Responsa #27
The carnage of Carnage, The Sommelier Awards, In the Kindergarten, Me my friend, Volume I, Volume II
1. The carnage of Carnage. I now only think of Carnage carnage, of being abandoned by Carnage (my cat) by the death of Carnage or through the serious injury of Carnage. Which means I no longer enjoy Carnage but only fear the carnage of Carnage. I think only of the death of Carnage not the life of Carnage, and this ruins the living-Carnage-situation by thinking only of the dying-Carnage-situation, ruining the actual living-situation with the merely thinkable death-situation. My dreams are now filled with one-eyed cats with the intact eye looking at me in fear and accusation for letting Him (a mere catchild!) out into the world without knowing the worldliness of the world, without parenting and induction into the worldliness of the world – but how can I be a good parent to a cat without myself being cat or becoming cat or myself having being inducted into the life and the world (the life-world) of cat – and I cannot give to this dependent being what I myself have not been given.
(And only now does the advice I rejected – to change His name from the name given by His original abandoners, the name Carnage – begin to make sense. For I cannot call Him without also calling death or injury in the same breath.)
2. The Sommelier Awards. Two of the three sommelier-finalists were bitterly disappointed when they lost the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale award – which is to say, in french, the Best Sommelier of the World – held near Paris. They had got down to the final three contenders for this prestigious food industry award. The final three would come onto the award stage and have to respond to the worst possible restaurant situations, in which restaurant actors would sit at tables and act out their bodily and mental neuroses and needs on a stage according to a script, and the sommelier would have to meet these simultaneous faux demands by faux eaters and faux drinkers for food and for beverages and the resolution of problems connected to these demands for food and for beverages, such as the invidious pairing possibilities of vegan food with non-alcoholic beverages. The sommelier would primarily have to contain their absolute disgust for these people who were acting out these bodily and mental needs on a stage according to a script, a script which the sommelier had no notion of but just had to react to these people imitating the genuine food and drink needs of others – or, you could argue, representing the universal food and drink needs on a stage, going proxy for us all – making the sommelier’s life on stage hell just for the sake of this award, and just for the sake of this award the sommelier would have to act like a performing animal to a mocking audience and ruthless judges, the award itself conjuring up a false conception of excellence in what is actually an art in which humanity rather than excellence is what is ultimately desired, but in which because humanity cannot itself be rated and adjudicated, instead this acting award is given for something which is impossible to rate, but because we must rate everything out of 5 or 7 or 10 to understand anything or think we understand anything, so the sommelier must be paraded out on stage and must run around like a circus animal and be rated and ranked for their tasting, serving, and knowledge of pricing, and become a winner or loser rather than just a man being a sommelier.
The only point of the sommelier award is to promote the sommelier certification and training business and, at a personal level, to obtain the best positions in the sommelier life – which is not an easy life – and so the sommelier goes up on stage and flaps around appeasing these faux hungry and faux thirsty and faux irritable people, and thus becomes the willing puppet of this food and drink and serving industry that has arisen around our stomachs and palettes, an enormous industry designed to superimpose a culture on what is simply nature and a natural impulse to feed and to drink and so to profit from this layer imposed upon nature, culture and money constantly brought together so we can no longer see which is cause and which is effect, so much so that we now suspect culture for being simply a money enterprise to create and sell us a redemptive illusion around the satisfaction of our basic needs which are something natural, whereas in fact the very simple natural event of eating and drinking without the restaurant and without the sommelier would be quite enough.
3. In the Kindergarten. As a rough generalisation: everything which currently passes for wisdom or insight is a lesson that may properly be given to five year olds. For instance, the new and controversial idea that responsibility is an important notion, or the surprising and novel thought that we should credit the person who disagrees with us with intelligence not stupidity just because they disagree with us – in other words: recognising the contingency of our opinions and our mind, that is, we could have had their view if things had gone differently, just we do already recognise the contingency of our body, that is, we could have had their, for instance, broken body, had things had gone differently – or that our opinions are not definitive of who we are, and that we are at some basic level all the same etc. These banalities are now the basis for whole careers, for podcasts and followers and books and money, and they form the basis of political divisions and antagonisms – and yet they are things that no sensible person should disagree with.
What has happened to us such that there is so much as a market for these ideas for adults – ideas which we should have taken in with our mother’s milk, which should go without saying, be matters of course? What has happened such that it is probably welcome that there are such moderating voices in our culture; voices which speak of ideas of the common ends or common good and the widespread agreement about common ends, rather than the fractious discussion over means which are engineered to divide us and make us forget about these common ends?
4. Me my friend. Imagine you are a friend of yourself, and now ask yourself how you would think of this friend, or what you would say to them. Is it ok that they live in this way, or not? What are your judgements of this person, what do you feel about them, do you have advice for them? And this is a useful exercise because we can love a friend more than we can love ourselves. Or at least, our love for our friend is different: we can tolerate many terrible things in our own life that we should not accept in the life of a friend. In part because our life has been contorted slowly and its contortions have been familiar to us all our lives and now as (we think) part of our selves. Whereas we can see a friend’s life and its contortions without having this sense that these contortions are just part of who they are. We can simply compare the friend to what we take to be objective standards of a life, and how it should be lived, and what is good for a person. And in this way, we have a clearer head about them than we do ourselves, and attempting to think of ourselves as a friend might allow us more room to think about our own life, and to think of it more objectively.
5. Volume I. I can no longer enter libraries or study in libraries or read in libraries. It may be that the volume of human life has increased or it may be that my ears have become more sensitive to what is the same volume of human life, but it amounts to the same thing. It is not even that there is too much speaking but it is now the fear of speaking I am concerned with. Each moment of non-speaking is only the postponement of the speaking that will or might occur, and I can hear in the silence the speaking that would have occurred had there been speaking, which is only the speaking in my mind not the speaking in reality. So in the silence there is as much speaking in the library as in the times of speaking, only it is largely in the mind not reality. And if you can accept this speaking and this silence and speaking in the silence in the library, and this fear of speaking in the library, and this extremely loud speaking in the mind in the library – if you can accept all of this, this is a sign you are surely reconciled with life, and your therapy can stop already!
6. Volume II. What does it mean that the volume of conversation constantly rises in public or semi-public spaces? People used (in the past) to speak to one another only, almost in whispers with the sound directed only at the other whom they were speaking to by means of the mouth being directed only at the other and the eyes looking at the other and so directing the mouth. Whereas now (presently) it is considered appropriate to simply speak, not to the one person you are talking to but speak openly undirectedly, with eyes no longer directing the mouth, with sound waves spilling everywhere, without regard to anyone else existing who may receive these sound waves in their ears; and not only sound waves in their ears but also the meanings of these sound waves in their minds. We can only pray, in such cases, that if people speak loudly and openly they do so in an unknown language.