What Has Cecily Been Doing?

Books, Piano, Ceramics

I’ve been neglecting this newsletter somewhat while I make a big push on another writing project, so instead of a full-fledged essay I’ll collect a few updates on how I’ve been spending my time creatively/intellectually these past weeks.

Books

A Way of Life, Like Any Other, by Darcy O’Brien — an autobiographical novel, wryly and stylishly written, about the narrator’s childhood being raised by two washed-up Hollywood stars. The mother is overwrought, the father is passive-aggressive, and the characters who flit in and out of the story include a bigshot producer with a gambling problem, a Russian sculptor and Disney prop-maker whose work features satyr fellatio, and a dinner guest who monologues at length on the wonders of the avocado. It’s a breezy treat, but not quite a meal.

Lives of the Saints, Nancy Lemann — another short novel set in New Orleans and featuring a lyrical, observant narrator. She paints a portrait of the handsome, aimless, but honorable (she is convinced) young man with whom she is in love:

At his apartment, there would always be a stream of visitors, ranging from his old friends in olive drab suits and seersucker suits and bow ties, to wino lunatics. Often they were in some kind of trouble, especially those in the former camp, for sometimes the well-heeled suffer more, and they leaned on Claude.

The telephone constantly rang. He always had dependents in his entourage, which is the sign of the generous.

I do not often see intrinsic kindness and responsibility like this in men. That is why I looked up to him.

Even if he spoke in platitudes, which he often did, he still would turn people’s problems into a calm simplicity, a dear simplicity of his. He could take chaos — though not his own — and turn it into a calm simplicity.

This novel also features a cast of colorful eccentrics, a faded New Orleans aristocracy. Again, not quite a meal, but worth reading for the beautiful sentences.

The Worm of Consciousness and other essays, Nicola Chiaromonte — another collection of Chiaromonte’s essays, The Paradox of History, made an enormous impression on me a few months ago (you can read my piece about it here) and I immediately wanted to read more of his writing. The Worm of Consciousness is a much more disparate collection. It includes some essays written from personal experience: he writes about the socialist communities of Italian expats in France during WWII, his time in the Spanish Civil War, and his friendship with Albert Camus. Some of his critical essays about Jean Genet, Simone Weil, and Dante are also included.

The title essay, The Worm of Consciousness, was originally published in the Partisan Review, and (in a happy surprise for me) is a review of Alberto Moravia’s novel Boredom, which I wrote about in this newsletter last year. His piece is better than mine, and captures something of why I find myself returning to his novels repeatedly even though they have a poisonous, off-putting quality:

There are dozens of writers capable of describing outward appearance and sensation more clearly, more gracefully than Moravia. But there is no one to equal him in seizing the moments in which reality, piercing through the mist of velleity and pretense, begins to “exist” and to take on the meaning of its own overwhelming essence. These are the moments in which we feel the author’s self-assurance, the self-assurance of a man who has plumbed the depths of his own experience, who, when he speaks, arrives immediately at the heart of the matter. It is then that Moravia succeeds in eliciting the feeling of extreme uneasiness and depression from a gesture, a physical contact, a glance, or the most opaque piece of matter. It is this, not “the joy of narrating,” that gives the story its impetus, and it is toward this that the story moves. The plot is the “objective equivalent” of the irremediable condition of his soul.

The final essay in the collection, The Mass Situation and Noble Values, covers some of the same territory as the essays in The Paradox of History: what to do with humanist ideals of individual freedom and dignity in the wake of crushing societal forces that are human in origin but seem to act independently of any human volition? The Paradox of History mostly asked this question with respect to war, but this essay considers the effect of simply living in a society alongside masses of our fellow humans, all of whom are scrambling for the same resources we are — jobs, seats on the bus, a window in which to turn left in traffic, housing, partners, money, attention — all of whom have the same right to these things that we do, and all of whom are treated interchangeably by the structures of society. If I am reading him correctly, Chiaromonte sees that this endless scramble dehumanizes us when the regime is an oppressive and authoritarian one, but does the same even if it is nominally a free one: the necessity of earning a living, finding work and shelter, providing for our families, and discovering some way of being of use in a mechanized and competitive “mass world” makes it difficult to construct a life that’s in accordance with our values — difficult, even, to know what our values even are, since the values of the superstructure in which we live impose themselves with enormous force.

To live in a mass society means automatically to perform acts that are not free; doing what one does not because it is natural, and not even because one considers it positively useful, but because one wishes to avoid the complications and bad results that would come (for oneself and for others) from acting differently. For the single individual, this can be more or less painful. That is, the advantages to be derived from yielding to collective demands, instead of resisting them, are relative. What matters to the individual consciousness, however, is that one feels subject to an overwhelming force that come sneither from a moral norm nor from the sum of individual demands, but simply from the fact of collective existence. It is an experience of disorder maintained by laws of iron.

These conditions cause us to feel in opposition to our neighbors, even though they’re in the same position that we are:

We are together because “we can’t help it.” This is the prime fact. No one can help it. Everyone knows that others are constrained by the same necessity that has compelled oneself. Here, one could say, is the normative fact of the “mass situation,” its justification, and even the foundation of its humanity. Only if we recognize this necessity, this common subjection, do others impress themselves on our consciousness as “fellow men.” Otherwise, the relation among individuals in a mass is material, external, and provisional, and the next man appears as a profoundly alien being or even an obstacle or an enemy; if he were removed, our situation would be easier, we would be more comfortable, there would be more room.

I’m not sure what kind of society Chiaromonte is ultimately advocating for — he credits Marx with being among the first philosophers to deal seriously with the problem of mass society, but is wary of revolutionary solutions or anything resembling ironclad solidarity. Indeed, he throws up his hands early on in the essay, saying that liberal democracy has been the best system out of all those that have been tried so far when it comes to ensuring the freedom and dignity of individuals. But he argues that democracy as a system of government oriented toward the mass, or collective, contains the seeds of its own destruction in the form of authoritarianism: “Mechanization, bureaucracy, the increasing complexity of technology, and scientific specialization are typical phenomena of mass society today, yet they seem to vitiate the authority of the individual, as well as the democratic power of the majority, in favor of an anonymous principle of organization and discipline.”

I’ve always been suspicious of rhetoric about the alienating conditions of modernity because of how quickly it can turn reactionary: I am revulsed by those who suggest, even subtextually, that we’d all be happier and live more fulfilling lives under conditions of agrarianism, ethno- or religious nationalism, rule by aristocracy, unquestioning reverence for tradition, racial hierarchy, and sexual repression.

I do see those around me grappling — and I, too, grapple — with the difficulty of maintaining one’s integrity and living in a way that feels honest and moral and dignified, in the midst of a society that rewards and punishes according to its own merciless set of rules.

Piano

A while ago, when my piano teacher asked me what piece I wanted to learn next, I asked if I could learn a Schubert sonata. She told me I wasn’t ready to do a sonata yet, that I needed to develop my Schubertian technique first. She assigned me one impromptu, then once I could play that one reasonably competently, another one. Finally the sonata was permitted, and she told me to choose whichever one I pleased.

I picked number 19 in C minor, which turns out to be one of the longest. After months of working on the first movement, I am moving on to the Adagio, which is particularly beautiful. Radu Lupu is my favorite Schubert pianist, and I recommend his recording, which I have linked below. I have been playing nothing but Schubert for a while now and I wish I sounded like Radu Lupu:

Ceramics

Something that has happened to me over the past year, something I didn’t quite expect, is that I’ve taken up pottery as a hobby and become somewhat obsessed with it (I wrote a piece about it back then). For months and months last year I made things that fell apart on the wheel or that were heavy and lumpy when they stayed together, but the act of throwing felt so satisfyingly tactile, and almost ecstatic when it was going well, that I went back to the studio again and again, spending hours every weekend trying to get better and watching many more hours of YouTube tutorials at home. In the past couple of months, I’ve finally reached the point where my abilities are in the same ballpark as my taste, and I can give away my pieces to friends without too many apologies (although I always specify that they don’t have to keep them). Most of my pieces have defects of some kind or another — nicks and chips, uneven glaze, wobbles and asymmetries — but it’s through noticing and learning to prevent these defects that my skills become refined.

Last weekend I brought four of my pieces to a Raku firing session. The Raku done by studio potters here isn’t really the same thing as traditional Japanese raku, which is made with hand-shaped rather than thrown pieces and doesn’t involve setting anything on fire outside the kiln. In the “western” process (what I did), the glazed pot is heated in a kiln until it’s glowing red and the glaze is molten. Then, it’s taken out of the kiln while still red-hot and tossed in a bin full of combustible materials (we used newsprint). The combustibles catch fire, you close up the bin, and the reduction environment created by the rapid depletion of oxygen brings out unusual patterns in the glaze while any exposed clay underneath is smoked black. I was very pleased with the results:

I feel grateful that I have absolutely no desire to monetize this hobby or turn it into anything other than what it is: the simple pleasure of making shapes. Writing and music are more important to me, but they’re also more fraught: ego, achievement, and judgment are involved. With pottery, I’m accountable only to my own pleasure and my own taste. It’s something that’s only for me. It feels a little like dancing felt, when going dancing was still something I did regularly: a pure and physical connection to happiness.