Schweir vs. Material

Schweir vs. Material

Dreaming of him as Isabel only could; without ever having possessed him and merely because she is unable to possess him, she trumpets his glory and sings his praises in esteem reserved for no other in her life; as a manifold defense mechanism that has little, if anything, to do with love and affinity and everything to do with inauthenticity and sloth.



I'm referring to the character, Larry, in Maugham’s, The Razor's Edge. I am critical of Maugham’s own handling of Larry's character, who is supposed to represent a sort of mysterious ubermensch, sprung unexpectedly from the early 20th century elite, and who devotes his life to the pursuit of meaning and profundities... it wreaks of Maugham’s helpless sense of corpulent success, whereby he no longer has to research subjects too carefully but merely mingle in various stuffy social circles where a few eccentrics can cough up a little relevant, albeit woefully ill-informed, knowledge on the subject of the mystic and occult. And he was right, too-- he needn't have, because he was the most successful author of his day and The Razor's Edge is a classic example of his literary prowess. None of this is my point, however.



My point has to do with the notion that Larry's character is designed, poorly, to win the affection of our restless imaginations and spirits, which he no-doubt will if we haven't the courage to actually traverse some of the avenues Maugham insists Larry has. It says nothing good of you to defend in worshipful din all that Larry represents and why your flagrant devotion to him (or rather his character, which is worse) is a symbol of your own non-ubiquity.



We all get a hard on, or rather our panties in a moist bunch, for Larry when we first discover him. To extol the reaction 5, 6, 7 years later as a novelty meant to be telling of our unique position in the vast life of the mind is nothing short of a travesty as it belies the fact that all was idle worship-- we didn't really care about what he represented; he was just an IDEA of some life lived on the other side of the moon. Not meant for domestic consumption. That's as wild as you get, huh? No space in there for your own deviations and not just some tandem rants about the butterflies in your stomach when some stuffed parrot of a British author made a marionette and danced it around for a few minutes? Why not read Zarathustra? Yes, I know, I know.. he doesn’t dress to taste; he has nothing too pleasingly tragic about him. He probably doesn't even brush his teeth, the poor lamb. Nothing sexy about him.



I used to use the phrase, "dare to imagine everything." I stole it from Miller, who used it roughly in this context: "Because if there is anything god-like about god, it is that: He dared to imagine everything." Now, I know that in any conventional sense, this is somewhat of an empty phrase: the containers left to us within which we should be daring to imagine everything are not really that big. That is, until we stumble upon some technology to expand them naturally, say, with some kind of physiological re-tuning that would undermine the wanton muck-raking intellect, but I wouldn't know shit about that... ANYWAY... it's not a big problem if we ignore questions of universality in considering "dare to imagine everything" because I know already that daring to imagine everything has little to do with universal discovery and much to do with "removing the suckers from the tree of life," as Miller also happened to say. And the way to remove these suckers happens to coincide with enlarging our cognitive containers. I am, of course, losing you at this point because I'm mixing metaphors in a shallow and irresponsible fashion, but let me just say this:



The spirit of "dare to imagine everything" needs to be taken seriously in the pursuit of folly. The more we dare to imagine everything, the more we reveal the folly of the backdrops upon which we were taught to stand upon and if at first that makes us feel uncomfortably weightless, no matter; by now, if you are one such that likes to trumpet characters like Larry, you should be accustomed to destabilizing your containers; your book-ends; your brackets. To dare to imagine everything simply means to be dedicated to constantly re-arranging those book-ends and brackets.



So for instance: If your sister's boyfriend has a bad spell and runs amok and they break up until he comes around, you can say, if you like, that he cheated on her, even though they were clearly broken up when he went and bonked someone else's boots for a while. You can say that if your only priority in inter-personal affairs is to reassert some ancient pack mentality of defending every last comical mishap that originated in your own house while bitterly denouncing any and all that happened to transgress your house. If ankle-biting and hydrant-pissing is all your interested in promoting, then never think twice about your book-ends and how cozily they wrap up the set of tomes you've dedicated yourself to preserving for future generations. But while that is so, I don't expect to hear you extolling the virtues of Larry, who clearly abandoned those people in his life for whom you are still chasing cars and ankle-biting. He could love them, it's true: he could love everyone without contingencies of recklessness or malice and without demonizing anyone, precisely because he refused to ankle-bite; because he refused to give anyone some kind of emotional immunity simply because they happened to have conventionally recognized status in his life, such as "fiancé" or "brother" or "teacher." He was could give everyone to themselves as he had given himself over to the lucid justice of folly, which really is universal, only he started with an itch and decided to scratch and keep scratching until it no longer itched. And if Larry speaks of devotion to another, he does so basking in the light-heartedness devotion entails; at that level, it doesn't matter that Isabel ruined her life because she couldn't throw off the harness of her hysterical selfishness any more or less than it mattered if Larry's teachers had achieved perfection in being: all IS on that plane and nothing else; it's a more fundamental reality than we're accustomed to considering and to consider it properly, you have to devote a lot of time and attention to it which will mean that other pursuits or necessities, such as resume-building, will suffer for it.



And while it would be absurd to suggest that resumes are an indicator of one's authenticity or inauthenticity, or of one's real passions or of the passions they read about and conveniently adopt as their own, my my... I didn't have the car, the disposable income, the consistent resume, the high GPA, the luxury of shunning guaranteed office work,... but I just don't see how it was YOU who was being taken advantage of.