For reasons clear below, I bought a bubble pipe and toga to write this post.
As I write, Don DeLillo’s huge Cold-War-half-century novel Underworld purrs in my lap like a kitten. Underworld (my canon-fiction summer has made it through mid-August!) is about garbage, baseball, the internet, installation art, and people off balance, like those Phoenix waste-management executives who find themselves pretending– every day in the office, at skyboxes, to their assistants, in meetings– to be executives. They’ve studied each other over barbecue or across tables or dressing down their employees, and now
[…] there’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat.
Do you study the characters you are? In a classroom, do you pretend to be your teacher self? Your lover self in bed? It’s self-contemptuous to believe that the truest wisdom is self-explanatory, readily at hand.
But enough: I should explain my outfit. In Book IX of the Republic, Plato breaks the soul in three. We humans are
part man (that is, to quote the frameworks of a wonderful omnivorous erudite professor from college, Richard Kenney, Reason; residing in the frontal lobes; persuaded by logic),
part lion (Emotion; residing in the midbrain; persuaded by beauty),
and part monster (Appetite; residing in the cerebellum; corralled by virtues).
This is a framework worth whiteboarding and staring at. Professor Kenney used it a number of ways– as classical neurology, as a manifestation of the truth/beauty/goodness triune, as a frame for talking about John Keats. Plato’s own brilliant use of this analogy is to say that, in the forest of the soul, man trains the lion to protect him from the monster.
Plato is smarter than you!
And me.
Plato’s trio, though, lately reoccurred to me because of its last (shakiest?) proposition: the suggestion that reining in the appetite with virtues is analogous to stirring the emotions with beauty. Is restraint a stimulus?
Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics (translated by J.E.C. Welldon), distinguishes between the senses, the arts, and the virtues like this. He begins by noting the obvious: that we’re born with our senses, then we exercise them: we have the faculty of sight and so we look around. Contrarily,
the virtues we acquire by first exercising them, as is the case with all the arts, for it is by doing what we ought to do when we have learnt the arts that we learn the arts themselves; we become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly it is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts that we become courageous.
We can’t be said to possess any inner quality (to be seen as possessing them, or to feel them in ourselves) until we exercise it.
Has art made you moral? Have virtues deepened your emotions? And, in your life, do you ever–
Decline kisses from breathtaking strangers (hey, in her beach-history Kissing, Andr??a Demirjian tells us that Himalayan cultures are among the few in the world who don’t kiss: saliva is considered unsanitary enough that trading it is like rubbing gutters) with a waiting sweetie in mind?
Finish your damn ghazal or pushup?
Clean the catbox (it’s Wednesday and Wednesday is catbox day)?
Skip more-fun-than-writing things to write?
If concepts are only electric current (or the idea of electric current?), is will the twitching muscle or the sub-aware photosynthetic buzz we feel ourselves surrounded by?–
I feel like apologizing to you by making myself a subject.
In the 1970s, pioneering botanist Dorothy Retallack found that her plants liked hearing Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, and Duke Ellington. I’m raising my jade tree on hardcore punk.
I’m off to exercise my qualities. See you at the toga shop.