Éric Rohmer: A Biography V

I did finish the book, though it does not quite live up to my biographical ideals. There is a great deal of information provided about Rohmer, but nearly all of it is in the strict context of filmography. He made a large number of films, and I've only seen a fraction of them. Toward the end of his life he worked on The Lady and the Duke, a historical drama set during the French Revolution. Unlike most of his films, it had a significant budget and a large crew, and, while it received positive reviews, it seems forgotten today. Of the films that I've seen recently, I'll just mention my favorites. I'd say that A Summer's Tale is my favorite, because it draws excellent performances from the actors, and the subject matter is one that Rohmer obsessed over for his entire career: the relationship between the sexes (before LGTBQ came along). For me, Rohmer is one of the few filmmakers who portrays women whom I find interesting. This is displayed in their perceptiveness and complexity, and is something that you don't generally see in films, particularly in American films: for that matter, those characteristics often seems nonexistent in American women. My second favorite is probably Claire's Knee, which, besides the beautiful scenery, includes interesting young and older women and good dialogue. The Jerome character and Claire's boyfriend, Gilles, seem self-centered to me, as do many of Rohmer's male characters. I guess My Night at Maud's is my third favorite. It suffers from being in black-and-white, and I don't really identify with the male protagonist, Jean-Louis, who is a devout Catholic. Maud is really the only interesting character, though she doesn't get much screen time. Jean-Louis ends up marrying Françoise, a Catholic who had been having an affair with a married man. There is an interesting twist at the end if you watch carefully. Five years later, Jean-Louis and Françoise go to the beach with their young son and run into Maud. Apparently Françoise and Maud know each other and are not on particularly good terms. After briefly talking to Maud and Françoise separately, Jean-Louis realizes that Françoise had been having an affair with Maud's husband just before she met him. Another film that I like, perhaps not as much, is A Tale of Autumn. This features Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, two solid Rohmer long-timers. It is a little unnerving because the subject is middle-aged dating, an unsettling subject for me, but it has a happy ending. It also features a new young actress, Alexia Portal, who is rather strong-willed and brushes off her philosophy professor, who is pursuing her. In the other Rohmer films that I've seen, there were things that I disliked that were not offset by other features. In many of his films, Rohmer recorded the background sounds himself, and there are often very loud roosters in the morning. There can also be very loud insects on summer days.

The major deficiency of this book is that Rohmer's private life is practically invisible. You don't really find out about how well he got along with his wife and children or whether he maintained a good rapport with his brother. In a practical sense, he seems to have been a workaholic who spent very little time at home. This may simply be a manifestation of Rohmer's personality, but it could also be an intentional effort by Rohmer to prevent his family from knowing about his work life. Over the years, he became extremely close to Marie Rivière and Françoise Etchegaray, and Françoise never met his family until 2009, when he had a stroke. While Rohmer may not have been involved in any extramarital affairs, I think that the absence of information about his family life disqualifies the book from being categorized as a biography. It might also have been interesting to know more about his brother, René Schérer, who wrote about Charles Fourier, the utopian theorist who had been popular with George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist friend.  

Éric Rohmer: A Biography IV

Rohmer's filmmaking career was extremely long, with his first major film releasing in 1967 and his last in 2007. It is confusing to follow his development, but, to some extent, he followed a pattern in which his early theme in the late 1960's was relationships between men and women, his middle theme in the late 1970's was more complex dramas set in Napoleonic and medieval times, and in the 1980's he returned to his 1960's themes. Part of the confusion has to do with the fact that none of his films were made in an industrial environment like Hollywood, and Rohmer's development as a filmmaker at his own pace reflects a transition from amateurism to professionalism without much external assistance. During most of his career, his films were made under extremely spartan conditions that would not be tolerated by most actors or cinematographers. He did all of the writing and casting himself and was generally incapable of raising the funds necessary for larger productions. I think that this was largely related to his introverted personality and penny-pinching habits. He seemed to prefer to do everything on a modest scale. Toward the end of his career, he had name recognition and a large assortment of supporters who had worked with him over the years, and, to some extent, his late films may be construed as better-made representations of his earlier films, though, because he was much older then, there are more middle-aged characters.

Far into the book, the authors are beginning to make more interesting comments about Rohmer. In the making of The Green Ray (1986), Rohmer hired Françoise Etchegaray as a supervisor. Under a tenuous agreement, his frugal tendencies precipitated a reaction:

These temporary conditions did not fail to create certain tensions. Especially when Rohmer, at the end of a lunch with volunteers playing secondary roles, quibbled about paying for their meals and ended up leaving the restaurant after furiously throwing the bill on the table. The next day, Françoise threatened to abandon everything if he persisted in acting like an ill-tempered miser.

She was the first to dare stand up to him, and that did not necessarily displease him. She was the first, especially since Barbet Schroeder with a willingness more complete than Marie Bouteloup's, to go to great lengths to realize the great Rohmerian dream: working from day to day, with the means at hand, without worrying about the constraints of traditional production (assistant, scriptwriter, work schedule) and freely adapting to circumstances.

There is also discussion as to whether Rohmer was politically incorrect. On the surface, he appears to have been: minorities are not featured in his films, women may seem to behave subserviently, and all of the characters belong to the bourgeoisie. The only thing that he seemed to have going for him was an interest in environmentalism. From my perspective, he had a right to explore in his films life as it was while he was growing up. As someone who grew up far from Paris and was born in 1920, I think that he is allowed to have some 19th century characteristics. For the most part he was apolitical, and his brother, René, described him as "a ferociously independent anarchist." To this I would add that, although some of the men in his films might be described as male chauvinist pigs, the women stand up to them quite well. Rohmer's women are often more thoughtful, observant and articulate than the men, who sometimes seem a little out of touch with reality, especially in his early films. I particularly like A Summer's Tale (1996) in which three young women and one young man have encounters in which they are all on equal footing. If you watch many Rohmer films, it becomes obvious that he absolutely adored women, and they are the centerpieces of his films. He is never attempting to transform them into dutiful housewives.

I am nearing the end of the book and will make one more post.

Diary

I seem to have cut back on my "Diary" posts recently and decided that I should write another one. At times I thought that I may have been making too many of them, and now perhaps not enough. These posts add a dimension to the blog, which may otherwise become a bit monotonous and overbearing, with serious (or pretentious) topics. It is probably healthy to indicate that an actual human being is writing this blog. I attempt to rethink the blog periodically in order to decide whether or not I should change anything. For most of its life it has had very few readers, and I know a few of them. Because I have been posting on it regularly for twelve years, and because of the way that search algorithms work, the number of pageviews started to increase steadily during the pandemic, and it went from about 200 pageviews per month in 2019 to about 25,000 per month today. I currently don't need any additional income, but it would be possible to put advertising on the blog if I started to go broke. However, I would hate to force people to watch those stupid LiMu Emu & Doug advertisements just to read the blog, and that isn't under consideration at the moment.

This is the coldest winter here in several years and resembles 2014. That can make life a little more difficult for some, but I can handle it – because I'm a Vermonter! Some things are actually easier in these conditions. The snow is fluffy and easy to remove, and, without thawing and freezing, there is no ice on the roads or my driveway. These conditions also draw a large flock of goldfinches to the feeder. The squirrels have a dedicated snow trail from the woods. One slight disadvantage is that, since I don't drive as much during the winter, the car's battery doesn't get charged up as much. Also, because the mailbox is a quarter-mile from the house, if the only driving I do is to the mailbox, it can be hard to restart the engine because the battery hasn't had a chance to recharge. When the temperature is below zero, your cold cranking amps are very low. But this isn't a serious problem, since I have a good battery charger and can restart the engine almost instantly. The battery is now eight years old but works fine. Other than this, the only problems are dry skin and insufficient exercise. The skin part is easy to handle with moisturizing cream. For exercise, I did go on a regular hike once in January, between snow storms. The rest of the time I just do jumping jacks and pushups inside. Also, because I now have a large basement, I'm doing indoor jogging. I don't actually like jogging, but it's an easy way to get your heartrate up. I think that half a mile would be about twenty-five laps, but so far the most I've tried is ten laps (it gets pretty boring). There is still the growing problem of low-quality television and news – including PBS – but that is a year-round problem.  

For entertainment, I am continuing my attendance of performances in Middlebury. Last winter I saw Steven Osborne, who is an extremely talented pianist. This year, because my grandson is a budding pianist who already has paid performances, I took the whole family to the Middlebury Inn for dinner, and then we all went to see Nahre Sol at the college. She is amazing! I had often wondered what would happen to classical music – would it die out? I now think that it could be having a resurgence, albeit with new compositions. There has always been a subculture of classical musicians, but you hardly ever hear about it these days. Although I have no musical training, I occasionally go to Musical Assumptions to remind myself that there are still civilized people in the world. The barbarians are at the gate, but I think that civilization will survive.

I will continue with Éric Rohmer on my next post.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography III

I am finding that, although the French New Wave was a movement, it was not coherent compared to, say, Impressionism. The Impressionists exhibited together during the Belle Époque, and their paintings are now exhibited in museums all over the world, whereas the French New Wave occurred briefly during a less-affluent period. It was built from an existing medium and merely added slightly different styles, whereas Impressionism represented a permanent replacement of formalism in painting and a transition to modernism. Moreover, film is a more transient form of art than painting and doesn't lend itself to exhibitions in museums or purchases by art aficionados. Since the early 20th century, film has been an industry, and "art films" such as those made by Éric Rohmer constitute only a tiny segment.

As I read, I am slowly forming a more complete picture of Rohmer. In 1974 he said in an interview:

I have in reality three activities: (1) the cinema; (2) teaching cinema, which is a kind of theoretical reflection; (3) a more open pedagogy, teaching through cinema. I did that for educational television, and now I am doing it on the service of research. I am very happy with this triple vocation, because I don't want to confine myself in a personal universe that is pure fiction. I seek to retain, in every possible way, contact with the world.

This doesn't explain his choices of subject matter, which I think can be understood with a look at the available biographical information. There is evidence that he would have preferred a university position and felt that, to some extent, he was a failure for not obtaining one. That is what his mother would have preferred, and he let her believe that he was still a schoolteacher right up to her death in 1970. He also gave his sons no encouragement to enter the film industry. On some level, he always seemed to think of it as a disreputable field.  

As the authors of this book suggest, Rohmer's second full-length film (1969), My Night at Maud's, was in fact highly autobiographical. He was a conservative Catholic who wanted a Catholic wife. In the film, this is slightly intellectualized by a discussion between the characters regarding Pascal's Wager, but it is one example of his hidebound religious and social views. In his first full-length film (1967), La Collectionneuse, the protagonist, Adrien, engages in a lot of self-deception regarding the sexually promiscuous Haydée until he finally gives up on her at the end. In his fourth full-length film (1972), Love in the Afternoon, Frédéric avoids pressure to begin an affair with Chloé and decides to remain faithful to his wife. In his third full-length film (1970), Claire's Knee, Jérôme gets to know the young Laura but isn't attracted to her. When he meets Claire, also quite young, he is attracted to her. Since he is about to leave and get married, he elects to sublimate his attraction by focusing only on her knee to resolve the tension. It is probably fair to say that there is a little of Rohmer in each of these four male characters.

As far as Rohmer's film career is concerned, his popularity gradually increased among critics after Claire's Knee and My Night at Maud's. In 1976 he shared the Jury's Special Prize in Cannes for The Marquise of O, awarded by Tennessee Williams, but was not present that day. Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or. In 1986, he won the Golden Lion in Venice for The Green Ray. Even so, he never had high box office sales by industry standards.

One topic that isn't mentioned at all in this book is Rohmer's influence on Woody Allen. Allen was an early admirer of Rohmer and to some extent copied his style. He liked the emphasis on conversation and the interactions between men and women. However, it isn't necessarily easy to see Rohmerian characters in short, talkative, neurotic Jewish New York men and their Waspy girlfriends. 

I should finish this book within a couple of weeks and will make some additional comments on the Rohmer films that I've seen and what I like and dislike about them.

Theme Song of the Day

John Prine (from Bruised Orange)

Éric Rohmer: A Biography II

At the time of his marriage, Rohmer was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, one of the leading film magazines in Paris, and this provided most of his income. His own experimentation with filming was done on the side with what became his production company, Les Films du Losange, co-founded with Barbet Schroeder in 1962. His preferred cinematographer became Nestor Almendros. Everything changed in 1963 when, due to financial losses at Cahiers du cinéma he was fired and replaced by Jacques Rivette. He does not seem to have been prepared for that and briefly considered returning to school teaching. However, by then he had two sons, and his wife didn't work, and he preferred to keep the family in Paris. As far as I've read, in November, 1963, he began to make short episodes for educational television. 

If you have been reading this blog much, you may have noticed that I make an effort to keep the dates straight in order to get a good picture of the sequence of events. In some biographies that information may be listed at the end of the book and makes this a little easier. However, when you are looking at a "movement" – particularly in the arts – the sequence of events can be quite murky, and this book does little to remedy that. Rohmer produced short films in 1962 and 1963, but his full-length films didn't begin to release until 1967. In the context of the French New Wave, Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol had released full-length films in 1958, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais in 1959 and Jean-Luc Godard in 1960. So, technically, Rohmer's films fall at the tail end of the French New Wave. He was primarily a journalist during the first few years. This isn't necessarily crucial knowledge, but in order to understand how the aesthetic aspects of a movement evolve, it would be useful to at least have detailed descriptions of the motifs and styles of the directors over time and the extent to which they influenced each other. I am not finding this book very helpful in that respect.

Ironically, I first learned of the importance of dates while studying Impressionism in Paris in 1995. The instructor, Jean Lancri, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, always states the birth and death years whenever he mentioned an artist. This may be a little tedious, but it is a good way to avoid mistakes, such as considering people to be contemporaries when that was not possible.

Other than this criticism, the book is quite readable, and I am hoping that greater detail will be provided when I get to Rohmer's major films.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography I

This book, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, is my current reading project. I like most of the Rohmer films that I've seen and wanted to understand him better. What I've found is that all human activities, including the arts, exist in ecosystems. It isn't always easy to recognize this, particularly when you live in a dominant ecosystem whose participants presume that it is the best of its type in the world. When it comes to the arts, Americans tend to think, or are trained to think, that box office sales, value at auction, copies sold, crowd size, number of followers, etc., are indications of success. However, that is just a current sociological phenomenon here and is unlikely to hold up over time. What I find is that various motifs and styles surface and disappear all over the world all of the time, and to understand them properly requires a lot of work. In the arts as in the biological world, the ecosystems are ultimately what determine the success of individuals. Often, when evaluating a work of art, it is best to start with the ecosystem. I think of classical music as an example. First there was Bach in Germany, then a musical cult developed in Vienna and was led successively by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I think that if Vienna hadn't developed as it did as a musical center, you may never have heard of Beethoven. In the case of Éric Rohmer, I find that his particular ecosystem is not entirely familiar to me, as I have not paid much attention to the French New Wave. However, it does appear to be a distinct artistic and cultural movement, and I will attempt to discuss Rohmer in that context.

Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, in south central France, on March 21, 1920. His grandfather had moved to Tulle from Alsace-Lorraine, where he had worked as a gunsmith, following its annexation by Germany in 1870.  He married a Tulle woman, and they had one son, who was Rohmer's father. His father worked as a notary's clerk, and the family belonged to the middle class and were conservative Catholics. Rohmer had a brother, René, who was two years younger. They were close, and René grew up to be gay. They were both good students and enjoyed the arts. Rohmer had little exposure to film but staged theatrical productions at home while he was growing up. He studied in Paris for entry to the École normale supérieure in Paris and passed the written exam but failed the oral exam in 1939. He tried again in 1940 but failed. At that point he was drafted into the French army for physical work. He was discharged from military duty on January 31, 1941 and wasn't sure what to do next. He eventually decided to move to Paris, where his brother, René, was studying for the École normale supérieure. When the Germans retreated from France in 1944, there were severe reprisals against Nazi collaborators, and this seems to have traumatized Rohmer. Simone de Beauvoir describes this period in The Mandarins. She was twelve years older than Rohmer, but they had similar postwar experiences.

Rohmer never succeeded at gaining entry to the École normale supérieure. Instead, he earned a license-ès-lettres and was only qualified to teach Latin and Greek in a secondary school. René, on the other hand, entered the École normale supérieure at the age of twenty-one, which led to a brilliant career in philosophical research. René entered the same "mandarin" class as Sartre and de Beauvoir, but was not a close friend of them. This all had a psychological effect on Rohmer but didn't damage his relationship with René. However, within the Schérer family, René was considered the brains. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably just as well, because Rohmer's career was more interesting. One of the factors that interfered with his academic success was probably his shyness, because in those days aggressive students like Sartre and de Beauvoir were the model. I'm probably a little prejudiced on this because I've never had any desire to study French philosophy. In any case, René went on to have a successful career, despite once being charged with "inciting minors to debauchery." For that matter, Sartre and de Beauvoir were always a little depraved.

The relevant details in this book are a little slim, but Rohmer did work as a teacher for a few years and had a job near Paris. In the early 1950's, the film craze that led to the French New Wave gained momentum. All of a sudden there were countless film clubs and film journals. Rohmer wrote articles and was exposed to the new directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. I'm not sure exactly why Rohmer chose to use a pseudonym, but it may be that he didn't want to upset his mother, who was extremely conservative and had a low opinion of films. The actual films didn't appear until the late 1950's. Most of them were markedly low-budget. Rohmer seems to have been completely inept when attempting to make his first film, and I enjoyed this anecdote from Claude Chabrol:

Intending to make a film of Les Petites Fille modèles, he thought it would be a good idea to seek his actress in the parc Monceau. Imagine the scene: this tall, skinny, dark-haired silhouette wearing a cape, slithering silently down the garden paths with a package of candy in his hand. When he liked a little girl, he beckoned to her, saying: "Come here, little girl, I'm going to tell you a lovely story." After using this ploy for three or four hours, naturally he got himself arrested by the park guard. In his absolute innocence and entirely cinematic passion, he didn't understand why the cops hauled him off to the police station.

Some of the inspiration for the French New Wave came from Alfred Hitchcock. Rohmer enjoyed It Happened One Night, by Frank Capra. There was also an interest in Paris of American authors such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Rohmer enjoyed the works of Balzac.

Rohmer's shyness may have impeded his romantic life. This was resolved as follows:

One Saturday evening in December 1956, at a dance at École des Mines, this very shy man had the nerve to approach a young brunette who was herself very reserved, and whom he had "spotted" (one might think we are already in My Night at Maud's). In doing so, Rohmer, who had never been very bold with girls, suddenly made good on a wager he had made with his friend Jean Parvulesco: "This evening," he had told him, "I will meet my wife." Her first name was Thérèse. She came from a good family in the north, having been born in Cambrai. She had been carefully brought up, was a practicing Catholic, and was twenty-seven years old. They began seeing each other. On July 13, 1957, Maurice Schérer married Thérèse Barbet at the church in Paramé, near Saint-Malo, where the young woman's family owned a vacation home. Rohmer, established in his profession, married, and aged thirty-seven, looked for an apartment for himself and his wife: his bachelor life was definitely over and he left, after fifteen years of Bohemian renting, his furnished room in the little Hôtel de Lutèce on rue Victor-Cousin.

A Cautionary Note on Democracy

As I've been saying, I think that The Contrarian has been doing an excellent job reporting on the abuses of the Trump administration, and I appreciate their initiation of legal actions against it. However, because my primary view of anything that has to do with human behavior has been affected by my knowledge of evolutionary biology, I occasionally have to question their faith in democracy, while I recognize that they are lawyers and that this is their particular area of expertise. The question that comes up for me is: how important is democracy in the greater scheme of things?

In my understanding of world history, democracy has not been all that important. Some of my ideas were affected when I read Upheaval, by Jared Diamond. While Diamond is certainly not omniscient, I think that he made a strong case that the general success of the U.S. was largely the result of geography. The advantages included more high-quality soil than anywhere else due to glaciation, physical isolation from other world powers, a highly navigable river system, and a huge influx of people who wanted to make money. In fact, the American Revolution was primarily about financial independence, and George Washington was sworn in as president at the intersection of Broad Street and Wall Street in New York City in 1789: Wall Street was literally the capital of the country then. I think that, to some extent, the success of the country has more to do with free enterprise than anything else. Broadly speaking, the country became extremely wealthy by removing economic constraints for most of its history; additionally, no monarchs or religious leaders had influence over the political system. These factors alone probably had more significance than democracy per se. It seems to me that the primary structure of American society has always been capitalistic, and equality and democracy were almost afterthoughts that arose when wealth imbalances and racism became conspicuous during the nineteenth century. As late as 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court stated that slaves were not citizens and therefore had no federal or legal protections.

Comparatively, there has been far less unity of purpose and stability in Europe than the U.S. since the seventeenth century. Wars between the U.K., Germany and France have been common, and now Russia is acting up. Furthermore, unlike today, the Roman Catholic Church was often politically engaged and interfered with governments. These were rarely American problems. Additionally, it is more difficult to control immigration in Europe than it is in the U.S., and, whereas the U.S. often benefits from immigrants who take unwanted jobs, in Europe, the waves of immigrants may actually contribute to political instability. 

The obvious problem with democracy for me, which I've brought up repeatedly, is that people don't necessarily vote rationally. No matter how many articles you write, rallies you hold, petitions you sign, etc., there are still going to be lots of irrational voters out there. I think that in many cases, to convince irrational voters to vote rationally in their own best interest, you may have to rely on different arguments that are also irrational. 

To put this in the context of how I make voting decisions, let me describe my actual process of thinking about Donald Trump as a politician. By 2015, I already knew that he was pretty stupid and had an enormous ego. I didn't like Hillary Clinton much in 2016, but, with Trump running, voting for her was a no-brainer. I tried to give Trump the benefit of the doubt when he won, but it immediately became apparent that he was completely incompetent, and, rather than learning from his mistakes, he tended to double down on them. Over the years it has become increasingly apparent that he only has one model – the same one that he has been using for decades. This is not a complete list, but covers what I think are the basic ideas:

1. Recruit only people who have a major handicap and are willing to declare full allegiance to you.

2. Groom your hires for corrupt activities.

3. If hires don't deliver, fire them.

4. When negotiating, always exaggerate whatever assets you have.

5. Favor negotiation with those who are unable to match your legal resources in the event of a conflict.

6. If you enter a political position, keep opponents under constant attack.

7. Leverage your political position to extract the maximum possible financial benefits for yourself.

8. Never waste time thinking about benefiting your constituency and delegate those tasks to subordinates.

9. Arrange situations in a manner such that your subordinates will be blamed for failures rather than you.

I think that Trump has always been highly predictable, but that the evidence wasn't quite as clear during his first term. That was largely because he resorted to experienced people in that term and found that they were not only an encumbrance but a threat to him. That is why he has assembled an outlaw gang for his second term. The sheer volume of lies being generated by his administration now is astounding in historical terms.

From the above, you can see that I don't think legalistically. I prefer to analyze the personalities of politicians in order to predict their behavior. Since Trump's behavior indicates that he usually only attempts to benefit himself, that is sufficient to reject him as a candidate or an incumbent. For this reason I have suggested several times that a solution to the current plague of corrupt and incompetent politicians might be something as simple as vote-assisting software. That would be easier than engaging in years of lawsuits, impeaching Supreme Court justices, amending the Constitution, etc. In this vein, since Trump is such an incompetent president – he may be costing taxpayers trillions of dollars – why not just replace him with an app? A few Nvidia chips could probably do the job!

Diary

This is peak cabin fever season for me at the moment. It has been cold and snowy, and the main disadvantage to me is that I don't get enough exercise. I manage to stay entertained by reading or by watching films. I still make an effort not to follow Trump closely, because he is predictable and boring. Fortunately, he is so stupid and self-centered that he is accelerating his own political demise, and, rather than obsessing about him, I am content to watch his death spiral from a distance. Conventional news media are still doing shoddy reporting, but I find The Contrarian quite reliable, and there is now a massive movement to get rid of Trump or at least to reduce his influence, and I think it is already succeeding. The problem is that this all occurs in slow motion. Although I find it very hard to get excited about politics, it could be an interesting year.

The films I've watched recently have been Chinatown, The Wizard of Oz, Claire's Knee, My Night at Maud's, Love in the Afternoon and A Summer's Tale. Chinatown, I think is one of the best noir films, with great acting – and a fantastic musical score. I saw The Wizard of Oz in a theater with family members. From a historical standpoint, I think that The Wizard of Oz may be the most important American film ever made, because it effectively captures the American mindset at the end of the Great Depression; the basic pattern of innocent, simple people trying to survive in a world full of hucksters still exists here. And I just love Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West. Also, the production quality for the time (1939) is amazing.

The reason why I'm re-watching the Éric Rohmer films is that I plan to read a biography of him soon. He is not exactly a household name here, but he is one of my favorite directors. Technically, he was part of the French New Wave, but stylistically he had little in common with the others. I think that most viewers find him boring, because there is a lot of dialogue and not much action. His films shot outdoors in color are generally easier to watch. What I like is seeing male-female interactions in which there are complex undertones to the dialogue. That is something that I have rarely experienced not just in films, but in my own interactions with females. Rohmer represents an earlier period, as he was born in 1920, and, though some of his films are autobiographical, social interactions between men and women may also have deteriorated in France by now. But France has a long history that included many sophisticated women, and the same can't be said of the U.S. Although there was and still is sexism in both countries, French history includes many talented women, such as Madame de Staël – with no equivalents here. More generally, France and other European countries have long had intellectual classes that function independently from universities. Although Tony Judt thought that French intellectuals declined in quality after World War II, he lamented the fact that there was no intellectual class in the U.S. Rather, we merely have PhDs who teach at colleges and universities. Czeslaw Milosz felt the same and didn't identify with his "colleagues" at Berkeley. The reasons for this are complex, but derive mainly from the fact that this is primarily a money-driven country that awards little status to any activity that doesn't somehow produce income. As my father-in-law, the rich lawyer, used to say, he didn't want to waste time meditating on pinecones. This attitude permeates American society and severely reduces the number of interesting conversations that one is likely to have in one's lifetime, and, as I've said, in recent years the internet and political correctness have only made things worse. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably find the U.S. boring now; life was so boring in Boston in 1832 that he had to sail to Europe to find someone interesting to talk to.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire VI

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass and sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson read it immediately and liked it. He wrote back to Whitman approvingly. Without permission, Whitman had the letter printed in the New York Tribune.  Thereafter, Whitman became the poetic model for Emerson, and Whitman built his reputation on that. If I were Emerson, I would have disliked Whitman's shameless opportunism, but Emerson was also opportunistic, and in Whitman he had found a poet who seemed to fit his literary ideals. Since this is my last post on the biography, I'll say that I don't find Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman to be particularly good poets. By this time, Emerson was having a hard time living up to his "great man" ideal.

During Emerson's later life, there were growing abolitionism and women's rights movements, and he participated in them. To his credit, he publicly opposed materialism. In a commencement address at Williams College in 1854, he said "It is the vulgarity of this country—it came to us with commerce, out of England—to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or design, is merit." When Darwin's Origin of Species became available in 1860, he read it with interest. In Richardson's description, it doesn't sound as if Emerson or Thoreau had a good understanding of speciation, though they were sympathetic toward the general concept of evolution. Thoreau died from tuberculosis in 1862.

By the 1870's, Emerson was quite famous and was still accepting engagements. In 1871 he took a trip out west, during which he met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and John Muir at Yosemite. In 1872 there was a fire at his house, but the damage was repaired. Following the fire, he took a trip to England, France, Italy and Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. They returned in May, 1873. His memory gradually deteriorated, with Alzheimer's symptoms, and he died from pneumonia on April 27, 1882, at the age of 78. Lidian lived to the age of 90, dying in 1892.

At this stage, I have a fairly mixed view of Emerson. On the positive side, there are his humanistic qualities: he valued equality and disliked material excess. He emphasized the importance of natural environments, but so did many others at the time. For me, his most important impact was on Emily Dickinson. Many of her poems directly embody some of Emerson's ideas. Though they never met, she read his works and attended one of his lectures. I think that what distinguishes Dickinson from the proclaimed transcendentalists is that she had exactly the right feelings and exactly the right words. To me, she is a far more skilled writer than Emerson. In Emerson's case, you can imagine him saying to himself "By God, I'm having a spiritual experience!" I don't agree with his endorsement of Whitman.

I think that there is more to criticize about Emerson in his postures as an intellectual. He was sort of a Romantic social climber, but his timing was all off. When he first arrived in England in 1833, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Goethe were already dead, and Coleridge and Wordsworth were old. The best ally he could come up with was Thomas Carlyle, who was not a particularly good fit for him. More significant, I think, was his compulsively wide reading in conjunction with his dilettantish summation of it. Also, I think that he set the bar for himself quite low by relying primarily on public lectures, often to uneducated audiences. Though I do make allowance for the fact that the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology barely existed in those days, he liked to quote people who lived all over the world in different cultures over thousands of years as if he just ran into them in Concord. I doubt that he fully understood the cultural contexts of what he read. This would have made it difficult for him to apply those models to nineteenth century Massachusetts. My greatest irritation with Emerson has to do with his adoption of the "great man" theory, which he probably applied to himself. To be sure, that has long been a theory among men and is still present in global and national politics. However, the idea had been suspect for quite some time, such as when Beethoven changed the name of his Third Symphony from Bonaparte to Sinfonia Eroica (Heroic Symphony) in 1804.

Summing up, I would say that Emerson was a nice guy who had an interesting life. It would have been fun to visit Emerson and Thoreau in Concord. But I think that an appropriate way to memorialize him would be with an excellent portrait – by Norman Rockwell.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire V

I'm finally approaching the end of the book, and am looking forward to that, since I haven't become a convert to transcendentalism. For me, this is light historical reading, which is useful for understanding earlier periods and the contexts in which people lived, but, in this case, with Emerson as a popular figure of his time, it stands out to me that very little of this has filtered down to the present. Rather than discussing that now, I'll wait until my next post.

Richardson provides a good account of Emerson's life, and the point that Emerson was primarily a lecturer is significant:

Over his active career of four decades, Emerson gave some 1,500 public lectures. Lecturing was a major part of his life and a major source of income. For twenty-five years he was out and away from home lecturing for four, five, or even six months out of each year, every year. He traveled as far west as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and eventually California; he gave 17 lectures in Canada but almost none south of the Ohio River. He delivered the great majority of his lectures in Massachusetts. He gave 157 lectures in New York State. He gave more lectures in Maine than in New Hampshire (35 to 27) and many more in Illinois (49), Ohio (56), Pennsylvania (42), and Wisconsin (29) than in Connecticut, the land of steady habits, where he spoke only 18 times in his entire career.

Throughout his life, Emerson also went on reading binges, sometimes in exotic areas. In 1846 he became obsessed with the Persian poet Hafez, who was a Sufi. This inspired him to write Hafez-like poems and translate Hafez into English. Of what I've seen so far, I'm not inclined to read Emerson's poems. Also that year, the Emersons decided to convert their house into a boardinghouse. This may have been because Lidian's health had declined, and she had difficulty doing all of the housework. They hired a woman to run the boardinghouse and continued to live in part of the house. He took up horticulture and planted many fruit trees, as was popular at the time. By then he had also published four books. But he became restless at home and planned another trip to Europe.

The trip lasted from October, 1847 until July, 1848, and he did a series of lectures at the Mechanics' Institute in different locations. While he was away, Thoreau moved in with Lidian and the children. This is the trip in which he met George Eliot. She was 27 at the time and hadn't started her literary career. Later, Emerson told Carlyle "That young lady has a calm, clear spirit." George Eliot wrote a letter to her friend, Sara Hennell, saying "I have seen Emerson – the first man I have ever seen." He also met previous acquaintances, Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau. New acquaintances included Thackeray, Tennyson, Disraeli, Dickens and Leigh Hunt. He spent time with Carlyle again, but they had some strong disagreements. Apparently, in his later years, Carlyle became reactionary and supported slavery. They both liked the "great man" theory, but Emerson disliked authoritarianism and Carlyle didn't. Even so, they remained cordial, in that they had each assisted the career of the other on their respective continents. During this trip, he briefly visited France and witnessed the revolution in which King Louis-Phillipe was deposed.

When he returned home, Emerson seemed a little disoriented and depressed. His driving idea had been to show the English how competent the Americans are, but he was concluding that the English were in fact superior to the Americans. He wanted to be a "great man," but how could he if he were hanging out with a bunch of losers? A conflict emerged with Thoreau. Thoreau had enjoyed the children and Lidian, and he may have preferred it if Emerson hadn't returned. Thoreau was also in a bad mood because he was unable to find a publisher for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was later printed at his expense but never sold well. Thoreau was in fact stubborn, churlish and lacking in social graces, but their friendship survived.

Emerson gradually readjusted to life in Concord. He went on long walks with Ellery Channing, the "ne'er-do-well" poet. The equanimity in his relationship with Lidian was restored. He began writing again and took up Hegel and Swedenborg. On July 19, 1850, Margaret Fuller died in the shipwreck off Fire Island while returning from Italy, and Emerson was shocked and saddened.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire IV

I'm up to 1844, when Emerson reached the age of 41. His first child, Waldo, was born in 1836 but died in 1842. This had a devastating effect on the family that lasted for some time. He also had a daughter, Ellen (1839-1909), named after his first wife, another daughter, Edith (1841- 1929), and another son, Edward (1844-1930). He seemed to have a good relationship with his wife, Lidian, and she dutifully cared for the children and household and the stream of visitors invited by Emerson, which must have been a strain, because they often stayed for four or five days. Some of them were eccentric, such as the poet Jones Very. Two new women, Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis, entered the circle, and Emerson seems to have been attracted to both of them physically and emotionally, though nothing came of it. He fretted about this for some time, as Richardson describes:

In August of 1841 Emerson was still protesting that "it is not in the plan or prospect of the soul, this fast union of one to one." In September of 1841 he repeated that "plainly marriage should be a temporary relation, it should have a natural birth, climax and decay, without violence of any kind,—violence to bind or violence to rend." The same year, he made a note, "I marry you for better, not for worse." In 1843 he was still upset by what he called "the vitriolic acid of marriage," and in 1852, after his trip to England, he was still thinking (as he wrote) that "everything is free but marriage." 

There was a similar tension with Margaret Fuller, though he seems to have been less attracted to her. She became the editor and a contributor to their new publication, The Dial, in 1840. This was a transcendentalist publication, and other contributors included Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and W.E. Channing, a preacher. The Dial was never popular and it ceased publication in 1844.

In 1840, his friend, George Ripley, invited the Emersons to live at his newly-formed commune called Brook Farm, which opened in 1841. The commune had been carefully planned and was organized on principles from Charles Fourier. After mulling this over for some time, he declined, because it had an intricate collectivist social structure that would conflict with his independence. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there briefly. In any case, Brook Farm was never financially viable, and it closed in 1847.

In 1841, Emerson took an interest in Plotinus:

Emerson was particularly struck by two Neoplatonic teachings: the idea of the world as emanation and the idea of the ecstatic union with the One. For Plotinus everything emanates, or flows out, from the One, the ultimate power and unity of things. The first emanation is thought or mind, meaning the whole range of ideas from which in turn the whole range of tangible things and beings emanate. In a piece of visionary writing of this year Emerson says:

As the river flows, and the plant flows (or emits odors), and the sun flows (or radiates), and the mind is a stream of thoughts, so was the universe an emanation of God. Everything is an emanation, and from every emanation is a new emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also. If anything could stand still, it would be instantly crushed and dissipated by the torrent which it resisted.

When I see language like this, I begin to think "Where's Waldo?" To me, this is not serious writing, though I can accept the ideas obliquely in poetic form, such as in the poems of Emily Dickinson. 

In 1843, Emerson's friend, Bronson Alcott, started a transcendentalist-themed commune called Fruitlands. That lasted for less than a year. In 1844, Emerson became an active opponent of slavery. In modern terms, he seemed to have a hodgepodge of ideas that would not cohere well today. For example, he supported capitalism though that is usually seen as inconsistent with most religious sentiments. So, I'm not exactly in awe of Emerson as a thinker at this point but will save my conclusions until after I've finished the last two hundred pages.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire III

I'm at the middle of the book, and it seems to be getting more interesting at this point. The five surviving Emerson brothers are starting to die off. Edward died in 1834 at the age of twenty-nine. More significantly, Charles died in 1836 at the age of twenty-seven. Charles was close to Waldo and had planned to marry later that year. Waldo had added two rooms to his house so that the couple could move in with him. An organization that came to be known as the Transcendental Club began to meet in the Boston area, and although Emerson wasn't particularly fond of it, it indicated that Emerson was forming a sort of movement that came to be centered around his house in Concord. At this point, Emerson's primary source of income seems to have been his lectures.

A heterogeneous group of people began to meet with Emerson at his house. One was Bronson Alcott, who was a rather eccentric educator and a utopian thinker. He was not thought to be an effective writer. His ventures were usually unrealistic, and he was often unable to support his family. Nevertheless, his daughter, Louisa May Alcott managed to become a successful novelist. Another was Margaret Fuller, a prominent journalist and feminist. Fuller added a dimension to Emerson's group, but she was also not a good writer. She died in a shipwreck in 1850 at the age of forty, which I mentioned in my discussion of the Thoreau biography. Thoreau himself probably met Emerson when he attended a lecture by him in 1835 when he was a student at Harvard. After graduating in 1837, he met Emerson at his house and began to become Emerson's disciple, though I think that that is a rather strong word to use, given Thoreau's independence. Richardson's book emphasizes how close Emerson and Thoreau were for a time. I think that, in Emerson's quest to start a movement, Thoreau may have been the only person who was of much help.

Emerson published Nature in 1836, and it became the centerpiece of the transcendentalism movement. At first the essay was a little controversial, but that died down. I have been reluctant to read Emerson because I know how he developed his ideas, I don't agree with all of them, and Thoreau was probably a better writer. Thoreau was a perfectionist in both reading and writing. He preferred to read everything in the original text, including Latin and Greek, and his writing was straightforward, based on his own experiences, and did not contain many abstract ideas. Emerson, on the other hand, was a frenetic reader, and was actively trying to piece together some sort of gospel, which did not occur to him spontaneously. He wanted to identify a spiritual essence in nature, whereas I consider that a waste of time, because it doesn't exist. This tendency, I think, places Emerson within a now-dead cultural environment that was still active during his lifetime. Up until the late nineteenth century, spiritualism was quite popular, and you could find it in Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Owen and George Eliot. I think it is ironic that the system that Emerson was trying to replace, Unitarianism, is more rationalistic, and that survived while transcendentalism vanished. Another area in which I think he was incorrect was in his emphasis on individualism. He seemed to think that people could be trained to become more individualistic, and, though I suppose that might occur occasionally, for the most part it is an inborn trait. It is a commonplace statement now that individualistic people were more attracted to the U.S. from other countries than collectivists. Moreover, I noticed from an early age that I was individualistic, and I know that I was born that way, and that no essay would ever have affected me in that respect. Despite the above criticisms, transcendentalism probably did have some positive effects. It can be seen as a precursor to a respect for nature and environmentalism. Furthermore, it is well establish now that exposure to nature can be quite therapeutic.

So, I am looking at this as a story about cultural evolution that has little to do with science or theoretical considerations. Indirectly, Emerson was attempting to differentiate American culture from European culture in order to reduce the appearance of vassalage. But Emerson was hardly exposed to psychology, anthropology, sociology or evolution, so it would have been difficult for him to say anything that I would find interesting. Even so, I have to admire him for living at a time when people were open to new ideas and enjoyed discussing them with others – sooooo nineteenth century!

Emerson: The Mind on Fire II

At the time of their marriage, Ellen was already showing signs of tuberculosis, and she died on February 8, 1831, at the age of nineteen. They had been happily married, and this occurring after less than two years was a blow to Emerson. On Christmas Day, 1832, he left on a long trip to Europe, from which he returned on October 8. He was not at all wealthy at that point, and lived very frugally. Later, he received an inheritance from the estate of Ellen's father, but it wasn't large. On the trip, he spent time in several countries and met people. In Rome, he met John Stuart Mill, and, in Paris, he was struck by the Jardin des Plantes, which stimulated his interest in botany. But he really hit the jackpot in England and Scotland, where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was the closest to his age, and they maintained a long friendship. When he returned to Massachusetts, he switched to becoming a lecturer and a writer. At a lecture in Plymouth, he met Lydia Jackson, who was about a year older than he was. They married on September 14, 1835. Eventually they moved to Concord, which was the ancestral home of the Emersons. He disliked her name, and they changed it to "Lidian." Besides being nearly a year older than Emerson, she was more conservative than Ellen, but she also seems to have been somewhat more intellectual. In any case, the marriage lasted up until Emerson's death in 1882. While all this is going on, there are various illnesses and deaths in Emerson's family, which have consequences with respect to living arrangements and financial support. I am trying to avoid writing about that, because it is not central to the narrative.   

Richardson is doing a good job showing the development of Emerson's ideas. It is apparent that he didn't really want to be a minister and wasn't a particularly good preacher. He seems to have taken it upon himself to distill a new conceptual model that would be suitable in the mid-1800's. He drew ideas from his readings and travels in order to, in effect, transform Unitarianism into transcendentalism. It is apparent that he was quite ambitious and energetic in this pursuit.

I am already starting to see Emerson mainly as a participant in the history of ideas who only makes sense if you look at him in the context of the intellectual currents in the U.S. and U.K. at the time. Unfortunately, he came along just as the Romantic poets were dying off, and before Darwin came along. Thus, like Thomas Carlyle, it is hard for me to see him as a force whose ideas have much significance today. Carlyle seems to have led a pro-Germany movement that encouraged intellectuals to adopt German cultural attitudes from the time of Goethe, but that all collapsed in the twentieth century. I now like to use G.H. Lewes as a barometer of intellectual trends in England during the nineteenth century. First he was a Romantic and a friend of Leigh Hunt; as the century progressed, he switched his focus to Goethe and Germany, like Thomas Carlyle. Finally, before he died in 1878, he was essentially a Darwinian devoted to the scientific method. Generally, it appears to me that Emerson was too old to be a Romantic and too young to be a Darwinian. It is also relevant that he had studied little science.

With this in mind, I'm not terribly excited to read much Emerson myself, but I will follow Richardson's examples and analysis in this book. One of Emerson's weaknesses, I think, is his belief in the "great man" theory:

Every great man does in his nature point out and imply the existence and well being of all the institutions and orders of a state.

I think that it would be fair to say that Emerson considered himself a "great man." Not a good sign. I've also been thinking about Emerson's famous statement from Self-Reliance:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

When I first read this some time ago I found it interesting and tended to agree with it. Given what I know now, it can also be seen as self-aggrandizement by Emerson. And, based on my readings on neurology by Vinod Goel and Robert Sapolsky, it is normal for aging human brains to follow methods that they learned earlier in life. Understandably, Emerson could not have known this.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire I

I've started on this biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Robert D. Richardson Jr. So far it seems to be well-written, but, because I'm reading it more for the historical context of writers in nineteenth century Massachusetts than for a specific interest in Emerson, I'm not finding it particularly exciting. Emerson and his family sound fairly extroverted, and, over the years, I have gradually come to dislike extroverts compared to introverts. The writers, artists and scientists whom I like best tend to be introverts: George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, László Krasznahorkai, Emily Dickinson, Vivian Maier, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and E.O. Wilson, for example. Part of this may be that in order to grasp aspects of life or the world well, one must be capable of observing them and meditating on them for long periods of time. The need to socialize reduces the time available for extroverts to excel in many fields. Rather, I think that extroverts tend to serve the specific function of fostering social unity in various groups. There are probably exceptions to this model, because most people aren't purely introverted or purely extroverted, but it reflects my observations of people over the course of my life. In any case, Emerson seems to me to have been an extrovert, which means that I am unlikely to find his ideas interesting. Nevertheless, it should be informative to learn more about how he interfaced with Henry David Thoreau and other American and British intellectuals of his time.

Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston. This made him about fourteen years older than Thoreau and twenty-seven years older than Emily Dickinson. In 1803, Boston was a town of only about 25,000 residents, but it was at the beginning of a population explosion. Emerson's father was a poorly-paid minister, and, like other families at the time, his was large, with illnesses and early deaths. The first two children, a girl and a boy, didn't survive to adulthood, then there were five boys who did and one girl who didn't. Emerson's father died 1811, when he was eight, so did not have much direct impact on him. The household, however, was highly literate, and Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt, was extremely well-read. He attended Boston Latin School and entered Harvard in 1817, when he was fourteen. This wasn't because he was precocious, and his family's church connections generally allowed the boys to attend Harvard. Harvard at the time was part boys' school and part college, and there were only sixty students in his class. He did not excel academically and seemed to prefer literature to science. He fancied himself a poet.

After graduating from Harvard in 1821, Emerson didn't have a career plan, and he taught at a school for young women until 1825, when he entered Harvard Divinity School, which he did not complete after withdrawing because of an eye infection. Recovering from the eye infection, he traveled by ship to Charleston, South Carolina and Saint Petersburg, Florida in 1826. In 1827 he returned home, visiting friends and relatives in Baltimore, Alexandria, Philadelphia and New York. He became a preacher and met 16-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker in Concord, New Hampshire. She was a daughter of a deceased Boston rope manufacturer. They fell in love and married on September 30, 1829.

Besides the above, the book dutifully recounts Emerson's readings throughout and his efforts to clarify his religious beliefs. Of course, his religious struggles are of little interest to me, but I realize that they may be important to others. For me, the ideas discussed by intellectuals didn't become particularly interesting until about 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species; by then, Emerson was already fifty-six. I do find Richardson's book helpful for understanding the historical and sociological context of Emerson's life, but am doubtful that I would share Emerson's concerns. Hopefully this will not stop me from finishing the book. Because of Richardson's writing style, I may end up speed reading sections of it that don't interest me. In a worst case scenario I'll read only the sections that pertain to Thoreau and Emerson's trips to Europe. 

Diary

Although, as I've said repeatedly, I don't like thinking about or discussing Donald Trump, I thought that I should pass along my impressions of what is happening now. While Trump has proven himself to be incompetent in multiple areas, he is actually fairly predictable, and, after being forced to pay attention to him for ten years, I just noticed how he is changing his strategy. There is a certain amount of speculation here, but this is what I think. Because of his interaction today with the newly-elected mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and some of the comments that he made during the meeting, I think that Trump has recognized that he is about finished with the MAGA movement and is fully prepared to exit the Republican Party. This is evident in his harebrained continuation of his economic policies from his first term, which didn't work then and aren't working now. Despite his often-aggressive behavior, Trump is one of the most predictable public figures that I've ever observed. He never had much of an emotional connection with the Republican Party, because he grew up in New York City, and he now sees the writing on the wall regarding his future as the leader of MAGA, and he is preparing for a retirement from politics which will allow him to maintain connections with New York City. This can also be interpreted as an attempt to divert from the reality of a weakened economy and public disgust regarding his military assaults on American cities, but, to me, Trump seems to be exhausted from his entire effort and has reached the point where he is seriously thinking about exiting the situation – rather than continuing his attempt to transform the presidency into a dictatorship. It is also possible that new facts from the release of the Epstein documents may be affecting him, but, in any case, Trump seems to be giving up. In addition, it is quite possible that he is now getting negative feedback from the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court. The reason why I'm writing this is that the news media in general is not courageous enough to say it or even speculate at all.

Regarding the last comment, although I don't always enjoy The Contrarian, Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen have in fact created an effective antidote to the Trump phenomenon. I find that some of their interviews get right to the heart of the issues, and they don't pull punches. It can be really frustrating to watch the traditional news outlets waltzing around meaningful commentary. My only complaints about The Contrarian are that they are more confident about the democratic process than I am and perhaps have a religious faith that I am completely lacking. Still, their chutzpah can be inspiring. 

In any case, whether or not my evaluation is completely accurate, I now feel that Trump is on the way out. The job market is deteriorating, and if Trump decides to mail out checks to get a political boost, that will only increase inflation.

In other news, I am attempting to prepare for a long, slow winter. I currently have a lengthy biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson to read, which should last for several weeks. While I don't think that I will find Emerson's ideas particularly interesting, I have recently been reading about nineteenth century New England people, and this will help round out the picture for me. I've read enough biographies now to think that entire periods are generally more interesting than any particular individuals who were prominent during those times. This is also a safe way to avoid lionizing one or two people who don't necessarily deserve it. Many famous people have serious flaws that can be quite annoying when you take a close look. At this point I find it more interesting to look at different periods and locations and see the biographical participants within their particular ecosystems. This has worked fairly well for me recently for the French Enlightenment, nineteenth century British intellectuals and artists, and now nineteenth century American intellectuals and artists. However, I may be running out of material and may soon have to learn Mandarin or some other language – though, as I've said, I'm terrible at languages. For entertainment, I am currently watching Claire's Knee, by Éric Rohmer, for the third time. I enjoy seeing Lake Annecy, which I visited in 2000. Annecy is also where Rousseau met Mme. de Warens. While there, I took out a motor boat on the lake.

The Origins of Consciousness: Thoughts of the Crooked-Headed Fly

This new book, by Giorgio Vallortigara, continues his discussion of apparently complex neurological mechanisms in simple animals. He moves on from his last book, Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge, which discusses chick behavior, indicating innate knowledge at birth and the ability to perform some kinds of abstract reasoning without language. This book is comparatively more varied and discusses several different experiments involving much simpler organisms in an attempt to clarify the origin and function of consciousness. Because of the density of the material and the brevity of the book, I found it less compelling than his last one. There are eclectic elements to Vallortigara's writing style, and this book even includes two poems by Emily Dickinson!

One of the most interesting experiments to me was one in which bees were trained to identify paintings by Monet and Picasso. After the initial training, they were generally able to discriminate other paintings by Monet and Picasso. There is also a study of horseshoe crabs, which are actually more closely related to spiders than crabs. They have two primitive eyes which, with their neurological system, allow them to discern visual edges. There is an experiment with cockroaches which indicates that their visual system is similar to that of humans.

The experiment with the crooked-headed fly of the title seems to indicate that this fly possesses a neurological structure that contains a model for the external world around it, and that new external stimuli are compared to the standing model in order to assess their reality. In this instance, the fly's head had been rotated on its body from its normal position. When new experiences don't match the existing model, the fly may freeze. Vallortigara's main thesis is that moving organisms, as opposed to stationary ones, as a matter of survival have evolved the neurological equivalent of a map that shows how their bodies are oriented in relation to objects in the external world. He expands this to say that this is the origin of consciousness, and that consciousness is not an emergent phenomenon that exists only in animals with large brains, such as H. sapiens.

I finally figured out, several years ago, that "consciousness" is actually a buzzword that is often used by people who implicitly believe that ours is the only species to have reached that exalted level. In this respect, I am very much in agreement with Vallortigara's tendency to demythologize our place in the universe. Whether or not this experiment proves his conclusion, I already agreed with Vallortigara that many species share characteristics that have enabled their survival with other species; it makes sense that survival-based characteristics may also work in other species. Not only do we inhabit the same universe, but we inhabit the same planet, where all currently known life has evolved.

There is also some discussion in the book about how animals with very small brains manage to survive, given their limited neurological capacities. Vallortigara thinks that social insects may compensate for this with specialized jobs within the hive: one insect doesn't have to know all of the jobs.

I am generally in agreement with the ideas expressed in this book and think that most people who think like naturalists probably would. I was also reminded of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, in which humans do most of their thinking fast, like insects, and reserve larger portions of their brains for more complex matters. I am still amazed to see how quickly flies and hummingbirds react to changes in their environments. Larger animals may have the capacity to process more complex information, but they are all descendants of smaller animals that never did slow thinking. 

Diary

One of my characteristics is that I like to be completely caught up on all responsibilities so that I don't have to worry about things that don't interest me much. This is fairly easy to do if you don't work for a living, and I haven't done that since 2007. Even so, certain challenges do come up occasionally, such as at the beginning of winter. It snowed last night, but it is already melting. My property maintenance tasks become compressed at this time of year, since I do nearly everything myself. Because I have a small shed, at any given time I can conveniently take out either the tractor or the snow blower, but not both. This means that I must finish all of the mowing and put away the tractor before the first snow. Then the snow blower can easily be taken out. I also have to clear the leaves from the yard before a heavy rain or snow, or they may still be sitting there in the spring. In addition, since I don't have a garage, I try to install my snow tires before the first snow. This all occurs within a short time period. One advantage at this house is the fact that I have no wood-burning stove. Though I liked having one, it was quite time-consuming stacking and moving wood and cutting and splitting firewood from the property. Also, from sleeping on hard mattresses for thirty-six years, I had developed tendonitis in my shoulders, which was exacerbated by all the wood-lifting. Since moving and buying a new mattress, my tendonitis has disappeared.

When I have free time, that doesn't necessarily mean that I daydream all day. Although I'm not as obsessive as my former neighbor, Dorothy Douglas, I don't like to see trash along the road, and occasionally I stop to pick it up. Yesterday, on a hike in Pittsford, I noticed that there had been a large beer party in the woods behind the Congregational Church. Rather than having to see the cans lying there for years, I decided to remove dozens of Labatt Ice 24 oz. cans. With winter coming, there may not be another beer party until next summer.

Since I'm tired of thinking about Donald Trump, I thought I'd say something about Dick Cheney, who just died. It is instructive to examine Cheney's political career, because he normalized self-dealing within the Republican Party well before Trump came along. He became Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush in 1989 after five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. Then, from 1995 to 2000 he served as the CEO of Halliburton, the energy services company which has deep connections with the defense industry. Some of his business decisions were considered questionable, and he accumulated $45 million while there. Cheney is a good example of the revolving door practice in which government officials move on to high positions in the corporate world. Later, after becoming Vice President under George W. Bush, he became the main promoter of the Iraq War, with Iraq as a major oil producer. From an ideological standpoint, he was an advocate of increased presidential power, which has probably helped pave the way for Donald Trump. However, perhaps as a form of contrition, he opposed Trump politically and voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.

There is nothing unusual about self-dealing in politics, but I have long been irritated by people who idealize democracy and present corruption as something that can easily be controlled by voters. It can't be. As I've said on numerous occasions, the underlying problem of democratic governance is that humans are simply large mammals, and, as such, are likely not only to behave irrationally much of the time, but to act primarily in their self-interest if they think that they can get away with it. So, my standing model is still an AI-based government which, if designed properly, would have the potential to permanently remove corruption and incompetence from governance. On a theoretical basis, I think it is possible that democracy may only work in very small societies whose citizens are culturally uniform and have only one class; ideally, they would all know each other. Even then there would be conflicts, but they would occur on a manageable scale.

In other news, I've done a very small amount of stargazing and did get a quick look at the Orion Nebula, though the moon was up. My new mount is working fine now. It is convenient to leave the mount and telescope set up outside, because, at this location, you never know exactly when the sky may clear up. Sometimes that lasts for only a few minutes. I'm not about to move to the Atacama Desert in Chile for better viewing conditions. I plan to bring the telescope inside rather than leave it outside all winter. The mount can handle the weather and that stays outside because it is time-consuming to set up. I've started on a new book and will probably have something to say about it on my next post.

Diary

I have been preoccupied for a few days with a visitor and therefore have not spent much time thinking about this blog. I have also been casually reading two books. One, I decided, wasn't worth the time, and the other, though of some interest to me, is on an obscure topic that would not interest many readers, so I'm setting it aside for now. I did, however, also receive a new book by Giorgio Vallortigara, which looks very promising, and I will be starting on it soon.

We had a few dry, sunny autumnal days, and the leaves are past their peak colors. They are now falling rapidly, with wind and rain at the moment. It is relatively warm for this time of year, and it may not cool off significantly for several weeks. I still have a few edible tomatoes left.

There remains the background noise of the Trump administration and Washington politics, which, as I've said, I try not to dwell on. While I'm reluctant to make an explicit prediction about Trump's demise, it does currently seem to be proceeding at an accelerating pace. His popularity is continuing to decline. He hasn't created new jobs and the economy is somewhat stagnant. The Republican-controlled Congress also isn't producing results which will encourage ordinary workers. Generally, healthcare costs will rise and government services will be reduced. Trump's tariff plan still seems like a fiasco and is unlikely to produce desirable results. His skill in international diplomacy is pretty much nonexistent. Under conditions like this, he tends distract from his incompetence with actions that violate the Constitution in new ways. I think that he may have imagined that by this point in his current term he would have charged up the economy so that he would win votes, but that isn't happening. As of now, he may be more inclined to contemplate an actual takeover of the U.S. government with the military. However, since such an action would be considered unacceptable by the Supreme Court, Congress and nearly all voters, it would be far more challenging than anything that he has attempted so far. While he has been able to control the U.S. military up to now, his actions could precipitate a rebellion within the military, and, in the end, he might be found guilty of treason. I don't think that he has the intellectual resources to extract himself from this mess of his own making, and the Republicans and the billionaires aren't really his friends and will dump him at some point. Furthermore, the "No Kings" movement has a lot of momentum currently and is unlikely to dissipate.

The other aspect of this, that I've mentioned before, is investing. The uncertainty of the effects of Trump's tariff plan has been evaporating. But there is still uncertainty over the AI industry and the meme investing that has been revived recently. Under these conditions, I now have a fairly normal portfolio. I had large portions in money markets and gold for a while, but I have recently returned to stocks.

Diary

We are about at peak fall colors now. Some leaves have fallen, but there is still a long way to go. Technically we are still in a drought, but it has been raining, and there is more rain in the forecast. I've put away the lawn tractor for the winter and the snow blower is ready for action. It probably won't snow for a few weeks. There is a gigantic harvest of acorns this year, probably because of the wet spring. With the dry summer, the bears may not have found enough berries, and they were in the yard during the day eating acorns. I also saw a bear on one of my hikes. Fortunately, black bears are not normally dangerous to humans. Currently there are no longer any mice hanging around outside the house at night, since this is no longer their domicile, but there may be a mouse population explosion next year because of all the acorns. The squirrels are also having a feast. I've done a little stargazing, with Saturn and Jupiter visible now. I can see the Orion Nebula lying in bed, but I haven't felt like getting up at 3:00 A.M. to look at it through the telescope. I plan to wait until it rises earlier, and after that I'll put away the telescope for the winter.

I've been reading a couple of different books. One I didn't like much, and I've given up on it. Another is somewhat interesting to me, but it's on an obscure subject that wouldn't interest most others, so I'm not going to write about it. The popularity of this blog is of some concern to me because it keeps growing. Originally, I thought that I might have a few regulars and have some low-key discussions. Since the pandemic there has been a steady rise in pageviews, and I'm currently up to about forty thousand pageviews per month, according to the data provided. Strangely, in the last month the blog has been more popular in China than in the U.S. And almost as many pageviews came from Singapore as the U.S. I had been sort of avoiding catchy titles for my posts, but I slipped up with "Brain Death by Technological Innovation," and it became one of my most popular posts almost immediately. That may be because it seems to be a popular topic now, and I've seen other articles on it since then.

As usual, I have been trying to limit my exposure to the Trump phenomenon. One of my favorite news sources is currently The Contrarian, and although they tend to focus on legal issues, it is one of the best places to find straightforward assessments of the pitfalls of the Trump administration. I still usually watch part of PBS NewsHour, where I find the news coverage uneven. The new blonde on the staff, Liz Landers, isn't too bad actually. It is probably a tactical advantage to have a blonde female cover the White House. Laura Barrón-López was probably discriminated against at the White House. Some of the NewsHour staff probably also got on her nerves because of their inappropriate neutrality on Trump. Fortunately, many news outlets now aren't afraid to report accurately on Donald Trump: he is a stupid, egocentric, unprincipled liar. He doesn't do anything systematically, and at best he may produce a random assortment of bad outcomes and good outcomes. In the long term, I don't see how he could benefit the Republican Party. He isn't going to make America great, and others will probably have to clean up after him – perhaps for decades. Trump may appeal to Nazi types, but the probable percentage of the population that would convert to Naziism now in the U.S. is tiny compared to Germany in the 1930's. Furthermore, much of Trump's appeal is based on promises that he will probably be unable to keep. He will be known for creating chaos rather than leading a disciplined movement.

I was glad that I came across the poet Jemma Borg. I like poems that describe human lives in the context of the natural world, without the usual filters imposed by transient styles or cultural norms. It is probably relevant that Borg studied zoology and evolutionary genetics. I think that science writers can make good poets. In other news, I was glad to see that László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I have found him talented and original, and I like the fact that his motivation isn't entirely pecuniary. In his case, his sales may go up a little, but he won't be the next Stephen King.

Before & after the night

 after Antonella Anedda

I

At last, what must be done falls away

undone          Darkness grows like headaches grow

from a hard seed & gathers as pain gathers

                                           the body in, the last note

of sunset paled behind the hill's shoulder

           Night muffles the windows of the house

& the fleet-beacons of cars blare in the dark

           then a quiet that had spread as shadows

from the trees' roots becomes whole

with the lights unfastening                        

                                               Sleep, eyes - let the heart speak -

& a cold air cracks & the bare, brown earth

listens, remembering ice

           The truce of an owl sounds in the wet-winged oak

II

Time stretches, filling the unburied dawn

with windows & cars & leaves - relinquishing

the silence, as songs do

                        when they sing the unsolvable pain

We have slept, contagiously, then rouse

to the road's slick roar, to clocks shaking out

          their numbers like an arcane dew

                                             What no longer mattered -

which was the night's comfort - picks up again

its substance like a ghost

& cleans its aching teeth

                      We enter our empty clothes: here

           comes a hand through a sleeve

like a worm        out of earth        into the blackbird's beak

—Jemma Borg

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson VI

I've finally reached the end of this long biography, and here is the wrap-up.  

Her 1862-to-1865 period, when she first corresponded with Higginson, was probably her most productive. However, she remained reclusive and did not meet Higginson until 1870, when he visited Amherst. Fortunately, he wrote a detailed account of this visit. So much of this book is a recording of her interactions with family members and routine acquaintances that I found Higginson's impressions far more useful: he was a worldly outsider and far better positioned to make an objective evaluation. He found the household strikingly individualistic.

In the entry hall he heard a "step like a pattering child's & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair...in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl."...Twice he used the word "childlike." His hostess presented him with two day lilies as her "introduction," then asking him to "[f]orgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say," she began talking. She talked "continuously" but "deferentially–sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her"–and then resuming....he judged her to be "thoroughly ingenuous & simple." Although he doubted his wife would care for her, he considered much of what she said "wise."

"Her father was not severe I should think but remote."

"I was never with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: "The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and something abnormal." 

As Habegger notes, this is probably the best existing description of Dickinson and her household. Emily became increasingly reclusive as she aged, and she was only thirty-nine at the time of this visit. Higginson saw her only one other time, in 1873, and that appears to have been uneventful.

Edward, her father, died in 1874, at the age of seventy-one. In true patriarchal fashion, he left no will, and it was simply assumed that Austin would thereafter take control of the household, with the three women having no rights or inheritances. From here on, the book is mainly a sequence of deaths. In 1882, her probable "Master," the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, died. Emily came to know the popular judge, Otis Phillips Lord. He was about eighteen years older than her. His wife had died in 1877, and, after Emily's mother died in 1882, he apparently proposed to Emily. She did not accept. It's probably just as well, because he died in 1884. Emily herself died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five. At the time, the stated medical cause of death was basically mumbo jumbo. A more recent analysis suggests that she died from hypertension, which would certainly make sense.

 Austin was having an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) then. She was the wife of an astronomy professor at Amherst. She was a spirited person, liked sex, and had an open marriage – nothing like any of the Dickinsons. Todd worked with Higginson to produce the first book of Emily's poems. There has been criticism of their editing, but the book sold exceptionally well, and Emily's reputation as a poet was immediately established.

Habegger reproduces the entire title poem, which is about death:

My Wars are laid away in Books—

I have one Battle more—

A Foe whom I have never seen

But oft has scanned me o'er–

And hesitated me between

And others at my side,

But chose the best—Neglecting me—till

All the rest have died—

How sweet if I am not forgot

By Chums that passed away—

Since Playmates at threescore and ten

Are such a scarcity—

I've been thinking about the main influences on Emily Dickinson. Although she apparently admired Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her style is probably much closer to that of Emily Brontë. She also admired George Eliot, but George Eliot was vastly more knowledgeable than Emily – and a bad poet. While Emily seems to have been well-read – apparently she did like Henry David Thoreau – as a practical matter she was challenged by direct interactions with people, which excluded her from the kind of knowledge that makes good novelists. Still, I find some of Dickinson's poems to be remarkable little gems.

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson V

Emily Dickinson left behind three unsent drafts to a person who was addressed as "Master." This has caused a great deal of scholarly speculation, which, according to Habegger, isn't really all that important. One possible candidate was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who had visited her at least once. They appear to have been written in the late 1850's and early 1860's. At a later date, in April, 1862, she read the article in Atlantic Monthly, written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which I discussed earlier here in connection with Renée Bergland's book, and Higginson thereafter became her de facto "Master," though probably not at an exalted level. The intellectual men who attracted Dickinson's attention tended to have religious training, and that even included Higginson.

Habegger's book is full of minutiae regarding boring bourgeois life in the last days of Puritan New England. He is dutifully reporting it, given that he is a scholar of the subject, but, understandably, this is not a particularly exciting topic, to me at least. Even so, it is still of some value to know that the people in Dickinson's life faced problems different from the ones we have now. Besides the Civil War, with a lack of effective contraception and a primitive state in medicine, people tended to have enormous families, and they were often ill, dying or going bankrupt. Dickinson herself had eye problems and spent a lot of time in Cambridge getting treatments.

As I am reaching the end of the book, I am tending to think about Dickinson in the context of the history of poetry. Since the only other poet I know much about is Denise Levertov, I am often making comparisons. They had a few things in common and a few major differences. They both had hard times establishing their footings as poets. Both wrestled with their religious backgrounds. Levertov's father was a fringe Jewish theologian who came to recognize Christ, and she grew up admiring Rilke. Dickinson's family consisted of rather bourgeois lawyers. Her brother, Austin, lived next door in a showy house; he became an art aficionado, making special trips to New York City to purchase art objects, and this perfectly fits my model of a social climber. Levertov had greater political proclivities than Dickinson; her sister had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Denise actively opposed the Vietnam War. Both Dickinson and Levertov had very strong religious interests, and in this area, Dickinson seems to have been more sophisticated because of her awareness of science, as discussed in Natural Magic. Levertov, on the other hand, was scientifically illiterate, and she seemed to go off into a haphazard religious exploration at the end of her life. 

I was intrigued that both Dickinson and Levertov used the word "Master" to designate people who could guide them in their poetic development. In Dickinson's case, there was no existing blueprint for female poets in the U.S. at the time. She really wanted guidance, and I don't think that she ever found it. By 1862, she had settled into the idea of writing for posterity, and there does not seem to be any evidence that she wanted a public life. She was bound by her family culture and the artistic environment of Massachusetts at the time. Thus, for her, Walt Whitman was not an acceptable or even a readable model, and even Emerson and Thoreau may have been too risqué for her. In Levertov's case, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a poet and unselfconsciously engaged in networking until she became established. Her transition to the poetry ecosystem within the U.S. after World War II was challenging, and she at one point designated Robert Duncan as her "Master." Because she had worked in Massachusetts for several years, she may have picked up the term from Dickinson. 

Dickinson and Levertov are two of my favorite poets, and they both occasionally seem like mystical visionaries. At the time and place of Dickinson's life, it was impossible for her to have experiences similar to those of Levertov. Thus, what we see is a restricted artistic expression, which I think demonstrates a restrained challenge to religious dogma, along with a remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Levertov lived during a far more propitious time for female poets, and her poems cover a wider range of human experience than Dickinson was capable. However, because Dickinson's work was essentially private during her lifetime, she never had to make compromises for commercial considerations or the prevailing views of the arts crowd.

I expect to finish the book soon and will make a final post. 

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson IV

I'm up to the year 1860, when Emily turned thirty, and will finish the book within a couple of weeks. During the 1850's, her life took more shape, and her writing skills continued to improve. Most of her childhood friends drifted away, and she became close to Susan Gilbert, who came from a wealthy family but was orphaned at a young age and had grown up with relatives in Geneva, New York. Subsequently, she moved to Amherst and lived with a sister and her brother-in-law. Apparently, Susan and Emily didn't meet until late in 1850. They were the same age and seemed to hit it off immediately. Susan had a sharp mind, and they had productive discussions and correspondences. However, Susan occasionally gave Emily the brush-off, so she must have had other priorities. The most obvious one was her involvement with Emily's brother, Austin, with whom she became engaged in 1853. 

In 1855, the former Dickinson Homestead came on the market, and Edward decided to buy it back. Initially, Emily wasn't excited about moving there, because she liked her home on West Street, and the Homestead was becoming decrepit. But Edward devised a plan, not only to refurbish the Homestead, but to build another home, later called "The Evergreens," an "Italianate villa," next door for Austin and Susan. By then, Austin had graduated from Amherst and Harvard Law School. Austin and Susan had planned to move west, and apparently this was an incentive for them to remain in Amherst, with Austin working at his father's firm. "The Evergreens" thereafter became the site of much of Emily's social life.

Habegger, I think, effectively captures the emotional dynamics and the poetic results created by this living arrangement:

What made Sue's distant nearness so powerful a stimulant was that it fit a basic rule of life for Dickinson: always seeking intimacy and finding it withheld. The pattern shows up not only in her friendships but in her orientation to nature and religion. The naive fixation on heaven that was so central in Protestant America, and which she had recklessly taken to heart without experiencing a conversion, had generated a pressing quest for the absolute within the mundane. This perennially expected rush is one of the things that gives her poems on bees, sunsets, and the seasons their Dickinsonian cachet:

A something in a summer's Day

As slow her flambeaux burn away

Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer's noon—

A depth—an Azure—a perfume—

Transcending extasy.

The last line was not hyperbole. Ecstasy comes with fulfillment, but what moved Dickinson was expectation: not rowing in Eden, but the thought of rowing in Eden. A later stanza of this poem describes the action of nature's fingers on the responsive heart:

The wizard fingers never rest—

The purple brook within the breast

Still chafes its narrow bed—

Sexual, yes, but so much more than sexual, this constant chafing that results in a poetry of increasing power, daring, mastery. The poetry of arousal, it is the product of the single heart lying in its narrow bed and dreaming of a final escape from itself.

I'm not sure whether Emily Dickinson herself would agree with this analysis, but it's the best one I've seen on the dynamics within her poems.

Besides this important artistic tension, social events at "The Evergreens" provided Emily with interesting discussions occasionally. She got to know Samuel Bowles (1826-1878), the editor and owner of the Springfield Republican, quite well. He was far more progressive than her family members and an advocate of women's rights. Although Sue and Austin did not operate what would be called a literary salon, Sue may have intentionally invited guests who would suit Emily. One such guest was Ralph Waldo Emerson, though Emily apparently never met him. It isn't clear whether this was Emily's choice or an accident. In any case, Emily seemed to find ample intellectual stimulation from English authors, particularly the female poets and novelists of the time.

It would seem that, by the age of thirty, Emily had settled into a life that would intentionally not entail marriage, employment or fame.