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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785353376 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Collective Ink |
| Publication date: | 06/24/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
MORGAN MEIS has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The New Yorker, n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, Image Journal, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He won the Whiting Award in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant.
Read an Excerpt
Dead People
By Stefany Anne Goldberg, Morgan Meis
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan MeisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-337-6
CHAPTER 1
Christopher Hitchens
(1949 – 2011)
At the moment, I'm angry with Christopher Hitchens. Not because he died. A man dies. And angry is not really the correct word, nor the correct emotion. I'm frustrated with Christopher Hitchens, troubled by him, moved by him, enamored of him and then repelled at the attraction.
The first time I met Christopher Hitchens was at a Harper's Magazine Christmas party just before the start of the Iraq War. Bloomberg had recently banned smoking in New York City and the intellectuals were pissed. In those days, Harper's parties happened down in the basement at Pravda. It was all very arch. Smoking ban be damned. Lewis Lapham and his band of merry lit boys were going to light up the smokes anyway. Hitch had a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But you've seen him like that a thousand times, in person, in pictures, on TV. I stood in line to speak with him. The line was moving smoothly until a woman in a red dress half a size too small for all her stuff gummed up the works. You could hear the collective groan all along the line as she stepped up to the Hitch. This was going to take a while.
I gave him a copy of a review a friend and I had written about his recently published book, Letters to a Young Contrarian. The book is not very good, a fact he readily acknowledged. Really, my friend and I wrote the review to attack him for his abandonment of the Left. He didn't care that we felt abandoned. Speaking with him, I came to understand that he really didn't care. All the same, he appreciated the review, which was pretty smart. Hitch appreciated smart. Always.
I suppose it was his confidence in leaving the Left behind that infected my own thinking after that meeting. He'd taken all his verve and passion and gone somewhere else. The real fight is with me, he kept saying, the good fight is with me. I'm a sucker for that kind of talk. I'm a sucker for a fist slammed on the table and a drunken rant about the genuine lost cause. It was around this time that a number of apostates on the Left were beginning to toy with the idea that being anti-fascist meant supporting any war that would rid the world of Saddam.
Anyway, I decided I was for the Iraq War too, and whatever else the new fight was going to entail, the grand struggle against all that is vile and inhuman. I signed up, if for no other reason than that I wanted to be with him.
Soon enough it became clear that the war had turned into a genuine debacle. When we all found out Hitch had cancer, I wondered if before died, he would say something about being wrong. A person can be wrong. Any person can be wrong. The facts don't turn out the way you hoped they would. Events turn ugly, turn sour, and history plays one of her infinite tricks, going one way just when you thought she was going the other. The Iraq War was a terrible mistake by any honest assessment and I, Morgan Meis, was wrong to have thought and argued differently. There. It isn't so hard to say. But Hitch could never say it. There was something greater at stake for him. There was something that he valued more deeply, in this case, than he valued the truth.
This is not at all to side with most of his critics, who happen to be smaller persons than he. There is no shame in being smaller than Christopher Hitchens. He was great. Most people are not great and are never going to be great no matter how hard they try. Arguing with greatness is an absurd undertaking. I can't tell you how many times I've watched Hitch demolish someone in discussion or debate when, in fact, the other party had the better argument, the more careful analysis. It doesn't matter with greatness. The force of greatness comes down like a cudgel. Everything is smashed when greatness comes barreling through.
It will be said a hundred times and then a hundred times more in the following weeks that Hitch's atheism was a stance of immense courage. This is complete bullshit. Hitch's atheism was a thing of anger and fear, and it fed off the anger and fear of the legions of angry and fearful religious people who took up the bait. Christopher Hitchens did not, for instance have the courage to confront the works of Simone Weil, and to read them with honesty and openness and a feeling for the greatness that is contained within her words. A person could read Simone Weil for a lifetime and never become a believer. But no honest person can read Simone Weil, truly read her, and maintain the position that religious belief is a phenomenon that can be dealt with solely in the mode of contempt. Christopher Hitchens was perfectly aware of this fact, which is why he never allowed himself genuinely to read the works of Simone Weil or genuinely to contemplate the paintings of Caravaggio or genuinely to recite the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, to pick a few random examples of greatness on this earth that, troublingly, cannot be disentangled from religion. There was something that Hitch valued more deeply, in this case too, than he valued the truth.
It will also be opined in the days and weeks to follow that Hitchens was a lover of reason and rationality. This is poppycock. Hitchens was a lover of argument and persuasion. He was a lover of being right and winning at any cost. This is what made him great. His irrationality made him shine. When the facts were out, and the facts were against him, it drove him to ever-more-eloquent flights of rhetoric in the name of his own doomed wrongness. This is not an admirable quality. In the hands of a lesser man, it would be pathetic. In the possession of a great man, however, such a quality cannot be judged so easily. It becomes a quality both wicked and grand. Hitch was large enough to take upon himself wickedness and grandness both. One of the reasons that we all loved to have Christopher Hitchens around is that he was proof that life does not always have to be so relentlessly disappointing, so boring. Being human does not always have to be a matter of being puny, of opting for the small matters of our own comfort day after day. Most of us live small lives of quiet desperation. Hitchens opted big every time. He paid the price for that choice, and never complained about it once.
When someone great leaves this earth you don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. It pains me that things will be said about Christopher Hitchens that have nothing to do with what actually made him great. Then again, this is as it should be. True human greatness is a thing that we do not get to measure. It is the thing that measures us. In his foolishness and brilliance Hitchens has established a measure that the rest of us now have to live with. We have to wrangle with it. We have to put our own lives as writers and thinkers and human beings against this massive thing that Christopher Hitchens has left behind. It is a hateful burden, this legacy. Still, it is as an honor that I bend down in order to lift up my own tiny portion. We all bear what part of it we can, the legacy of a great man. I'm angry with him. And I miss him very very much already.
By Morgan Meis
19 December 2011
CHAPTER 2Václav Havel
(1936 – 2011)
The recently deceased Václav Havel — writer, political dissident, and first president of the Czech Republic — wrote some very funny plays. Living through the dark times of communist Czechoslovakia, Havel was committed to keeping a sense of humor. Laughter, he felt, was not just an antidote to misery, an escape; it was a way to distance yourself from misery, gain a little perspective. This is the function of satire. Satire asks us to reflect on meaning, to ask what is truly meaningful and what is not. What do we take seriously because it is serious, and what do we take seriously because we've stopped asking questions?
These funny plays of Havel are generally classified as belonging to the absurdist tradition, alongside the works of Pinter, Albee, Stoppard, and Beckett. In the West, Havel's plays have represented all that is ridiculous and empty about communism in particular and bureaucracy and authority in general. Havel first came to international attention with The Garden Party. The play revolves around Mr. and Mrs. Pludek, who have middle-class aspirations for their two sons, Hugo and Peter. Dismissing Peter as a bourgeois intellectual, the Pludeks turn their attention to Hugo, who pleases his parents by becoming chief liquidator of the Liquidation Office. Hugo is told that the task of the Liquidation Office is to liquidate the Inauguration Office. Unfortunately, the Liquidation Office is also slated to be liquidated, and if it is liquidated it cannot liquidate. The capable Hugo finally becomes head of a new institution, the Central Committee for Inauguration and Liquidation, the purpose of which is liquidating liquidation. Because Hugo is smart and organized, he quickly adapts to his various bureaucratic roles, learning to speak the platitudinous, vacant language of his fellow functionaries. At the play's end, Hugo's identity is completely lost. Even his own parents no longer recognize him.
Havel's next play, The Memorandum, fully established him as a theatrical voice for Eastern Europeans living under the absurd logic of communism. The Memorandum begins in the office of Josef Gross. Gross is the managing director of the office, though what he manages, or what the office does, it is hard to say. It's a day like any other. Gross is reading his mail when he comes upon a memorandum in a language he does not understand. He is then informed by his secretary that the memo is written in a Ptydepe, a new language that has been introduced by the deputy director Jan Ballas, without Gross' knowledge or consent. Ptydepe, it is explained to Gross, is a more efficient and reliable language for the office because it is more redundant, ridding language of unwieldy similarities and also emotional connotations. All words, for instance, must differ from words of similar length by 60 percent. Gross at first protests against the introduction of Ptydepe, but is later convinced by Gross that Ptydepe is best for everyone. Nonetheless, Gross still does not understand Ptydepe, and spends the play in an exasperating attempt to get the memo translated. First he needs permission. He is told to get authorization from the graduate Ptydepist, and then, actually, from the Chairman, who, it turns out, does not herself have authorization. He asks a secretary named Maria to help him, but she tells Gross that while she can translate the memo, she does not have the proper permit to do so. And the whole time, of course, Gross is being watched by George, the staff watcher. In the end, Ptydepe is replaced with another new language, Chorukor, and then it is agreed that everyone will, in fact, go back to the mother language. Then everyone goes to lunch.
In his 1990 book Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Huizdala, Havel wrote: "The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning — in other words, of absurdity — the more energetically meaning is sought." Born into a wealthy, intellectual Prague family in 1936, the rise of communism in then-Czechoslovakia cancelled many of the privileges that would have been afforded to the young Havel. Because of his "bourgeois" background, Havel was prevented from attending university. He worked for a time as a lab technician, and then studied at a technical college before serving in the Czechoslovak Army in the late 1950s. But all the while, Havel maintained an interest in literature. He began to write in earnest and involved himself in various literary circles. In the 1960s, he got work in a theater as a stagehand and started to write his own plays. After the Prague Spring reforms were crushed in 1968, Havel became increasingly immersed in the political struggle against communism. His arrest in 1979, and his life as a public dissident in Czechoslovakia, ran parallel to his life as an internationally known playwright. Soon, Havel became the world's most visible Czech dissident. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this privileged-yet-disenfranchised famous artist and political revolutionary became president of Czechoslovakia. He resigned in 1992 only to be elected president again the following year — of the newly created Czech Republic.
In the decades that followed, Václav Havel, the playwright turned politician, became one of those go-to public figures when someone needed a voice of authority on aesthetic freedom or political revolution. Yet Havel's guidance rarely focused on either politics or aesthetics. The problem of creating real and lasting societal change, was, for Havel, a moral dilemma. And absurdity was the path through this moral problem. Havel did not see absurdity as something that people in power impose on the powerless. He did not see the absurd as that which is devoid of purpose, as Eugéne Ionesco said. Havel saw absurdity as a fact of life, and the embrace of absurdity — the experience of meaninglessness — as the necessary condition by which we find meaning. Modern man, he wrote in Disturbing the Peace, needed to descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point. Only then could he look beyond it, only then could he discover real meaning. Havel's plays are not critiques of "systems," of authority figures and illogical bosses and the tedium of office life. Havel's plays are a critique of us, of all of us, those in charge and those under charge, who created all the absurd and meaningless structures of modern society we lament on a daily basis, feel so oppressed by, and yet refuse to change.
"Lie" is a word Havel used often in one of his most discussed and influential essays, 1978's "The Power of the Powerless." He wrote:
In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife.
For those who haven't read the essay, or haven't read it in a long time, the word "powerless" in the title might suggest those suffering under communism, the masses, or perhaps all people who are in a power struggle against authority. But the essay is much more existential and much less political than that. For Havel, the modern world was in spiritual crisis. "As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it," he wrote in Disturbing the Peace. The modern project to make humans more powerful — more in control of our environment, of nature, each other — resulted, rather, in a loss of power, a loss of meaning. And the deeper we experience the absence of meaning, "the more energetically meaning is sought."
This is the point when individual people, alienated and lacking purpose, become susceptible to ideology, to placing their trust in an anonymous Power that offers them comfort, even if that comfort is a lie. It's not even necessary that people believe in the lies they are told; they only need to behave as if they do, to conform to its logic. In return, the lie offers not just a new politics; it offers a new mythology, a new identity, a new language, a new metaphysics.
That willingness to float down the river of pseudolife is a problem common to all individuals, and is not reserved for the powerful or the weak or the doltish. "Individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system." To prove his point, Havel made the main character in "The Power of the Powerless" a greengrocer — an innocent shopkeeper, who only wants to sell us fruit and vegetables. The greengrocer is a prototype of the average person who longs for meaning and allows his moral vacuum to be filled with easy, empty ideology.
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
Note the way Havel chose to specifically critique "unification." In the ideological fight against communism waged by the dissidents of the Eastern Bloc, the idea of unity — solidarity — was the weapon of choice. True solidarity, thought Havel, versus the false solidarity of the communist regime, was the basis from which change would spring. And yet, Havel wrote the word "unity" almost as if it were a dirty word. The reason is this: Unity was also a slogan of communist ideology. Indeed, all authorities declare a comforting message of unity. This is the primary function of ideology, he wrote. To provide people, "both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dead People by Stefany Anne Goldberg, Morgan Meis. Copyright © 2015 Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Christopher Hitchens,Václav Havel,
Eric Hobsbawm,
Leszek Kolakowski,
Tadeusz Konwicki,
Mikhail Kalashnikov,
Rsyzard Kapuscinski,
Osama bin Laden,
Charlton Heston,
Mary Ellen Mark,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Thomas Kinkade,
Roman Opalka,
Cy Twombly,
David Weiss,
Robert Hughes,
Arthur Danto,
James van Sweden,
John Updike,
Chinua Achebe,
David Foster Wallace,
Tom Clancy,
Susan Sontag,
Sun Ra,
Adam Yauch,
Guru,
Kurt Cobain,
Bob Bogle,
Günter Grass,