Pseuds Corner Black Label Edition: Damon Young

Just as the pink petals fling themselves onto asphalt and pebbled concrete, so too does Nikos throw Why into the day. His why is not simply an interrogation - in the face of daffodils, baby honey-eaters and blossoms, it is a celebration, a yes to what perplexes and goads with its tangible thusness. (Damon Young, "My Melbourne Spring", Meanjin Volume 69, No. 3, 2010)

Distraction draws on the lives and ideas of a surprising and illuminating collection of philosophers, writers and artists – from Plato to Matisse, from Seneca to Machiavelli, from Nietzsche to T.S. Eliot. ‘They are not heroes,’ says Young, ‘they are my peers. They are people who I talk to like to my friends. What I do with their advice is my business but I will certainly ask for it. In writing this book I have wanted to meet them. I have wanted to say to Seneca, “Dear Seneca, your death is an inspiration!”. I wanted to say to Ovid, “your poems have survived!” I wanted to say to all of them, “All this time later, we remember you!”’ (Maria Tumarkin interviews Damon Young)

To avoid the commonplace you lapse into bombast and, on the other hand, simplicity is so close to the merely platiduninous. - Flaubert

***

What do you do as an aspiring writer with those stray thoughts that you're really rather brilliant – that ecstatic inkling that the greatest writers of all times are not so much your heroes but your . . . peers and equals? What do you do if you're an aspiring philosopher with the afternoon dream that the content of your life - your kids, your happy relationships, your love of old pens and karate - is deeply admirable? The Great Stage's advice is - if you ever get round to putting them down on paper - stow them away in a folder in the bottom drawer of your desk, lock that drawer and get someone you trust to mind the key. The writer who features as the star of our second Deluxe Edition of Pseuds Corner has earned a proud place for himself there by doing the opposite - letting the notion that the small details of his own life are really rather edifying colour his writing: indeed a lot of the time not just colour it, but supply its basic content.

Damon Young's self-appointed task as a philosopher is to offer general advice to the perplexed. And there's nothing wrong with that in itself. However, the fact that so much of the good counsel comes with reference to the exemplary sophistication - the raw satisfactoriness - of Mr Young himself is a major problem. Three years after the publication of his first book, Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, Young is already talking about it as if it were the work of late Emerson, warmly effusing on the ABC website about the air of "meditative patience” he detects in certain passages of the book he wrote with his favourite fountain pen:

'My pen,' wrote the Roman author Ovid, 'the best part of me, truest witness, my soul's true mirror.' Of course, Ovid was exiled to the shores of the Black Sea because of his quill. But never mind, the lonely poet was right: our pens can help to bring out what's best in us. It's easy to forget this. We see so many pens: countless chewed, inky, snapped biros. In 2005, Bic apparently sold it's one-hundred-billionth pen. With these figures, it's easy to take them for granted, leave them between car seats, or use them as pea-shooters. (Am I giving away too much about my teenage years?)
But why? In a time of cheap ballpoints, tiny laptops and Word-enabled mobile phones, what on earth can be gained from a fountain pen? Isn't this just expensive, shallow, Luddite stubbornness? Perhaps for some, it's a misplaced longing for the past, or a sign of pomposity. But for most, it's simply a useful, beautiful, evocative tool. . . Take my new pen, a simple European model. It is simply a pleasure to use: balance, texture, colour, line - these all add to the experience of writing. And as I write a lot, this is important. It makes the job a joy. . . By encouraging longhand, it offers meditation, focus, personality. I wrote much of Distraction by hand, and the passages written in longhand have a certain meditative patience. (Damon Young, “The Write Tools” darkly wise, rudely great; “Write On” ABC Online, The Drum Unleashed: Robust Community Debate)
 
Major problem number 2 is that he insists on calling the product of this rather tepid narcissistic discourse of the self “philosophy”. Too often Young strays into territory that is philosophy-related but distinctly unphilosophical. Distraction and many of Young's various efforts on the opinion pages of newspapers degenerate into a sort of literary-philosophical Who Weekly, throwing round the names of the odd philosophical classic, or milking episodes from the lives of the philosophical greats for home-truths that are instantly applicable to the busy inhabitants of the contemporary world.

This is not to deny the need for philosophy to keep in touch with what the Germans call Lebensweisheit; the practical wisdom of the world is a neglected aspect of philosophy's historic role, so much so that practical wisdom is sometimes seen as a challenge to philosophy coming from outside philosophy, rather than one of philosophy's perennial sources. (On this equally cockeyed view, Lebensweisheit is a sort of instinctive protest leveled by non-philosophers against philosophers' ingrained habit of turning just about everything into an open-ended series of potentially quite complicated questions.) How philosophy in its incarnation as Lebensweisheit came to be neglected is a question that's been posed on The Great Stage once or twice before. The fact that practical philosophical wisdom has fallen into disuse seems to stem at least partly from the way philosophy is nowadays expected to justify itself to the institutional powers-that-be within universities as a distinct discipline with a technical vocabulary, science-like research methods, cognitive authorities, disciplinary boundaries and a specifiable use-value of its own. Within the contemporary academy, philosophy, it has to be said, turns easily into a rather desperate exercise in academic conformity on the part of what was historically a sort of anti-discipline - one, indeed, that has produced some of the most chequered non-conformists of all history. Part of the academic mug’s game that philosophers are forced to play involves seeking out industry partnerships and justifying the tangible benefits of philosophical scholarship to the economic life of the nation in pretty much the same terms that the engineering faculty points up its contribution to more efficient power grids and the medical faculty its presence on the advancing front of breast cancer research. You don’t have to be a great sage to see that the playing field isn’t quite level.

Young's major intellectual problem is not academic philosophical conformity, however, but the opposite - the conformism of the book market, with its many varieties of half-written fiction and half-thought thought - so few of which seem like the result of aesthetic conception or philosophical reflection pursued for their own sake. While philosophy as a technical speciality passes over into a would-be science that is equally devoid of depth and the rush and colour of life, philosophy as Lebensweisheit passes over into lifestyle journalism, finding would-be depth anywhere and everywhere. Philosophy as lifestyle journalism dive-bombs into the shallows, mistaking the clarity with which it sees the bottom for penetration of vision. In a nutshell - the problem here is that philosophy, as it's practised by Young and his pop philosophical models, especially when it takes up residence in the arts liftouts of newspapers and so cuts its ideas down to the size required by the liftout format and the liftout tone, loses connection with the other bases of the overall philosophical enterprise. Philosophy without Lebensweisheit is often colourless, pointlessly theory-driven; on the other hand, philosophy which develops no rigorous concepts, builds no theories and puts no intellectually concentrated images into circulation is humdrum - humdrum, and, in Young's case, liable to inflate its own credentials with grandiose fantasies about its own significance.

At the heart of the problem is the conversion of what were once known as literature and philosophy into a literature and philosophy industry. Though you can sometimes hear the pain and self-doubt with which “industry representatives” use this crassly inappropriate metaphor, so many of them just keep on doing it. The situation is one to which Young is no doubt doing his best to adapt. The re-invention of literature and philosophy as industries means exactly what you’d expect it to mean: rapid machine-like production of standardized opinions and works for as wide an audience – or as well-defined a niche market – as possible. Above all, it means systematically and tirelessly exercising your powers of self-promotion. On Young’s blog, “darkly wise, rudely great”, the sad joke that human communication on the whole is degenerating under the conditions set by the contemporary market economy into one vastly ramifying exercise in cross-promotion seems to come true literally. And in general, so much of what is happening in the public world of writing reads like a textbook case from a first-year macroeconomics seminar: the ever more extravagant self-praise in the literary “industry” looks like a bad case of runaway inflation, where the expectation that everyone else in the market is about to jack up their prices or their stated opinion of themselves leads every individual market player to make the expectation come true, precisely because it seems the only way of holding your own. Of course, it has to be said emphatically – pretty much everyone is doing it in the book industry, though no one is doing it quite like Young. It’s so often what makes the internet – the blogosphere especially – so tedious. Time and again, your heart rises as you come across a bright independent new voice. Time and again, what you find you’ve discovered is another “emerging writer” rotating on the spot within a narrow circle of egotistical career-building self-preoccupation.

Some of the lifestyle philosophy on the market - not only Young's - comes pretty close to Oprah-style pop-psychological fluff. In fact, it often comes to something worse than that. Oprah doesn't purport to be much more than a saleswoman of "the happy thing"; her attitude seems basically to be that whatever puts you in the happy way should be given a go, whether it's white-water rafting, standing on your head, joining Rotary, salsa aerobics, having a good cry on tv (or a good scream) or saying to yourself that you're worth it 30 times a day. Young, on the other hand, dignifies his more high-minded mix of happy-making activities with the name of an ancient and venerable subject, philosophy. In doing so he flatters the vanity of his uncritical readers that their everyday concerns are quintessentially philosophical. Of course they aren’t “unphilosophical”. But to pretend that they’re anything but potential starting points for a type of reflection that is arduous, analytic, scholarly, argumentative and many other things besides – is to seriously gild the lily.

Young’s personal specialty - distilling moral commonplaces from his own life and the lives of philosophical and literary greats - needs to be viewed with a wide cultural lens. What it seems to be part of, in the long-run, is a pop cultural reduction of the past, above all the extraordinary cultural creativity of historical individuals, to a routine set of comestible, rather sentimental concerns. This is the same general process whereby Keats becomes a pseudo-American heart-throb, every second Jane Austen character turns into an Eastern Suburbs private schoolgirl and John Nash goes from being a profoundly dissociative mathematical mind to a "beautiful mind" whose owner is cured of his non-conformity by the Power of Love and Success. In Young’s work, the whole process of anti-metamorphosis – the transmutation of the extraordinary and the complex into the simple and approachable - goes even more badly wrong. Plato turns into someone who belongs simultaneously in a glossy travel brochure ("The evening breeze from Piraeus was perfect") and in second-rate gay pornography ("He was young, handsome, well built - he could feel the eyes of the old men on him, touching him, tasting him.") Marx turns into a man who liked his seafood and whose life-work confronts us with the unchallenging idea that "in the economy, as in the jungle, there's no such thing as a free lunch". What can you say? Praise the thinker and pass the canape's! But don’t talk to me about philosophy.

 ***

Home is a varied thing: part sanctuary, part nursery, part kitchen and vegetable garden, part office. If I were to give a word to what unites it all, I wouldn't say bricks and mortgage. I'd say 'rhythm'.- Home combines all sorts of rhythms: eating and sleeping, outings and returns, work and play, and the cadence within each. For example, the rhythm of chopping parsnip and carrot for mackerel soup is very different to the rhythm of writing a newspaper column. Yet home throbs with all of this. (Germaine Leece interviews Damon Young about "The Philosophy of Home", Some Home Truths - What Home Means To Us Today)

Put economically, attention is a scarce and precious resource; frustrating as this might be, we have to be canny with it. When we cannot do this, we're said to be "distracted". The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that to distract someone is to "prevent (someone) from giving their full attention to something". For example, while I was writing this book my wife, Ruth, read the first two paragraphs and immediately wanted to talk about our little boy. In the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, she was "preventing her husband from giving his full attention to his book". With her understandable interest in our son, she was distracting me: presenting a stimulus that clogged up my perceptual bottleneck. - But there's more to distraction than a breach of cognitive constraints. Psychological blockages are part of a much larger set of limitations: those of mortal life itself. (Damon Young, Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free)

"It can be genuinely consoling to admit that we all struggle to seize life's elusive potential. With a combination of Schadenfreude and relief, I certainly feel much better when I read of Marx's chaotic work habits. He apparently found all his domestic arrangements difficult, and spoke of producing "miniature dunghills" after his daughter Eleanor was born. When he did get the time to work on what he once called his "economic shit", he would embroil himself in petty disputes, even challenging mortified writers and editors to duels. (And I thought my hours spent watching Doctor Who were wasteful!) . . . Marx was a curious mix of idler and workaholic. He was often distracted from his important work by petty disputes, domestic chaos and illness. If the portly, scruffy philosopher wasn't fidgeting or pacing, his fiery temperament led him astray. And when A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy didn't live up to Marx's hype, his easily diverted character was to blame: despite all his self-congratulation, he simply hadn't put the work in. Admittedly, it's hard to concentrate on the revolution when your arse boils are flaring up. Yet Marx's chaotic home, unpaid bills and life of impetuous feuds give the impression of a disorganised teenager in a man's shaggy body. . . We need to eat, to wash, to find shelter, and these things aren't provided gratis by Mother Earth. As Marx was keen to point out however, most work is simply the replacement of one necessity with another: the laws of the economy become as commonsensical as those of metabolism and circulation. Even if we don't catch our own fish (Marx's favourite dish), we still have to pay the bills (or, in Marx's case, get Engels to pay them). The lesson is simple: even if you're bankrolled by the son of a wealthy industrialist, necessity will out. In the economy, as in the jungle, there's often no such thing as a free lunch. (Damon Young, Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free)

Aristodemus [i.e. Plato] shrugged his broad shoulders. He was young, handsome, well built - he could feel the eyes of the old men on him, touching him, tasting him. He enjoyed the attention, the longing of their wrinkled hands, dried-up mouths. But they were disgusting. He looked around him, quietly grimacing at the landmarks and faces. Luminescent above him was the old Parthenon. How typical of this race of old women - a temple to a virginal, celibate sky-gazer. Still, she did help that cunning old bastard, Odysseus. She wasn't all bad. . . He ran his fingers over his chest. His biceps swelled, forearms tensed - and more looks of longing. Plato revelled in this distance, in the human span that cut him from his admirers. Being beautiful was easy enough - there were plenty of handsome young epheboi. His exquisiteness was his discipline: he knew with precision how to approach and withdraw, how to mix tenderness with cruelty. - He drummed his fingers on his thigh, watching the muscles dance. Hypnotised, he turned as he heard footsteps behind him - but he kept up the cadence on his skin. It was his brother. "Plato, you little oik. Father wants you." . . . (Damon Young, "The Lesson", Meanjin)

Socrates laughed. It was a hoarse, wet-sounding laugh - but a genuine one.
"I know I'm wonderfully amusing," said Plato. "Lucky you - I'm to be your pet boy, yes?"
"Absolutely," said Socrates dryly. "Once you're spayed and toilet trained you'll be perfect."
"Don't blaspheme," was the quick reply. "Only the gods are perfect. And Pericles, of course - if you believe my uncle."
Socrates laughed softly and rose. Without a word, he unfastened his tunic, kicked off his sandals, and waved for a slave with oil. "Enough. It's time for you to teach me a lesson [in the wrestling ring]."
"You're joking," said Plato, looking the old man up and down. For an ugly mutt, he had a beautiful physique - muscular, well-proportioned, relaxed. He looked like a nobleman, except for his horrid mien.
"Why does everyone," laughed Socrates, "say that when I'm naked? No, I'm serious. You're not afraid of a little wrestling, are you? What a shame, Plato. I think your uncle's Persian perfumes have made you into a sissy."
Plato shook his head and stripped. The slave oiled Socrates first, and then the younger man. They stepped into the arena. As they stretched, Plato enjoyed the soft sand, still warm on his feet. The evening breeze from Piraeus was perfect. (Damon Young, "The Lesson", Meanjin)

Aren't children a distraction from creative endeavour? In a word, no. I think Connolly, and those who agree with him today, are profoundly mistaken about the role of children in creative life. And their failure to appreciate this stems from a confusion about the nature of distraction itself. . . For example, as the parent of a verbose, energetic little toddler, I'm more productive than when I was single. The reason for this is simple: I've learned to work with less! Dealing for months on end with sporadic working hours and flagging energy, I became accustomed to opportunistic work: getting pen to paper, whenever or wherever I had the opportunity. He's asleep in a cafe? Great, time to finish off that chapter! He's absored in his Lego? Brilliant, I can catch up on important emails! Put simply, parenthood has disciplined me - and maybe Cyril Connolly was just a little, well, soft.
. . . Playing with Nikos has been a great exercise in creativity. Whether it's morning Lego, drawing differs or making a chair-and-doona cubby, playtime accustoms me to open-ended, free-thinking activity. It urges me to be cautious, less conservative in my writing and thinking; to commit myself to the twists and turns of the process, rather than desperately chasing outcomes. It becomes less rigid, and more innovative. . . But most importantly, my son is a commitment; a living line in the sand. This might sound glib, but he's often why  Iwrite. To take up my pen with sincerity is to defend him, and the sort of world I'd like for him. In this, he a reminder of what I value inlife, and the embodiment of every living thing. If I want a more creative existence, he's not a distraction - on the contrary, he's what I should never be distracted from. (And, bless him, he hasn't woken up yet!) (Damon Young, "Driven by distraction" The Age)

[pen-portrait of Mr Young by A Karenina]