A New Perspective

I attributed the sudden jolts of pain I was feeling to a flurry of semi-strenuous biking, first through the fields and woods at Elm Creek Regional Park, and a few days later down the big hill on Wirth Parkway, around the pavilion at Wirth Lake, and back. Nothing out of the ordinary, yet a few minutes after that second ride, I felt a horrible pain deep in my upper leg, hip, or gluteus maximus—I'm no expert in anatomy. It jabbed me so fiercely that I couldn't put any weight on that leg at all. When I adjusted my posture slightly, the pain vanished. But avoiding that particular flex of the joint made walking very difficult.  For the last four or five days I've been going heavy on the ibuprofen, wearing muscle-relaxing menthol patches, and walking around hunched over like an old man, grabbing onto every chair and counter-top I can find.

In fact, I haven't been walking around much at all.

I spent the morning Sunday, when the jabs were at their worst, sitting in my portable camp chair out on the deck in the cool crisp sunny air, which had been refreshed by the previous day's rains.  Seeking a position of maximum shadow, I chose a spot on the deck where I'd never sat before, on the landing heading down the steps to the yard. It's a silly place to sit; the landing is only three feet square. But I found that from that perspective the neighbor's houses are entirely blocked from view by foliage, which is nice, and I'm also much closer to the greenery in the yard. You can't see the garden from here, but that's also nice. It looks pretty ragged these days, and also somewhat chomped down by the deer and rabbits.

Yes, the ligularia are blooming now, but they're less robust than they were a few years ago. We seldom fertilize, and two years of drought have also taken their toll. Maybe that's just the way of all plants—to lose their vigor and peter out.

One further virtue of this spot was that it afforded a view of both the trees and the sky in roughly equal measure. At one point I looked up to see a tiger swallowtail fluttering amid the highest branches of the silver maple that dominates our back yard "woods," moving at remarkable speed in a seemingly random series of sudden lurches without crashing into anything.

On a little table at my side were three books: a collection of essays by the French philosopher Pierre Badiou called Infinite Thought, a very short book by the nineteenth century novelist Alphonse Daudet called In the Land of Pain, and a book by art critic Jed Perl titled Authority and Freedom. I might almost say that I chose them at random, but you know as well as I do that isn't how it works. No. You comb the shelves looking for something to read and this or that title "jumps out" at you. You "respond" to it. "Yes, this is the perfect thing," you say. "If not for ever, then at least for right now."

Only time will tell. But exploring such affinities is what keeps life moving ahead,  enriches us, and, yes, makes us happy.

On page two of the introduction to Infinite Thought I hit upon an interesting passage. According to the commentator, Badiou divides life into two realms, ethics and truth, and further subdivides experience into four spheres or categories—art, love, politics, and science. This scheme resembles that of the Italian philosopher and statesman Benedetto Croce, who divides life into thought (truth) and action (ethics). Croce's more detailed set of distinctions includes four "moments of spirit," each of which corresponds to a value—beauty, truth, utility, and goodness.

I have little doubt that Croce's handling of these concepts is more rigorous than Badiou's, but the Frenchman might turn out to be more fun to read, and his points of cultural reference will undoubtedly be more up-to-date. Glancing at the index, I noted that Badiou never mentions Croce, though he does refer to Wes Craven, a film director best known for Nightmare on Elm Street.

The trouble with such ad hoc reading programs is that I seldom get very far. The sky had gone to a gauzy gray, the neighbor's wind chimes started acting up, a robin began to cluck, and a chuckling goldfinch began to circle the neighborhood. Soon a great-crested fly-catcher arrived in the neighbor's yard. I didn't see him, but I could hear his defiant war-hoop.

Foregoing the translator's introduction, I opened one of Badiou's essays and soon came upon the following remark:

"Every truth that accepts its dependence in regard to narrative and revelation is still detailed in mystery; philosophy exists to tear the latter's veil."

For myself, I'd be content to stick with the narrative and revelation. Such devices or vessels "hold" the truth quite well, and it's much easier to drink from them.

So I turned to Jed Perl's defense of the arts, Authority and Freedom. But I couldn't help asking myself, "What is Perl defending art against?" In any case, authority and freedom make odd bed-fellows. Artists are basically free by nature—aren't we all?—and they've never been much concerned about authority. It's the critics and historians who want to assert their authority, struggling to establish or defend a canon, and so on.

It occurred to me that Perl seemed to be treading a path laid out long ago by T.S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Which I have never read.

Off to the bookshelves I went to fetch a book of Eliot's essays. My collection didn't have that essay, but "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture" caught my eye, and thumbing through it out on the deck I came upon a few nuggets of wisdom.

"The pursuit of politics is incompatible with a strict attention to exact meanings on all occasions."

"Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake."

"One symptom of the decline of culture in Britain is indifference to the art of preparing food. Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living."

"What we believe is not merely what we formulate and subscribe to ... Behavior is also belief ... Even the most conscious and developed of us live also at the level on which belief and behavior cannot be distinguished."

Eliot's analysis is unequivocally a defense of Christianity, but he is so careful to discount anything that smacks of peremptory theology, empty piety, or mere ecclesiastical display that his argument, such as it is, begins to take on a Zen-like air, as in this elliptical remark:

"The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications ... It holds good only in the sense in which people are unconscious of both their culture and their religion."

Thus did I wile away the day, almost as if I'd been at a cabin staring out at the boundless horizon of Lake Superior. Hilary joined me often, knitting at the table at the other end of the deck, and sometimes heading down into the yard to pick up sticks or tend to some ailing plant. Late in the afternoon we went inside to cook up some Thai meatballs, though standing upright long enough to mince two or three cloves of garlic was all I could do the contribute.

We got the meatballs out of a bag in the freezer, which moved things along. The sauce consisted of a potent mix of hoisin, rice vinegar, chili-garlic sauce, oyster sauce, fresh ginger, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, and quite a bit of brown sugar. The recipe, though Asian in flavor, came from a cookbook written by a woman from Bayfield.