Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

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Just something I ran across last night:  

The Dahomean believes, and will say with conviction, that each narrative “history” is fixed and unique, both in form and content.  We tried the experiment of reading to a cult head two different versions of the myth giving the quarrel of the two brothers, Sogbo, the Thunder, and Sagbata, the Earth….The unhesitating reply was that the gods do not reveal the same things to everyone, and that each narrator was telling “true history” according to the way the vodun have given it to him.—Melville J. & Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (18)

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In Straw Dogs, Gray quotes Schopenhauer from On the Basis of Morality:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (37)

It’s a good quote, I would say a ‘true’ fable.  But both Schopenhauer and Gray seem unable to crack open its hard outer shell to enjoy the meaty nut contained within.  They think Kant laughable, worthy of derision, for being so foolish as to spend so much time chasing after what was already his.

But imagine that this story is not in the mouth, the pen of bitter Schopenhauer, sitting, lonely, in his study with his dog Atman at his feet.  Strip away the cynical laugh he is having at the ‘old fool.’  Instead, imagine Kant telling this story, his wife at his side, in a warm drawing room, with an old friend fresh from the dusty road to Konigsberg. 

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Straw Dogs is one of the best works of skepticism that I have read.  I’m not talking about the tawdry I-don’t-believe-in-anything-but-science sort of skepticism, either.  This is the good ol’ Sextus Empiricus brand of philosophic thought.

Gray overstates more than a few of his points, over-relies on easy notions of natural selection, and tends to engage in the “you cannot have your cake, though I shall eat of it” problems.*  But there is a kind of cunning to all that which makes it clear that he knows this.  His style is reminiscent of moments in Nietzsche when he set outs, almost side by side, statements that suggest their own undoing.  There is a textual ‘wink’ and a sly smile behind it all.

Which brings me to what most impresses me.  The book is wickedly stylish.  Each section is, at most, a few pages long, containing tightly packed meditations that lay waste to many a cherished idol, revealing them to be, well, nothing more than straw dogs.  Each piece has been cut and crafted to say what it means and nothing more. 

The last work I read with this kind of care and craft might have been Adorno’s Minima Moralia.  The comparison is apt on many levels, too, when you consider the underlying pessimism and the easy way both have with quotation.  It’s sharp, cutting insight.

It’s inimitably British, full of easy-going pessimism and self-deprecating wit.  Sure, we humans may be headed for hell in a handbasket, but relax, we’re not really as important as all that.  Even when I don’t agree with the sentiment or the argument, I cannot but tip my hat to his presentation.

 *By which I mean that he criticizes several ways of conceiving history and humanity, while tacitly using them for his own rhetorical benefit.  For example, he dismisses the notion of ‘modernity’ as empty, a final shell for progressive morality, while making statements about polytheism being ”too delicate for modern minds.”  But, like I am about to say, there is a sense of deliberateness to that.