Sonntag, November 12, 2006

the high-cultural conservative

Been reading a book about art controversies in the United States. Was reminded of how I loathe so much of contemporary art. There are in fact many spheres in which I think - and I believe I am not alone - that what has been chic among intellectuals ostensibly serving the various muses for the last forty to seventy years (depending on the genre) is not merely false, not merely bad, not merely worthless, but quite destructive of the soul - visual art, architecture, poetry, classical music jump to mind, but I'm sure there are other areas in which I am equally curmudgeonly. There are certainly many social constructs in which participants display the same sort of collapse into pure masturbation. I have no time to parse this out right now - in fact, I think it might be more of a book than a blog entry - but I'm rather fascinated by the idea that after all is said and done I am a rather proud conservative in the arts, as liberal as my political and social thinking may be. I'm not a reactionary, and I have an open ear and eye and mind to new work, but I think there are quite genuine and valid reasons to despise much of the high culture of the moment.

Perhaps my top concerns - and again I don't have any time to parse this out - but I say perhaps my top concerns are:
  1. the claim that art's highest purpose is to "challenge" or shock
  2. the difficulties of the artist who would try to recover something of what has made art great in the past (which includes the tendency to appear reactionary or stupid, problems I admit are very real)
  3. the way the problems in the arts are fed by or maintained by or enforced by the broadcast media and other new forms of communication

Montag, November 06, 2006

Shocking!

The fall of Ted Haggard, evangelical megachurch superstar, has me thinking about transgression. It is easy to think of transgressions as alien and bizarre, yet apparently easy to commit them. That combination of unthinkable and easy is what fascinated Camus and Gide – it seems like the leading edge of existence, which is perhaps itself unthinkable yet easy.

I haven’t struck anyone since I was a child, but I remember that it was sort of wonderful. I am not naturally a violent person, and I found myself, when it came down to an actual fistfight, very timid at first to land a solid blow, moving my hands slowly and feeling out the space between myself and my enemy as if to prove by a stepwise approach that the air between us could actually be crossed – unreal in a way to someone who had not only not hit anybody or been hit but had never kissed anyone or been kissed either. I would reach out my fist for what was really a kind of love-tap in the truest sense of the phrase – it meant something profound to feel the fabric of someone else’s shirt. I’d loosen up a bit, and even land a few punches, still awkward but growing into the happy sense that I could reach out and touch someone.

I was slightly too big to be elaborately bullied and had too few friends to make terribly many enemies, so my fights were few. But I remember them somewhat fondly. Now, fisticuffs don’t compare to amicable touching, and I wouldn’t go back. And I never developed a desire or had an excuse to fire a gun. But I can understand how it could be terribly thrilling to do violence, particularly for people who are profoundly isolated.

Now of course, violence is only one kind of transgression, and not the one Mr. Haggard is accused of. But sexual transgressions, at least in their early stages, must feel like a gun shot. Ages of silence and disbelief, then a cannon shot! And adrenaline coursing through the body, which shakes and sweats and weeps.

What is sexual transgression? For someone like myself, in a traditional marriage, most of the sexual possibilities would be destructively transgressive. But that is just one possibility, and transgression is in the eye of the beholder and is often a matter of degree. If Haggard had slept with a middle or upper class white woman who was not his wife, he might well have made it through with his high position – and his marriage - intact. But sleeping with a male prostitute was going several steps further than he needed to if he wanted to destroy his life – any man would have done. Any non-white or poor or lower-class woman would have done. Videotaping sex with an otherwise acceptable mistress would have done. Keeping a collection of vanilla porn or writing himself private naughty stories would have done.

And what about your average unattached American? Everyone seems to have their own standard, but somehow that does not utterly deflate the power of transgression. Many young people who “experiment” sexually do it entirely or partly for the thrill of doing things they feel their superego would tut at. Nearly everyone I ever dated tried to shock me – or perhaps to establish themselves in a position of sexual strength – by telling tales of transgressive sex. In other words, the idea that it was transgressive was very much a live one and a powerful one.

The pope of the church of transgression
Taught oddballs to love their obsession.
"Golden showers," he said,
"As they baptize the head,
Will release every ounce of aggression."