“At Bennington the self was a creation; the life was a kind of performance art.” Jonathan Lethem
“I don’t think we change much over time. I think we grow deeper into who it is we always were as artists” Jack Driscoll
“Hermeneutics is the Greek word for interpretation and it comes from the Greek god Hermes, the messenger god who brings language. But in philosophy it is a school that holds that human beings are interpretive meaning making creatures. We dwell in our meaning. There is always the question of what kind of meaning we want to make. And I don’t mean that in a spooky way. Clifford Geertz, one of the greatest anthropologists in the 20th century says ‘humans dwell in meaning the way that spiders dwell in webs.’ We make meanings and live in them. And the question of what kind of meaning we want to make is not a question that all the data in the world can decide for you and that’s not a question you can have a science about.” Jason Blakely
What did Soren Kierkegaard mean he said “life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards?”
I have found the concept and metaphor of the snapshot one of the precious few links between what we consider art and what we consider life. You will note from that one sentence for me the two are not one: I want to always be mindful of the made-up quality of all art that makes it not, say, brushing your teeth and going to work. (If you photograph or document either of these acts you are already entering the realm of art, of course, no matter how little is altered in your documentation - even if all you did was make one click on some device).
But a snapshot can be either from life or art: a person could create an unreal or fake snapshot: this is done quite a lot in movies or television when depicting periods of time where the specificity of the time is indispensable in some way or another. Sometimes in fictional works, in a classic example, the opening credits of the movie Norma Rae, the filmmakers will “cheat” and simply use the actual snapshots from the actor’s real life to depict the character the actor is portraying as was done with Sally Field in that movie. And, increasingly in our current moment, there is arduous and belabored construction of imagined settings to depict a particular time or place through devices like clothes, hairstyles, architectural settings, cultural environments and so on.
But whether the snapshot is taken directly from life or is utterly invented, people can and do look at a snapshot and are able to recognize something about personal experience or experience from distant and previous eras and generations.
Here are some snapshots from my own life for about every stage of my development in linear and durational time.
One most conspicuous feature is that I am basically wearing the same mode of clothing for close to forty-five years. I am pretty sure this is most unusual for any human being in our current epoch. There are these little differences in the design or style of the clothes due to changing silhouettes and design details on the lapels, or how much or little chest there is what kind of shoulder line there is - all terminology from the menswear world - but not very much. I had always wanted to have some kind of career in menswear but it was never to be given other, prior commitments.
October happens to be the month of my birthday and, in what seems to be perfect timing for my preferences of how to spend that time I will be attending a reunion of Interlochen Arts Academy.
I have often thought of that school and the immense, outsized effect it has had upon me. Rarely do I meet people who regard their high school experience with anything like the love and joy with which I confess was the case in my admittedly unusual biography. I often hear accounts of, for example, bullying, which I never experienced, or other kinds of grievances and complaints. There is an adage or homily that it is good if people’s earlier years are marked with suffering and strife since then there will sure to be compensatory happiness later on, when, in most people’s view, happiness is more needed or welcome since you are at least adult enough to enjoy it. (I am guessing here so bear with me - not about the adage but about people’s feelings)
While not going so far as to say my life is inverse proof of that belief, the immense personal loss that has entered my life since 2016 would appear to make such an adage truthful. I will never succumb to determinism or what I prefer to call “inevitablism” And of course there is also the ancient Jewish proverb, “for example is no proof”.
I am thankful I was free from a lot of these kinds of problems in my earliest years and even more thankful that I experienced a kind of flourishing. I have no idea what my life would have been like had I not been part of the family business and my parents had been, say schoolteachers, or even unemployed altogether. I only know my own life. Much like the hundreds of productions I wrote of in a previous post there are many hundreds of books I have read over the decades: I have had before me some of the greatest models of what one can achieve in prose.
I was born in 1967 which in my school of historical thought is the beginning of the long seventies which goes until roughly 1984 or so. Then there was this unicorn of a period when the Berlin Wall came down and we had a flirtation with a kind of utopianism and high optimism. I have said before and I will say again that one of the unique things about that period is the coexistence of two states that don’t usually or aren’t supposed to go together in such a strong sense of equal measure. There was immense creativity, innovation and ambition, fueled by the power and optimism unleashed by the positive defeat of the Totalitarian world in 1989 but this existed alongside some fateful mistakes and errors in the same period.
We are now living through the destruction of that era, largely inaugurated, in my view, by September 11th - which enabled those mistakes and errors I mentioned above to overtake all the good and dictate the conditions of our present.
In most respects the world for which those years prepared me and the world for which I trained and into which I became ensconced or absorbed is a world that is no longer. I have not really said this until this post but in many respects this entire podcast is a reaction to this situation: the situation of being literally taken away from a certain position and place in the world that I honestly, even if stupidly or naively, thought I would occupy until my own earthly death.
There is, to me, a truly extraordinary podcast that is the creation of Lili Anolik called Once Upon A Time At Bennington College which of course is about so much more than a single, if unusually cultured and sophisticated, college. It deals with particular periods of recent historical time, by which I mean, sections of the Post War 20th Century rather than, say, far older centuries, epochs or eras, Thus, when she covers Bennington College and Los Angeles of the early 1980s and some of the famous artists who came from that milieu like Jonathan Lethem, Jay McInerney, Donna Tart and Bret Easton Ellis (the latter who I favorably covered on our podcast) she is actually dealing with snapshots, though I could understand if she would not formulate it in this way.
That is, she is treating what is in reality, from the point of view of a single lifespan, a rather short period of time as if it were a far longer history, treating thirty years ago as if it were hundred or sixty years ago. (This might be contrary to her intent of course since one fashionable sensibility now is to make everything relatable and approachable as always about the present. (This is, perhaps what Presentism is). Yet the artful presentation of interviews and narration of show of this kind creates a sense of that there must necessarily be a gap between a now and a then while honoring both and not telling us what to finally endorse or not. This in turn implies that out most fierce convictions of now, the various ideologies we take to be natural or progress are simply what we happen to think is the case in our moment.
This one example of course is not in any way an inspiration for my podcast, which is an entirely different style, that of people simply talking about stuff in a living room (I have as of this writing not yet done one from my bedroom but that is an idea) I particular there is a deeply aesthetic examination of how Bret Easton Ellis learned the art of syntax from Joan Didion as a teenager (as she in turn learned from her and my favorite Henry James). There is also a discussion of the sensibility of those years as being what I would call today nuanced, a mixture of numbness and feeling at one and the same time. (Ellis’ idea)
I am far from a literal minded person yet I do live in a “literalist age”: I will say that in very few respects am I like the characters in this podcast, aside from being vaguely part of Gen X and being like them, in the arts. These commonalities are surprisingly smaller than you would think. For example, the people in that milieu you could say were “wild”. By every association that humans have had with the word and concept of “wild” my life has been far less wild than them, deliberatively so. I seemed to have taken Flaubert’s famous advice a little too literally (from what I understand it was advice and not a quip) when he said that one should be conventional and bourgeois in one’s life and the exact opposite in one’s art. But then he also said “Madame Bovary C’est Moi”. Flaubert of course never said what should happen were a bourgeois life be deemed undesirable and worthy of destruction by so many people as well as not simply possible even were it desirable.
If I have been less wild I have been also far less conventional; whatever troubles the figures in this podcast have gotten into practically all have chosen family life, marriages and kids, all things which I have never wanted to be a part of my life.
One of the most challenging matters in writing this book of my life is how to include rather abstract even wonky ideas about political, cultural and economic change, especially as it relates to the story of my family business Aubrey Organics, and quite personal and intimate matters from my own life.
For example, one of the salient facts about my birth, besides the fact that I remember it, though of course fuzzily, is that I had the sensation of simply not wanting to be here, of actually not wanting to be born. I have no idea if this is consistent with the material and biological facts of my birth , which included being a C section birth and putting my mother through what she would always say was profoundest suffering and hell and having to be isolated for many weeks in some kind of incubator. Of course I am describing mood and affect, that which is non linguistic, where approval or disapproval or pleasure and displeasure are possibly all that exists at that overrated stage of life.
Did this initial and fundamental hostility affect my life? Probably. But I have never felt such a connection to that state of mind as much as I do in my life now.
I want to state all of these things in this post and see what can happen if my wish is to preserve the mystery, including what is best described as ultimate mystery. Mystery implies a separation between things, not the world as sold to us by tine Internet Age that we are all simply part of a simple and unified whole. We back to the anoretic questions again. What does it mean to go ten to twenty years forward in earthly time? What is the meaning of stages of life and are they same for all of us? What do we do with the fact of radical change within a single life, say fortunes gained or lost? Will it ever be possible for human beings to give up the dream that we all be alike in some way?
The current and seemingly ongoing obstacle for me in continuing my book is the absence of material and financial foundations to such a project. I don’t have an agent or publicist and I am not part of the publishing world at all. You will note that I was a journalist and reporter for thirty years but this was only possible, in my view, because I was not a precarious freelancer but on a solid salary. Whether these can be changed is one thing I would like to not remain a mystery.
I am not writing these remarks with the full knowledge of what my reunion will be like, of how it will “turn out” in the pop grammar of storytelling. But that is as it should be. This post concerns what it is to be in the middle of things and all of us are in the middle of something.
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