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summons to the self

Against Everything is a collection of essays by Mark Greif, most of which were originally published in the journal n+1. I suppose you could describe them as essays in the old sense of the world: they are general in the grand way, non-specific and apparently all-encompassing; the momentary focus on a particular subject is only ever a springboard towards a wider point about the nature of music, or food, or even the Meaning of Life (and that one’s a four-parter).

For Against Everything one might as well read About Everything. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; though I had the sense here, as I often get with broadsheet columnists, that the author is only building a case to support an outcome determined in advance; that they risk nothing in perpetual dialogue with themselves. Which is not to say that this kind of dialectic is without interest: the only risk comes in mistaking one’s own bon mots for profundities.

Greif is an exemplary generalist: you always have the sense that he’s read everything worth reading on any given subject, and that he earnestly wants to tell you something about it without resorting to trickery. He is expressive and emotive without being manipulative. His tone is authoritative without being shocking, so you don’t always notice when his aphorisms take a turn towards the bizarre. His take on exercise, for example, is fairly scathing:

‘Exercise means something other than health to a young person who conceives sexual desirability as the truth about herself most worth defending. And youth is becoming permanent, in the demand that adults keep up an outward show of juvenescence. The body itself becomes the location of sexiness, rather than clothes or wit or charisma. Yet this is probably less true for society — which values personality still — than for the exerciser herself, who imagines an audience that doesn’t exist. Saddest of all is the belief that an improved body will bestow bliss on the unloved.’

There’s a lot to unpack here. The overall argument of this piece is that exercise culture is an unwelcome aberration; gyms are a bizarre ritualised arena in which one of the last private bodily functions is rendered public; keeping fit this way is ‘like a punishment for our liberation…a set of forms of bodily self-regulation that drag the last vestiges of biological life into the light as a social attraction.’ Like all his stuff, it’s well written, and quite funny. And you couldn’t exactly say it’s not true any more than you could say a Seinfeld routine is untrue. The observations are quality.

And yet I read the paragraph above again and my patience begins to slip. The invocation of an imaginary ‘young person’, then ‘society’, then an ‘audience’ — the reader is supposed to know what he’s talking about, I suppose. But who are they? The jibe about ‘the truth…most worth defending’ is contemptuous in that special way that suggests the author is privy to the real order of truth in her world.

It’s arch, this writing, and it deals in generalisations and simplifications, if only because those things are essential to the generalist. Is he right? I don’t know. Not always, perhaps: was there ever a time when ‘the body’ (whatever that is) wasn’t the location of sexiness (whatever that is); is it really the case that society ‘values personality’? And if that audience for the anxious young woman doesn’t exist, who is it that the author is talking about when he refers to ‘society’?

Perhaps I am being pedantic. But I don’t want to be unfair because I think his point about the ‘outward show of juvenescence’ is well made here, as it is in another essay about the way in which popular culture exemplifies the bodies of young children as the ultimate ideal. He’s perceptive; again, he’s difficult to disagree with, like a poet, or a very good advertising copywriter. But it may be that he is difficult to disagree with because his observations don’t amount to much in particular. And for every well-turned paragraph in this collection, there are two or three which leave me tripping over myself.

Sometimes the author seems to have had the same response to his own work, and there are several addenda here which clarify or even modify conclusions reached years ago. It’s perhaps for the best, for example, that he quietly revises his opinion that it was somehow important for him to start learning to rap since Obama came to the Presidency (‘…it doesn’t sound good to ask what practicing Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” had to do with the first American president of African descent…’).

Actually his essay on rap music is pretty good; despite the author’s puzzlingly literal approach to reading lyrics, there’s some memorable stuff here about the contrasts between gangster rap and white indie music trends in the 90s as being also about a vision of unashamedly aspirational capitalism versus conspicuous ethical consumption; the former built out of necessity, the latter only surviving through the nourishment of a century of accumulated middle-class capital.

Would it be a better essay if it were only about that stuff? Perhaps: though I can’t say I didn’t get a kick out of the story of Greif’s own attempts to rap along with his favourite records on the bus, while covering his mouth to avoid embarrassment and skipping the parts a white man shouldn’t really be caught singing. But how strange that all this should be wrapped up together with the stuff that is actually about the music.

Perhaps that is what writing is now; perhaps readers won’t accept writing about rap music (or anything else) if it isn’t accompanied by the sideshow of a little author living his own little life amongst the text. And that’s fine, I think. It’s probably even good. But combining this with an approach that attempts to wholly encompass a subject that is inherently complex, varied and contradictory as rap music — that seems somewhat over-ambitious.

The best and worst of the writing here comes in the essays which deal with the problem of how to live. The author is adept at pinpointing the causes of contemporary dissatisfaction: we fall into the gap between early promised happiness and total freedom of opportunity towards the disappointing reality of specialisation, mediocrity, and a general deficiency of all the worldly pleasures we’re told we ought to be enjoying.

His suggested remedy is a combination of aestheticism (seeing everything in life as if it were a work of art) and perfectionism (not as the word is commonly misused, but in terms of weighing everything one might encounter as if it were an ‘example’ of how one should or should not live). ‘Perfectionism thus makes experience total, not by viewing outside people and things as art, but by feeling how each directs its summons to your self, and letting it enter and the self respond,’ he writes. I am not sure this entirely helps, but there you go.

It seems to have taken a year between the writing of that essay and the next instalment on The Meaning of Life for the author to realise that perhaps not everyone might not be able to observe the machinations of their own feelings in this way. Or rather: what if the ‘summons to the self’ is rendered as ‘piercing, grating, intrusive…it is a scourge. All you wish for is some means to reduce the feeling.’

The subsequent reflections on the ‘anaesthetic’ solutions to this problem of the scourge of existence are described as if they were literally anti-aesthetic: a reaction against the excess of stimuli that daily life brings. Greif’s catalogue of solutions is broad, wandering, digressive: it ranges from Epictetus and the Stoic philosophers, to campus stoners, to the difference between tragic representation in ancient times and the omnipresent tragedies of our current era. I like this very precise distillation of what it is like to watch a human being actually beheaded on video:

‘…The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth, are — like one’s own experiences — retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as “numbing”. “Numbing” is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid “real” that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from outside as the simple occurrence of death.’

All of this is very true, I think. But as ever with these essays, I’m left with little idea of what the author thinks the reader ought to do with this information. Is the general surfeit of this kind of media what’s making us depressed? Why can we not aestheticise the murder video? Why can’t it be another ‘summons to the self’ that is turned away, as not being a model on which to live?

No modification to the earlier argument can be suggested because already the author is off tilting at the next windmill. These essays are trapped in the same mindset that considers the person watching the video as if they were only interesting as an example of their type. The essay holds that person — that example of a person — at a distance. It uses them for whatever point that needs to be made; and then it leaves them behind. Fine: it isn’t really about the example of what that one person felt, watching the horrid video, any more than it is about the woman who had to exercise. But what is it about?

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