A Second Coming

The Last Judgement by Michelangelo

Truly great thinkers introduce a human dimension into what is generally thought to be a political condition. Once you introduce a broader question which usually means dealing with what Martin Buber called I/Thou rather than I/It relations, the latter of which turn individuals into objects, you add an unwieldy element of complexity. However at the same time you remove the kind of bifurcations that allow humans to regard themselves as being obstacles to each other’s happiness. Albert Camus did this in his essay The Rebel and in his novels The Stranger and The Plague; it’s one of the messages in the J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Put in another way, this is true identity politics because it forges identity rather than separateness between potential opponents who carry the weight of historical conflict on their backs. Genocides thrive on the lack of empathy for the other. In the Bosnian-Serb conflict of the 90’s, ancient sites like Sarajevo and Srebrenica were a kind of a fuse which re-ignited centuries old grudges between Muslims and Christians. Millenarians who thrive on the notion of a final destination for history discountenance such relativistic and ambivalent perspectives. They propose a Manichaean view of the world in which there's good and evil and they justify murder and mayhem in the service of their cause, which they deem to be a greater good. Yeats’ lines from  “The Second Coming” are overly quoted, but say it best, “The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

The Stranger

Baby boomers will recall the desert beige colored Leo Lionni cover of the Vintage edition of Camus’ The Stranger which became an iconic representation of a French import called existentialism in the later 50’s and early 60’s--and which Steve Heller recently wrote about on his design blog, The Daily Heller. Other books like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet would achieve a similar cultish status--verging on being a mass market phenomenon if such a thing can be said about items whose basic appeal is to intellectuals. But Siddhartha and The Prophet, along with Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Sartre’s  Nausea are now literary footnotes, while The Stranger seems to maintain its philosophic and commercial credibility which is to say that people continue to read and admire The Stranger in such a way, as to make one suspect that it might achieve the status of immortal works which remain pertinent while also being read differently by future generations. Hamlet is the major example of such a phenomenon. Only recently Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a novel based on the brother of one of the main characters of The Stranger (the murdered Arab) garnered France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. But what makes L’Etranger live on? Dusty streets, a random act of violence that recalls in some way another set piece of proto-existentialism, Raskolnikov’s murder of the old woman in Crime and Punishment are the palette from which Camus worked. Existence precedes essence is what you learn about existentialism in philosophy 101. Humans are defined by the actions and choices they make. However, what makes the novel perennially relevant is not a philosophical aphorism but the conjunction of an idea and a world. Camus was born in the North African culture which he describes and it’s as if the philosophical novel he created seamlessly evolved from a milieu, he knew--essentially a colonialist society, in which the punishment for being a lower order of the food chain was objectification. The Stranger is the other. Martin Buber talked of I and Thou (Ich und Du), I and It. The other is the It, the person who has been denied his humanity. Perhaps the novel has maintained its hold on our imaginations because it’s fundamentally about empathy or the loss thereof—a phenomenon that allows for what Clausewitz termed “the continuation of politics by other means,” a state we know only too well, as war.

The Zeitgeist

The Zeitgeist is like a person who walks into a room and feels totally at home. “Zeit" in German is time and “Geist" is spirit. So the words literally means “spirit of the time." But there are, in fact, certain people and cultural artifacts that reflect the Zeitgeist of a time. Camus’s The Stranger, a book, by an obscure French intellectual, who had edited the resistance newspaper Combat, became a publishing phenomenon in 50’s America. Bob Dylan epitomized the Zeitgeist of the 60’s. He would have several other incarnations which would make him at the very least a fellow traveler in the Zeitgeist of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. However, that first album, The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan (which included songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,”) with the picture of him walking down the street, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his arm around a pretty girl was like the concept of a first cause in philosophy. Today Lena Dunham's  Girls seems to be a candidate for Zeitgeistmeister, to the extent that it portrays a whole post-modernist generation who have majored in ambivalence and see all of life as a work of meta-fiction in which reality has been mirrored so many times that it’s been reduced to chards of relativity. Opportunistic art entrepreneurs are always on the look out for the next Zeitgeistlich writer, artist or musician, but it’s hard to predict what the Zeitgeist will be since the pupa of its essence is often embodied in a personality like a Dylan whose imagination is like the ignition on an explosive device. Does Karl Ove Knausgaard reflect the Zeitgeist of Norwegians since one out of 8 of his countrymen own Min kamp. The book's incipient provocativeness seems an unlikely candidate for the Zeitgeist of a nation with such a reserved façade? Is the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey a reflection of the Zeitgeist or is E.L. James’s novel merely a clever manipulation?  Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Annie Lennox and Sting all reflected the Zeitgeist of their respective times, as did Picasso, Jackson Pollock and now yes Damien Hirst? In the political sphere, do the beleaguered Barack Obama, the arrogant Vladimir Putin or even the horrific ISIS reflect the wobbly nature of our globe? And has our age become too complicated to produce philosophers like Plato and Aristotle whose tomes emanated an eternal Zeitgeist, however oxymoronic, that ultimately could tell us how to live?

Erewhon

There is something beautiful about the city when it is deserted on a hot mid-summer afternoon. There is something oppressive about it too. In Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault’s senseless murder occurs on a similarly hot, quiet day on a deserted beach. On a recent Sunday, crowds wait to board a ferry to Governor’s Island, where art is exhibited in an antiseptic government structure with linoleum tiled floors and fluorescent lighting. Some of the art concerns what is occurring right outside the gallery space—the tides and the future of the island itself. Some of it concerns bird songs and soundscapes that render visual representations. Some of the art is political and deals with the ultimate subjectivity of the observer, as with one piece that plots the degradation of a trauma victim’s testimony. The ferry ride back is equally packed and you marvel at the Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women who stubbornly cover themselves in the heat. The restaurants of Chinatown are scarcely populated, except for an ice cream parlor, which is packed. An old man sits on his stoop, smoking. Utopia is by definition that which cannot be, like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. For a moment one thinks of the sylvan sands of Eastern Long Island, but the fantasy is broken by the realization that beauty has become a commodity like everything else, and pristine settings like East Hampton, Cap d’Antibes and Venice (California and Italy) are purchased for a price. You make bargains in your head. What would you sacrifice? Is it worth it? Is anything worth it? A refined sensibility doesn’t generate the resources to acquire a front row seat to beauty. But rugged individualism, resourcefulness and luck do. Maugham had a bit of  them all, and lived in a villa called Mauresque in the fairytale locale of St. Jean Cap Ferrat.