Failing Upward Edition
The blessings of failure, RIP Hilary Mantel, new Bourdain bio, and Umberto Eco on Casablanca. Also marigolds.
Hello, happy October (the best one). Welcome to my monthly roundup.
At the hermitage we are recovering after a brief soujourn to New Yawk City.
It was my first time back in the city in two years. I thought the clarity of distance might give me some interesting insight into the post-pandemic urban fabric, in the way infrequently seeing an old friend makes the progress of his deterioration (or, sometimes, his revival) exceedingly conspicuous.
But for all the totemic bluster the city summons in the “national conversation,” it felt, strikingly, just about the same as ever. Or should I say—changed in the same way under the same forces as most of the rest of the country. It turns out the most accurate prophecy of coronatide belonged to a spinner of fictions, who predicted early in 2020 that the pandemic upheavals would not lead to a “new normal” nor even a dread “great reset.” Rather, he saw, life “will be the same, just a bit worse."
That is the dynamic of the decline we are now well into. There is no cathartic collapse, as some secretly or not-so-secretly long for. There is instead the succession of jolts and emergencies, managed with kludges which may “work” (or not) but which also tend to layer on thickening webs of half-assed fixes. In Cuba, it’s using Soviet parts to keep the 1950s Fords running, here it’s using bailing wire and prayer to keep the 1904 6 train running. It’s not, like, the end of the world (that we must leave to the experts) but I think psychologically it helps to accept that stuff doesn’t really get “solved” anymore, just patched. And even the patches are mostly financed through debt (like everything), which…works until it doesn’t.
And that’s okay. For a long time we’ve ridden cheap energy and cheap money into the utopian mentality that we are entitled and duty bound to control the entire world, life and death included. That can only end in frustration. No need to keep re-proving that hubris breeds nemesis, we can just read the Greeks and save ourselves some trouble. Embracing limits can also turn the temperature down in political life, save us from seeking either scapegoats or saviors where we shouldn’t. It can help return focus to making our daily, hidden lives a little better instead of a little worse, which is still sometimes possible. (Though that requires a view on what make life “better,” which removes us from the soothing neutrality of the technocrats and places us firmly if distressingly back in the territory of the philosophers. Sorry.)
New York, for instance, did demonstrate one or two undeniable improvements. The expansion of outdoor dining, for one. That’s big for a city with a claustrophobic lack of comfortable public spaces (even denser cities usually feel less oppressive in this sense). They may be the equivalent of sitting in a plywood shed while the Escalade twelve inches from your head lays on the horn, but we can’t be too picky.1 Also, the new LaGuardia terminals are quite nice.
I also renewed communion with the places that have been important to the development of my soul, such as it is. A day at the Met, Manet and Rodin and Redon and Kuindzhi and especially, especially Rembrandt. And the prime people-watching—the gaggles of onlookers from all corners of the Earth alternatingly enthralled or desperately bored. Paying respects at my church, which was back then maybe the only community that could have credibly delivered a “twitch upon the thread.” A stop in to the corner bar where I once slung pizzas with an endearingly insane man who claimed to have invented a new type of oven. Lovely afternoons in waterside parks and dinners of superlative Moroccan merguez wreathed by the sweet smell of shisha and the staccato dialects of Arabic and Greek. Life. Felt good.
I’ve lived a lot of places, and abandoned a lot of places. But I always go back, even to places I don’t particularly miss. Didion says “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not” and in each place I’ve inhabited there is a different ghost version of myself, waiting, pacing, circling. I keep thinking if I go back, walk old streets or drive back roads, turn over stones, rebreath air, he will finally tell me what I need to know. He and I will both be freed. But he can’t speak. We just keep some silent company, gesture mutely, move on.
I left New York in a particularly jolting way, partly due to lockdowns, partly to economics, and partly to (non-covid) health problems that made walking and daily life increasingly difficult. I left, that is, with an uneasy mixture of desperation and opportunism. It was the pandemic measures that made it possible for me to change my life while keeping a job, which puts me in the uncomfortable position of owing a certain measure of gratitude to the disastrous response. That is the crux of the mingled shame and relief I feel in my New York failure.
And it was a failure. Not because living in New York is some unique barometer of success—that is a form of communal narcissism from which I have mostly deconverted. But because it is the one place I arrived with the clear intention of making my home. I had resolved to stop bouncing aimlessly and stand my ground, for good or ill. And I failed. Not that it’s the biggest failure of my life—it’s not a tragedy on par with, say, attending grad school or committing a single mortal sin or unleashing any one of many acts of petty cruelty. But it stands out in relief because of the clarity and naive enthusiasm of my intention.
Life is one failure after another; that’s nothing new. Some call it a long defeat.2 Some chipper folk advise that failure is really just a sort of success in disguise, a precursor to accomplishment. Flushing out the rot, clearing the decks, bracing up the mind, opening new doors, and all the rest. I have not found this to be the case.
But the life of failure is also, by the grace of God, a felix culpa, a happy fault, from which we learn our total dependence on our Creator. We have no other hope, for all else fails in the end. Where failure abounds, there grace more abounds! “This I know / For the Bible tells me so.” True, I’m coming to believe, in the creative life as well. “They took your life apart / And called your failures art,” as another Elliott put it. Yes. Inshallah.
Links.
RIP Hilary Mantel: ”I really felt as long as I could keep writing I wasn’t going to die…The idea of writing and ink and blood became very fused in my mind.”
Speaking of our friend Michel, you would be maladjusted and dyspeptic too if this was your relationship with your mother. Elementary Particles suddenly makes a lot more sense.
FT’s Wolfgang Munchau on the chances of another EU miscalculation in Italy: “Like the Bourbons, the EU never learns and never forgets…As with Brexit, there is a huge danger that the EU might end up on the losing side because they are talking to the wrong people and reading the wrong newspapers.”
Interesting piece on how America’s party weakness has led to the outsourcing of political thought to the country’s truly sui generis constellation of think tanks, philanthropies, and other advocacy non-profits.3
In praise of character actors: “If it’s a performance you seek, look at the edges, where it is allowed and—if you care about cinema at all—necessary.”
Is the new Bourdain biography revelatory or defamatory? I am not immune to gossip, unfortunately, but as a palliative I suggest revisiting his writing. It may have birthed thousands of mediocre imitators, as genius tends to do, but the original Pirate Chef manifesto still rips: here’s the 1999 New Yorker piece that launched him to bookdom and then stardom.
Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.
Adam Zagajewski and the ecstasy of exile.
Did the industrial revolution even happen?
Film.
I finally got around to watching Casablanca (1942). Very enjoyable. There’s a strange sensation to watching something in which nearly all the lines are already familiar due to their memetic uptake in the broader culture. I also highly recommend Umberto Eco’s essay on the film, in which he argues that it embraces its clichés so heartily that it ends up transcending them:
When all the archtypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.
I’ve also been filling gaps in my knowledge on the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. This BBC documentary, made right after the end of the Bosnian War in 1995, is rather stunning in its ability to capture the major players speaking voluminously to both their motives and their crimes.
Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game.
—Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet, 118
Garden update.
Marigolds coming in just in time for first frost.
Other stuff.
I wrote about Portugal, Pessoa, Sophia, travel, the sea, olives, etc.
Poetry.
That’s all. See you round the campfire.
As ever,
J
Of course, this being America, such a small mercy will just as likely be overturned soon enough. Opponents say outdoor cafes can only be legally justified as a public health measure, and apparently we have no more need of public health justifications as a forcing mechanism for decisions we otherwise lack political capital to make. This battle really is pure Americana: a blind hatred of any restrictions on parking combined with a devotion to settling governance questions through court challenges to bureaucracies operating under spurious “emergency” powers.
“Tolkien notes that within the long defeat, there are ‘glimpses of final victory.’ I would go further and say that the final victory already ‘tabernacles’ among us. It hovers within and over our world, shaping it and forming it, even within its defeat. For the nature of our salvation is a Defeat. Therefore the defeat within the world itself is not a tragic deviation from the end, but an End that was always foreseen and present within the Cross itself. And the Cross itself was present ‘from before the foundation of the world.’”
See also Skocpol from way back in 2001 on the decline of broad-based membership organizations and the rise of elite-driven advocacy projects: https://prospect.org/power/associations-without-members/