Murderous Children

I’ve been reading Holderlin some and it’s remarkable how relevant his work remains almost 200 years after the fact. If there’s any one artist to point to as evidence that in the modern era artists in the West were called on to carry the spiritual freight it would be Holderlin. It can be tough to get past all the Classical references in his poems, but the tone remains strikingly contemporary…except that, as you note, artists in this late phase of the modern have a hard time taking themselves seriously, let alone asking others to do so. This is not their fault. Duchamp sunk his work beneath an ocean of irony in order to protect it from the corrosive qualities of World War I and the culture that gave rise to it. Since then, the public arena has only gotten more toxic with regard to interiority of any kind.

A world without art is a world devoid of the category of questions that have no easy answers. A world without art is a world without mystery, in other words. And to give the devil his due, something in the human psyche longs profoundly to inhabit a world without unanswerable questions, a world without mystery. The Southern California lifestyle is perhaps the fullest expression of this wish for a benign, shallow happiness, a freedom from the shadows that disturb, but also provide depth. The goal of life in this setting is to create a kind of continuous inner spectacle, as Guy Dabord defines it, a spectacle designed to keep all nagging doubts at bay. Homeownership is a keystone of the California dream of life without art, without mystery and right now Southern California is burning. Homes since log cabin days are the embodiment of America’s national aspirations, aspirations that can no longer be sustained and now Malibu is on fire, the plumes of smoke heavy with carbon adding to the greenhouse effect that creates the conditions of the blaze.

Such interlocking feedback loops are rising up everywhere as different tendrils of the problems caused by this bedrock human desire for freedom from art and surrender, freedom from mystery, and an embrace of the endless dream of the self. Spectacles, like everything else, are impermanent. To those who have come to rely on them, their end is traumatic always. The panic caused by the waning of the dominant American spectacle now fuels aggression on the domestic and international level, the political field turning decisively in the direction of tyranny. Tyranny sustains and justifies itself via conflicts abroad. Militarism is thus an expression of the desire to achieve a kind of permanent happiness that by definition can never exist. American militarism is no different than any other in the history, except in how clearly it is linked to this very basic, childish longing for shallow, endless happiness. This is why the murderous child is such a central American archetype, from Billy the Kid through George W. Bush.

We never have wanted the image of a perfect Suburban So-Cal home to be tarnished by all the suffering that sustains it, makes it possible. It’s so beautiful in such an accessible, grounded way, that beautiful beachfront home with the perfect weather and the perfect view of the Pacific and the perfect appliances and furnishing and the perfect books in the book shelves and the perfect light cotton pants maybe and flipflops by the door in case you need to make a quick trip down to the local supermarket as you prepare the perfect salad to eat with some friends while the moon pops up - we don’t want this image of perfection sullied in any way by real understanding of what sustains it, economically. Life would scarcely seem possible without a dream of perfection like this against which to gauge what choices need to be made. It’s a trap, perhaps - or rather the belief in the dream of perfection is a trap - but an endlessly seductive one. And now the climate itself seems to be shifting in such a way that no matter how brutal and rapacious we become abroad, the dream cannot survive. Viewed from certain angles, this change might be a great blessing.

Guy Zimmerman