stoneunhinged

“Presenting” is a term I took from the novelist Walker Percy, one of my favorites and one of the most intelligent and perceptive authors of the 20th century.

You can read up on Percy elsewhere; for my purposes, I only need to give you my own, very brief interpretation of his work. Percy, as I see him, specifically wanted to distinguish between man as spiritually understood and man as scientifically understood. What the scientific community would see as “disease”, Percy sees as “malaise”. Put another way, we’re all fucked up, it’s true: but it’s not because we’re sick in a psychological sense; rather, we’re alienated by a modern culture which has lost all sense of the truly spiritual, and by language which fails to “signify”.

(And even more specifically, he is writing of a “South” which had lost its sense of self, and thus it’s soul. Whereas Faulkner presents a tragic, Gothic south, Percy presents a comic, from plantations to shopping malls south. But again, you can read more about Percy elsewhere.)

The term “presenting” comes from the novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. The main character, Dr. Tom More , returns from a period in jail (he was selling pill prescriptions to truck drivers) to find things at home are strangely different. His investigation reveals a scheme to improve human behavior by spiking the water supply.

Dr. More notices many things which leads him to investigate, but one of the first and more important is the change in women, specifically with regard to their sexuality. He notices this first with a patient named “Donna”:

I get up to get it to give it to her. Not hearing her chair scrape, I am startled when at the very moment I turn around, I run into her. She has come around my desk, barefoot and silent. She backs into me.

“Oh, sorry,” I say automatically, moving sideways to my chair, but she has already reached behind her, seized my hands, brought them around her clasped in hers and against her.

A few paragraphs later, Dr. More analyzes what happened:

To describe her backward embrace, I can only use the word primatologists use, presenting. She was presenting rearward.

Later, Dr. More finally gets the chance to make love with his wife for the first time since getting out of prison:

Ellen starts for the bed. I start for the wall switch and turn out the light and head back.

“Lights!” says Ellen.

Very well. By the time I’ve turned on the light and come back, Ellen is in bed but is, to my surprise, not lying on her side as she used to but is on all fours.

Very well, if that’s—

“Well, bucko?”

Bucko?

“Cover,” says Ellen.

“You mean—” I say, taking the sheet.

“No.”

“I understand,” I say, and cover.

“All right,” says Ellen.

Later, Dr. More, summarizing the case histories of his patient, says this about Donna:

Now she’s jolly, lithe, and forward, or rather backward, presenting rearward.

There’s more in the book than these examples, of course, but I’m not writing a master’s thesis here. Go read the book.

Within the context of the book, presenting rearward is a sign of the changes produced by the chemical additive in the water supply. I don’t think Percy is arguing against doggy style. The point here is specifically the “presenting”. Presenting rearward is, in the context of the novel, symptomatic of a chemically induced evolutionary return to a primate level of sexuality.

Got that?

Now look at this: Bootie. It is a video of a girl “presenting” rearward. To me. To you. To the whole goddamn world, in fact.

Note at the sidebar there are a few thousand videos of precisely the same thing: a style of dance in which young girls “present rearward”.

(I knew about this, of course. But I suppose I should say a word about how I came upon this video. I was watching the video of the UF tasing incident, and this appeared in my sidebar. Which means: it’s one thing to know of its existence; it is another thing entirely that it is so prevalent that one runs into it without seeking it. But that’s a subject for another post.)

Make no mistake: while I am only familiar with hip-hop culture in the vaguest way, I can say two things about it:

1. It is the primary dance/music culture of young people in the western world;

2. The predominant dance move of girls performing hip-hop is to present rearward.

This is very strange. I won’t get into how girls used to try to turn boys on when I was sixteen, but it wasn’t by shaking their behinds in our faces during dances. That this reduces eroticism to its most primitive, basic level I think is indisputable. (You don’t think so? Okay Mr. Philosopher, convince me of its sophistication in a comment.) That a primitive, basic level eroticism is a sign of a much deeper, spiritual malaise I will leave to Walker Percy.

For you, I will just ask: hooking up? Friendship with benefits? Presenting rearward? Do our children have the slightest chance at all of discovering the spiritual power of intimacy?

jj

They buried Simone yesterday. (Well, they buried her ashes. In Germany, ashes must be “officially” buried or scattered, but cannot be taken home and put on the mantle or in the garage.)

The funeral itself—the second one I’ve been to in just over three weeks—was…well…not to my liking. It was a religious ceremony, and religious funerals leave me cold. It’s all “God’s ways are not our ways” and “God” this and “Jesus” that, and the person who has died—well, say a few sentences about the person and then move on to talk about the Book of Revelation and the resurrection and a new heaven and a new earth. The person being mourned is lost in a cloud of preaching and phrases of comfort that could be repeated an hour later for the next person on the waiting list. Religious funerals are like Las Vegas weddings, but for the dead. It’s “Insert Name Here” amidst the reading of Psalms and self-serving platitudes of faith and sorrow. The only truly touching part of the service for Simone was the playing of a song by a well-known German singer. The world is off-kilter when God is outdone by a pop-star.

But the problem begins not with religion. Rather, the problem is a common misconception about funerals. Today, in our post-Freud, therapy-infused, self-as-the-center-of-the-universe society, funerals are to console the bereaved. We must have “closure” and find comfort and give each other hugs and say goodbye to the departed. Funerals are for us, not for the dead.

Bullshit!

I mean, it’s not 100% bullshit, but 80% bullshit still leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Africans—hell, all the ancient peoples of the world knew better. Double hell—probably everyone outside the western world STILL knows better. Funerals are partly about us and our need to put a death behind us and move on with our lives. Mostly, however, funerals are about remembering and honoring the dead.

I will repeat this, dear readers, so that next time you go to a funeral you might have a chance of knowing why you are there: funerals are about remembering and honoring the dead.

The only gift we can give the dead is to remember them.

When I die, I don’t want some priest or pastor standing behind a pulpit saying things about everyone getting to see me again at the resurrection, or that Jesus will remove all sorrows, or—should I die early—that God’s ways are not our ways. What I want is for someone to remember me. I want someone to say something like this:

Here’s Jeff. A bit unhinged. A Beta alcoholic but not a gamma one. A mediocre musician. His father’s son with his father’s temper. But a good man. A kind man. A loving man. He hated physical work but could read something as boring as Aristotle for 20 hours straight. And he loved dogs. He loved his wife and son, though he should have shown it a lot more. He had a few secrets. We found more than a small portion of pornography on his hard drive. We found an empty whiskey bottle hidden in his sock drawer—though, knowing him well, we know that he never cheated during his February alcohol fast. We found at least ten pounds of various candy bars and gummy bears and other sweets hidden around his bedroom. Irrationally, he didn’t take good care of his teeth. He’s here—not his ashes—because he wanted y’all to take one last look at him. He wants you to feel sorry for him having not had any tobacco in some time. He wants you to understand that’s why he has a roll around his waist. We know from at least once source [that would be this blog] that he was frustrated in his attempt to find out whether some women have truly blond pubic hair: since the rise of the internet coincided with the rise of pubic hair removal, his research went nowhere. Jeff’s favorite song was Red River Valley. He always believed that when his friend Simone died, they should have played Red River Valley instead of letting some pastor speak. He loved the old TV show “Kung Fu”, and watched it on DVD almost every night. He was unnaturally obssessed with playing cards. He should have been a Mormon or a Jew, but his agnosticism kept him from converting to either faith. Mostly, he was a philosopher without students, which tended to make him strange. He was okay, I guess. He hoped some of you would cry today. But he also hoped some of you would smile or even laugh. Mostly, he hoped you would always remember him for the rest of your lives.

Or something like that. I think you get the idea.

Again, the ancients knew this. It is no accident that ALL ancient religions—and most current religions—involved ancestor worship. Ancestor worship is actually just the rememberance of the dead raised to the level of superstition and then orthodox belief .

The desire to be remembered is strong, for it is essentially a desire for immortality. When we say funerals are to console the bereaved, what are we doing? We are denying immortality.

But we need immortality, so we bring God into it and speak of the resurrection. And then, having put all of the responsibilty onto God, we shirk our responsibility to honor and remember the dead. We do it, but not enough, and thus there is a void of rememberance. Thus we find strange distortions in modern society. We find humans who want FAME, who want to be honored and remembered before they are dead. But this desire is pathological. It gives immediate gratification, but to what end? Does anyone really want to live like Madonna? Even Madonna? Or consider the younger victims of this distortion, like Britney Spears. Is her fame anything other than a personal tragedy?

My friends, here is what you should do: make a shrine. Get photos of your family, of your brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents, and put them somewhere. My sister has such a shrine on her refrigerator. When you go to the fridge to get a cold beer, you see a picture of our grandmother (among others). THAT is rememberance.

And next time you go to a funeral, don’t be so damned selfish. Don’t think about yourself; think about the dead, and what they meant to you, and what they did, and who they really were. Celebrate their life.

And if you have the courage, boo the pastor.

jj

Being preoccupied with something always sends me to the books, if you know what I mean. And my recent preoccupation with death reminded me of something Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, so I went back and read it.

He says, essentially, that the most significant difference between the philosopher and other men is how the philosopher faces death. Other men have their crutches to lean on concerning death: they believe in heaven, or reincarnation, or at least in glory and rememberance, or the piety of the bereaved, or something which gives their death meaning. The philosopher, on the other hand, knows that we don't know shit about what exists after death—if anything at all—and thus he knows that how he lives is the only thing that matters.

An interesting analysis, and one which I have sympathy for. But it is also quite interesting that in Saul Bellow's Ravenstein, the character who represents the real-life Bloom becomes—as death approaches—significantly more interested in his Jewishness and the meaning of the Holocaust. Taking the not-so-great leap in thinking that Bellow's Ravenstein is a rather accurate picture of the dying Bloom, this would mean that Bloom did not really face death like a philosopher: instead, Bloom faced death like ordinary men, grasping for some kind of meaning which philosophy cannot provide.

Bloom had a gigantic mind, and I am indebted to him. But in his death (and again, I must qualify this by saying that I am taking Bellow's account to be fairly accurate), he demonstrated the limits of the philosophic life.

A philosopher cannot face death any better than anyone else.

The philosopher knows only that he does not know what might come after death. The philosopher suspects, given an absence of evidence, that there is nothing (yet Socrates—and many other philosophers after him—argued for the immortality of the soul, proving the disingenuity of philosophy and thus evidence for the Straussian approach to reading philosophers). But suspicion alone cannot suffice to mitigate the fear we have in facing death. Philosophers remain as uncertain as anyone. Only the religious fanatic, totally convinced of heaven and his place in it, can face death with a lesser fear. But as a human being, even the fanatic must have some fear.

I find this fascinating—Bloom as a philosopher in Closing of the American Mind, and Bloom as described by Bellow in Ravenstein. But my fascination is irrelevant to the need to sort things out in my own mind. I suspect there is nothing after death. And that makes me afraid that my life might end before I have experienced what I should. But this is irrational. I will experience what I experience: there is no should. Philosophy—for all the years I have given to it, and it has given to me—has not made me understand how to approach death.

Did you ever hear Tim McGraw's Live Like You Were Dying? I could write a 50 page paper on the song, if I were in college. Mostly, I would write about the "anthem" style of country music (hey, maybe I'll blog about this some time) which is kitschy but cool; but I would have to say something about the whole message of the song. For the most part, it's embarassingly sentimental ("going fishin' wasn't such an imposition, and I went three times that year I lost my dad"). But the whole idea of living "better" as if you knew that death is near I find to be profound. Death is always near. We should always live as best as we can.

There is one line that gets to me:

"And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying"…

I may not be religious any more, but if there is one thing I believe—not as a philosopher, but as a man—it is that we should have a much greater appreciation of our family, friends, and fellow human beings, and that we should love and cherish each other, and give forgiveness always, and demonstrate all of these things daily, as if we might not have another chance. That's how to approach death, I think: to say I hold no grudges, no one holds grudges against me, I have told my friends that I love them, and they have told me they love me. I have no enemies. I am no one's enemy. I did not keep my love hidden.

I remain afraid of dying, and always will, I suppose. But for me, philosophy has given me no better preparation to die than the basic belief in human kindness. And that basic belief I gained from neither philosophy nor religion, but from life experience.

To this day, Rodney King's plea, "Why can't we all just get along?" is remembered above all as sounding ridiculously naive. In fact, it was pure wisdom. We should get along. That's it. And when approaching death, we should be able to say, "I got along."

Tell someone you love them today.

And tell them I sent you.

jj

I’m not sure whether I’m going to continue my Raymond Chandler marathon tonight or not. I read The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window in four days. I also just read the short essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” about fifteen minutes ago, and it is chillingly good.

Chandler is a hell of a writer, but I guess a lot of it is personal taste: how else can I explain that my general distaste for similes (I can’t read more than a page of Updike before screaming “I can’t take another simile!” and throwing the book at the wall) is completely nullified by him. I can’t give you details—how can I, after reading three novels in four days?—but I do remember a couple, though not word for word. My favorite was comparing a woman’s face to “flat beer”. But enought on similes.

But that’s a matter of taste. That he is truly a great writer is, IMHO, not. What truly makes him great is in fact the same thing that makes the greatest western of all time great—and by this I mean the movie for which I promised a review several weeks ago when writing about justice and the western—and that is his understanding of the role of the “hero”. Of course, for me to explain this will first require me to write that review of the greatest western film of all time. And even then, I’m not sure I can do it.

Y’all could help, I suppose, by brushing up on some ancient literature like The Iliad and Plutarch’s Lives, but even then, you wouldn’t get it. If you could somehow understand the connection between Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood, Achilles, Philip Marlowe, and perhaps even Barney Fife, then you might come close. If not, you have to wait for me to write it, and I’ve not felt well lately, and I have a gig on Saturday, and so on and so on.

(Besides, that’s what’s really irritating about blogging: I could give you the keys to the universe, and still only six or seven of you would know about it—and you wouldn’t have had to pay me a nickel. So don’t complain if I withhold the keys a little longer. Thank me if you get them at all.)

Anyway, the reason I’m not sure whether to continue my Chandler marathon is because I just got Encounters of the Spooky Kind today in the mail, and may just fire up the DVD player instead of crawling into bed with Chandler. We’ll see. Does anyone even care? It’s getting cold in here….

And by the way, I’ve edited this post six times and the Italics work and seem to be properly done in HTML, but ain’t showing up on the blog. Anyone know why?

And something good from Chandler to end today’s post.

“Dead men weigh more than broken hearts.” —Philip Marlowe

jj