like that? Good enough to be famous?”
“For a person of real potential these characteristics are no mean feat to attain—it is as difficult to suppress ability as to cultivate it. To become famous, one must incubate qualities that are the antithesis of Castiglione’s courtier. Where the courtier has vast cultural knowledge, the celebrity is oblivious to all but his ego. Where the courtier has wit, the celebrity flaps platitudes with a silver-plated tongue. Where the courtier has military prowess, the celebrity is ready to get in a drunken bar fight to defend the honor of his one-night stand. Where the courtier is proficient in several musical instruments, the celebrity once held a violin while a recording played in the background. If the courtier was the model Renaissance man, today’s model figure is the peasant suddenly granted a noble title on the condition that he don a jester’s jingly hood and motley speedo—left out is the critical function of the jester, the divine right of the nobility, and the peasant’s stock of useful everyday knowledge. The result is a figure of charm rooted in a useless beauty devoid of any classically sublime aesthetic.”
The boy looks at his watch. A quarter to eight. He tiptoes out of the room. The professor doesn’t notice. Gesticulating wildly, he continues:
“And then, after the triumph has faded and the weight of routine threatens total breakdown, comes the negative epiphany: that fame is not about adoration, but envy—though not at first of the sort you imagined. For it is not your achievements they are envious of (there are none), nor you (you have no talent). It is, rather, your fame itself they envy (or rather, the fame momentarily descending to inhabit you), and the effect of your fame. They imagine your fame soothes you to sleep at night, while it in truth it has become an unending torment to you. Secondarily, they envy your wealth, which they imagine brings you pleasure, but which at best is an inadequate consolation. And if this unlikely realization comes to you, it may be followed by this rare pearl: that there is no ‘long view.’ Fame in our age involves a contraction of time, both subjectively—in the Warholian fifteen minute sense—and historically: out of unworthiness, your actions are inscribed in no annals, rest in no cultural memory. So when Silenus says that the best thing for mankind was not to have been born, we could perhaps amend his carpe mortem admonition as the next-best alternative: ‘to be forgotten soon!’ And in fact, Silenus’s statements of ought are facts for the celebritas species: the people of the present forget you soon, and for the people of the future it is, for all practical purposes, as if you never existed at all.”
World as Swamp Bog
Schlegel’s “Postulate of Vulgarity” is not just a lens for historians to view the past, but a lens cap for society to obstruct even present sublimity. All that is lofty, grand, and noble, that appeals to the cerebral sensibility or is in any way genuinely great, evoking an awe beyond measure, a sense of wondrous mystery surrounding the origins of its manifestations . . . is too extraordinary to notice. Billboards being the cardinal model of communication for a gridlocked population, the infinite becoming of poetry takes on the limits of the prose caption’s word count cut-off in the margins of the audiovisual feast.
Beauty finds itself twisted, extended, reduced to things it had never formerly consented to participate in: paintings of charming rustic huts, celebrity photos doctored for weight loss, or in the case of the really vulgar. . .a Strauss symphony. Even the dainty is trampled underfoot.
The Apeirokaliac: one who has never been surprised by the beautiful is galvanized by shock of the coarse. Rather than being transported by the wonder resulting from the experience of novelty, the Vulgarian feels only titillation. Often afterwards, over an appetizer, it is mistaken for wonder, and in the retelling it stinks of garlic and onion flavoring.
A discerning mind does not stop at merely spotting bad taste; he feels it his duty to condemn it as well. An ethical overlaying onto the aesthetic dimension, bad taste reinscribes as a species of morality what, for our age, has remained an autonomous sphere distinct from it.
Champion of erratic locomotion, the Vulgarian turns banalities into anthems. Communers with the sublime having isolated themselves in their attics to concentrate and mope, the Vulgarian becomes by default the last patriot willing to carol his bawdy allegiances in the street. The abstract is subsumed under the mundane, to the libido’s mode of knowing, the sensus communis of the Roman holiday. Moving in the opposite direction of Abelard, he intends to be a sensualist and becomes thereby a nominalist—universals are matter for his tongue, which dies gradually from increasing numbness. In the end a quiet impotence results. There is no Historia Calamitatum, no hindered achievement—the Vulgarian’s life is the story of a lust affair with himself not worth relating. Not because he is totally naïve, but exactly because, in admitting his defects in the way of innocence, he continues to walk the path. There is often some degree of monastic reflection in the Vulgarian’s life—his vulgarity is not simply physical, but the animalization of the spirit. Metaphysics, too, is the province of a particular being. We are disgusted by his final confession: he just couldn’t help himself.
Vulgarity: all that emerges out of the rectum which lacks substance. If the sublime is a mother-of-pearl cloud, the vulgar is a puff of flatulence. The fart is proof that aesthetics can ascend beyond itself and develop ethical connotations. Art cannot convince the nose of the legitimacy of art’s sake—its kingdom is the reptilian brain. The gas-passer’s stink gives off an aura of coarseness, a bubble of vacant space visualizing his lack of ingenuity—with a match, pyrotechnics could have redeemed the incivility of not excusing himself.
Suburblimity
Confronted by an infinite suburban landscape which we can imagine imperfectly only with the help of an aerial photograph and partially grasp with our intellect only through maps and blueprints, we shudder not just from the mere beholding of it but also from the consequences of its existence—terror over tasteless uniformity of living space mixed with queasiness of exhaust fumes and shouting children. We witness nature laid waste at our own hands: not bothering to refer it to our intellectual capacities, we vanquish it out of spite that its total conceptualization is beyond us; it melts away against the power of machines even as our lethargy fails to stir itself and gloat. It is a destruction we accomplished out of ignorance, experiencing the sublime only as an after-effect of negligence. The Sublime: a realization that setting no limits on ourselves is our fatal limitation, a feeling that presses upon us and does not allow our detachment—a jackhammer setting off a migraine, so relentless that skull and street become indistinguishable. Antithesis of Friedrich’s paintings in which we put ourselves in the shoes of subjects observing the sublime from behind, we instead find ourselves standing below a sea of smog, bending over and holding a mirror to our face, too apprehensive to crane our necks upward.
The man who lassos the moon thinks only of harnessing lunar energy for his midnight paddleboat ride, contemplating it for the sake of itself only as it crashes into his reservoir. As he spends all his remaining thoughts pedaling for his life, the passenger he was so eager to impress finds herself lamenting her date’s moral corruption and wanting only the view they once had. But the sky will not be whole again, and against our denials of debasement the forces of nature are almighty. Mother’s laws are not our own, but higher than us, falling upon the world and crushing our audacious autonomy.
Ward of the Flies
Evil is easy. Only the first murder—obeying the command to pull the trigger—is hard. After that desensitization occurs rapidly; the will acquiesces, even justifies its acts and delights in cruelty’s conformity. The Milgram subjects, profoundly pained to administer fatal voltage, become eager Nazi soldiers—the singular refusal, the “good man” despite circumstance, is quickly dealt with. Invested with authority from the beginning rather than obedient to it, initial pangs of conscience are blocked by chemical surges of sadism—Zimbardo’s Abu Ghraib experiments. The brutality among children lost in nature is shamed by the amusements of commoners in imaginary status roles with real props. And after irreparable crimes of civilization are perpetuated
