Said Chris Williamson on the new episode of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast, titled "Why Life Feels So Dull All The Time (and how to fix it)."
He's talking with Robert Greene, who has a new book called "The Law of the Sublime" (commission earned). Maybe he's got the answer to our problem of colorlessness.
Williamson prompts: "You talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It's the gods fighting that's made the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that?"
Greene responds: "I would love it if we would. I'm down. If you want to make a pagan commune somewhere, I'll join. I would because I've always felt myself to be pagan. I've always, when I see, when I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyrian [artifacts], I see some of those massive sculptures of like half human, half tiger, lions, whoa, I feel like it's expressing something so powerful in me. I've always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of like the, in the Aborigines, their little paintings that they make of, you know, the waves inside of animals, something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct."
Does that sound deep to you... or air-headed? It gets my "deeply (the word!)" tag, which doesn't collect deep things. It's, as the parenthetical indicates, for some modern-day usage of the word, explained in 2014, in "Deeply... it's such a poser word."
In the new podcast, Greene says "deeply" twice — "deeply, deeply." He also says "so powerful" twice. The giant sculptures and the squiggly-line paintings are making him feel "so powerful." Oh, I'm being unfair. Those things are making him feel "something so powerful in me." It's rather sexual. He's been penetrated with the power of lions and other animals.
Let me connect this discussion to something that's been going in in the comments to yesterday's post, "I hate travel. Just the slog of it. I like sleeping in my own bed. Said Grace Coddington...."
In the comments, Big Mike said: "Neither Althouse nor Grace Coddington will ever experience:the wonder of entering the Lion Gate of Mycenae and thinking that 3000 years ago Agamemnon rode his chariot out of this gate to lead the Greek city-states against Troy. Or toured the Palace of Knossos and gazed into the oldest throne room [in] Europe. Or stood between the front paws of the Sphinx."
Lions, lions, everywhere. They're so important to men seeking spiritual depth.
I'd love to see the great sculptural lions of the world.
And yet... as I answered Big Mike in the comments to yesterday's post:
And you will never experience how silly it is, to me, that your appreciation of history and art has so much to do with your personal body standing somewhere. Between the paws!
I'm more concerned with the great potential that if I were to go to see the Sphinx, I'd be stuck seeing it festooned with tourists trying to get off on standing between the paws. And then I'd have to try to feel the right feelings so the purpose of my slog of a trip would be fulfilled. But I'd know that was phony and I'd prioritize truth-telling and experience the awe of how could I be so stupid.
I mean, really, how does that "entering... and thinking" work? You get to the place and you think the appropriate thoughts. So you're there and you think about how, long ago, Agamemnon was also there. But what you are doing is the furthest thing from what he was doing. What would he think of you? Are you somehow identifying with him and feeling augmented with heroism? But you're just a piddling tourist on a dumb bucket-list trip. If you want to get high *imagining* yourself in grand historical events, why don't you read history books?
This idea of "the wonder" is such bullshit. It's one thing to be a wide-eyed child on Christmas morning... when you are younger than 7. A grown adult going on a planned trip to a famous destination is not going to experience anything that deserves to be called "the wonder." If you tell me you really do, I'm only going to think you are bullshitting.
If you really have the capacity for wonder, it should be in play whenever you notice a bumblebee on a flower.
The commenter Aggie dropped in to say:
I think these experiences really are different for men. Men tend to build things, to have a determination in construct, in achievement. To stand in a place where something profound and magnificent happened brings not a sense of wonder, like a child, but of respectful awe. 'Something great happened here'. When I saw the pyramids, it was from a horse, and that was awe. I didn't see any tourists, although they were there. Same when I saw a bunch of shot up Zeros on an old airstrip in Papua as I was scouting gravel. Or walking into some of Europe's cathedrals. There's nothing stupid or childish about those feelings, and the emotional connection is only made stronger by the history you have absorbed prior to going there.
If you were walking into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusulem, would you truly feel no sense of wonder or awe, and not even for a moment reflect on what ended there, and what started, at the same moment, and what it has meant for the world, from that very spot? I can't imagine thinking that it would be an insignificant experience, a mundane sweaty exercise with too many people around. They would be there, but it would always be incidental - even though I hate crowds and tours."
My response:
It's the stress on being there that spoils it for me. I could feel deeper feelings — things that might make you want to use the words "awe" or "wonder" — but not on schedule. Not after being imprisoned in a metal tube for hours and confused by signage and time changes and forced to rely on a hotel bed and restaurant food. Not with a crowd of people who are talking out loud about their own planned experience of awe. I would prefer to be alone with a book, perhaps an audiobook while I walk in the woods near my home. The experience is in the mind, so tell me the value of where the body is.
Posts
41 comments:
I've always appreciated this Anthony Bourdain quote: "The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent".
Recycled comment:
"Lazarus said...
People are looking for something "real" and "authentic." "Being there" is seen as a way of cutting through the second-hand stereotypes and phoniness. The emphasis on being there can be mocked, but so can the idea that being at home with one's books and imagination will give one all that one needs or wants. You look up from your books, and you are still in your kitchen or study, and you wonder when you are going to see or touch something "real" and outside of the routine and expected and banal."
The pagan appeal is to the irrational intuitive in us. The romantic longings for a world not contained by simple rules of geometry and their cousins in physics, and of ever-more-confining laws of human making.
But the real problem many are enountering was spoken above that, IMO:
"if the reality is, ... you scroll easily forgettable largely gray homogenous slop on a daily basis and your body is made out of everything you put in your mouth and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears you think about what that consumption pattern is like you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amygdala on a daily basis"
You have to get out. You have to make it new. You can't read the same things everyone else is reading. It doesn't take a huge amount of variety to break the dullness pattern -- just enough to wake you up.
Well, I scroll through "gray homogenous slop" daily, but ignore most of it for the bits of hidden gems therein. Like AI cats inserted into old kung fu-type movies. And AI cats cooking. And AI Morpheus singing Making My Way Downtown (Vanessa Carlton) to Trinity in a car (which is from some movie or other). And reels of wonderful people rescuing animals. Etc.
90% of most entertainment is slop anyway, at least to every individual.
"I've always appreciated this Anthony Bourdain quote: "The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent""
Do you appreciate that Bourdain was a man on a journey to suicide and that the obligation to travel continually is something that wore him down?
From Grok: "He spent roughly 250 days a year on the road. People who worked closely with him described the schedule as grueling: he poured everything into the shoots and then retreated to his room, often appearing “absolutely exhausted.” One source said it was as if he gave everything to the work and had “nothing, zero, left for himself afterwards.” In texts to his estranged wife (who remained a confidant) near the end, he wrote that he hated his fans, hated being famous, hated his job, and felt lonely and uncertain. He had previously called the job “the best in the world” while acknowledging it came at a cost, and he expected to die while working rather than retire. The constant travel and performance demands amplified existing depression, anxiety, and isolation rather than simply “burning him out” in isolation from his other issues. "
"And reels of wonderful people rescuing animals."
How do we know they are wonderful? Maybe they put the animals into the position where they need rescue?
I had to travel to Heidelberg to attend a molecular biology meeting in the early 90s. During my free time I walked the streets of the old section of the city. My mother’s side of the family was from Germany and it struck me that my ancestors may have walked these very streets - that feeling alone was worth the trip. Similarly, when I had to travel to Cambridge I was in awe of the history of the place. I hate the process of traveling (flying in particular) but find it worthwhile to visit places that have historical significance.
I am intrigued by paganism since it was the original religion of my European ancestors. My father’s side of the family comes from Ukraine and it’s fascinating to me that Ukrainian paganism has similarities to Hinduism. As an atheist I can find pleasure in reading pagan stories that I fail to find in judeo-christian lore.
Life is always colorless--if you make yourself color blind and can't see the wonder around you. It doesn't always come to you--but if you are alert, you'll see it from time to time.
“Not with a crowd of people who are talking out loud about their own planned experience of awe. I would prefer to be alone with a book . . . “
Shorter Althouse: Hell is other people.
I still appreciate the quote. Travel can be hard. The fortitude to undergo it is a measure of how much you value where you're going.
A friend and I would drive to the Canadian Rockies every summer for backpacking trips. We discussed once how we could get there in a few hours if we flew, rather than the nonstop 30 hour (or whatever it was) drive. We both felt that the extended journey to get there was part of the experience. Flying would have made it feel like we were going to Middleton.
I’m interested in the Althouse Theorem of Colorlessness and see this article as of a piece with the discussion that started with the death of Peter Max and has continued intermittently. The tag “color” is so anodyne as tags go, yet covers a multitude of spectrums and I intend to mine it as I try to quantify if color represented in culture grows brighter in boom times and turns dark or grey during economic malaise in a cyclical way that can be quantified.
But I really only have the headline contrasting with “gray slop” to seize on in this post. Like lions, we conservatives are at our absolute best (“yarak” is what falconers call that state) when pouncing.
Wherever you go, there you are. Whenever you get there, it's hard to see anything but the crowds of other tourists. The world becomes ever more homogenized, but still, there is some sense to getting out of the house and experiencing something different. Think of yourself as an archeologist trying to dig up a bit of nature or the past underneath all the asphalt.
Colorless beige light switches dream of being wiped by Julianne Moore.
A few thoughts…
For Althouse, I know you had much to say about Notre Dame after the fire. If I recall, you did not go to it. However, if you had, would your interest be in the architecture or the awe of what the building meant?
As for color, depth, and aboriginal drawings; I’ve seen the Olowalu Petroglyphs in Maui. They are essentially aboriginal drawings. They are not what I would call deep or colorful. They are equivalent to graffiti without any depth or color. Indeed, if you told me what is preserved there is an actual hoax played on tourists, I would believe it more than the story portrayed by the historical landmark.
Assyrians… the people and land that has been erased by modern day activists, so they can promote a notion that Palestine existed before Israel.
On travel, the wife and I now do it mostly by cruising, because it is a short drive to the pier, and the rest is everything that isn’t like being crammed in an aluminum tube. You can still get to far away places and often nobody is in a hurry to get to those places. Meanwhile, you can walk around, enjoy the scenery and other people. Eat, drink, dance, laugh, listen, observe and let someone else deal with the stress of getting you there. It isn’t for everyone, but we will take it over air travel when we can.
" You look up from your books, and you are still in your kitchen or study, and you wonder when you are going to see or touch something "real" and outside of the routine and expected and banal.""
Wally in "My Dinner with Andre": ""I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean... I mean, isn't there just as much 'reality' to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way. So that if you're--if your perceptions--I mean, if your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to Mount Everest, and sort of absurd! Because, I mean, it's just--I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on Seventh Avenue, but I mean..."
For Althouse, I know you had much to say about Notre Dame after the fire. If I recall, you did not go to it."
I've been there more than once. Been to Chartres too. And St. Peter's in Rome. Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's in London. Lots of other big architecture, and I like it a lot. Would love to do it again, but just don't like the getting-there part and don't like the crowds. Plus, I was robbed in Rome. I don't like the crime.
"However, if you had, would your interest be in the architecture or the awe of what the building meant?"
I don't like to plan to be "awed." I see what I see and I see what happens. I used to be looking for things to draw and I'd stand around doing a lot of drawing, which involved great interest in juxtapositions and irony. Humor. I try to keep mentally and visually awake and to find things spontaneously.
"... if you told me what is preserved there is an actual hoax played on tourists, I would believe it more than the story portrayed by the historical landmark."
I think a lot of tourism is a con, a kind of hoax. I like to notice and resist, not play along as a good little victim.
"Assyrians… the people and land that has been erased by modern day activists, so they can promote a notion that Palestine existed before Israel."
I like the "Fall of Civilizations" podcast. Here's the Assyria episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr4FiT0ks7I
We have two directions to go:
1. The position of your body is irrelevant. The physical object in situ is unimportant and unnecessary. We connect with past culture by reading or looking at photographs, understanding is of the mind not the geography.
2. There is a value in physically observing the place of past cultures. The landscape and objects give us context and scale. An emotional connection occurs in humans when a cave painting or amphitheater is viewed in the same personal way that it was seen by the people you are trying to understand.
I am with 2. When I stand at Gettysburg I feel I can hear the ghosts of the past speaking.
“This idea of "the wonder" is such bullshit. … A grown adult going on a planned trip to a famous destination is not going to experience anything that deserves to be called "the wonder." If you tell me you really do, I'm only going to think you are bullshitting.”
How to say you don’t get it without admitting you really don’t get. You make me think of a fellow I had a technical argument with many, many years ago. He admitted that the standard method fo coordinating parallel processes did not always work. I was working on a doctorate in computer science and had learned about a technique called semaphores (so, yeah, we are talking a half century ago, or thereabouts) and told him there was something else that worked better. And the guy totally rounded on me, and loudly insisted that the method he knew, which he admitted didn’t always work right, was the only possible method for coordinating parallel processes.
My point being that, like you regarding travel, he just couldn’t comprehend that there’s a different way to look at things. So he got angry that someone could possibly have a different frame of reference.
For the record, I do read history, avidly. And a fair amount of historical fiction (though I’m apt to put the book down and not come back to it if it gets the actual history wrong per the history books). At 80, with my enlarged (but thankfully benign) prostate I am, alas, a piddler.
If Agamemnon saw me at 5’ 11” (down from 6’ even due to age) he’d think I was tall and he’d wonder why I was clean shaven, where my sword was, why I wasn’t wearing armor, why I didn’t speak Greek, and what was that stick I was putting against my shoulder. Then he’d wonder no more as a copper jacketed .308 Winchester spitzer round ripped through his armor.
Anyway, after I chased the Greeks back to their ships, and after telling Odysseus to sail straight home and don’t stop on any islands (which he would not understand because, as I said earlier, I don’t speak modern Greek, much less archaic Greek, and the earliest a language would exist similar enough to the English you and I speak so that a third party could understand it would be about 2400 years in the future, give or take). Then a quick nod to Hector and Priam (assuming I got to Troy before Achilles killed the former), ogle Helen’s boobies (in the translation I read all those years ago, as Troy was burning Menelaus came looking for Helen with his sword unsheathed and murder on his mind, but Helen exposed her breasts to him and they were, ah, reconciled). Then off to the Island of Lesbos to see if I can’t turn Sappho straight, or at least bi. (I’d have to wait about 600 years for her to be born.)
Maybe my imagination helps me appreciate the sights I see. ;-)
Also for the record, ordinary tourists are not allowed anywhere close to the Sphinx or inside the Great Pyramid, whether or not they piddle. Wife and I paid extra for a tour led by a real Egyptologist. But we like to learn, even at our age, and genuine Egyptologists have things to teach us.
For all of that my objection is the deplorable streak in liberal women that makes them so utterly convinced that the way they see things is the one right way and anyone with a different perspective is wrong, wrong, WRONG! Well, there really are other ways to look at travel, and it’s vicissitudes, as nd some tolerance of that fact would be welcome.
On our recent trip to France, we had to make a last minute change to be closer to the Marseille train station. Cancelled Menton, home port of the French Navy. Google AI said Aubagne was 20 minutes away, had good history and some charm. NO. Great Best Western there, though. The two Ukrainian women who ran the rooftop bar/restaurant were great. (We were there
Oct 3 so the riots had started). One woman paid 460 Euros monthly for her son’s school. They didn’t feed him enough food. The teachers often didn’t even show up, so they sent the students home. My wife just told me a 14 year old in Aubagne shot two people, though maybe they will be OK. Then we went to Lille and Paris, Boul. St. Germain.
Good to be home.
@Josephbleau, I’ve been to Gettysburg too. I never felt the sensation you describe, but it must be pretty strong because people do report seeing real ghosts. I have heard it called “the most haunted place in America.” However my own imagination, fertile as it is, never extended to seeing long dead soldiers.
BTW, thanks for the tag.
The experience is in the mind, so tell me the value of where the body is.
You went to a mountain in Colorado to get married. Surely you have some appreciation for where the body is.
As for the stress you feel while traveling, that is internal to you. It is a perfectly valid reason for you to not travel, but don't assume that the same stress is interfering with other people enjoying the world around them.
"The color, I think, ...has been drained out of life..."
Rick Beato thinks so. Youtube video from 4 days ago.
"In this episode, I discuss the trend of disappearing color in all aspects of modern society, from movies and television, to automobiles, to music, to culture itself."
“However my own imagination, fertile as it is, never extended to seeing long dead soldiers.”
I knew when I said that that people would say I’m psychotic. When I go to Hadrians wall I imagine how the people were and feel a connection, when I go to see the Bayeux tapestry the same, I don’t see ghosts, I see poetry, poetry and human connection.
I got to go hiking in the Northern Cascades yesterday. I've been in the area six years and had never seen the larches, which turn golden in the fall, but only grow in the higher elevations.
With my cancer treatments I am limited in what I can hike, and the seven miles, 2200 feet elevation gain was at my limit. Unfortunately that is within the limits of many other people, and this weekend was peak larch, so at times it was a bit like hiking in the mall on Black Friday. But the crowd thinned out as you went, and the views were stunning.
As for the larches, their colors were muted by a bit of fresh snow and in many cases by frost that accumulated on the trees. But the snow really made the evergreens pop, so it was not a bad trade-off.
As for the crowds, they didn't much bother me. Other people, just like me, enjoying life, just like me. Most were wonderful. A few were inconsiderate.
My wife is much more bothered by crowds. She is in better shape, and would prefer something more challenging that would leave the crowds behind. She only chose this so we could hike something together.
If life feels dull during the Trump presidency, you're not paying attention. Like him or hate him, he is undeniably not "dull" and has changed things more than any other president I can think of.
And I get that this guy is not talking about politics. But there is so very much in the world that is changing so fast--some of it spectacular and wonderful and some of it not so much. But it's not "dull." Guy needs a vacation.
@Josephbleau, no I don’t think you’re psychotic, and I don’t think I said that. The Gettysburg battlefield has been very well preserved and the battle written about enough, that it isn’t hard to imagine the events of those days.
Some things are tourist traps and other things arent. And some things should be seen - but once is enough. The Civil war battlefields were great. And the same was true of many NYC/DC places. But would I go again? Doubtful.
If we went back to Paris, the Eiffel tower is out. And the same is true of someother things - like Napoleons Tomb.
The pyramids? Sure. Greece and Rome. Yep.
The color has not been drained out of life. Many people are just allowing themselves to succumb to mental inferiority living in the sympathetic nervous system caused by the auto-conjured pressure to maintain a civilized facade. Jung identified this mass insanity over a century ago and is the central topic of the Unabomber's manifesto.
Chill out. Tune in. Enjoy the ride.
No such thing as “one size fits all.” No such thing as just one right perspective or point of view. Acting as if there is? Now, *that’s* some bullshitting, too.
“A grown adult going on a planned trip to a famous destination is not going to experience anything that deserves to be called "the wonder.””
Yes. You don’t plan to experience true wonder, it comes unexpectedly.
“…..Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
–Annie Dillard, ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ (1974).
I don’t have much interest in the artifacts of modern mythologies, like sepulchers and sphinxes. I would like to see this place, though:
“After initially being radiocarbon dated to older than 47 ka, it remained an intriguing anomaly until a new project began in 2013. Then the real revelation came: a large series of dates using the uranium-series method1 showed unequivocally that this subterranean structure was made over 174,000 years ago. Instantly, Bruniquel became one of the most important Neanderthal sites ever found. Meticulous study found complexity at every level. Over 400 stalagmites had been snapped off, and from among the broken pieces Neanderthals had selected wide, straight mid-portions, obviously with particular sizes in mind. By aligning their ‘speleofacts’, they formed two rings on the chamber floor. The largest is more than 6 by 4m (6.6 by 4.4yd), and contains two small speleofact piles, with another two heaps placed externally at either end. A second smaller, but more circular, ring is set to one side. While the heaps of broken columns recall a Classical ruin, closer inspection shows this isn’t a random jumble, but a built construction. Each ring is made from up to four layers, some sections buttressed with vertical pieces, and one zone features five elongated speleofacts stood up side by side. The intricacy goes beyond support and into architecture. Tucked in behind the five ‘sentinels’ is a doubly poised creation: a flat plate balanced on a cylinder, itself holding up other pieces.”
"“A grown adult going on a planned trip to a famous destination is not going to experience anything that deserves to be called "the wonder.””
The Grand Canyon. I was in my late 50's when I first saw it. It's a wonder.
I do think the lack of color in the real world (i.e., McDonald's) is because of phones (screens) -- we expect to find wonder in the screens and not our environs, unless we push ourselves to go to places (Hey, travel!) that are either beautiful or profound or both.
I think Robert Greene might be the best interviewee of anyone living. Even when I don't agree with anything he says, his interviews are a delight to listen to.
Who are other top interviewees?
(I get a very strong sense of wonder being in certain places or near certain objects, but I'm not a fan of the same artifacts as Greene. In the British museum, the Egyptian sculpture gallery, the Franks Casket, and the Parthenon pieces do it for me.)
“The Grand Canyon. I was in my late 50's when I first saw it. It's a wonder.”
Wonder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder:
“ Lieutenant Joseph Ives famously wrote in his 1861 official report that the Grand Canyon was a completely "profitless locality" and a useless obstacle.
Because the canyon could not be easily farmed, mined, or crossed, early American explorers viewed it as a massive headache rather than a natural wonder. It wasn't until John Wesley Powell's expedition and the later push for tourism that the public began to see it as a treasure instead of a barrier.”
Kids today are color neutral. Stuck behind a school bus dropping off middle and high schoolers, one sees boys and girls almost exclusively dressed in black or some dark shade of gray. A joyless looking lot, all of them staring at their screens the minute their feet touch the ground.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.