Parerga,
Paralipomena,
and Avleptimata
1. Author’s Note, Page 10. Zeno’s Paradox.
At some point between 490 and 430 BC, the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea issued a book called Attacks. The text, lost to time, was said to have included 40 paradoxes undermining the theory of multiplicity and giving support to the philosophical arguments of Zeno’s teacher Parmenides, whose principal theory was that of oneness or monism.
Monism held that reality is an eternal, single, unmoving, round thing, or “One,” and that the appearance of the various—distinct beings or objects, cheese platters, clocks, row boats, and husbands, which is to say, anything that is born or built, has parts, falls in or out of love with you, or is non-spherical—is an illusion.
Through the writings of his intellectual opponents—Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, and Simplicius—nine of Zeno’s paradoxes survive, one of which is the Dichotomy Paradox (related as a parable in Droll Tales’ Author’s Note) wherein Zeno demonstrates, logically, that according to the common sense doctrine of multiplicity, motion is impossible.
By predicating his thought experiment on the acceptance of pluralism and showing how it leads to an absurd conclusion, Zeno makes the more broad assertion that common sense may deceive us, that what we perceive as “reality” may not, in fact, encompass the entirety of what is real.
“The motive of my book,” Plato has Zeno say in his book Parmenides, “was to protect Parmenides against ridicule by showing that the hypothesis of the existence of the many involved greater absurdities than the hypothesis of the one.”
In summary, Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox presents two fundamental problems of logic:
1. If every distance can be divided in half before the goal can be reached, then we are left with infinite distances making the goal impossible.
2. If every distance can be divided in half, neither is there a possible first distance to complete, for any first distance would itself first have to be divided in half—infinitely.
Thus, Zeno proves that travel over any finite distance can neither be completed nor begun, and so all motion must be an illusion. Only the eternal is possible.
In more or less romantic terms: A kiss can neither begin nor end.
2. Medusa’s Garden, Page 18. Ophelia’s Death: “Ophelia bleeding from the wrists inside the pool into which she’d fallen”
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the priest presiding over Ophelia’s funeral describes her death as “doubtful.” According to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, Ophelia, while out picking flowers, grabbed hold of a willow branch which then broke, casting her body into the river accidentally where, “incapable of her own distress,” she made no attempt to save herself. So was it an accident or a suicide?
Gertrude was not eyewitness to the death, nor was the priest, nor the gravediggers who discuss its “doubtful” circumstances. Acknowledging her suicide would bring shame upon her family and keep her from being buried in consecrated ground. So just as Ophelia was objectified in life, defined by others in terms of her relationship to others—she was a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, but never her own person—the tale of her death is described as yet another tale of her passivity. Ophelia did not choose death, they say, it chose her. Object even to her own feelings, she fell victim this time to “her own distress.” Even water, a mere substance without subjectivity dominates Ophelia, like everything else. By denying her suicide, the others deny her agency, and relate a story in which the world made of her a thing.
The narrator’s idea of a fountain then, in which Ophelia would appear as a statue bleeding water from the wrists in perpetuity recalls Ophelia’s passive death as a decisive act through the unambiguous symbolism (slit wrists) of suicide. Is this vision of Ophelia, not drowned but felled by her own hand, a mistake or a choice? The fountain is “doubtful.”
3. Medusa’s Garden, Page 20: Rodin’s The Kiss, “alone in the wind”
The adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca who were damned to the Second Circle of Hell, according to Dante, were the subject of Rodin’s The Kiss. The Kiss was originally part of his The Gates of Hell, a large door decorated with the various sinners described in Dante’s Inferno. Because this version of Paolo and Francesca ended up appearing more rapturous than pain-filled, however, and thus conflicted in mood with the depictions of suffering that surrounding it, Rodin took it out, replacing it with a different version of the two.
The replacement scene called, Fugit Amor—“Fugitive Love” or “Fleeting Love”—shows a man clinging backwards to a woman who, floating on her stomach with her eyes cast down, seemingly isolated in her thoughts, faces away from her lover while looking as if she is trying to escape into the air. Were it not known that this scene was an illustration of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca being blown about by hell’s wind, the air in which the two are suspended might more readily be perceived as water.
The earlier vignette which Rodin removed from the Gates, he later expanded into its own piece. These lovers, whose kiss is never consummated (they are forever about to kiss), critics would eventually call, The Kiss. According to some sources, Rodin called it Francesca Da Rimini. Is this a mistake of scholarship? True or not, the “mistake” is provocative. Why would Rodin name this sculpture not for both the woman and the man joined there in sin, but the woman alone? Is he suggesting that while Francesca is held in Paolo’s arms, she is still on some level alone? Or is it that she, Francesca, is the work’s true subject with Paolo her object? An aspect of the scandal surrounding the sculpture when it was first unveiled was the subtle physical cues suggesting that it is Francesca who is seducing Paolo in the scene, the woman who is the aggressor.
In Dante’s Inferno, Paolo and Francesca are together being cast about in the wind of Hell’s Second Circle. Instead of separating them, God has incoporated their union in their punishment. The lovers, together, cannot rest. In Rodin’s replacement vignette, Fugit Amor, the two are thus depicted together, but their body language suggests they are suffering separately, physically close but isolated in their minds, isolated in their desire as well as their anguish. In both sculptures, The Kiss, which occurs before their death and banishment to the second circle, and Fugit Amor, which shows them after death enduring their immortal punishment, the action is not consummated. In The Kiss, the kiss is approached; in Fugit Amor, he reaches for her as she reaches ahead.
The story of Paolo and Francesca remains one of the more provocative tales found in the Inferno because they represent more than adultery, the underlying problem of romantic love. Romantic love is amoral, an ideal that civilization demands we betray through the moral compromise of marriage—corrupting nature, covering her with clothes, we marry love and reason through a noble lie. Pure love is destructive, a flame that consumes itself, while marriage is a lamp. It is the bright of fire made sustainable and it is good. But who has ever said, “Let’s gather round the lamp now and watch its steady light”?
The plight of Paolo and Francesca resonates because it is our plight, too, whether we do or don’t give in to the kiss. Desire is a pain we seek to remediate through union, but union, if accomplished, kills desire. In becoming one with our object we lose the other and thus ourselves—one cannot long for oneself. Thus love is lost in its accomplishment. Either way, before and after, we find ourselves alone. Dante’s exquisite punishment is to give the lovers exactly what they want, the thing that is in life impossible, and even if it were possible would be excruciating: an eternity of desire, an eternity of reaching.
4. Medusa’s Garden, Page 25: Schrodinger’s Cat
Schrodinger’s Cat was a thought experiment proposed by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger in a letter exchange with Albert Einstein about his EPR paper. It was made to illustrate the paradox that arises when following the dominant Copenhagen Interpretation of the collapse of the wave function (first posed by Neils Bohr) to its logical conclusion.
The Copenhagen Interpretation holds that a quantum particle does not exist definitively in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at once. Each time it is measured (The Measurement Problem notes that measurement alters the measured—
the observer alters the observed, so to speak), the particle is forced into a different observable state. This explains why a quantum particle behaves erratically and its state can only be predicted probabilistically, as a wave, giving rise to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which holds that both a particle’s position and its velocity cannot be known simultaneously. Owing to this principle, a popular joke has it that Heisenberg’s gravestone reads, “Here lies Heisenberg, somewhere.”
Simply stated, the Copenhagen Interpretation, the dominant view in 1935, purports that a quantum system remains in a “superposition” (many states at once) until it interacts with, or is observed by the external world, when it then collapses into one or another definable states—a paradox that reminds one of Zeno.
In Schrodinger’s thought experiment, a cat is placed inside of a box with a vial of cyanide than can be spilled depending on the action of a quantum particle whose state is undetermined until it is measured. Thus the cat, before the box is opened, exists in a superposition as well, meaning it is both alive and dead at the same time. Schrodinger drew up this scenario not in support of the possibility of superpositions, but as a critique of it. He offers this absurd paradoxical image of a live and dead cat, as did Zeno when he tried similarly to refute pluralism with his paradox of motion.
To the irritation of physicists, quantum mechanics is often appropriated by generalists and has been used to support all sorts of personally favored convictions about the world. Quantum physics, with its theories of “entanglement” has become, for example, a proof often cited by mystics, with books like Quantum Affirmations by Monte Farber, being sold alongside healing crystals and tarot cards in shops where you may have your fortune read or, in physicist terms, have your particles predicted.
Mr. Farber, a psychic and author of 40 best-selling astrology books and divination systems that have sold over three million copies in eighteen languages, now and then accepts private clients. When Mr. Farber reads your cards, he begins by asking you to formulate a question, and then confesses or asserts, “If you know your question, you know your answer.” I didn’t know mine, I told him, as the immortal spirit of his deceased cat Zane slunk by his wife, artist and creative partner Amy Zerner, at her easel in the next room. This riddle of Mr. Farber’s brings us back to the Measurement Problem, now on a human scale. Thus hard science opens the door to hard wonder.
The various “misapprehensions” and “misapplications” of the Schrodinger equation, while a bête noir of academic physicists, are illuminating in their own way. Mistakes are human, and one’s misapprehensions of phenomena—be they objects or ideas—offer a window into one’s subjective experience. (Being human, being mortal, limits our point of view. Only God, Dante reminds us in his grand unifying theory, The Divine Comedy, knows all. Though it’s worth noting that Dante, by virtue of describing God’s justice, purports to know what he says man can’t, committing in his authorship an act of sacrilege. Not all writers go to Hell, just the good ones). The many states, the many points of view comprising the superposition that is “reality,” like the wave function, collapses into the singular, an individual, observed, measured particle—a story told. “Mistakes” need not be discarded or derided but understood as valid, personal, interpretations of our shared world, as absurd or as sensible as the Copenhagen view allows.
6. Medusa’s Garden. Page 30:
“’See the Moon?’ Debbie asked.
I nodded.
‘It Hates us.’”
This is an allusion to Donald Barthelme’s 1966 story, “See The Moon?” in which the narrator is conducting “lunar hostility studies” as he seeks to discern meaning in the collected fragments of his observable life—souvenirs, phone calls, letters, precise measurements of various phenomena, ages, newspaper clippings, recollections of the night sky viewed from his screened-in porch, recollections of a face—which could be called asserting one’s humanity. He is a scientist. Thus we all are, reading objects as symbols, assembling God.
7. Medusa’s Garden, Page 35: “Schopenhauer’s Parable of the Porcupines”
Porcupine: (German) Stachelschweine
Hedgehogs: (German) Igel
Today the “parable of the porcupines” is more commonly known as “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” even though hedgehogs and porcupines are entirely different animals. Neither the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (who created this parable in his 1851 book, Parerga and Paralipomena, Greek for “Appendices and Omissions”) nor the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (who popularized Schopenhauer’s parable when he quoted it as a means to discuss the problems of intimacy in a footnote to his 1921 essay “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”), referred to a hedgehog (igel) but, very specifically, to a porcupine (stachelschweine). Freud even kept a bronze stachelschweine on his desk.
I’m not sure exactly when or why the hedgehog replaced the porcupine as the parable grew in popularity, but my guess is that the hedgehog is cuter. Currently, it is one of the most popular exotic pets in the world with numerous “hedgehog influencer” accounts on Instagram. As of today #hedgehogsofinstragram has 1,288,441 posts which often feature the animal being cuddled, pet, dressed up in festive hats and posed adorably in warm, colorful, brightly lit interiors. By contrast, #porcupinesofinstagram has 3,535 posts, most of which show the dour and much larger animal alone in a colorless wild.
While the quills of hedgehogs do make them prickly, the quills of porcupines are much longer, sharper and dangerous, making them deadly—though the prey of tigers and lions, they have fought them and won. It is true that some do keep porcupines as pets, but so do some keep tigers. In 2003, a Harlem man was sharing his studio apartment with Ming, a 425-pound tiger. Police discovered the illegal pet after his owner had gone to the hospital to treat a very large and suspicious “dog bite.”
It’s worth noting that Freud, who’d popularized the “porcupine dilemma” did much to deny Schopenhauer’s influence on him, even claiming in an interview that he came to the philosopher very late in life, though in fact he’d cited him in numerous papers dating back to 1901. Why? Perhaps he wanted to claim ownership of an idea that he did not originate but merely repackaged.
In light of the evolution of what is today known as the “Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” I offer “The Porcupine’s Problem,” which is to have someone cuter or more popular, let’s say more easily grasped—which is to say, less prickly—take up your idea, simplify it for the masses, and pass it off as their own. Poor porcupine alone in the colorless wild, excluded from his very own dilemma.
8. The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein, Page 129. “It is the way it is the way it is the”
Before she found fame as godmother to the Lost Generation (and still a little bit after), Gertrude Stein’s “avant-garde” prose (heavy on the repetitions and light on punctuation) was often ridiculed by mainstream publishing outlets. In 1912, her 1,000 page novel The Making of Americans, was rejected by the London based publisher Alfred C. Fifield in a letter lampooning the work Ms. Stein had submitted:
Dear Madam,
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
The Making of Americans, published finally in 1966, long after her legend was launched, is a book few have read, but many collect, as Stein has become a symbol of an author more, revered than the work itself. Stein is easily recognizable; her visage has become a commonplace in the decoration of tote bags, bookmarks, and cafe murals meant to give a literary imprimatur.
She is the Zsa Zsa Gabor of 20th Century American letters, famous for being famous and for having famous friends who insist on her genius——a mantle inherited by Fran Lebowitz, whose books, if considerably more readable are also considerably less writable. Ms. Lebowitz’s well-publicized writer’s block took hold following the publication of two slim volumes of her collected magazine pieces, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies issued in 1978 and 1981. The block, she has told us in her many interviews, public talks, and filmed pronouncements, has lasted, as of today, nearly 40 years. Ms. Lebowitz’s compulsion not to write is matched only by Ms. Stein’s to repeat herself. Ms. Lebowitz is Ms. Lebowitz is Ms. Lebowitz.
Stein’s breakout novel, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, seen by some as a long defense of not wanting to revise and by others as a fantastic PR stunt, and popularly as a work of genius, could be described as a modernist memoir. Though narrated and supposedly penned by her companion Alice B. Toklas, it is written by Stein about Stein, and recounts stories of various artists and writers as they visit her Paris salon and agree that she is a genius. Ms. Toklas for her part, Stein’s partner and the character narrating the book (she is pictured standing in the background of a photo of Gertrude Stein in the book’s original cover), speaks frequently of the difficulty of living with a genius.
Say something often enough and it sticks. It was Walt Whitman after all, reviewing his own Leaves of Grass under a pen name, who crowned himself “the American bard,” inviting others to echo the sentiment. Ms. Stein did love repetition, and with her the echoes echoed. The Autobiography was a wild success, launching Stein on a lecture tour through the United States, which she chronicled in her next book Everybody’s Autobiography.
An heiress from California who’d expatriated to Paris where she began collecting early works by the most important artists of the century still unfolding, Stein’s talent some would say (her brother Leo among them, whom Gertrude claimed was just jealous), was exceeded only by her PR savvy. If one doubts the merits of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as a great work of art, it is undeniably a great work of art gossip. In it, Stein discusses her friendships with Hemingway, Picasso, and other famous visitors to her salon, like F. Scott Fitzgerald whose first novel This Side of Paradise had already made him a star. Whether you appreciate her writing or not, Stein was a charismatic and influential figure whose patronage, championing of younger artists and authors, and innovative writing style did much to shape what we think of as Modernism.
Indeed, Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, opens with an epigraph attributed to Stein who, older than he, had said to Ernest in casual conversation one day, “You are all a lost generation.” She’d first heard her mechanic say it to his younger assistant, but offered it anew to Ernest. While she spoke it as a rebuke, thinking of his generation’s dissoluteness, their wasted potential, it has come through history to be regarded more generously and ambiguously. While the lives of many of that generation were lost in the Great War, many of those who survived were lost in another way, dropped on the other side of paradise and left to remake the world.
The name stuck—“the lost generation.” As did Stein’s “genius.”
9. Aboard the Shehrazad, Page 196, ““‘Criticism for criticism’s sake,’ wrote Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance our reviewer gave two thumbs up, despite his feeling that the fourth chapter was ‘too minty.’”
Walter Pater’s actual line is “art for art’s sake.” Though he was not the first to say or write it, it became the unofficial slogan of the Aesthetic Movement when he published an essay including that line in his well-known 1873 book.
10. Exquisite Bachelor, Page 202.
Few people get stabbed at literary parties these days. Norman Mailer is out of fashion and many say for good reason. But one does miss this now old-fashioned idea of artists cutting (excuse the expression) bold romantic figures: Byron, being “mad and bad and dangerous to know,” after leaving a trail of romantic destruction behind him in England, marches off to fight for the Greeks and dies along the way. This is after he gathered with friends on the beach to burn the body of Shelley, who’d been drowned at sea. Did they snatch his heart from the fire and eat it to keep his spirit with them? Did Byron indeed ask to keep and measure Shelley’s skull? Many are the legends. Who can forget W. B. Yeats, passionate nerd, engaged in secret magick wars with rival poet Aleister Crowley for dominion over the occult group Order of the Golden Dawn (and legal rights to the club’s headquarters; Yeats’ signed lease ultimately trumped Crowley’s Egyptian costume and magical chanting.)
The myth of the artist shows artists living more intensely than we do, in danger of being driven mad by the passions that fuel their work, a wind that they might catch in their creative sail or be wrecked by. Artists, submitting to the gale, were once seen as martyrs to their work. Heroes, saints, madmen, warriors… We saw them not as mere “content creators,” but soldiers engaged in a fight for our souls.
In Europe between World War I and II, mid-way through the great age of artist manifestoes in France, which were frequently published on the front page of mainstream newspapers, Surrealism grew up. The movement was marked by clashes, public insults, excommunications, resignations, and of course more manifestos. In 1924, two rival surrealist manifestos were published by two rival surrealist groups. One was written by Andre Breton and the other Yvan Goll. The groups were openly competitive and, at one point, it is rumored, Breton and Goll came to blows.
While “formulaic” is today often uttered as an insult, the surrealists along with the latter day Oulipians (one of whose founders, the novelist Raymond Queneau, had studied mathematics) actively sought to discover formulas for the creation of not derivative but original art, little machines with instructions, practices you could repeat to produce, reliably, the unpredictable. A sound mathematical or artistic formula satisfies us with its elegance. What critics really mean when they deride a piece as formulaic, is not that formalism is bad, but that that particular formula was either flawed or the ingredients stale.
Classical poetic forms have their own mathematics—Shakespeare’s Iambic pentameter, Dante’s use of the number three, the sestina, the sonnet, etc. Raymond Roussel, a reluctant grandfather of the surrealists who repeatedly disavowed the group when they tried to claim him as one of their own, wrote a whole book on the odd creative techniques he’d invented to write his Impressions of Africa.
And there were many surrealist games. One of the more simple literary games, the game of definitions, instructs one person to write a question then fold the paper so that the question is not visible, and then hand it to one’s partner who then writes an original answer not having seen the question. The result: An original poem, a startling aphorism.
“What is love?
An octopus with one eye closed.”
One of the more well-known surrealist visual art games, Exquisite Corpse (in French: “cadavre exquison”), has each “player” draw a section, then fold the page so that only the bottom lines of their drawing are visible to the person next handed the paper, who is then invited to continue those lines into their new drawing, and so on, before the whole is revealed at the end.
Collage, of course, was a well-known surrealist technique. Max Ernst composed “collage novels;” his best known, Une Semaine de Bonté (“A Week of Kindness”) (1934) presented images without text. So have I collaged the surrealists in “Exquisite Bachelor,” using here some of their own translated words, hence the occasional appearance of quotes within quotes. Excerpts from Louis Aragon’s Treatise on Style are woven into the statements made by “Louis Aragon,” whose real life counterpart, over the course of 27 years, wrote a massive, impossible to categorize, two volume “novel” called Henri Matisse.
Part biography, part monograph, part autobiographical poem, but also none of these things, here is that book’s opening remarks:
Henri Matisse, Volume 1, by Louis Aragon.
“The door, or the window, opens onto the past, uneasily. Feathers and dust of all sorts, insects caught in their own threads, memories, old scribbles, letters with illegible signatures, every sort of repentance and regret, tattered dreams, forgotten fragrances, rooms where the light has gone out, a nameless something that curbs the spirit, every sort of happening, the wind of life, fade, the way everything blurs, the way fire itself flickers out, and there are no butterfly nets to catch words or the look of things, nothing is harder to hold than the music than once enraptured you, the illusion of words heard, lost, reinvented, with unintentional untruthfulness, and how can one retrace the thread of things said, or go backwards out of a swoon… the door, the door… everything is jamming it, and when it yields at last, when that cloud lifts, that dread, what will there be behind, what part of ourselves still there, what smoke? (For those who, once or many times, have experienced the blotting out of one’s world, it’s a pearl-grey smoke over everything, and nothing is left but one’s head and one’s pain…)
11. Veterans of Future Wars, Page 208.
The Veterans of Future Wars was a mock political organization founded in 1936 by college roommates Lewis Gorin Jr. and Urban Rushton among other Princeton University students who were aghast at the move to provide an early payout of the 1945 bonus promised to World War I Veterans in the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924. Incensed by how their taxes would be spent so profligately in the midst of the Great Depression—why should the young carry the old? (The ingratitude of youth would be wholly contemptible had the old not once been young and callow too)—and at what seemed to be America’s march toward another foreign war (World War II was on the horizon), endless foreign wars, the group protested by advocating, absurdly, for a similar early payout for themselves, the Veterans of Future Wars.
The movement swiftly gained national attention with unofficial chapters cropping up at universities all over the country. The fatalistically embittered and ironic anti-war sentiment resonated. Cornell’s engineering students launched the Future Munitions Workers, Rutgers’ journalism students formed Propagandists of Future Wars, The City College of New York’s journalism students created the Foreign Correspondents of Future Wars, and a women’s group at Bennington launched Future War Spinsters. The New York Herald Tribune declared the Veterans of Future Wars “the best and grimmest joke of 1936.”
Twenty years prior to the group’s formation, Princeton was the meeting ground of another famous pair, Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, though Fitzgerald, after spending more time writing humorous plays for the Triangle Club than studying, was in 1917 expelled. After, he enlisted in the army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in World War I. Fearful of dying before achieving anything of importance, it was on the off hours of his military training that he began writing This Side of Paradise, an autobiographical novel that drew heavily on his Princeton years. His friend, the future literary critic Edmund Wilson, declared it “one of the most illiterate books of any merit… full of English words misused with the most reckless abandon.” Published in 1920, it would usher in the jazz age, popularize the idea of the flapper, and make Fitzgerald a celebrity at 23 and a symbol of “youth in revolt.”
While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were close in age, when they met, Fitzgerald’s fame was at its peak while Hemingway was a comparatively little known author of short stories whom Fitzgerald decided to help by introducing him to his editor Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald was impressed by Hemingway’s much exaggerated war heroics (an ambulance driver in WWI, Hemingway was injured on his second drive out and spent the most of his service recuperating in a hospital before being sent home), while feeling himself sheepish as the war had ended before he “saw any action.”
By 1936, the year the Veterans of Future Wars published their satiric manifesto in response to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, among which Fitzgerald and Hemingway numbered, Fitzgerald’s fortunes had turned. The Great Gatsby had been a commercial and critical failure and, as a symbol of the fizzy jazz age, Fitzgerald’s cultural relevance had receded with it. As the once precocious Fitzgerald slipped into obscurity, Lewis Gorin Jr., the author of the Veterans of Foreign Wars manifesto, became famous overnight and, from his fame, obtained a book deal while still in college, making him even more precocious than the once precocious Fitzgerald.
In the same year that Gorin’s life rose up ahead of him, Fitzgerald’s essay, “The Crack-Up,” describing his personal and professional decline, was published in Esquire, which at least fetched a good fee. He needed the money by then to support his teenage daughter at boarding school and the hospital fees for his wife Zelda, who now lived in an asylum.
Hemingway, who had a habit of scorning all those who’d helped him (“Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up,” Fitzgerald observed in his journals), criticized Fitzgerald for publishing it. It looked weak, he said. Assessing his flagging and toxic friendship with Hemingway, Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook, “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.” Fitzgerald died a few years after that, in 1940, at the age of 44. In 1941, America entered World War II.
An excerpt from the 1936 Veterans of Future Wars manifesto:
WHEREAS it is inevitable that this country will be engaged in war within the next thirty years, and
WHEREAS it is by all accounts likely that every man of military age will have a part in this war,
WE, THEREFORE, demand that the Government make known its intention to pay an adjusted service compensation, sometimes called a bonus, of $1,000 to every male citizen between the ages of 18 and 36, said bonus to be payable the first of June, 1965. Furthermore, we believe a study of history demonstrates that it is customary to pay all bonuses before they are due. Therefore we demand immediate cash payment, plus three percent interest compounded annually and retroactively from the first of June, 1965, to the first of June, 1935. It is but common right that this bonus be paid now, for many will be killed or wounded in the next war, and hence they, the most deserving, will not otherwise get the full benefit of their country's gratitude.
12. Veterans of Future Wars, Page 209. “Lost, Greatest, Boomer, X.”
Ironically absent from Jacob’s summary of generations is The Silent Generation, which corresponds roughly to those born between 1928 and 1945. The term was coined in a 1951 Time magazine article:
“The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the "Silent Generation."
13. O Lost, Page 264, “’The cracks are how the light gets in.’ –Hemingway.”
This is an apocryphal statement posted often to Instagram and Pinterest boards offering inspiration in exchange of followers. It is most probably a combination of Leonard Cohen’s lyric “There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” from his 1992 song “Anthem,” and Ernest Hemingway’s famous passage from his 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms (which, without intending irony, a millennial friend of mine has tattooed on her arm):
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
17. O Lost, p. 280, “Theseus arching lithe oars in the abyss”
This is a line from Catullus’ Poem 64, in which the first century Roman neoteric retells, amid other linked tales, the myth of Theseus and Ariadne. Typically, when this myth is referred to, it is as “Theseus and the Minotaur,” that is, the hero against the monster, with Ariadne’s role treated as a detail. Catullus, though, focuses his retelling on the love that enables Theseus’ victory, that of Ariadne for Theseus who ultimately betrays her.
A brief overview: The Minotaur, King Minos’s bastard (his wife cheated on him with a bull and got pregnant), is imprisoned within a labyrinth created by Daedalus, Minos’s chief scientist. King Minos, as retribution for a previous wrong, has demanded that the king of Athens, Aegeus, send seven men and seven women to be sacrificed (eaten) to the Minotaur every year.
One year, amid the sacrificial group travels Aegeus’s son Theseus, who has vowed to slay the Minotaur and end Athens’ suffering. When the ship of sacrifices arrives on the shores of Crete, Princess Ariadne, King Minos’s daughter and half sister of the Minotaur, spots Theseus and immediately falls passionately in love.
Her love for Theseus, her “fides” (a Roman concept, one of the classical virtues as in “fidelity,” and an actual Roman figure of divinity, though Catullus uses “fides” somewhat iconoclastically in his highly personal love poems about his affair with a married woman), allows her to betray her family and country honorably, as fidelity to her love of Theseus constitutes a higher morality. She arms Theseus with a sword and thread to slay the minotaur and then to find his way out of the labyrinth, back to her, where they will escape, together. When his mission is complete, he promises, they will marry.
Theseus abandons her asleep on the shore. When she wakes to find herself alone, she is bereft, angry, ashamed, and frightened—she has lost her love but by helping him, by choosing him over her half brother, her father, her kingdom, she has lost her home and her self. Looking out at the empty sea, she weeps and curses Theseus, wanting him back, wanting him punished for his betrayal, which is to her more than personal. It is a betrayal of love, of fides, and so sets off within her a crisis of faith. She believed in a love that Theseus’s betrayal proved to be false. Powerless, confused, and in agony, she rages, praying that his family should suffer as she does. And they do.
Aegeus looks out from the cliff of Sounion waiting for a sign of Theseus. He had asked of his son that, should he be successful, he return with white sails raised in place of the black sail that typically accompanied the ship carrying the Athenian sacrifice. Triumphant now and forgetful of his promise, Theseus forgets to replace the sails, and his father, spotting the ship from the high cliff, throws himself off in despair.
Ariadne meanwhile, still weeping on the shore, rebounds with Dionysus, the god of winemaking, madness, and religious ecstasy. Who hasn’t, after all, gotten obscenely drunk in the wake of a horrible break up, that is, tried to replace the transcendence of love with the transcendence of booze? Dionysus falls in love with Ariadne; they marry and give birth to alcoholism, er, their son Oenopion (the mythic personification of wine, in English “wine drinker”), a common enough story.
Poem 64 is a departure for Catullus who was otherwise known for his small-scale confessional, vituperative, and sometimes humorous poetics (In poem 13 he invites someone to a dinner, but asks them to bring the dinner).
The Neoterics (or moderns) so called by Cicero, were a group of young poets who, eschewing the traditional themes of gods and heroes chose to focus instead on personal matters. Poem 64 is Catullus’s only epic. Twenty-five of his poems, notably, focus on his volatile relationship with the wealthy married woman, I mentioned before, whom he calls “Lesbia.” Over the course of these poems, he falls in love, she cheats, he hates her, he loves her more, she lies to him, she rejects him, he curses her, he insults her, he grieves her betrayal, he curses himself for ever loving her, he howls at the gods, he begs the gods that she might love him again, he begs them again that he might be released of loving, released of hating, released at last to simply go on.
Reading poem 64 in this context, one can see Ariadne, whose grief is at the center of this love epic, as a stand in for Catullus, who was heartbroken and shocked by his lover’s betrayal of their “fides.” Catullus was poor and powerless, a mere poet, next to his wealthy mistress “Lesbia” who, it is rumored, was based on a real life married aristocrat.
Yes, she was cheating on her husband, so how could he be surprised at her eventually cheating on him, a Reddit commenter might say. Or was the marriage itself a cheat upon the higher ideal of their love together, and so, while they were not married by law, they were bound together by a higher moral, an amoral ideal, which she betrayed? Catullus had abandoned the “real” world based on his faith in a transcendent one made by their shared feeling. Losing that, he was left with nothing but his poems, just as Ariadne was left with nothing but her cries, as Theseus went on happily, “arching lithe oars in the abyss.”
In Crete, Ariadne was sometimes referred to as Mistress of the Labyrinth. Robert Graves believes that in Crete Ariadne was worshipped as a goddess. What does it mean to be mistress of the maze? Not the creator of it, not the owner of it, nor the solver/navigator of it? Moreover, not the lady of the maze or its wife? But mistress, lover, loyal partner in passionate deceit, betrayed and betrayer, a faithless person of unshakable faith. What does it mean to worship an ambiguity?
Following his death, according to Homer, Ariadne’s father King Minos is made judge of the dead in the underworld. His post there wasn’t a punishment but an honor, as all the ancients wound up there. Heaven and hell are a later Christian idea. Because the ancient Greeks had the misfortune of being born before Christ, according to Dante, they cannot be promoted to paradise whatever their virtue, so in his Inferno we can assume we’ll find all of them, all of that world’s heroes and scoundrels, most of whom are both. Dante has King Minos standing at the entrance to the second circle, where he would have welcomed Paolo and Francesca and, presumably, his daughter.
The labyrinth is a metaphor for life—one must launch out on a mission, leave home, get lost, do battle, and find one’s way out. Maybe there are love affairs. Maybe there are monsters. Life is a dangerous puzzle with loss on the heels of gain, with loss woven into its very fabric, the thread Ariadne gives to Theseus. Unspooling it to help himself, he unspools her.
And you, heroes and heroines, return home successful, return home proud, leaving behind you a wake of compromises; you are an adult now, but your fathers are gone. Do you ever remember her? The face of Ariadne sleeping on the shore? Or is there instead now and then a cold feeling in your warm bed? A nightmare that wakes you, though you cannot recall with eyes open of what you were scared?
Older now you say, “I never remember my dreams.”