Literature

Descartes’ First Meditation was the first piece of philosophical writing I ever read. It was the first set text for my degree; until that moment, applications to study Philosophy at various universities notwithstanding, I hadn’t actually done any philosophy. Consequently, it has a particular standing in my philosophical universe.

Re-reading it, it’s interesting to see how my perceptions have changed—and sharpened—in the intervening years. Ostensibly an escalating expression of sceptical doubts, the First Meditation very cleverly sets the scene for Descartes’ philosophical project: the creation of firm foundations for scientific knowledge through the exercise of pure reason.

After all, if we doubt the evidence of our senses, on what other basis can anything be known? For Descartes, the answer is through reasoning alone.

Descartes’ rationalism, of course, founders on the various refutations—from Gassendi to Frege—of his arguments purporting to show the existence of God. However, it is striking just how compelling his initial line of thought is—that the world could be all illusion, and we would be none the wiser. The fact that as soon as we go down the pub with our mates such fears melt away is neither here nor there: the sceptical challenge to the beliefs we cling to will always remain lurking in the background. There is no true certainty, only the shifting sand.

The Meditations on First Philosophy are not merely a set of philosophical arguments—they are also a literate and compelling exploration of the process of reflection. The concluding thought of the First Meditation is that of the difficulty of maintaining philosophical vigilance, of the burden imposed by such thoughts, and it’s one that I find resonates for me more strongly than ever.

Just as a slave who was enjoying in his sleep an imaginary freedom, fears to be awakend when he begins to suspect his liberty is only a dream, and conspires with these pleasant illusions to be deceived by them longer, so I fall back of my own accord into my former opinions, and fear to awake from this slumber lest the laborious wakeful hours which would follow this peaceful rest, instead of bringing any light of day into the knowledge of truth, would not be sufficient to disperse the shadows caused by the difficulties which have just been raised.

The other day I was moaning about how I had too much to read, and how I couldn’t stop buying books. Still, although I should probably cut down somewhat, I’ve just been reminded why I got hooked in the first place.

Vintage Books is an imprint of Random House with impeccably stylish covers such as this one. My recent acquisitions from their fantastic range of classics include Catch-22 (since it was about time I had my own copy), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

There is a devastating sense of inevitability about the events of the novel, as though there is nothing the protagonists can do to avoid their nature, and hence their destiny. All that differs between individuals is their circumstances, and the ways in which they fail.

Set in Vietnam during the death throes of the French occupation, Greene’s message in The Quiet American seems to be that one cannot remain uninvolved; that our very presence involves us in events. The idealistic American official, Pyle, embraces this involvement: meddling in local politics, he seeks to create a democratic “third force” in the country. He is counterposed, in almost every way, by cynical journalist Thomas Fowler, who pours scorn on Pyle’s naïveté—but in the end, even Fowler’s outspoken desire not to be engagé crumbles.

Greene’s masterful prose transports one completely to the world he creates, the immersiveness created through layers of detail and observation, but also through this feeling of involvedness: of seeing the world through a man’s eyes, of noticing the things such a man would notice. Such is the subtlety of this effect that when it is brought into the foreground—when Greene draws back the curtain and reveals the true sharpness of his pen—I couldn’t help but pause, and put the book down, breathless, before resuming. The Quiet American is not only a classic, but a book that will stay with me personally; I plan to start on the rest of Greene’s work in short order.

Only one thing about Vintage’s publications bothers me, and it’s pretty minor. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose seems to be available both in their Classics range and in their Future Classics range. Maybe I’m just being picky, but how on earth can a book be—at the same time—a classic and a future classic? The term “future classic” seems to imply that the book will become a classic at some point in the future. But if it’s already a classic, how can it become one? Perhaps they’re trying to make some deep point about the metaphysical implications of Special Relativity: in some frames of reference the book’s already a classic, but in others it’s not a classic yet…

I own a total of nine Bob Dylan albums, plus the five Bootleg Series ones. Do I regret buying any of them? No. Have I enjoyed listening to all of them? Definately. Would I have enjoyed another album more than, for example, Oh Mercy (which, despite probably being the best album between Blood On The Tracks and Love And Theft, is not a true classic by any metric)? Maybe. But that’s not really the point, is it?

Am I just being completist, and is that completism spoiling my potential enjoyment and enrichment? Occasionally I suspect that might be the case, and one certainly needs to be vigilant about this. But there’s more to it than that.

Experiencing a body of work and knowing the biographical connections between individual pieces allows a better and broader appreciation than simply engaging with them in isolation would.

Take a big, black permanent marker and remove all the names from all the fronts of all the books you own. Right now. Then come back and carry on reading.

Did you do it? If you did, you’re a much less cautious person than me; I’d have finished reading the article before taking such drastic action! Moreover, I would have read the article with an eye to answering the question, “Why?”

It’s funny how things come together, sometimes. Vangelis’ Blade Runner Blues, from the eponymous soundtrack, came on in the pub a few days ago; not two hours earlier, I’d just finished Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream… are two very different pieces of work, and I encountered them under similarly different circumstances. If I have one complaint about my parents, it’s the way they failed to impart as much of their enormous fund of cultural knowledge to me as they might have.

Whether either of them had seen Blade Runner independently of me, I don’t know,¹ but my mum had certainly read a fair amount of Philip K. Dick. To be fair, she didn’t exactly fail me on this score: some years back, she bought a copy of The Man in the High Castle for herself,² and subsequently got me to read it,³ and she got the family a collection of his short stories from a charity shop. Still, she could have got me reading his books younger, and exposed me to more of them.

Quite why she didn’t, I don’t really know. If I were to venture a guess, it would probably be along the lines of her not having had similar input, and not wanting to push her taste on me. Human beings are made, not born, and this explicit concern—that we would grow up to be independent entities, with our own likes and dislikes—was always, I suspect, at the back of her mind (except, of course, when it was at the front). Personally, I wouldn’t have minded her pushing a bit more stuff on me, although on reflection, I might have complained at the time. I am—to great extent because of her influence—a doggedly individual person. More knowledge would have given me more tools, not a stronger cage.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I had a lot of problems with school, especially the more systematised elements. However, I also had some great and inspiring teachers, and some pivotal experiences; to these, I may in time return. More to the current point, though, is the fact that it was in school that I saw Blade Runner for the first time.

I couldn’t say why it took so long, but it was probably down to the fact that we didn’t have a television for much of my life. When we did eventually get one—ostensibly for my dad’s work—we didn’t get an aerial or TV license for some years. My childhood experiences of television were limited to six months of Canadian television when I was five, and the occasional Sunday afternoon at my grandparents’.

Despite a minor lapse on the part of my English teacher—showing us the original theatrical release, complete with dodgy voiceover and tacked-on happy ending, rather than the far superior Director’s Cut—the film definitely had an effect on me. Stories of spaceships became stories of cities; heroes became more troubled, motivations more complex. I can’t really disentangle the various influences on me at that point, especially given that I was fifteen and my life was changing fairly drastically in any number of ways, but it certainly marked some kind of turning point.

It was two years before I saw it again, and this time, the effect was seismic. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that it altered my fictional reality forever. It wasn’t just a film: it was a gateway, a nexus from which myriad worlds unfolded. ‘Crime fiction’, or detective stories, had long been a staple of my reading, but Blade Runner drove me back to Hammett and Chandler, to rediscover the roots of noir. A subtle shift of emphasis took place in my SF reading, too, eventually leading back to—you guessed it—Philip K. Dick.

I was, of course, aware that Do Androids Dream… was the basis of Blade Runner. A friend had read it, or at least started to, back when we’d seen Blade Runner for the first time in that darkened classroom. I also knew that the film and the book were quite different creatures; a documentary I’d seen made that much clear. However, I was old enough to differentiate between the two, to read the book on its own merits, and crucially I already possessed a certain familiarity with Dick’s work.

Re-reading Do Androids Dream… a few days ago lent me a certain perspective, heretofore missing. The book seemed shorter, easier, more comprehensible. Was it that I was older, better equipped to deal with its themes and preoccupations, or that the book became less opaque with a second reading? Probably both.

I also knew Dick’s work better: years of wrestling⁴ with a desire to purchase more of his novels led, fortuitously, to finding a recent anthology of five novels: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik and A Scanner Darkly, all for the very reasonable price of £12.99; far better than the £7.99 per book that’s now the standard paperback price.

Dick had, as one can see simply by scanning a bibliography of his work, a flair for titles, but that was hardly his only talent. If Blade Runner emphasises the noirish elements—the rainy city, the moral uncertainty, the doomed love interest—then Do Androids Dream… is a story of paranoia, identity crisis, existential angst.

The characters are wracked by doubt: how can they define themselves in a half-abandoned world where simulacra walk the streets, almost indistinguishable from human beings? The androids’ flaw is that they are not flawed: their perfection is impersonal, lacking empathy. Human beings, inherently damaged and self-destructive, must band together to survive. And yet, the humans in the story are all hopelessly alienated from one another, held together only by the relics of the past, by social conventions that are all but meaningless in this broken and empty world.

Dick is a giant of modern literature: his stories encapsulate and define the terrors of our age. He is an electric Kafka, searching for answers to the biggest of questions in a world that seems, for all the power of technology (and perhaps, because of it), more and more disconnected.

Being social animals, human beings tend to allow their better judgement to be stampeded by the crowd’s impulses. This applies not only to the followers of trends, but their critics: the bigger the icon, the bigger the kudos accorded those who accomplish its takedown. This is only aided by the ephemeral nature of popularity: both sides laud–or criticise–things based on their aura rather than the true nature of the thing itself.

A recent example of this is the Moleskine notebook. Produced by the Italian company Modo e Modo, Moleskines are essentially copies of a French design. Their advertising copy links them to a number of literary and artistic luminaries: Hemingway, Chatwin, Picasso. Since all of these people are dead, they can’t complain that they never, in fact, used the notebooks in question, although they may well have used very similar ones (Chatwin certainly did; his were purchased from a Parisian stationer, until the supplier closed down in 1986).

This is really where the trouble starts. Coupled with their good looks (the Moleskine is a very attractive notebook), the cachet of the artists and writers essentially providing endorsements for them gave Moleskine notebooks the jumpstart they needed. It’s important to note that the kind of person who will spend time looking for the perfect notebook is generally the classic “early adopter” so beloved of computer technology companies, and I suspect they (we) are perhaps more vulnerable to the lure of the Moleskine’s whispered promises. “Buy me,” it seems to say, “and you too can be inspired to write like Hemingway.”

Marketing does not fool us, exactly; it hands us the lines we feed ourselves. Seduction is something we allow to happen, and investing objects with mysterious power is an old trap. We want to believe that possessing these items is what will give us power, or wealth, or inspiration; we want to deny that ‘genius’ is a label we apply to those who are both supremely gifted and work harder than anyone else. Olympic athletes have a genetic makeup that makes them suited for their chosen sport, but this is at best a starting point; potential will always go unfulfilled unless it is accompanied by a daily grind of back-breaking labour. Nobody wants to hear this; it’s not a cheering message. The idea that we simply lack some talisman, owned by those whose powers we aspire to possess, is a far more attractive one.

The story so far: early adopters are drawn in by a combination of factors, one of which is the mystique evoked by Modo e Modo’s marketing copy; the cult of the Moleskine grows, and they begin to crop up in a multitude of stationery, art and book shops, helped along by distribution agreements with several major chain bookstores (Barnes and Noble, Waterstone’s). Enter the critics, with the message that Moleskine fans are clearly being taken for the proverbial ride, Hemingway and Chatwin never bought Modo e Modo products, and that the talismanic qualities that are (implicitly or explicitly) being appealed to do not, in fact, exist.

Several lines of argument appear in response to such sceptical claims; I do not claim any of them as my own, merely hoping to summarise the main position.¹

1. They’re just good notebooks, better than anything else on the market; yes, you pay a premium for them, but it’s worth it to have the best.
2. The talismanic qualities do exist; I write more and better in my Moleskine than I did before. Of course, the Moleskine only serves to evoke this response in me–it isn’t some kind of immaterial power residing in the notebook itself–but if the effect is real, surely the end result is the same.
3. I just like them, it’s a personal aesthetic preference. I don’t deny the marketing argument, but you have no basis for criticism as far as subjective preference goes.²

There isn’t much consensus on #1; some think that there are better notebooks, or cheaper notebooks that are just as good. Many don’t. Personally I haven’t found any that are both as well made and suit my personal needs as perfectly, and I suspect many of those needs generalise well. Briefly, the pocket Moleskines are compact, with a high page count for their size, and good paper (albeit with well-documented feathering and bleed issues; you need to choose your pen carefully). They are stitched and bound in oilskin-covered card, which makes them resilient. Lastly, they have several nice touches that make them stand out from the crowd. The built-in bookmark and elastic snap that keeps it closed while not in use are of obvious utility; the back pocket grows on one. I use mine to carry library photocopier cards and Post-it notes.

The second argument is trickier. Merlin Mann calls the Moleskine a MacGuffin, which seems to have a certain truth to it. However, speaking of the Moleskine in these terms does it something of a disservice, and does not tell the whole story by any means. On the one hand, it may draw out certain good behaviours in some people: writing more, writing better. The Moleskine, when evoking these tendencies, helps define an ideal we aspire to (it may do this by instantiating a certain ideal itself, that of the ideal notebook, or at least coming closer than other notebooks).

As portentous as this sounds, it is only one side of the truth; the downside is that a Moleskine can inhibit as much as inspire. By declaring this ideal of good writing, it poses a challenge–or an obstacle. If one is constantly second-guessing oneself, worrying about whether what one is writing is in some way ‘worthy’ of being written down in a Moleskine, then it is that much harder to write anything. The loudest voices may be of those trumpeting their new muse, but this does not mean that those who find the Moleskine a mental burden do not exist; perhaps they are ashamed of their failings, or simply don’t recognise the syndrome for what it is.

Having suffered from this problem myself, I suspect that which side of the fence one falls on is due to temperament, and how one views one’s writing. When I initially purchased a Moleskine, several years ago, I wrote fairly prolifically about a story I was trying to write, but I didn’t get much of the story itself written. Entering a period of greater depression, my doubts assailed me with more vigour, and my writing petered out. Whenever I did try to write, I had to use simple sheets of lined paper; if I sat down with my Moleskine, I would stare at the empty page, trying to think of something worthwhile to write. As my condition improved, I began writing more often in the Moleskine, and now I write in it at least every couple of days. Many of the posts on this blog began life as musings in my Moleskine.

There is a third point, of course, which is that whatever the Moleskine is, it is not simply a talismanic object. It is, in fact, a notebook–and rather a good one at that. In my initial paragraph I warned against the seductive nature of the aura surrounding a fashionable object, and here we can see that warning realised. The fan claims that the Moleskine helps them write more, and better; the critic responds that in many cases, using a Moleskine may actually hinder the writing process. All this does is polarise the debate: what we should be doing is looking at how these claims really relate to an individual choice (that is to say, whether or not they buy one, if they’re thinking about doing so). I don’t mean to claim that a given transaction (or the set of all such transactions) is the only thing that gives this argument meaning, but it is certainly an important nexus of it.

What do I mean by this? Well, to begin with, the decision puts these arguments in a context, relates them to behaviour, and generally provides some much-needed perspective. The question of how an individual’s writing will be affected by using a Moleskine is an individual one: it depends on their circumstances, their nature. Moreover, there are practical questions: is this the right kind of notebook for me? What does it do better than the rest? Is the price worth it? These issues depend on the individual, on the context in which the questions are asked, not on spurious normative claims. The hard work of answering a question is done once the terms of the question and the context in which it is being asked are defined closely enough.

These questions of individual circumstance bring us to the third argument. Essentially, it grows from a confusion about subjectivity: the word ’subjective’ is used as a shorthand to mean “circumstances specific to me”. When someone says that buying a Moleskine is “A personal preference”, or “A subjective judgement”, what they really mean is “It suits my needs, but not necessarily yours.” This isn’t what it really means for something to be subjective: the circumstances on which the choice is based are in fact objective facts; if you were in their position, you would make a different choice. There probably is an element of subjective aesthetic appreciation, but I think that if it exists (this is a point of philosophical contention) its influence is overrated.

I have several Moleskines in current operation: a sketchbook, some Cahiers for ultimate portability and throwaway scribbles, and a lined notebook in which I write… well, pretty much whatever I feel like. A couple of months ago I wrote the following in it:

Decided that too much sanctity is stifling me. Need to loosen up. Consequently, this notebook will loosen up—starting with some Post-it artwork. The Moleskine craze is apparently, just like the iPod, big. Now I’m just one of the crowd. Still, nice to be an early adopter for once, even if I haven’t written in it as much as I might (I put this down to the aforementioned desire not to violate such a beautiful notebook with incessant and unremarkable scribbling).

Post-its are another good way of avoiding this problem; I draw on them, badly, then stick the good ones in the Moleskine. However, I’ve decided it’s high time I did more of it—so I bought a Moleskine Sketchbook. We’ll see how it goes.

America is defined for me by sound and space. I read the wrong kind of fiction at the wrong kind of age; now, books are bound up with science fiction and European history and mythology. Music, though, and cinema, belong to America.

The mythic landscape is a big canvas, and modern Britain is too small and squashed. I could never have survived here, crushed between Thatcher and Eastenders—so I escaped. The world was bigger, long ago, before concrete and steel compressed time and space, squashing it all together. I took refuge in the past—and in America.

This, then, is the difference between Britain and America: we live with echoes, memories of greatness and glory and battles and great darkness and great light, but those things are past. Only America is still alive as a mythic place. This is why they’re so weird over there—and why sometimes it feels like everyone here is dead inside. We have our little victories, our little escapes; we laugh at ourselves, and in the process create great comedy. The canvas is smaller, the defeats are smaller, but we have lost the power of greatness.

America is big. No one knows what happens out there, in the wilderness, the forests and the mountains and the deserts that seem to go on forever. The individual—the gunslinger, the blues singer—has power because the people are scattered, isolated. Out there, the balance of power can be swayed by one man’s conscience.

The blues came from Africa with the slaves, and England with the religion, but only in America could it flourish. Only there, it had room to breathe. All that empty space was waiting to be filled, wanted to be filled, with something new. A whisper can fill a silent room.

A big world attracts giants, and sure enough they came: Robert Johnson, John Wayne, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan. These are the storytellers, the patterners who weave together America for me. History and myth have a strange relationship, a feedback loop spinning out ethereal static. When you lose the myth, the world seems so sad and grey. The world I grew up in has no myths anymore, and I’ve always wanted to leave.

I’ve never been there, but America speaks to me, whispers to me from the pages of books and the landscape of cinema. There is an America inside me, but that’s not enough: I want to se the real thing, bigger and more grandiose than my imagined one, yet even more deeply flawed and human. I want to go somewhere big, and America is nothing if not that.

I have a hunger for myths: stories give my life meaning, and myths are the biggest and most mystical of stories. The mythos of America defines my internal landscape, and I need to find these mythic spaces myself if I’m to truly write. Out there, in the desert, I will find something. Truth, maybe, or a muse, or just emptiness. But even emptiness is something. Maybe it’ll be enough.

It struck me yesterday, while reading William Gibson’s Count Zero, how very average most of the book is. The heart of the story grows from the idea of machine as artist, and while Gibson’s prose remains enjoyable, as soon as it strays from this central concept, it begins to dissolve, taking the story with it. Aside from this idea, the book is a fairly generic cyberpunk thriller. He has since revisited the notion of authorship, most notably in Pattern Recognition, and with markedly more success. Even so, his early insights remain keen.

Count Zero is seen through the eyes of three people: Turner, a mercenary specialising in high-level corporate defections; Marly, a disgraced Parisian gallery owner, and the eponymous Count, wannabe hacker Bobby Newmark. Of the three stories, it is Marly’s that commands attention; of the three viewpoint characters, outwardly she does the least, and yet hers is the compelling story.

Hired by the mysterious Herr Virek to locate the maker of seven objets d’art, she pursues her goal through a meeting with the lover who betrayed her, Alain, who claims he has information on the whereabouts of the Boxmaker. Finding him dead, but managing to retrieve the vital information, she takes a flight into orbit; the final confrontation with the boxes’ creator occurs in a derelict data-storage centre, amongst the wreckage of a powerful dynasty. The Boxmaker—the machine, a fragment of an artificial intelligence—speaks.

Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well… But the bright time broke. The mirror was flawed. Now I am the only one… But I have my song, and you have heard it. I sing with these things that float around me, fragments of the family that funded my birth. There are others, but they will not speak to me. Vain, the scattered fragments of myself, like children. Like men. They send me new things, but I prefer the old things. Perhaps I do their bidding. They plot with men, my other selves, and men imagine they are gods…

One might wonder whether the title itself is a reference to this return to an earlier state. Count Zero is short for count zero interrupt, a piece of programming jargon: “On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.” But perhaps this is too subtle. What we can be sure of its that time plays a central role in Gibson’s writing. He is not, of course, alone in this; Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, consistently hailed as a seminal work of literature, is renowned for its meditations on time and memory.

It is striking that this thread of story, winding its way through an otherwise unremarkable SF novel, resonates so deeply. Marly is searching for her lost time, when she was happy, curating a gallery in Paris with her lover Alain. But that time never existed; she was deceived in the heart of her happiness. The time is truly lost.

The Boxmaker, too, seems to meditate on that lost past. “My songs are of time and distance”, it says, and its songs evoke those things and more. The climax of Neuromancer, Gibson’s previous work, takes place on a beach seemingly outside time and space; an electronic Eden where the hero must wait, and wait, until the future reveals itself. This scene is revisited afresh at the beginning of Count Zero, but the actors are different, and the beach is real—yet it seems similarly outside time. Sitting on a beach, one can do nothing but watch the endless waves, and think, and remember.

What do these reflections touch to evoke so strong a response in us? Perhaps it is because we can never experience time directly: it is a dimension, a line along which we move, yet seemingly hidden from direct appraisal. Space extends before us, open to our questions, but we can experience time only as the present moment. Its depths are veiled in darkness.

Art, then, can open to us some measure of understanding, a window on the endless past and the empty future. Through its mediations we can experience time itself in some oblique way. Words, through their abstract nature, can bring us closest to the hidden geometry of that dark sea. One could almost imagine that when the Boxmaker speaks of the mirror being flawed, he was talking about stories.