The Meaning of Meaning: “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain”

The title comes from an essay by Thomas DeQuincy, one of the great writers of the 19^th century.

For those not familiar with the word palimpsest

1. writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased
2.  something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface <Canada … is a palimpsest, an overlay of classes and generations. — Margaret Atwood> <too short a time to get to know the palimpsest of Genevan societies, let alone those of Switzerland — George Steiner>

Our synapses are palimpsests as our our memories, our feelings, and our attempts at systematic rationality. We are all, as well, tissues of quotations.

Here are a few sets of words that I have put together into collage/palimpsest/commentary.

These voices inhabit me, whisper to me in ways that “sinduce” me (the word is from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake). May they tempt you and encourage you to create connections across authors, sentences, and syntax. Here you find quotes of quotes of quotes. What is originality? When are our words ours? Why? How?

What is an essay, a poem, a critique?

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Great stories happen to those who can tell them. - Ira Glass, US writer and storyteller

We can shoot for something higher than happiness. David Brooks

What distinguishes the essay from most of the writing that occurs within this system isn’t the presumption that your private story is of interest to strangers. The difference is that the essayist’s experiments aren’t safe. Risk is implicit from the minute you decide to write “an essay” rather than something casual, fragmentary, impromptu. The sheer act of carefully crafting a story raises the stakes. And the rigors of craft— the demands of form, the solitary sustained engagement with twenty-six letters and some punctuation marks— have the terrible power to reveal where you’ve been lying to yourself and what you haven’t properly thought through. The rigors of craft give you substance. And then, instead of sharing with a closed circle of friends or with a community safely known to be like-minded, you submit the finished written thing to an audience of readers who may or may not be sympathetic.  Jonathan Franzen. The Best American Essays 2016.

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information— a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s.

Marjorie Perloff Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

Henry James has a wonderful phrase in one of his letters. Chiding Sarah Orne Jewett for writing a historical novel, he says that novels should deal with “the palpable present-intimate.” Detail provides that “palpable intimacy.”  Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities).

As I looked around the popular culture I kept finding the same messages everywhere: You are special. Trust yourself. Be true to yourself. Movies from Pixar and Disney are constantly telling children how wonderful they are. Commencement speeches are larded with the same clichés: Follow your passion. Don’t accept limits. Chart your own course. You have a responsibility to do   great things because you are so great. This is the gospel of self-trust. As Ellen DeGeneres put it in a 2009 commencement address, “My advice to you is to be true to yourself and everything will be fine.” Celebrity chef Mario Batali advised graduates to follow “your own truth, expressed consistently by you.” Anna Quindlen urged another audience to have the courage to “honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and, yes, your soul by listening to its clean clear voice instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.” In her mega-selling book Eat, Pray, Love (I am the only man ever to finish this book), Elizabeth Gilbert wrote that God manifests himself through “my own voice from within my own self…. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are.” 6 I began looking at the way we raise our children and found signs of this moral shift. For example, the early Girl Scout handbooks preached an ethic of self-sacrifice and self-effacement. The chief obstacle to happiness, the handbook exhorted, comes from the overeager desire to have people think about you. By 1980, as James Davison Hunter has pointed out, the tone was very different. You Make the Difference: The Handbook for Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts was telling girls to pay more attention to themselves: “How can you get more in touch with you? What are you feeling?… Every option available to you through Senior Scouting can, in some way, help you to a better understanding of yourself…. Put yourself in the ‘center stage’ of your thoughts to gain perspective on your own ways of feeling, thinking and acting.”  Brooks, David. The Road to Character  

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.  Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities)

This is the way humility leads to wisdom. Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.  Brooks, David.  The Road to Character  

“The critic’s function is to interpret every work of literature in the light of all the literature he knows, to keep constantly struggling to understand what literature as a whole is all about.” Frye’s term “function” puts you in mind of Matthew Arnold’s authoritative 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in which Arnold concedes that “the critical power is of lower rank than the creative,” but “the elements with which the creative power works are ideas.” The best critics supply those ideas, which in turn help forge what Arnold dubs “the moment,” the perceptual milieu, “the intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself.” The artist’s daemon rises and thrives only “when criticism has done its work” of generating “a current of true and fresh ideas.” Cleanth Brooks, channeling Arnold in 1951, was more succinct: “Healthy criticism and healthy creation do tend to go hand in hand.” In a very real sense, literature doesn’t fully live until criticism completes it. William Giraldi 

People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from “crooked timber”— from Immanuel Kant’s famous line, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  Brooks, David. The Road to Character

Summer in the mind.

God opens his other eye:

two moons in the lake. 

Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

As Thomas Merton wrote, “Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.” Brooks, David The Road to Character

The pressure and purported mortal seriousness of the discourse could be felt in areas far exceeding the narrow philosophical worlds of its origins, as it was adopted by entrepreneurs of ideas for their own small worlds.  Greif, Mark The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America.

People didn’t brag about their college affiliations or their vacation spots with little stickers on the rear windows of their cars. There was stronger social sanction against (as they would have put it) blowing your own trumpet, getting above yourself, being too big for your britches.  Brooks, David. The Road to Character

Death gives birth to the first question— Why?— and kills all the answers. And how remarkable, that this first question, the word we utter as small children when we first realize that life will be taken away from us, does not change, really, in depth or tone or mode, throughout our lives. It is our first and last question, uttered with the same incomprehension, grief, rage, and fear at sixty as at six. Why do people die? Since people die, why do they live? What is the point of a life?

 I thought of Walter Benjamin’s argument, in his essay “The Storyteller,” that classic storytelling is structured around death. It is, as it were, the fire at which listeners warm their hands. Death provides the storyteller’s authority. It is death, says Benjamin, that makes a story transmissible.  Wood, James The Nearest Thing to Life (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities)

Culture in the sense of art can be avant-garde, while culture as a way of life is mostly a matter of custom.  Eagleton, Terry. Culture

In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography. You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that “to draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.” Berger is saying two things, at least. First, that just as the artist takes pains— and many hours— to examine that tree, so the person who looks hard at the drawing, or reads a description of a tree on the page, learns how to take pains, too; learns how to change seeing into looking. Second, Berger seems to argue that every great drawing of a tree has a relation to every previous great drawing of a tree, since artists learn by both looking at the world and by looking at what other artists have done with the world.  Wood, James (2015-04-28). The Nearest Thing to Life (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities.

Wells suggested that they simply saw the relationship between art and life differently: “To you literature, like painting, is an end, to me literature, like architecture, is a means, it has a use”. The distinction was one James passionately refused to acknowledge: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process”. Alicia Rix. Times Literary Supplement

“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves,” George Eliot wrote.  Brooks, David. The Road to Character

Charles Taylor has called “the culture of authenticity.” This mindset is based on the romantic idea that each of us has a Golden Figure in the core of our self. There is an innately good True Self, which can be trusted, consulted, and gotten in touch with. Your personal feelings are the best guide for what is right and wrong. In this ethos, the self is to be trusted, not doubted. Your desires are like inner oracles for what is right and true. You know you are doing the right thing when you feel good inside. The valid rules of life are those you make or accept for yourself and that feel right to you. “Our moral salvation,” Taylor writes, describing this culture, “comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” It is important to stay true to that pure inner voice and not follow the conformities of a corrupting world. As Taylor puts it, “There is a certain way of being that is my way. I am called to live my life in this way and not in imitation of anyone else’s…. If I am not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for me.” Brooks, David. The Road to Character

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say,” says E. M. Forster, and this is probably true of many of us. We don’t know our views until someone asks us. Writing is a way of asking ourselves.  Edmundson, Mark. Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

The self is less likely to be seen as the seat of the soul, or as the repository of some transcendent spirit. Instead, the self is a vessel of human capital. It is a series of talents to be cultivated efficiently and prudently. The self is defined by its tasks and accomplishments. The self is about talent, not character. The meritocracy liberates enormous energies, and ranks people in ways good and bad. But it also has a subtle effect on character, culture, and values. Any hypercompetitive system built upon merit is going to encourage people to think a lot about themselves and the cultivation of their own skills. Work becomes the defining feature of a life, especially as you begin to get social invitations because you happen to inhabit a certain job. Subtly, softly, but pervasively, this system instills a certain utilitarian calculus in us all. The meritocracy subtly encourages an instrumental ethos in which each occasion— a party, a dinner— and each acquaintance becomes an opportunity to advance your status and professional life project. People are more likely to think in commercial categories— to speak about opportunity costs, scalability, human capital, cost-benefit analysis, even when it comes to how they spend their private time.  Brooks, David. The Road to Character.

But habitual self cannot write to save its life. Habitual self is good for a grocery list, a laundry list, a note to the mechanic, or a note of thanks for the spotted birthday tie or the fruit-scented candle. But habitual self cannot write. It is worldly, pragmatic, geared toward the fulfillment of desires, and fundamentally boring— at least to others. At base, habitual self is the Darwinian side of us that wants to survive and thrive and procreate. When habitual self wants to read, it reads Grisham; when it wants to write, it sounds like a machine. It sounds the way your computer would sound if it had a voice of its own. I think sitting down to write is about getting loose from habitual self. If you’re going to tap into what’s most creative inside you, you’ve got to find a way to outwit the pressures of the ordinary. Think of habitual self as a barrier that blocks you from getting where you want to go as a writer. It’s not that massive wall that most of us have to smash through to get ourselves going the first time and make ourselves able to say we’ve begun as writers. It’s a smaller, less imposing but still potent version of that wall, and it rises up to some degree every day. There are two ways to deal with that wall I think. You can go over it and you can go under it. Most of the people I see and work with every day are professors; most of them write. Edmundson, Mark. Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters.

“Neither concern yourself about consistency,” he once said. “The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process . .  . If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as the two blades of scissors meet.”  Jonathan Franzen. Emerson quotes in The Best American Essays 2016 Charles Woodbury’s quote of Emerson quoted by Robert Atwan…..mise en abyme

The meritocracy liberates enormous energies, and ranks people in ways good and bad. But it also has a subtle effect on character, culture, and values. Any hypercompetitive system built upon merit is going to encourage people to think a lot about themselves and the cultivation of their own skills. Work becomes the defining feature of a life, especially as you begin to get social invitations because you happen to inhabit a certain job. Subtly, softly, but pervasively, this system instills a certain utilitarian calculus in us all. The meritocracy subtly encourages an instrumental ethos in which each occasion— a party, a dinner— and each acquaintance becomes an opportunity to advance your status and professional life project. People are more likely to think in commercial categories— to speak about opportunity costs, scalability, human capital, cost-benefit analysis, even when it comes to how they spend their private time. The meaning of the word “character” changes. It is used less to describe traits like selflessness,  generosity, self-sacrifice, and other qualities that sometimes make worldly success less likely. It is instead used to describe traits like self-control, grit, resilience, and tenacity, qualities that make worldly success more likely. The meritocratic system wants you to be big about yourself— to puff yourself, to be completely sure of yourself, to believe that you deserve a lot and to get what you think you deserve (so long as it is good). The meritocracy wants you to assert and advertise yourself. It wants you to display and exaggerate your achievements. The achievement machine rewards you if you can demonstrate superiority— if with a thousand little gestures, conversational types, and styles of dress you can demonstrate that you are a bit smarter, hipper, more accomplished, sophisticated, famous, plugged in, and fashion-forward than the people around you. It encourages narrowing. It encourages you to become a shrewd animal. The shrewd animal has streamlined his inner humanity to make his ascent more aerodynamic. He carefully manages his time and his emotional commitments. Things once done in a poetic frame of mind, such as going to college, meeting a potential lover, or bonding with an employer, are now done in a more professional frame of mind. Is this person, opportunity, or experience of use to me? There just isn’t time to get carried away by love and passion. There is a cost to making a soul-deep commitment to one mission or one love. If you commit to one big thing you will close off options toward other big things. You will be plagued by a Fear of Missing Out. The shift from the Little Me culture to the Big Me culture was not illegitimate, but it went too far.  Brooks, David The Road to Character

Wallace Stevens’s persona in the marvelous poem “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” Edmundson, Mark (2016-08-30). Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

But I’ll add something to the mix, a thesis if you like. As much praise as writing has gotten through the years, it has still not gotten enough. We are still not entirely aware of what writing, good writing, can do for individuals and for the collective. We have at our hands’ reach a skill that is also a spiritual discipline. Writing is a meditation; writing is as close as some of us can come to prayer; writing is a way of being, righteously, in the world. And this is something that everyone ought to know.  Edmundson, Mark. Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters.

 Universities imagine themselves as microcosms, but they’re only shards; their notions of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, aren’t even wan reflections of the real diversity in the world. That’s true of most private communities. The only truly public sphere is the public sphere itself.

Sontag’s mind was alive and alert and large enough, and she was interested in almost everything. (She once described herself as having ASD— attention surplus disorder.)  Edmundson, Mark. Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters.

We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we’d never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.  Jonathan Franzen. The Best American Essays 2016.

The ill-educated, toiling provincial has replaced the working class as the revolutionary force in society: not the sans culottes so much as the sans cool.

The new problems that pragmatism needs to fix are manifested in the new anger against elites. The social basis of that anger is spatial, educational and moral. It is the regions rebelling against the giant agglomerations: Northern England versus London and the South, the heartlands versus the coasts. It is the less educated rebelling against the more educated. It is the struggling “just-about-managing” rebelling against the feckless. The ill-educated, toiling provincial has replaced the working class as the revolutionary force in society: not the sans culottes so much as the sans cool. So what are these people angry about? Partly their gripes are economic. The fortunes of the new elite have risen, often undeservedly, while those of the sans cool have deteriorated. Anger is tinged with fear: for the sans cool economic security is collapsing. But anger and fear go beyond the economic: people see that the members of the educated southern/coastal elite are intermarrying (“assortative mating”) and embracing a globalized identity, while asserting their moral superiority by encouraging their favoured priority groups to elevate characteristics such as ethnicity and sexual orientation into exclusive “community” identities. The sans cool understand that both the withdrawal by the elite and the emergence of new favoured groups apparently creaming off benefits weaken their claim to help, just as their need for support is increasing. Effectively – and pragmatically – addressing these three concerns of the sans cool is the challenge facing our leaders.

But to measure a life in unread books seems about right to me. All the experiences we will never have, places we will never go, people we will never meet. Even so, just to hedge my bets, I’ve asked my family to bury me with a decent library. Orner, Peter. Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live.

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