William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

On cookie-cutter thinking

If it is characteristic of pseudo-intellectuals to claim knowledge where there is none, then it is equally characteristic to complain of pseudo-intellectualism without being able to tell a thought from a thirst trap. Just as nobody likes art but many have swallowed, unchewed, the idea of its significance, so has the value of books entered the notional orbit of those who can’t stand to read them. I prefer – and shall forevermore – the conversation of one genuinely interested in dirt to lofty philosophers’ lalia decorated with a few Greek nouns pronounced with too much heat in the throat. Wanting to know may be requisite for intellectual effort, but wanting to appear to know is positively destructive – to the point that one wonders whether knowing is really the right word for what’s wanting, and not, say, thinking, for on reflection some of the worthiest persons in history we find are those at peace – I do not say content – with ignorance. If we must speak of knowledge, then it is the image of knowledge that sees in it an event come once and for good, the way a filing cabinet knows, that is corrosive, as though having passed one’s eyes over every ink-stain in a poem amounted to knowing it and entitled one to speak at any length about it. But whatever word you’ll take, what’s evidently lacking is that facility with reality characteristic of an intellectual life, in virtue of which it is admirable. I recently had the misfortune of clicking through a video on art that, having met two painters for, it seems, two minutes, proceeded to christen one the Apollonian to the other’s Dionysian energy. Now, a distinction is as valuable as the classifications it makes, and these are effects of the tact of the mark-maker no less than the words themselves. – Words, we’re told, are tools, and meanings rule-bound – and it seems true enough that we’re forced to make sense with these clicks whose potential precedes us – but then, to apply a rule on an occasion demands determining that this is, in fact, a fit occasion for it, demands determining, in short, our sense as a site for the history of these sounds, and if this behavior can be explained, post-fact, in terms of rules, it is surely not performed by reference to them. – I digress, I guess, to say: distinctions can hardly be taken as relevant as given, but must be proven by an illuminating use here and now. Just as jokes retold lose something of their humor, distinctions reemployed lose something of their relevance – unless, that is, one knows how to tell a joke or have a relevant thought. As regards this particular distinction, one doubts if it was ever all that illuminating. Nietzsche at a time no doubt knew how to have a thought, and even in his hands Apollo and Dionysus threatened to beget a recipe for avoiding the peculiar. It seems meet for a society having lost a godhead but not able to court and bear the attention of the Pantheon to dissolve twelve gods and innumerable deities into two energies, and more meet still to take this distinction, crude from the start, as given, reuse it, and think any light has been shed thereby, when – what have we done? The intelligibility of the world has been folded hamburger-style into two planes which in their vastness and vacuity let us run free from one another’s intelligence, but which draw further from possibility our acknowledgment in terms fit to be known by.

    Take heed of trusting to such nice distinctions.

Of the memorable maxims of an overbearing parent of my former acquaintance the most frequently repeated – such as circumstances were – was: if you’re not anxious, you’re depressed. Which seems, in the mouth of an elder, like a thought that might bear fruit, but which is, on reflection, false. Take heed. And I have heard it said, in defense of another crude distinction, that art and the discourse around it must be political – by which a man meant: more immediately recognizable as political; by which we mean: it must use the most vulgar terms and distinctions on offer. If the political is just the realm of vulgar but relevant distinctions – and perhaps for good reason, concerning as it does the commons – then when there is something new to be said or done it will appear to turn away from politics; but then, if what one sees to be sorely lacking in the politics of the moment is the thinking that attends – that lets thoughts dawn and hearkens when another utters them – then art and the intellectual life more broadly will be concerned, for political no less than aesthetic reasons, to make new marks, and consider it a vice to recount old categories without a thought for, not only their utility, but their relevance.