it’s bad diet and stress

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century committed one grave sin against our reality: it compressed time. Letters that could’ve taken a month to be delivered started arriving within days, a trip that used to take months on horseback could’ve been completed in a week in a comfortable train. Nowadays we’re getting anxious and angry if someone’s not replying to our instantly delivered text within seconds of us clicking the send button (especially when, thanks to the dark arts of iPhone text messaging software, we know that they’ve received and read it).

Time compression that happened in the 19th century forced us, our brains, to accelerate –– and we’re trying to catch up ever since. 

The way this acceleration is usually (and easily) described to children learning history is through the capitalist equation of “time is money”. It’s simple because it can be proven with math: just compare the time it takes to develop a product through traditional hand production vs. time it takes to do it with assembly lines. This approach, however, forces us to focus the conversation on class warfare, money and economy, and although it’s obviously a conversation worth having, I’ve been thinking lately about another interpretation, and consequences of, said time compression. 

And it’s because I found a quote from “Escape from Freedom” by Erich From in my notes. He said:

“(...) crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man’s intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age.”

It’s obvious that "Escape from Freedom” is a book about the Second World War. Fromm tries to pretend that it’s about something else but the trauma of this tragic and insane event shines through every single page. And it’s an interesting sentiment that he shares in this particular quote – it immediately made me think of a fragment of an interview with Lars von Trier after he released “Antichrist”, where he commented on his failed attempt at curing his depression through psychotherapy:

“The tools that they use in psychology, the cognitive therapy, seem quite poor when compared to the rest of modern medicine. It seems as if it hasn’t progressed for many years. They will still tell you, “If you are afraid of the tunnel, you must go through it.” Compared to heart surgery, the techniques seem a little poor.”

When I was reading this interview –– at first it felt weird to see psychology compared to modern medicine, psychotherapy to heart surgery. But then I realized – why, actually? Why does it feel weird to see an illness of our mind compared to an illness of anything else? Why do we perceive influenza or tonsillitis as something so different from depression? 

Fromm gave me an answer – it’s because we tend to separate things we can understand through our intellect from things we need to feel with our hearts. We can see viruses and bacteria under a microscope so we know that they exist, and so we are able to develop ways of treating illnesses caused by them. We can’t actually see a virus of depression so how would we even start trying to cure it?

Can’t we, though? 

All it takes is some imagination.

The shift in perception of the world that the Industrial Revolution caused can be felt even now – it grounded us in a particular brand of reality ruled by machines and science. It forced us to know, to be sure, to test things through experiments that are logical and can be proven right or wrong. 

The problem, at least it feels like it, was that at the same time we were forced to develop new philosophies, new myths, in order to explain what’s actually going on in the world – and these myths needed to be grounded in something resembling rational thought or science. And so, for example, since time became equal with money, and it could be proven that by shortening the time of manufacturing and transportation of goods companies can earn more cash, we agreed that myths like capitalism are right. They are obviously working to some extent and it can be proven with math. They have the power of explaining the world we suddenly found ourselves in and so they are intellectually acceptable because they don’t force us to imagine anything or to believe in something. 

They allow us to ground ourselves in something we perceive as reality –– even though what we see with our own eyes is only a fraction of the whole system. The real thing might be invisible but it doesn’t matter: what matters is that the bubble we occupy stays intact. And as long as it does, everything’s all right.

But – what’s interesting in the context of that quote from Fromm is his comment on disparity between our intellectual and emotional development. The point is that even though the world could’ve abolished monarchies and aristocracy in favor or industrial magnates (exchanging one class of rich people for another), the shift of general thinking about class (”what? where’s my king?!”) threatened people’s ideas of how the world is supposed to work. And this is harder to accept because some myths are hard to shake off. They are based on emotions, not intellect.

Darwin challenged Christianity through science – because of that his views, after predictable moral outrage, were put under scientific scrutiny and they paved way for theories that led us to better understanding of how we, as human species, are biologically designed. Nietzsche challenged Christianity through poetry of his thoughts – his views got lost in time for years before they got rediscovered around 1960s. The point here is that people were not ready to be challenged on an emotional level, and that’s precisely what Nietzsche did in his books. We needed decades in order for someone to actually sit down with his work and read it as something worth treating with respect. 

It’s because, getting back to Fromm, man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. We were able to find proof of some kind of evolution –– but can we prove that God is actually dead? 

Well, why not? If, as a though experiment, we tried to treat mental illness just like any other illness of our body, what would be the diagnosis? 

What causes depression? Do we have to stand by obvious biological explanation such as “stress”, “lack of exercise”, “bad diet”? We’ve already accepted “various psychological traumas” as an acceptable cause. But what if we said that the way we’ve constructed our society – and we made certain decisions about it because time got compressed in the 19th century and we’re still trying to catch up – is the reason for depression? What if the real treatment, just like a drug for any bacterial infection, of this illness is a major change of how the world works –– because the way it works now is defective?

What if our ideologies, beliefs, and myths we construct about our reality, are just defensive mechanisms we create in order to makes sense of the trauma of the 20th century and of this festering wound that’s our modern reality?

a chauvinist pig in love with his sister

My favorite part of Susan Sontag’s “Under the Sign of Saturn”, among some interesting thoughts on Riefenstahl and Barthes, is definitely her essay about Antonin Artaud – a man known best for his concept of Theatre of Cruelty (on which he elaborates in an amazing collection of essays called The Theatre and its Double). I won’t get into Artaud’s theory of theater, though, because it’s not all that important for understanding the most interesting part of Sontag’s piece – a very refreshing view of how pop-culture approaches things it finds hard to accept.

The part I’m talking about feels like a self-reflection of an accalimed author/writer/journalist (and all these labels seem fitting since this essay was originally printed in The New Yorker), and it helped me come to terms with starting a lot of books of highly praised authors, yet taking so long to actually finishing them. Especially since I’m currently reading through various works of Bataille and starting to feel like I’d either have to accept that I won’t fully comprehend what’s going on in them, or I will never manage to finish reading his stuff at all.

What Sontag had to say about Artaud rings true about plenty of authors – be it Comte de Lautréamont or Maurice Blanchot. In our current climate it’s easier to hear things about them, then to actually hear them – their books are not only hard to get in modern bookshops, but also getting a proper translation might be challenging (if we’re talking about obscure authors such as Lautréamont, not Nietzsche in whose case the sheer amount of available translations is a problem, not lack of them). On a side note: it’s easier to find books about Borges in bookshops all around me, then his writings.

Anyway, Sontag packs a lot of topics in a very short paragraph of her essay. She says, for example, that:

Unknown outside a small circle of admirers ten years ago, Artaud is a classic today. He is an example of a willed classic-an author whom the culture attempts to assimilate but who remains profoundly indigestible. 

And it’s an interesting sentiment. This indigestible quality of some authors seems to be precisely the factor that still separates certain ideas from the mainstream thought and popular culture. Artaud or Bataille remain resistant to pop-cultural appropriation we’ve seen happening with Nietzsche or Baudrillard – it’s hard to trap them in a cage of regurgitated aphorisms (”And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you”, and others, ad nauseam) or misunderstandings and misconceptions (as in the case of simulacra/simulation and The Matrix – beautifully summarized by Baudrillard himself as: “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce”).

However, even thought it might find certain things hard to digest, the pop culture (The Mainstream, understood as "what’s acceptable”) never stops in its attempts to consume and regurgitate things that seem dangerous to its existence –– because, it seems, that’s the only approach to preventing its own internal explosion that it knows. I know, it might seem like a juvenile and oh-my-god-how-edgy thought, but at the same time it’s an interesting phenomenon that might prove to be a handy guide in predicting what’s going to be acceptable and treated as normal by the society (or media) in years to come.

Philip K. Dick summarized this cycle beautifully in “Valis”, where he said:

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

It’s a beautiful, visceral description of a snake eating its own tail, a cycle that never ends – and of war that’s never going to be won. However, it feels  refreshing to consider whether approaching this problem with a dualistic mindset (even describing it with words such as “the Empire” or “a virus”), isn’t what actually creates this particular problem of an endless loop of attempts of appropriation and regurgitation. Fighting the Empire is what forces it to actually make an effort. 

On the other hand, Sontag says: 

One use of literary respectability in our time and an important part of the complex career of literary modernism-is to make acceptable an outrageous, essentially forbidding author, who becomes a classic on the basis of the many interesting things to be said about the work that scarcely convey (perhaps even conceal) the real nature of the work itself, which may be, among other things, extremely boring or morally monstrous or terribly painful to read. 

It feels like an interesting case to think about – how the names of such authors as Artaud or Bataille live in our culture mostly thanks to things said about their work by other people. People who had more luck in “fighting the Empire” (thus becoming a part of the mainstream, being widely known and, consequently, discarded as mad or boring), and so gained literary respectability/made careers, that allowed them to spread the words of long forgotten visionaries – creating “classics” that everyone knows but nobody reads. It’s like creating a virus that infects a virus: passing on a thought that needs to spend time in other minds in order to bloom. Because even though Bataille or Artaud had dreams of fighting the Empire (be it through revolutionary thinking or a shift towards existence-without-a-project, embracing the void), their influence needed time to infect other minds –– and precisely because their writing is extremely hard to internalize in its whole, it essentially acts like infection. Like an unwanted influence that the mind constantly feels –– and can’t shake off, even though it tries. And so their thoughts still don’t constitute what’s normal (they can’t). They’re still on the sidelines – and here’s a beautiful paradox: thanks to being outside the mainstream, it feels like their influence might only become stronger with time. Because even though they’re not widely read, they’re not, and won’t be, forgotten.

As to the hardship of actually reading them: maybe it’s their degree of introspection that makes them extremely hard to approach with a clear mind and good intentions – to read them is to accept you’re not going to spend time in a pleasurable company of friends, but rather rolling in thorns that somebody laid in from of himself precisely in order to not be approached, read or understood. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s only a desperate cry for someone to finally understand, and that – being visceral and gut-wrenching as it turns out to be (at least in case of Bataille) – makes it only worse.

As Sontag wraps it up:

Certain authors be­come literary or intellectual classics because they are not read, being in some intrinsic way unreadable. Sade, Artaud, and Wilhelm Reich belong in this company: authors who were jailed or locked up in insane asylums because they were screaming, because they were out of control; immoderate, obsessed, strident authors who repeat themselves endlessly, who are rewarding to quote and read bits of, but who overpower and exhaust if read in large quanti­ties.

And that seems to be the crucial part: reading them feels like watching them being consumed, eaten alive, by thoughts they couldn’t control – hence the endless repetitions, entire unreadable chapters of their books or lack of focus mixed with heuristics based on knowledge that’s never explained (as if – locked within the author, whereas the whole point was to let it get out, making the whole ordeal of writing a book ultimately a failure). What’s interesting, though, is that maybe precisely this tiresome obsessiveness of Sade, Artaud or Bataille, make them so hard to be appropriated by pop culture in their original form – as if “the Empire” needed other’s people interpretation of their works in order to consume and regurgitate them in an easily digestible format. 

It’s not like it never happened before: when taken to an extreme, the Empire needed Nazis to help it with Nietzsche, and when Nazis failed (because after the War his thinking became more widely understood than ever before), it eventually used Hollywood to preach that he was nothing more than: “a chauvinist pig, who was in love with his sister.”

let’s try

Even though I’ve been reading it for months, I’m still not done with “Journey to the End of the Night”. Yet I recently stumbled upon a quote from Céline that’s supposed to be somewhere in this book – somehow it was even more gut-wrenching then what I’ve already found by page 100. 

He says:

“One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort… You’re good and sick of hearing yourself talk… you abridge… You give up… For thirty years you’ve been talking… You don’t care about being right anymore. (…) From that time on you’re content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere.“

Yes, even though he’s writing about experiences of soldiers, things I’ll hopefully never have to experience myself (and I feel ashamed to even mention this in relation to myself), then there’s always this weird aspect of good art – that it transcends time and context, that you can find something for yourself, about yourself, even in things that weren’t meant to be even remotely related to your own personal experience. 

And this quote rang true. It’s exactly what I’ve seen happening with my mind lately. This silence and apathy – feelings of loss, this gaping void that looks in my direction and turns any movement or thought, beyond whatever’s needed for bare sustenance, into a tiresome chore. It feels like it’s time to stare back. 

Let’s make an effort, then, and try to find a path that’s leading somewhere – anywhere, but away from this damn nothingness.

God, it feels so weird to actually write anything again.