The Gleaming Sword has been going for roughly four years now, and the last couple years have been particularly productive, but I’ve decided it’s time for a break, or at least a significant slowdown, so I can focus on other projects. Nonetheless, I’ve had a number of ideas on the back burners for months now, and rather than leave them unvoiced, I thought I’d present them all together here in abbreviated form. They’re still only halfway thought out, researched and fact-checked, but here they are nonetheless.
Lana Del Rey: In Praise of No Context
This post was nearing completion when I decided to apply the
brakes to my blogging. The post was to
discuss how encountering Lana Del Rey’s music without knowing anything about
her personal life and how she is perceived by others enhanced my appreciation
for her art. I was particularly excited about making a connection to the Kazuo
Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go (2005) and the character Kathy’s deeply
subjective enjoyment of a cassette she purchases at school.
From the post that never was:
“Most people have probably had a similar experience: certain lyrics in a song will jump out, taking on a meaning for the listener that the artist never intended or one that is different from what others experience, but what criteria exist for calling wrong someone else’s innermost experience of a work of art? The experience of art is a meeting of subject and object that is often better without third parties.”
The context-free experience of art is rapidly becoming scarce as we are constantly bombarded with minutiae about every topic imaginable, reading reviews on iTunes before downloading an album, looking up movies on IMDb even as we live-tweet them. Today, we come to art and entertainment through a haze of chatter, a cacophony of others’ voices, but we might be much happier tuning it out.
From Ultraviolence:
Cecil the Lion and the Will to Power
I also intended to crank out a piece about the reaction to
the news that a dentist from Minnesota had hunted and shot Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe,
but that was nixed early in inception. I found it interesting how every side of
the issue illustrated Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power.
Killing big game, raging against big-game hunters, pointing out the piety of
those who decry big-game hunters, and blogging analysis of the debate (as I’m
doing here) all serve to make the self feel superior to others. In Freudian
terms, they all feed the ego.
So what could one say that wouldn’t be an expression of the
will to power? Probably nothing. As I understand it from my days of heavy
Nietzsche reading, the will to power underlies all, or nearly all, human behavior.
Taking a clue from a maxim by La Rochefoucauld (previous post), Nietzsche
pointed out that even saying “Thank you” is a way of raising oneself above the person
who has done you a good turn.
From Daybreak:
“Even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.”
Why Reverse Racism Does Exist
The most potentially controversial of my plans was a post arguing that
reverse racism does indeed exist, an opinion very unpopular in certain circles.
The argument usually starts with redefinitions of words like racism and
discrimination (usually to include power) that conveniently lead, through
simple logic, to the conclusion that reverse racism does not even make sense, cannot
exist, or is just a misnomer for what is in reality plain old racism. It's a
bit of sleight-of-hand the likes of which is increasingly common among the
perpetually outraged but which never fools their opponents.
My argument was to be philosophical. In the 20th Century,
philosophers began to spend a great deal of time examining language, and one of
their favorite preoccupations was regular, everyday speech, which functions in
a staggering variety of ways. The reality is that people use the words “reverse
racism” to point to behaviors and attitudes based on race that are perpetuated
by members of a group that is usually seen as the oppressed against members of
the group that is usually seen as the oppressor, and everyone who hears these words
knows that. By that right, the phrase is legit and what it describes does
happen.
You may find the existence of what is called “reverse
discrimination” uncomfortable, you may find it to be negligible compared to the
atrocities committed by the usual suspects, you may not like the phrase, you
may hate the way it is used to combat any efforts calling for attention to race
problems, and you may find it more economical to just call it “racism,” but you
can’t just wish it away.
How an Atheist Can Enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s Noah
I refused to watch Ridley Scott’s Exodus, because as an
atheist (previous post) I see a return of big-budget Biblical epics as exactly the
kind of religion-stroking the world is better off without, but I was intrigued
enough by Darren Aronofsky’s past films like The Fountain and Black Swan to
check out Noah (2014), and I’m glad I did. I loved fantasy elements like the
Watchers, savored the way it toyed with orthodoxy, admired Emma Watson’s performance,
was moved by the human relationships, and was gripped by the plot. Scenes like
the one in which Noah tries to kill Ila’s twins always used to leave me unmoved--I
sensed screenwriters trying too hard to get a response from their audience--but now that I’m a father, I was like, “Oh no you don’t, motherfo!”
This is how we interact with stories. Aronofsky said he
never intended Noah to be a traditional Biblical epic espousing an exclusively
Judeo-Christian worldview, and his film did turn out to have much to offer aside
from whatever lessons the religious may find in it. No doubt some atheists would
adopt a harder stance, but many atheists such as myself remain open to inspiration--strictly
humanist--from religious art.
Joseph Conrad’s Use of Irony in Heart of Darkness to
Critique Colonialism
The meatiest of my planned projects, one which ill health derailed
last spring, was a series of posts focusing on Joseph Conrad’s use of irony in Heart of Darkness (1899) to criticize colonialism. While Heart of Darkness is devoid
of sermonizing, I noticed that Conrad often uses officious and grandiloquent
language when describing functionaries of the British Empire, precisely
when he means to scorn them. And his portrayal of the effects of colonialism on
the colonialized is damning--whether the colonialization is military,
commercial or in the name of civilization.
And is American imperialism any different? I don’t have a
simple answer for that, but I intended to address the question via a look at
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which sets Conrad’s novel against the
Vietnam War, and also to examine colonialism as a racist endeavor. My
primary text for this last topic would be a chapter from Darkwater (1920) by
W.E.B. Du Bois. In “The Souls of White
Folk,” Du Bois presents a condemnation of white supremacy that I highly
recommend reading:
“How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe, which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.”
Possibly Fruitless Pursuits
A few other ideas were on burners even further back. I was
hoping to continue exploring my idea of the thin graphite line, a conception of
artists, writers and thinkers as a bulwark against barbarism, in light of
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Another idea that may not have panned out was
investigating des choses in Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) as examples
of das Ding in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. A lighter post was to be a
look at the variety of pop styles exhibited by Kylie Minogue’s discography from
Light Years (2000) to Kiss Me Once (2014).
Alas, these posts will never come to full fruition. However,
while The Gleaming Sword is slowing, I am still here. I welcome comments at the
bottom of the page or through Twitter (my profile). Now I leave you--only
temporarily!--with some music:
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