proximoception | (no subject)

I should stop calling people I'm inimical to narcissists, it's clearly an infinitely abusable word. And not a concept I necessarily understand.

Still, I mostly only hate them when I'm with them. At a distance they can be extremely amusing. In film and music they can achieve quite striking things: their tendency to see their own lives and whims as terribly important, epic, sacred affairs can be infectious at the remove these arts allow. Less so with painting, much, much less with literature, I'd say, which are forms where novelty itself can't carry the day. Narcissists don't understand what the rest of us find important, and tend to borrow the trappings of these Important Things to celebrate their own creative selves in a way that becomes immediately transparent in a book. (E.g.) Kanye West and Lady Gaga, like Madonna and Michael Jackson before them, are extremely amusing people you would want to murder if you had to deal with them in person and who have never spoken anything but bullshit on any actual topic. The only thing that tends to come out of their mouths is their ambivalence toward their own greatness. This ambivalence can take on complexity, intensity, and variation - and is probably forever novel to most of us - so it meets many of the basic criteria for artistic interestingness, but it can't take anything real into itself. It is ultimately stupid, which doesn't play in literature (and shouldn't have but did in the by-and-large train wreck that was 20th century visual art).

Great writers can be pretty horrible people, mind you, but you don't have to be a narcissist to be a horrible person. And vice versa - there must be border zones. Maybe great writers are in one? Smart enough to detect, crack out of their own colossal narcissism? The initial narcissism providing the energy used later to examine both it and other things? Who knows?

But part of me wants to go farther and agree with Borges that intelligent people are invariably kind. I think that fits with my own experience, but maybe I just try to make it. Ezra Pound's deficiencies as a writer and thinker seem to line up with his failure as a human being. And I've never seen the appeal of Chaucer, who may have raped someone - though he may be good in ways I can't yet see just like he may have been innocent of the charge. Dostoevsky, undeniably great in his way, was both a crazy dick and terribly unsound writer. The unsoundness works as a virtue in awfully narcissist-ish ways - more of the self-hating school of narcissists, or anyway the type fascinated to probe the rot of their own teeth. There must be exceptions? Schopenhauer? Flannery O'Connor? Her idea content's quite nasty but perfectly presented. They tell me conflating genius with goodness is fallacious (Truth/Beauty). But I think they may correlate, at least insofar as geniuses tend to understand morality better, and it's hard to be very bad when you understand the badness of bad.

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Best thing I have read for a long time.

Especially considering Pound whose "economical" poetry I tried to read ages ago. What was it Stein said about him (herself as immense a bore as anyone can get to be): "He is a village teacher. Interesting if one is a village. If not, not." (Not exact, quoted from memory.)

I love the Borges take on this. I hope, it´s true. Thanks for a lovely essay!

I think it may work the other way, to some extent; being a nasty person makes you a worse writer. For really extreme cases see Slacktivist on the Left Behind series, probably the best (and certainly the longest) critique I've encountered of really bad books; the plot is an irrational failure and the good guys are routinely sociopathic because the authors insist on following intellectually defunct theology to the letter. He has a refrain that how intelligent you end up being is often a moral choice: stupidity is mostly made up of comfortable delusions, and the self-doubt needed to overcome those delusions takes a moral effort.

These days I increasingly think about the critical relation of literature as being the respect that the author-in-work earns, and what they do with it. (If your respect for the author doesn't matter for your appreciation of a work, you're no longer dealing with literature.) One of the things the author can spend respect on is to get away with disrespecting the reader; this can do important things, but if it's attempted before the author's earned any respect themselves then failure abounds. Getting the whole enterprise to work is very similar to negotiating relationships without being an asshole. A lot of parallel skills, at least.

Morality? Most writers would fail a Christian morality test, and a civics one -- understanding, if that is what writers have, may make you less selfish, but I wouldn't say it would necessarily make you more self-less. Selfish and selfless are tropes, and with understanding should come questioning.

I would agree only if you mean "kind" to be a sort of neutrality. Which is I think what you would get if you met shakespeare, a sort of polite and open dismissiveness. Because he knows better.

I've never met these personal narcissists you're so unfond of, the ones that aggravate me are cynics.

Is it naive of me to think about how happiness fits in here? I don't know that there's a correlation between intelligence and happiness; I think intelligence grants one a deeper understanding and keener appreciation of both the goodness of good and the badness of bad: one sees more how and that the world is wonderful to the same extent that one sees more how and that the world is horrible too.

But I think there is a correlation between goodness and happiness. I don't think that bad people can be happy, not really happy. But maybe what it is is that bad people don't miss happiness, or understand it, or want it in the first place, or that other pleasures -- being "right," feeling superior to, etc. -- are more important to them.