter. To me, anyway, which is the point. Like Nautilus says, the music is. It is real, it is true. I will not deny it. Nor Hamlet.
FINISHED. MORE Later. I will be changing the ending. And I should not rely on outside sources to refresh my memory in the future. But I can get lazy. and my nature is too trusting sometimes....it's a great book: I'm glad I took the time to read it so slowly.
How can this be?
-Roquentin appears at times to be speaking truth to me: the world sometimes falls away to nothing, yet sometimes gives us music to make ours.
-The pitiable Self-Taught man is admirable in his quest for knowledge and his humanity and need for companionship?
-Sartre is right; our only truth is for ourselves: no other person or thing or knowledge can impart it, yet our existence is filled with our bumping into "the other"--we make them ours if we meet them with truth.
-Coleridge and Wordsworth are right: the divine rests in some supernal, mysterious place we embrace best when alone, becoming ours through memory.
-Proust is right: memory gives us context and identity (not sure if that's an accurate synopsis, as I have not read much of his work).
-Memory is detritus: fallible and no longer ours. Therefore useless in our quest for meaning.
--And Hamlet and those new Nobel prize scientists are right: there is more to heaven and earth than dreamt in philosophy. It cannot be reduced. And resides in two states, simultaneously. Or more.
I am really attached to the idea that you can simultaneously love someone and not love him/her all at once. And both feel and not feel drawn to him/her.
And then there's dreams to work in.
I think I feel the dual nature concept most when I'm trying to learn a piece of music that I found outside myself. I really have a harder time playing other people's music. If I make up something myself, in some ways it flows easier, because I'm only on one channel: mine. Not that making up music is in any way easy for me!! At least to make it sound like anything...
But, when I play something I've admired, I have a fairly easy time working out the moving parts, the chords, the notes. What I can't capture is the soul of the original piece, the heartbeat, and I know, logically, this is an impossible task. Yet it always throws me off. Because I believe a musician's soul is in that heartbeat. You can't steal it.
Mine is apparently a plodding, lazy, impatient, arrhythmic soul. Maybe it's this stupid irregular heart I have. As soon as I've worked out the parts, and start to play it in a way I can handle, a 2nd channel comes into play: my learning channel, that is playing a horrid warped version of a song that was once beautiful to me. Now I hate it. I must be doing something wrong. The song now resides in two states in my head.
So I plod back to the original, listen again. Oh, Christ, I can't make it sound like that: the dude must be a magician! He must have practiced for hours to sound so effortless. I don't have the patience. First, his timing is impeccable. When I start playing , it seems like time turns fluid and doesn't exist: that sounds rather poetic, but it is not; it is horrid. One note is just as long as another. I can't tell the difference between a whole note and a quarter note. Part of this is because my conscious brain has replaced the beautiful song with the ever too solid plot of my new arrythmic version.
Right now I feel sort of frozen about music. I feel on the brink of improving--some sort of epiphany or breakthrough, but instead of motivating me to play, I'm hardly ever, like I'm afraid it's going to take over. Piano, forget about it. All dead. So instead I've been playing "Layla" obsessively (for me). Just practicing rhythm, thinking about this Russian guy named Igor I saw who has such a beautiful version--He even does the piano break on guitar!--I know someday I will break his video down and attempt to emulate at least his chords, because I can see he's doing different ones, little split versions of chords with rippling hammers and pull-offs, but I don't feel up to figuring them out yet--which is the part I usually like to do. Figures it's a song about totally screwed up love.
I erased probably a page worth of stuff about the Self-Taught Man. I think I was obsessing over it. Have to come back to him when my perspective clears.
Just read this: Sartre was a speed freak: especially used amphetamines when he wrote. What does that add to the mix??????
I just thought of something rather bizarre : could Roquentin have made Anny into a worthy love by reacting differently--a different rabbit hole ?
Feb 12, 2014: In-laws are back. Food, such an issue with them. "Hope I die before I get old." I don't mean in age, in attitude.
I'm here because my father in law and I got into this discussion at dinner (maybe I should be grateful for intellectual discussions at dinner? Or any discussions that don't involve the cat or how dinner was prepared;))
He was bringing up this idea--I guess I'll call it a scientific one--about Emerging/ent Systems.
Now some background about my father-in-law. He was one of those guys in the 40s/50s raised in a dysfunctional Catholic family, practically raised himself, did the whole Altar Boy, mean nun thing. Me, too. (Well, I wasn't an altar boy--doch was))>
And as a result is now, I believe, an atheist. Everything he says comes with the a priori notion that the concept of a Supreme Being (or even a sub-par Super Being?) is malarkey, superstition, and barely worth discussion. I feel his Catholic rejection, but my thought is that his rejection is hardly more logical. Maybe I've just read more philosophy than him. He's rather pontifical, taking the stance of the wise older man imparting years of knowledge accumulated...he's got that Johns Hopkins' street cred...
So, his description of Emergent Systems is something like this--scientists have now observed that there is phenomena--think flocks of geese, schools of fish, snowflake patterns, cells in an organism--in which the individual is less than the sum of its parts. That is, the larger organism seems to acquire "consciousness" and a larger purpose, i.e. flying north for the winter, a beautiful, symmetric snowflake pattern, that the individual is unaware of. Apparently, none of the known laws of physics can scientifically explain why this organizing "consciousness" pattern emerges--although there is that theory about organisms evolving into more complex forms and apparent "conscious" purposes. Why it happens remains unexplained by science. He's using this analogy to discuss the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence that were explored in a new movie we had both seen, Her, where a man falls in love with his computer's operating system. Is this a possibility, according to the emergent systems theory?
But, the way he defined it, he was making it sound like there could be no intelligent manipulation from an outside source. So I said, so your point of view precludes the possibility that there is a God/gods/controller. I.e., there is no way an outside force can be creating the organization.
Even though I explained I was just playing Devil's Advocate (Isn't that my purpose in life? I seem to think so!!) I think my argument pissed him off a bit, because it took away his upper ground in controlling where the discussion was going. His response went into some sort of ad hominem attack on the superstitions and narrow-mindedness of people who blindly believe in God, but I was actually pointing out something else--that since science doesn't have a law or rule to explain this phenomenon, doesn't that mean there may be some "Super" explanations--something that runs in the direction of gods, God,. Bog, a bigger, unknown, invisible controlling force? It could even be a limited controlling force, but one that has this particular organism by its bits. (Feel me, moy brat?)
Again, I'm just making a logical argument--I tend towards agnosticism--although I'm not quite sure. I definitely take the stance that man doesn't know everything, no matter how many scientific laws and theories we come up with...not that I don't believe they work, like evolution, gravity, motion, etc. Guys like my father-in-law seem to confuse this information as having absolutes, and ignoring the fact that there are holes in their knowledge. This is the challenge I like to bring up to The Scientist. I don't think they get that argumentative stance very often, and I could see my FIL humming up for a "don't challenge the almighty power of the One you should respect and fear" type of argument -- the stereotypical XIAN mindset. I ain't afraid. That's not what I wanted.
I will allow there could be some scientific process we have not yet codified and labeled, that explains the Emergent System, and its logical holes, in perfect scientific fashion. Maybe there's an environmental explanation, a chaos theory sort of explanation, about interconnectivity? I'm assuming science hasn't done this just yet enough for the common masses to discuss.(according to Wikipedia))).
I could see he didn't know what to do with me. My husband would also probably never debate these ideas with me, cos he thinks I just like to argue. I do, but it is also what I believe--he shouldn't be afraid of what I believe, just because we don't agree.
This is why I still feel alone, even among intellectuals.) Mi dispiace. Mia culpa. Just gimme some truth. Not your personal life history.
October 14: Sensing there is an existential crisis somewhere in my air. Well, they never totally go away, do they, if you are a sensitive, thinking being... Somebody gonna save my soul??
February 10, 2015: Have a new angle on Jean-Paul Sartre: via a French movie called
Violette. Ok. JP and Simone De Beauvoir had a famous open romance--was she Anny? That doesn't feel right, but I never read her--I should. But Simone had another "love" interest--Violette Leduc, also a writer. The movie follows her. She was in love with Simone--I've watched the movie, and contrary to the hype in the movie's teasers, I've seen nothing to show a relationship was ever consummated, or that Simone was even interested, only Violette. Also both seem to like men as well as women. Sartre could be easily described as a multiple women-lover who convinced Simone to live the crazy life they led so he could easily have other women without lying about it.
I like this movie because I think it is one of the first I've seen that explores a single person's sexuality (not a romance or love affair, but their own individual feelings) in some detail--including excerpts from her writing which are very good-sensual, soaring portals into feelings maybe some of us have but cannot verbalize. She was censored, of course. She said it made her feel mutilated--I understand. Sartre and De Beauvoir were her champions. I don't know how personal their relationships got, but they definitely got into each other's head on a cerebral and even sentient level--I can see that, and I get it. Know it. She seemed to have quite a lonely, or, alone life, really.
April 21: Time for new life to be pumped into this: In am reading Albert Camus' "The Fall", which has 5000 spiderweb connections to Sartre.
The narrator spent days confessing to a new found friend (BTW, his false name is Clamence--clemency, get it?)) Why does one confess? To not be judged? So, This seemingly self-satisfied Parisian lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence , has left Paris for Amsterdam--it seems through some sort of self-acknowledged failure that he keeps alluding to but never clarifies, at least not right away--he hangs around in a bar called Mexico City, confessing, but at times calling his listeners his clients who he is advising.
By his own account he was an excellent lawyer, well respected, extremely intelligent and impressed with his own, sort of popular for a generosity he meticulously cultivated through charitable acts. I must be careful in my descriptions, however, because a large part of his confession has to with how every act he did was in reality it's inverse: charity was self motivated for attention and reputation, etc. He went to extraordinary lengths to make this appear otherwise--therefore cultivating also an image of humility.
A large chunk of his confession had to do with his love life or lack thereof--which seemed to involve copious amounts of physical love, but little of the spiritual--he was one of those ladies' men most impressed with the machinations of behavior that deceived his love interests, and sometimes himself--oftentimes to avoid boredom. There is a question: does he believe in "true" love or has he ever felt it?
He has this part condescending/part admiring relationship with the bartender who he refers to as "the ape"--he is a counterpoint to himself, but sometime he seems envious of his lack of self-awareness/judgement. He calls his present occupation "judge-penitent."
His every word makes me think of Roquetin, worried about the eyes that are on him--intregal to his existential crisis. He seems to be searching desperately for either sympathy from someone who has done life his way, or condemnation from without, so that he can be his own judge--something he seems to be unable do, even in the crisis moment of the black-haired girl at the bridge, which seems to be the motivation for him leaving Paris for Mexico City/Amsterdam. Besides his name having a nod to John the Baptist, the renewer of spiritual life, the whole thing is rife with biblical allusions--some hidden, (there's a good doc on line showing them) some not, like the title.
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I'll start with this crazy paragraph/image, near the end:
"By the way, will you please open that cupboard? Yes, look at that painting. Don’t you recognize
it? It is “The Just Judges.” That doesn’t make you jump? Can it be that your culture has gaps? Yet if
you read the papers, you would recall the theft in 1934 m the St. Bavon Cathedral of Ghent, of one
of the panels of the famous van Eyck altarpiece, “The Adoration of the Lamb.” That panel was
called “The Just Judges.” It represented judges on horseback coming to adore the sacred animal. It
was replaced by an excellent copy, for the original was never found. Well, here it is. No, I had
nothing to do with it. A frequenter of Mexico City [129]—you had a glimpse of him the other
evening—sold it to the ape for a bottle, one drunken evening. I first advised our friend to hang it in
a place of honor, and for a long time, while they were being looked for throughout the world, our
devout judges sat enthroned at Mexico City above the drunks and pimps. Then the ape, at my
request, put it in custody here. He balked a little at doing so, but he got a fright when I explained the
matter to him. Since then, these estimable magistrates form my sole company. At Mexico City, above
the bar, you saw what a void they left.
Why I did not return the panel? Ah! Ah! You have a policeman’s reflex, you do! Well, I’ll answer
you as I would the state’s attorney, if it could ever occur to anyone that this painting had wound up
in my room. First, because it belongs not to me but to the proprietor of Mexico City, who deserves it
as much as the Archbishop of Ghent. Secondly, because among all those who file by “The
Adoration. of the Lamb” no one could distinguish the copy from the original and hence no one is
wronged by my misconduct. Thirdly, because in this way I dominate. False judges are held up to the
world’s [130] admiration and I alone know the true ones. Fourth, because I thus have a chance of
being sent to prison—an attractive idea in a way. Fifth, because those judges are on their way to
meet the Lamb, because there is no more lamb or innocence, and because the clever rascal who stole
the panel was an instrument of the unknown justice that one ought not to thwart. Finally, because
this way everything is in harmony. Justice being definitively separated from innocence—the latter on
the cross and the former in the cupboard—I have the way clear to work according to my
convictions. With a clear conscience I can practice the difficult profession of judge-penitent ....."
I gotta remember to connect this with some strange documentary I watched on Fandoor about an exhibit in Manhattan in the 1980s? Claimed to be full of fakes, but then a critic came and claimed the Rembrandt was the real deal--then the entire exhibit and the Czech artist, disappeared for years..what was his name? Ah, Pavel Novak, the doc was called "Stolen Art". Wonder if they stole the idea, too?
October 2:
I recently read
Notes From the Underground, or as GR Ian pointed out, the more direct Russian translation might be
Story From the Floorboards, which I think sounds better. I should look up the original Russian title, so I can judge for myself--I know the Russian words for "story" and "floor". I already posted about this on my Russian Lit page, it being Dostoyevski and all. But, since I see such a strong existential connection --precursor to Sartre, etc..I thought I'd write some here, too.
Wiki says original was --
Записки из подполья-- поль being the word for floor, под -under, so, ehh. Also might relate to under field, so underground? I do like the "floorboards" translation--more picturesque
So, the first part of this book is heavily philosophical, making arguments against what would have been the new philosophies of D.'s time, namely, all those scientific rationalist permutations, like utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number), naturalism, that your "personality" is scientific, you are reacting in a practical way like a flock of seagulls would. He strongly argues against this idea, pointing out one's possibility of making choices that absolutely oppose what would be beneficial to one's self--giving examples.
I'm wondering about this "Crystal Palace" idea the Underground Man discusses---apparently taken from a Russian novel of the time
Что Делать? I think it was called--which was later held up as some sort of blueprint for the ideal working class-commune, in theory improving working conditions для товарищей that will be promoted during early Soviet times. What I'm thinking is---Queen Victoria called the centerpiece of the World's Fair in London "The Crystal Palace." I think it still exists as some sort of museum. Нет--не правда. But, was the name choice an accident or a nod to all these "modern" ideas/ World's Fairs were always pushing progress, and QV later promoted worker's rights, I think. Hmm. Look something up to test my speculations...(Later--it has a different direct source, anyway--so is claimed, some English novel.)
I am inclined to agree, with UM's philosophical position, although he becomes a real creep in the 2nd part. This is where the story becomes like
Nausea, when the narrator (Underground Man) becomes an example, like Roquentin, of his own philosophical viewpoint--going out and doing repeated harm to himself apparently as a result of a personal existential crisis. He makes a fool of himself by imposing himself on some boring classmates that he actually doesn't care for, tries to instigate a fight and is not taken seriously, and sleeps with a prostitute. Afterwords he gives her a big moralizing speech predicting her future, which has a profound effect on her--basically changes her life. Which he immediately regrets, like he regrets the dinner with his schoolmates that he now believes damaged his reputation--seems like it was already damaged with them, but they also seem like the
who cares? variety to me--always that popular, "successful" type to get around in this world...
More later
Notes from Underground has a less hopeful ending, I think, than
Nausea with it's life saving music, unless you count the prostitute who considers turning her life around. Underground Man himself is a mess: in spite of his stance on not caring what people think, it seems he does let all the eyes influence him--it's the only explanation for his lack of choices. This I suppose, if you want to make an easy judgment, makes him an unreliable narrator, unlike Roquentin. Aah, I should read the ending again to get more details for why I formed this opinion.
