turbine

March 10, 2010

"Faulkner, never one to do things halfway, made extravagant use of standard modes of reentry in New Orleans, not merely geographical and perhaps sexual modes, not merely alcohol, but also a regular repertory of disguises. In the Vieux Carre he made appearances as a wounded veteran with swagger stick and a bogus steel plate in his head, a hard drinking pre-hippie vagrant Left-Bank type –and wrote Mosquitoes, a not very good novel. It took the ultimate reentry, the return –he had to go home- to write The Sound and the Fury. Even then, he had to “be” a farmer on the side. Later he made the grandest Southern reentry of all, as a Virginia horseman."

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Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos, discussing what he called reentry: the difficulty we face in returning to ordinary reality after transcendent experiences. That transcendence is not sustainable is one of the catastrophes of human consciousness: one evolutionary function of the mind is to attend with heightened awareness to what is novel while codifying our reactions to it so it no longer remains so but becomes, rather, rote, unconscious. This aids in survival, but diminishes all experiences over time so that no joy, no lust, no drug, no thrill remains as vivid as when first experienced.

(Note: this, too, involves the machinery of memory; whether and how memories of an event are made tells us as much as our perceptions do of how we experienced it).

This is a problem for us all, and the awkwardness of moving between euphoria, transformation, and joy and the tedium of reality, with its traffic, gas pains, and wrinkled shirts explains why popular media usually chooses one or the other realm and stays there. Percy catalogs with special amusement, however, some of the methods artists in particular must use to achieve transcendence —abstraction from immanent, banal reality— and then navigate their return from it. The entire section recalls Kierkegaard’s discussion of the aesthete’s reliance on rotation and repetition in lieu of deeper metaphysical or moral commitment, which is fitting.

It’s also quite funny to think of Faulkner in such terms. See here for an illustration of the transcendence-reentry problems facing Kafka and the casual music listener.

(via mills)

1:48pm | URL: http://tumblr.com/ZlJibyQC8yw

(Notes: 42)