Becoming Who You Are

Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America (excerpt here from The Daily Beast) is a worthy review of that force of nature, offering not a comprehensive examination (which will some day run to many volumes), but a series of deep core samples, as it were, taken from representative phases of Dylan's tortuous and protean career.

Dylan's story is a half-century version of Seinfeld's "show about nothing," that is, he is the trickster irrationalist, the artiste supreme, resisting every categorization. He is about nothing but sheer exuberant creativity, following his own quiddity, throwing off songs as a fire throws off sparks. For him there is only history, human nature, and the music driving the flower through the green fuse. He speaks endlessly but does not answer questions (as such, he is a kind of ultimate counter-example to psychiatry, or perhaps rather a competitor, the great blank screen and arch-therapist).

In parallel, D. G. Myers at A Commonplace Blog neatly identifies the dilemmas of religious toleration vs. tolerance. A deeply religious man to judge from his writing, he points out that all theological justification is logically circular, and there is no arguing first principles; in a process that apparently remains mysterious, one finds oneself either inside or outside of a belief system. So religious toleration is the recognition that one has nothing to fear from other faiths outside of coercion and violence.

What do Dylan and religion have in common? For me, it is the realization that there is finally nothing outside of nature, attachment, and seduction. I mean the latter not in any manipulative sense, but in the sense that not only art, but also persuasion and reason, are attempts to beckon others hither, to say, "Look at this wondrous state of being, if only it could be realized."

Psychology of the Artist as a Young Man

Inspired by current local conditions, I picked up Heat Waves in a Swamp, an exhibition volume on the works of the visionary American watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967; his Four Seasons is above). Discussing Burchfield's decision to remain in small-town Ohio and then rural western New York rather than going for the bohemian big-city life, Dave Hickey writes:

First, he was far from a genuine rustic, enamored of his isolation. His daily life was that of a cosmopolitan intellectual who has isolated himself, as a secret drinker might, to conceal his weakness. In Burchfield's case, this weakness was his bond with the landscape of his youth, a place that, for Burchfield, was less beloved than genetically imprinted--like the promise of water on a baby duck--that was less a theatrical setting for his art than an inextricable, mysterious extension of his selfhood, or he an extension of it. Over the years, I have tried to put a name to this particular malady. Many authors, writers, and performers have suffered from it. It is characterized by a shift of centeredness. The ground shifts and the barrier between ourselves and the world disappears. We feel ourselves to have become possessed--to have become an extension of the world, a particle in that whirlwind. The self is obliterated in this instant. The effect is akin to Stendhal's syndrome, to the wooziness we feel when we are captured by pictorial illusion. It is akin to dancing, to the loss of self that accompanies our giving ourselves up to the music. I call it the curse of the soft self--the unwilling dissolution of one's identity into its environment. It is the malady of painters, writers, actors, musicians, and critics. It always brings with it the terror of not being able to reassemble one's identity int he wake of having lost it.

I found this to be remarkably perceptive, and I think I can help Hickey out with the name of the peculiar malady: schizoid personality, of which this passage is an apparently unknowingly evocative description. The schizoid type's instinctive human craving for connection is in conflict with a hypersensitivity toward physical and emotional contact; what is feared is smothering, intrusion, definition by others. The world as it is is too much with them; the self is perpetually under siege. The modus operandi of the schizoid person is withdrawal into an internal world of imagination and intellectualization (William Blake's "I must create my own world or be enslaved by another man's"). Schizoids are lovers of distance, which Burchfield apparently found far from the hip, crowded art scene. As Nancy McWilliams writes in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994):

The most adaptive and exciting capacity of the schizoid person is creativity. Most truly original artists have a strong schizoid streak--almost by definition, since one has to stand apart from convention to influence it in a new way. Healthier schizoid people turn their assets into works of art, scientific discoveries, theoretical innovations, or spiritual pathfinding, while more disturbed individuals in this category live in a private hell where their potential contributions are preempted by their terror and estrangement. The sublimation of autistic withdrawal into creative activity is a primary goal of therapy with schizoid patients.

The Stars, Like Dust

"If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas."

Mark Rothko

"Twelve hundred miles its length and breadth,

That four-square city stands.

Its gem-set walls of jasper shine,

They're not made by human hands."

Iris Dement

This afternoon I enjoyed the Whitney Museum's exhibition of Charles Burchfield, a latter-day William Blake of small-town America, whose watercolors blaze with a similar spiritual energy (above is his "Sphinx and the Milky Way").

And I couldn't have said it better, as regards plenitude and significance, than this blog post by Adam Frank. Size matters. An atheist could be defined as one who finds all existing conceptions of God to be inadequate.

Motive for Metaphor

For years my appetite for fiction, once prodigious, has diminished, and in recent months, in reaction to what Wallace Stevens called "the pressure of reality," it has vanished altogether. Give me facts, give me philosophy; for the time being fantasy repels. I haven't read or seen, much less enjoyed, a story, novel, or film in months, but have I lived? Oh yes, I've lived a great deal these few months, for better and worse.

Intellectually I still see Aristotle's famous point that history merely deals in particulars, whereas poetry at its greatest deals in universals. However, there are stretches in life in which one is so bound by the brambles of particulars that universals are like the dark side of the moon. And fiction is, after all, a species of lying, that propensity that most distinguishes humanity from the other animals.

Fiction is a luxury of civilization, to be relished only so long as no barbarians are banging on the gates. But barbarians infiltrate the citadel all the time, one is never wholly safe...Even now I'm not sure whether art intensifies life or merely offers an escape therefrom.