James E Hartley

Leaving Lasting Art for Posterity

“If we can more and more free ourselves from values other than spiritual, I believe we are going in the right direction.”

Anni Albers said that; Christopher Benfey repeats it in an extended…what’s the word? Meditation?
Reflection?  Creation?…let’s just call it a Book for now.

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay.

I’d read a few reviews of this book before buying a copy; I don’t think I have ever seen a case where the reviewers so completely missed the point.

To read the reviews, one would get the impression that this is one part Benfey’s family history, one part history of Black Mountain College, and one part discussion of pottery. The reviews make it sound like it is a simple hodgepodge, a well-written hodgepodge to be sure, but nothing more than, at best, a wonderfully eclectic romp through history and art.

That description isn’t even close to what his book actually is. The book is actually better described by the remark above made by Anni Albers (a 20^thcentury artist well known among those who know much about such things (and Benfey’s aunt)).

There’s an even better blurb for the book in the book itself. A reviewer writes: “This is not a Book of Travels, properly speaking, but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned by the Objects which the Traveler observed—It is a delicious book; & like all delicious things, you must take but a little of it at a time.” Coleridge (yes, that Coleridge) wrote that review. Benfey throws in the quotation in an offhand manner in a chapter about William Bartram. Coleridge thought he was describing Bartram’s book, but I daresay that Coleridge’s description is far better used on Benfey’s book than Bartram’s.

In the Coleridge quotation lies the real description of this book: it is a series of poems, chiefly descriptive. It looks like a tale of, for example, the discovery of white clay in the Carolinas or a trip to Berlin or a visit to a Japanese village known for making pottery. But the real story here has nothing to do with the superficial.

The book is an act of taking a lump of clay, spinning it on a wheel, firing and glazing it, turning that lump into something unexpectedly beautiful. All the stories and side notes are just so much salt, thrown into the furnace to add an interesting texture to the life being crafted, bit by bit, story by story.

So, what is going on here? A curious book, to put it mildly. Joyce wrote A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, a novel telling about how a poet (who is, of course, Joyce) was born. Benfey is going Joyce one better; in this book he is not telling about how the artist was born, he is creating the artist who is none other than himself.

It reminds me of nothing so much as an old joke about baseball umpires:

First Umpire: I call them like I see them.
Second Umpire: I call them like they are.
Third Umpire: They aren’t anything until I call them.

Traditional autobiography tries to be one of the first two umpires. This book is the third umpire. We are watching the author make himself here in exactly the same way we would watch a potter make a jug or a bowl or a jar. The author is both potter and clay. The tales of his ancestors are really just so many flicks of the wrist to add shape here or there; the historical tidbits are there to add color.

To see it another way (which is exactly what this book does endlessly), consider an anecdote from the book. Benfey is relating his trip to find Cherokee Clay when he finds himself talking to Jerry, the owner of the Great Smoky Mountain Fish Camp & Safari.

As we sipped long-necked bottles of beer at Jerry’s bar, he dragged out a bucket of Cherokee pottery shards. They were brown or gray, unglazed; whatever color they retained had come from the smoke of the kiln. Each carried a pattern of some kind, scored with a pointed tool: zigzags in parallel or an array of tight spirals, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I was fingering one gray fragment in my hand like a magical talisman. “Take it,” Jerry said. “No one will ever care for it more than you do.”

One way of looking at this book is that it is a collection of those fragments. And at times, Benfey is encouraging us to see the isolated parts here as nothing more than interesting broken shards, like a scrap from a Van Gogh painting. But, look again and note that parts are really just fragments when they are in others’ hands; when Benfey picks up the fragment it becomes a magical talisman. And here again, we find the secret of the book. It looks like a fragment to you, but Benfey is using it for another, magical, purpose.

Benfey ends the book with this:

And every once in a while, a restless genius came along—a Bartram, a Wedgewood, a Coleridge—who wandered from the familiar trail, risking falls and failures, and fused the new possibilities in unexpected ways, leaving lasting art for posterity.

Exactly so. This book is a gigantic gamble on the future. Will it merit rereading in a few decades? How well do the asides and stray notes cohere when one begins to take apart the book? Or can the book even be dissected at all? The closest parallel to this book I have ever read is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, but this book is much more crafted that Nabokov’s. This book has an intentionality not only in the chapters themselves, but in the book as a whole. So, I suppose I really can’t think of a comparison.

This is a book to be read in the same way one reads a book of poetry. Nothing is stated directly, but as the ideas sift in memory, a pattern emerges. I suspect, like all great poetry, as one reads it over and over, the picture takes on new hues. Highly recommended for those who like to let their minds wander while reading.

Corporations, Marxists, and the Academy

Why Teach? An interesting question, that.

Mark Edmundson asks that: Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education.

In a curious way, this was a rather thought-provoking book. It’s a collection of essays which, truth be told, meander all over the place, united only by the fact that they have something to do with education.

The book is best described as a cri de coeur. Edmundson looks out and sees a sterile corporatized (a favorite adjective of the Academic Left) educational system which has moved well past taking root and is starting to flower, bear seeds, and replicate itself. That college is anathema to Edmundson. He is a prophet standing on the hill lamenting and denouncing and calling his people to repentance. Edmundson is Jeremiah.

What does Edmundson want? An education that matters, that rips right into the souls of the students and shakes them out of complacency into deep reflections about things that truly matter. He wants faculty who don’t want to play the game of the modern college, who eschew the trendy pedagogical imperatives of the day. He wants faculty who are most certainly not cool, who do not try to meet students where they are but force students to move to a better higher place. He wants students to pause in their race to graduation and decide to learn something deep and meaningful. Get rid of all that technological floor show, no multimedia spectacles, no simplifying the curriculum, no making everything easy. Hard, meaningful work. Studying important timeless things in timeless ways. Professor, student, Great Book. That is all you need.

Obviously, I agree with Edmundson. He is the type of professor who often walks up to me after a faculty meeting and says things like “Wow. Even though I totally disagree with your politics, I really agree with you about education.” I don’t know why liberal faculty are always surprised that a conservative academic preaches the value of Tradition in Education. I suspect it is because they think that the enemy of Education, properly conceived, is that “Corporatization” thing, and “Conservatives like Corporate America,” so Conservatives must hate Great Books. It is strange how narrow minded modern liberal professors can be.

By the way, this is not just some gratuitous swipe at Edmundson. He fits the type I have met all too often. For example: “My overall point is this: It’s not that a left-wing professorial coup has taken over the university. It’s that at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism. The consumer ethos is winning.” So typical.

In this book Edmundson spends many, many pages showing that the whole neo-Marxist-feminist-multiculturalist-genderindentityist crowd have destroyed the reading, real reading, of Great Books. That new crowd has turned every book into a mirror, simply reflecting back the author’s prejudices. From the argument in Edmundson’s book it is obvious that the left-wing professoriate has joined forces with the consumer culture to destroy the type of education Edmundson values.

Yet, Edmundson must periodically assert his left-wing credentials by giving the very people he is criticizing a pass. It is really quite sad. When people like me note how the reading of Great Books has been destroyed, we are just called Neanderthals. Edmundson should just embrace his inner Neanderthal.

The problem with the modem college is not some sort of corporate takeover by evil outside administrators. The problem is that the faculty have given up the battle to educate. Providing an education is hard work.

One of the overlooked things about the modern academy is: many (most?) faculty are really not interested in working hard at educating. They get offended when you say this, by the way. But, if you walk onto campus in the first week of January or sometime in the middle of the summer, I would suspect that far less than 20% of my colleagues are in the office.

Similarly, when I hear my colleagues wax poetic about all those new innovative pedagogical tools, the thing that is left unsaid is this: if you use these new tools, then you won’t have to do so much work. Show videos in class? Don’t have to prepare a lecture. Encourage students to get together in groups to work on problems together in class? No lecture. Flip the classroom so students watch lectures on-line and then come to the class to work on problems? What do you know? Less lecturing.

Then there are all the pedagogical innovations that simply make less work for the students—and less work for the students means—you guessed it—less work for the professor. Fewer readings for students? Less reading for the professor.

Saying such things does not exactly make you popular with the crowd. Edmundson almost says such things. After reading the book, I doubt he disagrees with those things at all, but he never quite gets around to saying them. He may be Jeremiah, but he is a kinder, gentler Jeremiah.

Why Does the World Exist?

Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt.

In this case, the title is not deceptive; it is exactly the subject of the book. Holt poses the question and then travels around, Socrates-like, to assorted people who think they can answer the question.

Nobody has a very satisfying answer.

Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt. In this case, the title is not deceptive; it is exactly the subject of the book. Holt poses the question and then travels around, Socrates-like, to assorted people who think they can answer the question. Nobody has a very satisfying answer.

Holt tries to provide an answer at the end, but oddly, after just showing how nobody can provide a satisfying answer, he seems to think his answer might be at least somewhat satisfying, but suffice it to say a) his answer is not in the least bit satisfying and b) his answer is totally irrelevant in evaluating the quality of this book. The book is extremely good.

Just think about the question for a bit. Why is there something rather than nothing? Obviously there is something. But why? Is it Necessary for there to be something? Is or Was Nothing a possibility. Could it be that Nothing…and here we get stuck even more…can you ask Could Nothing Exist? Is Nothing Something or is it the absence of Something? If Nothing is the absence of Something, then can it exist or does existence require being something?

Now it seems like this question of why the world exists can be easily solved by positing a Deity. The world exists because a Divine Power Created it. But, that backs up the question. Why does God exist? To which the traditional theological answer is God Necessarily exists because Existence is a Necessary Characteristic of Deity. But, how do we know that? Does God necessarily exist? Is it possible that God could Not have existed? What is either the Deity-generating Process or the Reason that the non-existence of God is impossible? In other words, even if the Universe is Created by God, if we consider the God/Universe combination or the Universe alone, the exact same questions arise: Why?

The multiverse doesn’t solve this, by the way: This universe may exist because there are infinitely many universes, but why are there infinitely many universes? Also, if there are infinitely many universes, is there a universe which doesn’t exist? Is the non-existence of a universe among the possibilities granted by the multiverse? What does that question even mean?

It also seems like if we can get around the question by asking what seems like a simpler question. What is the purpose of the universe? Or, How did the Universe come into Being? But neither of those questions has a very good answer either.

This most excellent book by Holt does not have an answer (as noted above, ignore Holt’s desperation pass at the end—it falls incomplete).

But, reading this book is like one endless mental exercise on an unbelievably fascinating question. This book is like one of these wandering discussions which just keep turning back on themselves and by the end you aren’t even sure what you are asking, but by golly, it sure feels like you are making progress toward some unknown end but you have no idea what you are learning because you have forgotten where the question started or what you were trying to answer or even whether you are actually writing a coherent sentence or off on some bizarre string of words in which each word follows from what came before but it is no longer clear if what is currently being written has any resemblance the to the matter you began to write about at the commencement of the sentence, which probably no longer qualifies as a sentence anyway.

Why Does the World Exist? I have no idea. In fact, I know less now than I did when I started reading this book. And that is seriously high praise for a book.