On Desire

I am writing (or so I sometimes claim) a novel based on John Cleland’s ‘Fanny Hill’ which set the eighteenth century standard for pornography. (They knew it when they saw it.)

Like Cleland’s book, mine will deal with desire and its comic consequences, but as I have long forgotten what little I ever knew about desire, I thought I’d better review the literature, beginning with Cleland’s approximate contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, and his famous ‘calculus of pleasure’.

Although our acquaintance was brief (a survey course in philosophy fifty years ago) I have always liked Bentham. I lump him with the Enlightenment thinkers, well past Locke, but not yet to J. S. Mill (whom we never reached.) Bentham was as far as we got before the course ran out of time and steam, and so he became, for me, the ultimate British philosopher.

Bentham's philosophy was grounded in psychology. He thought it was ‘human nature’ to seek pleasure and avoid pain. From this premise, he proceeded (by way of arguments I have long since forgotten) to the conclusion, that society should seek the greatest good for the greatest number.

Well, that seems fair enough, liberal, sensible, and sort of middle class. Still, Bentham could be as odd as anybody. He left his body to be dissected in an anatomy class (OK so far) but required that the leftovers be reassembled and preserved. His mummy ended up at University College London where (dressed in his own clothes and sitting in a glass cabinet) he presides over its Board of Regents, no doubt reminding them to make ‘rational choices’, calculated to produce ‘the greatest good for the greatest number.’

In Bentham’s day, and for long after his death, 'free will' wasn’t a theory, much less a joke. It was an ingrained assumption, an entirely different sort of psychology than we imagine today. Intent was thought to be an important part of every act.

Freud was not yet born—and his diabolical invention, ‘the subconscious’, was as yet undreamt of—at least by proper Englishmen. Years of simple-hearted goodness and moderation remained to mankind—decades in which subscribers to Bentham’s thinking could enjoy a reasonable degree of pleasure and avoid a ton of pain.

Baron de Sade, another approximate contemporary of Cleland, was almost certainly unknown to Bentham who was far too British to grasp the notion that pain could be fun. Bentham could hardly have factored Sade into his calculus of pleasure.

I Googled ‘Bentham+Freud’ to see what the solemn Austrian might have thought about a fellow who had his body converted into an ‘auto-icon’.

No luck. Instead, I unearthed an article by the late Andrew S. Watson, M.D.

It brought back memories. Watson was a brilliant psychiatrist, who worked at the intersection of criminal law and psychiatry—the flash point of free will and determinism. I had him for a class in the early 60’s. Like all law students, my classmates and I wanted to ‘get the answer’ and move on—especially in ‘Crim’ where nobody intended to practice anyway.

His teaching method consisted of disruptive challenges to our inside-the-box thinking. On the first day of class Watson announced that anybody who needed to know criminal law could look it up. Instead, he meant to teach us How to Think About Criminal Law. (Gaack! Who wanted to think? Especially about Crim Law?)

The text for the class was a massive tome called ‘Donnelly, Goldstein and Schwartz’, a casebook that followed a paedophile through the justice system, from arrest to prison to parole, with detailed excerpts from the legal filings, judicial rulings, witness statements, briefs, etc.

Now it happened that the gentleman in question was arrested and tried in the same county where I grew up. I had never heard of him as his arrest occurred after I left for college and the army. It was rather startling, on first opening D, G & S, to find this alleged ‘monster’ capably defended by my grandmother’s lawyer, and to find my high school principal testifying as a character witness for the accused.

Fifty years ago, beginning law students were 99% white, 98% male, and totally committed to conventional values and un-nuanced judgments. Watson meant to shake us up, and he succeeded... in a way. We hated the course, and even more did we hate the prospect of having to discuss the case in a classroom full of equally inhibited peers.

We lived in abject fear of being called upon, and the agony was in no way reduced by his inquiry one Monday morning, ‘How were your climaxes this weekend?’ Talk about ‘deathly silence’... my heart still goes out to the lone female in that sea of balked testosterone, an attractive girl with the nervous habit of biting a strand of her hair.  

Alas, Bentham’s calculus of rational choice is obsolete. And so, too, is Cleland’s heroine, wending her (more or less) merry way through a series of bad choices to a happy conclusion.

If anything, we assume the opposite, that people are helpless pawns in the grip of subconscious urges running from ‘nasty’ to ‘appalling’. Nothing is likely to end well, but of course, everyone is more to be pitied than blamed.

It’s progress of a sort... I guess... or at least, it’s different.

But where do we go to find out about desire?

A Book Whose Main Character is 'Godley'

The Infinities

By: John Banville

Alfred A. Knopf, 2009

273 Pages

The ancient poet, Hesiod, claimed that before time began there was (and when all else is swept away there will remain) the eternal conflict of Desire and Necessity, an annoying itch in non-space-non-time from which are descended the generations of gods, with all their works. Or to put it in terms we understand, there is an instability in ‘nothingness’ that triggers Big Bangs, and all the ‘thingness’ that flows therefrom. (You do understand that, don’t you? O.K. Me too. Let’s move on.)

When you have ‘things’ you have interactions—things bounce off other things. There are consequences—causes have effects, effects create more causes. Was it necessary? Was it random? Or have the gods been interfering with cause and effect?

In a truly deterministic universe not only would larger fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, but these lesser fleas (who have smaller fleas, etc. etc.) would not act at random (much less by choice) but strictly in accordance with their individual destinies. Each flea would have its particular nemesis whose note in the grand symphony of cause and effect was determined at the beginning of time in accordance with the inscrutable will of the Composer.

Or maybe some other way. Who knows?

We can’t know, really. Mortal understanding, celebrated for encompassing ‘everything’ from quarks to Big Bangs, is marvelous only relative to the comprehension of garden slugs, or domestic cats—both of which species know exactly what they need to know to be what they are. And we know just enough to be human beings, a species that craves understanding, but must make do with explanation.

Some explanations are more satisfying than others. The jittery motion of a particle in a fluid, is said to be ‘random’—but ‘randomness’ (as an explanation) is just a way of throwing up our hands—an admission that there are too many causes and too many effects. Something can be said in statistical terms—about the jittery motion of all the particles—but that’s a different explanation of a different question.

We can only perceive, comprehend and retain, so much—and lacking critical facts, which may be entirely outside our purview (or, if noticed, may have been misinterpreted—or perhaps judged ‘irrelevant’) we are likely to miss the point entirely.

And worse, just when we get a handle on the data, Galileo looks at Jupiter’s moons with his new telescope. Whoops! The whole explanation changes. That’s embarrassing. But although the explanation has changed, the truth remains the same—and remains slightly beyond reach. There’s a lot of ‘Dark Matter’ out there. Could it be Necessity? And all that Dark Energy? Is it Desire?

All of which is prologue to confronting The Infinities. Not the actual infinities, which mortal man may not usefully consider, but the peculiar subset of infinities in John Banville’s book. The book has been extensively reviewed and universally approved. I agree. It is a wonderful book, full of lovely English sentences. (English is often improved by Irish writers.) Better still, it deals with two of my favorite themes: modern cosmology (Hugh Everett’s thesis, and its eleven dimensional offspring—as thrilling to modern physicists as angels on pins were to their predecessors) and: the Olympian gods, whose lusts, whimsies and spiteful tricks are another (perhaps ‘the real’) explanation for why things go wrong.

Adam Godley, mathematician, lies dying in his isolated farmhouse in Ireland, an Ireland  similar to ours, but not quite the same. The shabby, ill-smelling house, its dank rooms connected by unexpected corridors, is the ‘universe’ of his final days. It lies ominously adjacent to a train track that doesn’t go anywhere in particular. His family (wife, son, daughter-in-law and daughter) all variously damaged by life, are in attendance. His retainers (a maid, and a ‘cowman’) are in and out. The god, Hermes, orchestrates the action and serves as narrator. Zeus is there, seducing Adam’s daughter-in-law, and Pan will be along later to upset the inevitabilities. Oh, and let’s not overlook Rex, Adam’s faithful dog, who shares some of the attributes of the gods.

As Hugh Everett tried to solve the quantum riddle by arguing that each choice we make creates a new universe, so Godley has, literally, created this world. His equations have solved the riddle of Time, opening the door to that infinity of universes, where everything imaginable becomes possible, and everything possible becomes inevitable. But, no matter that access to the Infinities is similar to entering heaven (or joining the gods on Olympus) nobody is anxious to pass through the door.

Instead of increasing our satisfaction, the certainty that everything will happen, and all will be understood, has diminished the human world. It was a mistake, Banville suggests, to envy the immortality and omniscience of the gods. They’re bored. They’ve been bored for aeons. They’re petty. They play cruel tricks and practice deceitful seductions. We resemble the gods, but it’s not necessarily a good thing. In fact, the more godlike we become, the worse we are.

And beneath it all, they envy our mortality and limitations, for it is only in worlds that can be snatched away by death, that the poignancy of love, the intensity of regret, the glory of light and the immanence of dark can be experienced. Life is not life without its looming opposite—that creepy shadow lurking in the corridors, that only Rex can see. We wanted to be them, but they (who know better) want to be us.

There are lots of ‘references’ in the story—fun for the literary minded. For example: the daughter-in-law is an actress, currently playing the role of Alcmene. Zeus makes love to her disguised as her husband—the same trick he played on the ‘real’ Alcmene, who became the mother of Heracles. Why? Zeus hopes, by seducing women, to learn something about human love, one of two things that the gods cannot experience. He is convinced that there is a relationship between love and death, that ‘…one conduces to the other…” But why the disguise? He’s a god—his seductions are bound to succeed. Wouldn’t they succeed just as well without the trick? Who knows? Banville, it seems, likes the story of Amphitryon and Alcmene—and it’s his book.

And, it’s a fine book—only the length of a midsummer’s day, but frequent flashbacks make it a full round day—and if I have made it sound a bit gloomy, remember that the gods also bring comic relief. The earthy Pan, Adam’s frequent companion in life, visits him at his deathbed to arrange a cheerful postponement for all concerned (for happy endings are only possible sometime prior to the actual end.)

The final pages remind us of the last scene of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream—everyone as happy as the Bard’s lovers, celebrating an ingeniously contrived ending.

“The trees tremble talking of night. The birds, the clouds, the far pale sky. This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.”

Like Adam Godley, we don’t appreciate it sufficiently.

The Education of Anthony Barker

A good way to embarrass yourself at 77 (should you be so inclined) is to remember all the books you thought were great when you first read them. 

I am among the millions (I suppose) who admired The Fountainhead  when I was 17, and who gagged to recall it by the time I was 20. 

Some time later, I don’t remember exactly when, I was delighted by The Education of Henry Adams, surely the most smugly self-satisfied memoir ever written. Even to think about it, fifty years on, makes my skin crawl. But I went on to enjoy his even more wearisome bloviating about the the Cathedral of Notre Dame, ‘... the Virgin and the Dynamo.’  Maybe the lesson was: Americans should avoid the third generation of distinguished families with outsized notions of entitlement.  

On the other hand, books that I have not read in decades still shape my life—maybe for the best—although it is difficult to be sure. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace three or four times—once in college (where we skipped over the Count’s brooding on the meaning of History)—and again in different translations since.  

When I first read it I thought it was so great there was no point in becoming a writer—between Shakespeare and Tolstoy (and maybe Faulkner) all the good stuff had already been written. I never did become a writer, although I have since regretted falling for such a feeble excuse. 

Still, War and Peace stands out for me as the impossible standard, even if not the end of world literature. 

Tolstoy himself surpassed it in Anna Karenin, a book I read in lieu of attending some of my graduate classes at the University of Chicago—thereby squandering my chance to become a professor of Political Science. I am grateful to Tolstoy for the thousands of blue books I have never had to correct. I wouldn’t have been much of a teacher—even tucked away (as I doubtless would have been) at some remote ‘liberal arts’ campus in central Ohio.

 

My obsessive reading of the Count also cost me the chance to govern Iraq. While I was at Chicago I took a seminar with Leo Strauss, never realizing that he would later be recognized as the mentor of the notorious ‘Neo-Cons’, the evil demons who invented the Iraq War for the younger Bush.

I don’t understand how that kindly old gent, dressed in a woolen suit with a woolen tie, could have been such a diabolical influence. I remember him droning on at great length about 17^th century political philosophy... but perhaps I didn’t attend regularly enough to ‘get the memo’. 

Had I paid better attention I might have been a Neo-Con myself, and left some footprints in the sands of time.