Art and youth

I have felt for a while that the Dionysiac wildness I felt in my college years would never return to me, whether because it was put on, because it was a product of hormones or naivete, or because it was a product of a profound unhappiness I never expect to feel again.

But reading Rilke's selected poems lately made me think twice. Rilke was an "artist" to the hilt, creating, in Germany, during and after World War I, completely fantastic poetry, reaching for the eternal verities. Thoroughly sincere "art for art's sake" in such a time and place amazes me. He did this mostly over the course of a decade, during which he never showed signs of considering what he was doing ridiculous, as I realized some might. As I realized I did! Not in his case. The value of what he did is clear enough. But I realized I had decided at some point that my own artistic aspirations were ridiculous, that it was all childishness and intellectual masturbation. It was THAT, I think, that put out the fire in me. Never consciously or all at once, I had slowly put more and more distance between myself and my art, increasingly calling the seriousness I had once wished to bring to it artifice and self-indulgence.

So perhaps I don't want that which I have lamented before as impossible - the return of youth. I thought that only with a return of youth could I return to art. But that was wrong, wasn't it? What I must do is not return to art obliquely, but grasp it by the throat, cover it in kisses, slap it, pet it. I have been the wallflower of art, hiding my yearning under feigned disinterest, calling it names, abusing my love for it in order to soften the blow of my loss. I went from thinking I wasn't good enough to art to telling myself it wasn't good enough for me.

But reading Rilke reminded me that it can be good enough. Rilke's poetry was the first new thing I've read in many years that attempted to achieve high art and, to my reading, made it. I've read a lot of great novels in the past couple years, but they didn't have the same artistic ambition, being at least equally concerned with entertainment. Ulysses had the ambition, of course, but seemed insincere to me, a bunch of stunts. And it is that artistic type - the fraud - that has seemed to predominate in my personal experience and tends to dominate this cynic's imagination of the typical artist. At some point I suppose I came to doubt there were anything but frauds. But Rilke - and he's not my favorite poet, though I see his greatness - is not a fraud. I'm also reading Flaubert's letters - also not a fraud. These men loved and lusted after something real - lets call it the Muse, for lack of a better term. Now I'm coming for her.

The apotheosis of political correctness

One insufficiently noted aspect of the current presidential election is the historic apotheosis of "political correctness." By this I mean attacks on the opponent based on convenient principles asserting that certain statements are not to be allowed because they might offend.

One of the problems with political correctness, as it was originally conceived, was that it was often unclear whether anyone was in fact offended by a given statement, or how strongly felt that offense might be. This problem is magnified in the current environment, in which it has become clear that there have been many cases in which no one at all was offended by a statement, but the opposing party took up the statement as a cudgel on the theoretical basis that it could offend - "lipstick on a pig," for instance. This is meant only partly to inspire a sense of offense in those the theory asserts should be offended; it is more powerfully intended to undercut the moral authority of the opponent by offending the moral righteousness of those many millions (in some cases the entire population) who could never be personally offended by the statement per se.

What interests me about this is that it seems to be trumping every other kind of argument. Civilized behavior seems to have become confused with some sort of fictive, perfect political correctness, which judges everything from candidate's families to their level of honesty to be unmentionable by the opponent. The candidates - mostly the Republican side, but the Obama people are playing too - seem to to be mainly concerned with staking out the highest territory on Mount Outrage. Promises from both sides to shun negative campaigning have not until recently been dropped in favor of traditional negative campaigning, but nevertheless have long been dropped - in favor of negative attacks claiming outrage at the negativity of the opponent's campaign.

So it seems to me the chickens are coming home to roost for liberals who thought it was a good idea to declare various kinds of speech out of bounds. It turns out the enemy can play that game just as well, with the inevitable consequence - escalation. The outrage arms race is banning more and more innocent statements, leaving no content but the feigned outrage itself. We free speechers told you so.