To describe myself as a pessimist and an elitist is, today, an act of radical repudiation and risks misunderstanding and even hostility from those who, first, accept mere potted definitions of these words rather than the dynamics that underlie their definition, and second, those who conceive it as a rejection of, even an insult to, their own praxis both as artists and as individual agents in the world. We still live under a mythologized conception of Enlightenment, in which our belief in reason’s ability to dominate the world, manipulating and using that world as instrumentation towards our own ends, self-satisfaction, and self-preservation, is accepted as an act of faith. The pessimist says that this stance is impossible, unsustainable, and indeed has been proven mistaken again and again in the years since the French Revolution. As reason, science, and administration have progressed, the culture and those individuals who make it, who live in it, have become more and more barbaric. No one with access to a newspaper that reports on events outside of the first-world urban enclaves of Europe, Asia, and North America (those first-world enclaves that have bestowed upon and encourage this barbarism in other enclaves, though the barbarity of these first-world enclaves is just as evident, however subsumed under the veneer of an administrative and entertainment class they may be) can deny this. But in saying I am a pessimist, I repudiate the idea that pessimism is a deterministic stance, because I am convinced that the catastrophe has already occurred: the twenty-first century is the first post-catastrophic century of the modern era; my pessimism has already been confirmed; the post-catastrophic landscape is the urban landscape in which I live today, from which I feel alienated, dispossessed, in which I feel foreign; it is not the post-catastrophic landscape of the Hollywood film or the genre novel; reality has outstripped imagination; there is the post-catastrophic Mel Gibson of the Mad Max films and the post-catastrophic Mel Gibson of the gossip columns; it is the second that is real, the first that is a disposable diversion. The idea that each culture has its own provisional set of aesthetic standards — that these, in excluding some so-called artistic work and including other so-called artistic work, are necessarily by dictionary definition elitist — is a radical repudiation of the democratic and egalitarian efforts to turn everyone into an artist (or to insist that everyone is born an artist, and that all one needs is “training” — a word that has amusing connotations to anyone potty-training a young child or housebreaking a dog — and the opportunity to express). These efforts turn the definition of art and artistic activity itself into mere vague and abstract nothingness. If everything is art, nothing is. The idea of aesthetic experience itself — one of the two avenues to anything even resembling redemption or salvation — has been so cleansed of its danger, so reduced to mere diversion, that one can’t speak of it. The discussion of such experience has been criminalized as a threat to the comfort of the consumer culture. To point to a work and to say “This is not art” is, as I said above, an invitation to ridicule and marginalization. (The ancillary action — to point to a work and to say “This is art,” a statement which assumes that there are other cultural products which, in fact, are not art — is an invitation to similar dismissal.) It is not that anyone will argue with me when I call myself a pessimist or elitist. In the tolerant culture, that would be rude. The tolerant culture will insist upon silence.

Every culture has had its work of eudaemonics — some of them have had several. Marcus Aurelius, Gracian, more recently Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodor Adorno provided a few. These latter two provide eudaemonics for a modern catastrophic age, but some individuals, especially those who have come to accept the epiphanies that reveal the truth of both pessimism and elitism, need their own internal guides to happiness. It is not a paradox to say that one can find happiness, even joy and ecstasy, in traversing the post-catastrophic landscape through a lifetime. But it is also true that a post-catastrophic eudaemonics will of necessity be radically different than those which came before. It must be constructed from the ground up, for the catastrophe has levelled the culture. Aesthetic creation and experience has its place in this eudaemonics as well. The human animal is made of a mixture of the urge to create and the urge to destroy, though these urges are not equal, the latter far outstripping the former in some individual cases. But there are no saints either. In a post-catastrophic landscape, a eudaemonics of aesthetic experience, of compassion, of resignation — of those three qualities which are the themes of the third and fourth movements of Schopenhauer’s great symphonic philosophical work — is more important and urgent than ever if one is not to become buried in the despair that accompanies a recognition of the post-catastrophic world. But the fact is that most twenty-first century men and women do not need a eudaemonics; they remain deterministic optimists, faithful to the race and the world, and to reason and administrative instrumentality. Their heads remain buried in the sweet-smelling artificial fertilizer of the Culture Industry, which feeds their amour-propre. They are voluntarily blind, and eternally happy.

The bitterness of Tay-Sachs disease and similar syndromes lies in its distillation of human existence. An infant with these syndromes is born quite normally and enters the world to recognize, make, and manipulate it: she begins to recognize light and dark, color; can begin to distinguish between the voices of her parents, those of others, and her own; though no small or gross motor skills have yet developed, she reaches for hands and can grasp. As the infant grows older, she might also learn that she can move things on her own. But before long, the progress of the disease takes its toll, and one by one these abilities fade: the eyes fail, the ears fail, her movements become uncontrollable, and eventually she slips away, just as she can begin to express love and need and exist as an individual self. This happens, usually, within three years’ time, but having watched both of my parents die over the past few years myself, I can see that this is mere concentration of the condition of existence. Visiting a father or a mother in a hospice, one sees the progression. One day they rise from the bed no more; they slowly lose the ability to see or hear or speak or express clearly; and one day, as the doctors say, they are not “there” any more. (For both the infant and the parent, the care is “palliative,” so that they may not suffer more, we imagine, than we ourselves ordinarily are capable of suffering.)

This occurs whether three or eighty-three. The sadness that attaches to the young life is that it is so new, and the door shuts just as it opens. It attests also to the truth of Pozzo’s realization, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” and of Vladimir’s conclusion built upon Pozzo’s truth, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.” We may find in this the invitation to compassion and love, but only if we accept this truth, if we imbue our art with it or remember it every single day.

“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.”

Bearing the humbling injunction from Arthur Schopenhauer above in mind, I recently attempted once again a sympathetic, open-minded reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and like my attempts to read Nietzsche sympathetically in the past, I failed once again. In some circles (but not in mine; I don’t have a circle), Nietzsche is the contemporary philosopher par excellence, esteemed for his style, his rhetoric, his polemic power; for me, ass though I may be, I find little sympathy for any of the three. There may be many reasons for this. No English translation of any of Nietzsche’s work sounds like anything but an English translation from a foreign language; if this were untrue of any of the translations I’ve come across (and I’ve tried three different translations of BT), I might blame the translator, but there may be something in Nietzsche’s thought itself which renders it so unaccommodating to my ears. The fetishization of the Dionysiac spirit, and of pre-Platonic Greece itself, is profoundly unconvincing to me (as is Bataille’s obsession with ritual and rite); again, this may be because by nature I am more sympathetic to the Apollonian spirit, but I am not at all sure that this is true. All that heightened rhetoric, all those exclamation points! Reading Nietzsche I can’t help but feel subjected to a loud never-ending harangue from a soapbox, punctuated with a loud, forced laughter and unhelpful references to abstractions like an Übermensch or an eternal recurrence (the concept of the latter, especially, is unpleasant). I have my suspicions as to why Nietzsche is one of the most popular and certainly most influential philosophers of the modern age, but perhaps these are best saved for another time.

I do not require that a philosopher be systematic. Nietzsche certainly is not. Neither, despite all of the secondary literature defining his system, is Schopenhauer, and he admits as much in the very first preface to the very first edition of The World as Will and Representation. But reading Schopenhauer I feel rather differently, as if in a quiet conversation in a dimly-lit study equipped with all the bourgeois pleasures of the mind and body — a roaring fireplace, a carafe of brandy, quiet talk, ironic laughter, as outside a snowstorm rages in the night. Schopenhauer’s manner convinces me as much as his insight; I am happier to admit his inconsistencies, as he himself admits he has them, especially when it comes to women and sex; as Schopenhauer said of Kant, great minds must be allowed to make occasional mistakes with impunity. For me it does not ameliorate the force of his thought or his writing.

I will be fifty in two months’ time, and perhaps I value these bourgeois pleasures more than I ever have: it is night outside, after all, and there is a fierce blizzard blowing. And I am perhaps less interested in popularity or community than ever before. I doubt that any sacrifices I might have to make to be popular or clubbable, whether it’s within a small circle or a large public arena, would justify the returns, quite small as I can imagine them in the larger scheme of things. I can see no justifiable or significant recompense to the exertion to be popular, or at least more widely read. I do not believe, like Nietzsche does (sometimes; sometimes he doesn’t; it depends on which of his aphorisms you quote, and that’s a game I’m not interested in playing, for I don’t have the time), that a culture or a civilization might somehow be recreated that reflects the characteristics of a society that would value tragedy, through revalorizing the Dionysian spirit or what-have-you, and I don’t have the desire for propagandizing those values within my portfolio as a writer.

When it comes to whatever I may write about drama or theatre, especially as it exists now in the country of my birth, I find myself to be more disconnected than ever before, no matter the blowsy and illusory “connections” that things like the blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook pretend to provide. I suppose I have a reluctance to be absorbed into the corporatized digital world that these represent. The mad desperate craze for connection, for accessibility, for popularity, for community, I find profoundly foreign and hostile to my nature as a writer and as a person, especially in an art form like theatre. And yet it is this nature which must be the source for my writings about and for the theatre and drama. This places me outside, which is where I suppose I prefer to be. “A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time,” Kenneth Tynan wrote in the foreword to his 1967 book Tynan Right and Left. “A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.” In both Word Made Flesh and in my writings about erotic tragedy, I have written about what is not happening. I make no pretense that I am, QED, a great critic. But Tynan suggests there is some value to it, and I am content to rest with that.

And besides — it is unfair to write about the dramatists and theatremakers in America without the opportunities to see and become more deeply acquainted with their work than is possible for me now. In acknowledging this, I trust that my readers will understand that from now on Superfluities Redux will be less about theatre and drama and more about other things (theatre and drama will inevitably be engaged on occasion as well, though, as I conceive it, rarely). I write for no community, but for you, if you would like to read it; no harm done at all if you would not and go elsewhere; I will be happy to sit alone with you in that quiet bourgeois den and speak quietly about those obscure, quiet things that matter to me and just may matter to you as well. We may even talk a little about that storm outside, for it is certainly spectacular. Together we can talk away the hours, sharing our resignation, until the blizzard finally slows and ceases and the endless night is peaceful once more.

I’d very much like to thank those who braved the 25-degree temperature to join Margo Jefferson, Tom Sellar, Randy Gener, Andy Horwitz, and myself for the panel discussion on criticism at the Public Theater yesterday. It is always a delight to exchange viewpoints, not only with fellow panelists but also those who took the time to introduce themselves to me after the program. I was grateful to make your acquaintance.

And a note regarding my post last Friday: One of the audience members at the panel yesterday pointed out that some American dramatists are indeed writing about the Iraq and Afghanistan war experiences on the battlefield and on the home front; some of these plays are collected in Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays, an anthology of dramas by American and British dramatists that was issued by the Northwestern University Press last March. Edited by Karen Malpede, Michael Messina, and Bob Shuman, the volume features plays by Naomi Wallace, David Hare, and Lydia Stryk and includes an introduction by journalist Chris Hedges. I’m pleased to be able to take note of it.

I’d like to wish regular readers of Superfluities Redux a very happy 2012, and offer them my thanks for continuing to visit the site through 2011.

I will take a brief pause before resuming posts in January, but want to offer you a new feature in the meantime. If your Twitter, Facebook, or RSS feeds are so full that you occasionally miss new postings here, you can now have new posts to Superfluities Redux sent to your email in-box as they’re published. It’s simple enough to do; either visit the new “Subscribe” page here, or enter your email address below and click on the “Subscribe” button. Once confirmed, you’ll begin to receive e-mail notifications of new posts:

Once again, a happy new year to all, and I look forward to hearing from you in January.