signs of stendhal

I have to preface my answer by saying that, as much as I had pictured being a mother, I never really pictured myself being pregnant. It’s not that carrying my own child wasn’t something I wanted to do, to the contrary; it’s just something I was unable to clearly envision. I, like many women, entertained a convincing paranoia that it wouldn’t work for me. A miracle of such enormity is already hard enough to compute; participating in any way is almost beyond the credit I could give myself, especially knowing perfectly qualified and worthy would-be parents who couldn’t get pregnant. If nature denied them, why would it be generous to me? Well it turns out, that part is random, or at least subject to an otherworldly logic I need not understand. I got lucky, so here I am.

OK, let’s get the things-that-are-just-how-I-expected out of the way, because they are kind of boring:

• Strangers invite me to take their seat on the bus.
• Friends like to touch my stomach.
• I have rare but random weepy spells, even when I don’t feel particularly emotional.
• My boobs are bigger and I’m always horny.
• I gleefully eat ice cream 1-3x a day.
• It’s harder to flirt with dudes.

Now for what surprised me: 

• How much I’ve loved this baby before it’s even technically a baby. I now understand why parents think everything their kid does is the greatest, because I was so fricking proud of my little zygote for implanting, and then of my little blastocyst for cleaving, then of the little embryo for growing organs, and now of our little fetus for kicking and squirming. Basically, for doing all the stuff it’s expected to do that looks ordinary to anyone on the outside.
  
  The experience has given me the gift of this beautiful epiphany: that I never really fathomed my mother’s love for her children. Because if her pregnancies were anything like mine, by the time each of us was born she probably loved us more than anyone else ever could. Which means her eagerness for me to have my own child wasn’t just because she wanted a cute new baby in the family, but because she was impatient for me to finally understand how much she loves me.
  
  
• Upon finding out about the pregnancy, I expected to feel joy but I also expected to feel panic, so it was quite a surprise when the panic didn’t come. Instead I felt a great relief, a marvelous freedom from all the things I didn’t truly care about and all the other lives I should want/could have — because I knew I wouldn’t have time to dwell on those thoughts anymore. I would finally have to stop bullying myself over what I hadn’t yet done or would never do, and instead put all energy into doing only what met the highest standard of Mattering To Me. That list quickly became very short and very obvious in the best of ways.
   
• But the biggest surprise is how much being pregnant has prompted me to think about death. Not in a morbid or fearful way, and not even because I’ve been reading up on birth stories and stats, which expose the subject of America’s unnecessarily high maternal mortality rate. I just find that I can’t reflect on what’s happening in my body from any perspective except one that hovers above the axel of life’s revolving door. To contemplate a beginning is to contemplate an end. To introduce a life into the world is to introduce a death into the world. That is the dual nature of nature, the twin stares of Mother Isis — all swirling simultaneously in my gut. Especially in the early weeks when a miscarriage felt as likely as anything, the birth/death outcomes seemed two ends of the same rope at which my imagination would grasp ardently, late into the nights…
  
  Before I’d told anyone except my husband about the pregnancy, I used to pace hurriedly through the streets of our neighborhood just like a girl with an urgent secret, instinctively holding my stomach and parsing through racing thoughts, one of which was, Wow. I have inside me right now the person who is going to bury me someday. When I later shared that with friends, they laughed, seeing it as comically macabre. But it wasn’t that; I actually felt comforted at the thought, and was awed by this preemptive glimpse at closure. As I wrote in my journal the night my pregnancy was confirmed, that moment of finding out instantly became “the belly button of my life,” tying the skin of my past and future existence into a defined center, giving it all unified form.
  
  And I suddenly understood how some people say that having kids makes it easier to die. That’s usually proposed as a critique, and certainly I always thought of the inevitability of death as a lame “reason” to reproduce. But now that I have another generation gestating in me, I see the relief of being survived not as a ‘reason’ but just as a fact. I do feel better about her father and me eventually dying, believing that our families have combined into a new person who might carry on our love for the world after we expire. It’s not that we were looking for a way out of death, or that we naively believe we’ll carbon copy ourselves onto another being. We just lived our lives naturally until more life grew out of it, and somehow that notion takes the edge off death’s unyielding persistence, and allays what doubt I had that the big revolving door is nothing cruel, or futile, or anything to fear. Now the door seems, just like everything in life, another way of learning to share, learning to take turns, learning to grow up.

Long before being a candidate for parenthood, I enjoyed randomly asking people: “Pregnancy: miraculous or mundane?” I’d felt it was equally both things, but now, for me, its mundanity only contributes to its miracle. I suppose that’s one of the shifts that constitutes our transformation into gushing, lovesick parents. At least, that’s my assessment halfway through the process. Ask me again next trimester!

I’ve actually thought about this a lot. I use Pound’s phrase in my bio mainly because it contains a concise, inspired definition of art (and its implied value) that I believe has been lost. To say whether I agree with it exactly, I have to break it into parts: what Pound meant by “art,” what he meant by “the sole means,” and what he meant by “ecstasy” or “the sensation of the soul in ascent.”

ART: People have proven time and again that the term “art” is very pliable, that there’s room for all sorts of products and practices to share it if these things emerge from passion rather than imperative. But I think it’s safe to say that here Pound is talking about culture’s conventional definition: fine arts, literature, drama, music. My definition tends to be broader – I am moved when I see people do even mundane tasks with love and flair – so we might disagree slightly here on that term.

THE SOLE MEANS: When he calls art ‘the sole means’ of transmuting a certain ecstasy to others, he is specifically contrasting art with religion. Later in this same passage* he calls religion an inferior subcategory of art, a “[failed] attempt to popularize” it, by which he probably meant to standardize it for the populace, i.e., to indiscriminately diffuse the sensation of the soul in ascent to religious devotees. He admits that a religion can sometimes convey this ecstasy to its members, but irregularly — and I might add, with more distressing consequences when it fails, in that it can too easily provide a false sense of having succeeded.

ECSTASY, or, THE SENSATION OF THE SOUL IN ASCENT: Forgive me while I speak with total authority about something I have not and can not confirm. Because I’m about to clarify, on Pound’s behalf, what this turn of phrase truly refers to:

Art has many functions that everyone knows about – provoking critical thought, emotional reactions, discussion, aesthetic pleasure – but ‘the soul in ascent’ is a specific phenomenon that not everyone experiences (although everyone could), so it’s not an inherent aspect of art appreciation. In other words, by “ascent” Pound is not simply talking about art’s potential to be “uplifting.” (For that matter, tons of great art can ruin your day.) His ecstasy is the quintessential spiritual experience: it is the feeling of growth on an arational psychic plane. It is the expansion (ascent) of the self (soul) into a broader understanding of reality, which cannot be achieved through studying or obeying parental guidance, governments, scholastics, or even, as Pound wishes to emphasize, religion.

There are a lot of other words for this awakening. Mystics tend to call it “Enlightenment.” Scientists might be more comfortable with “evolution.” What it means is in either case is transcending your paradigm, and since all language and institutions are produced by and for their paradigm and are so limited to its logic, they are not very effective at conveying its transcendence. That is why Pound calls art the sole means – or really, the best hope – for sharing (and therefore perpetuating) this phenomenon. It can do so by nature of its forms (stories and pictures), which forego pretentious/futile “explanations” of ecstasy, aiming instead to arouse the innate intuitions that, taken seriously and sincerely pursued, become ecstasy itself.

Now, I’m certain there are other ways that the seed of transcendence is passed on and planted. Falling in love with someone, for example, can mutually initiate such an adventure. (Although falling in love and appreciating a work of art are not so different; in both cases deriving meaning from and becoming attached to something beyond rational self-interest and/or its practical function.) But Pound was writing about social change, so I suspect he didn’t intend to rule such revelations out so much as focus on ways that ecstasy can be inspired remotely, and on a large scale. Here I do agree with him that art trumps anything formally organized for the good of the people. The appreciation of art is an emotional state, and only in such a state can epiphany take you over the threshold to ecstasy. Religion and politics are usually founded on the logical conclusions of somebody’s legitimate ascent, but they focus on canonizing and enforcing those conclusions rather than precipitating individual epiphany. Insofar as a religion or the like does inspire individual epiphany, Pound says, it does so as art.

So I guess that’s a rambling way of saying that I agree with Pound’s intended subtext, if not his actual statement. History seems to agree that even the most sincere attempts to transmute enlightenment are doomed to fail – to be exploited and misinterpreted, to generate propaganda, to brainwash, to disempower – if they do not intrinsically incite personal epiphany on the other end. Because the whole point of Enlightenment is that you can’t bum it off someone else like a cigarette or a pop quiz answer. You can only fully know the sensation of ascent if you actually ascend.

What do you think?

*In his 1907 letter to Viola Jordan, which I’ve admittedly not read in its entirety but only seen as fragments in secondary sources.

I first thought of all the wonderful thinkers that have already addressed this question, but my instinct to cite others might not be a great one. So do definitely read Emerson and Hume and Plotinus and Gibran and Burke and approximately a jillion other writers for brilliant, in-depth musings on all the varieties and experiences of beauty, but here I’ll keep it as simple as possible:

To me beauty is a quality we attribute to something when we feel uplifted just from having perceived it. What’s important about that is it doesn’t have anything to do with a rational process or a useful end product. Nothing gets ‘accomplished’ through beauty alone, but much is inspired. In general our collective attitude would benefit from better appreciating things (and moments, and lifestyles, and play) that don’t necessarily produce anything, but are uplifting in and of themselves. At the same time, if our actions and productions were motivated by uplifted feelings, we can really optimize that inhale-exhale exchange of perceiving and embodying beauty.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read and respond to my post!

I agree that conversations (within and beyond the scope of science and religion) limit themselves to a very small range of productivity if they fail to consider the origins of their own rationale. When you take a step back, most ontological theories are actually much more harmonious than we inadvertently make them by omitting context.

But harmony does not mean interchangeability. The basic logical fallacy in theist/atheist debates is the attempt to make two specialized systems of understanding comment on each other as though one deserves the final say. In fact both will always evaluate things according to their own (limited) interests, again presuming competitive rather than complimentary priorities.

For example, in the case of atheists who ask believers for ‘proof’ of God — this is not a move toward mutual understanding so much as an affirmation of the atheistic value set, i.e., empiricist assumptions that all truth…

1. can and must be proven in order to be taken seriously,
2. is invariably invariable, i.e., objective,
3. is proven by measurable and reproducible perceptions of the five senses, 
4. can and should be transmitted from one person to another.

Those are perfectly reasonable expectations to a scientist because they mirror the scientific paradigm. And make no mistake, we’ve needed that scientific paradigm to build a healthy, free, progressive modernity. However, I think a theist argument could reasonably claim not that those premises are incorrect, but that they’re simply inappropriate for making conclusions about God, rebutting respectively:

1. Some perceivable truths are still beyond what we humans can explain. To reason otherwise is anthropocentric. 
2. Excluding all notions of subjective, private, and complex truths actually restricts rather than enriches our capacity to understand reality.
3. There are other valid ‘senses’ of perception that must be developed on an individual basis [implied: through some kind of religious practice].
4. We are fundamentally unable to explain some truths to each other because we are not meant to, the point of personal Enlightenment being that it is only understood through personal epiphany, which is only achieved through personal practice [of certain moral codes]. The limitation of what can be “proven” about religious claims is therefore not a weak point of faith but an intentional delineation between those who have actually earned sacred insight through right living and those who’d rather just Q&A about it — the latter transreligiously derided as “the learned and the wise.”

So asking a believer to prove the existence of God through science is kind of like asking a scientist to prove a theorem by praying for God’s confirmation. These are mismatched appeals to conceptually distinct authorities. 

It may seem like I’m making a case for the superiority of theist values, but again, it’s this whole notion of ‘superiority of values’ that I’m trying to quash. Obviously I love science, skepticism, and academic rigor. If my persuasions skew toward pro-theism here it’s only to attempt balance in an environment where heels are dug more deeply into the empirical end of the value spectrum. 

I understand why that is, though. The modern mind clings to scientific intelligence because it’s still smarting from the way enthusiast intelligence so violently betrayed the project of civilization (see: the Middle Ages). Thus we unconsciously heed the whispers of that collective trauma: Oh dear, we can’t have mystery, we can’t have ecstasy, we can’t have faith because they are too corruptible. From hereon all belief must be justified by peer review. No respectable person can hold unique and genuine insights because if so any quack who claims them can start a monstrous revolution. It’s logical — but to me it’s also sad. It throws the proverbial baby of enlightenment out with the bathwater of religion.

And it’s doubly sad to me as an academic, because not only does it implicitly teach students that the world is hostile to any inner authority they might muster, it also makes a lot of their curriculum more boring than necessary. See, monopolization by the empirical value set not only frames how we look at the future, but also how we edit the past. It has airbrushed over a lot of the mystical drama that got us as far as we are in arts and sciences, resulting in an incomplete and rather dry version of our evolution and the course material derived from it.

I could pick a million examples, but one that is personally true for me is the spiritual sterilization of mathematics. In high school I could barely stay awake while plotting x’s and y’s on graph paper, mostly because I didn’t see the point. To me, turning algebraic equations into Cartesian coordinates and back was as useful as folding and unfolding laundry. Had some honest teacher ever told me that René Descartes developed all that in order to decode The friggin’ Matrix, by God I would have pulled a muscle from raising my hand. But no. What does History have to do with Math? What does Religion have to do with Science? What does Context have to do with Conclusion? What does Epistemology have to do with Knowledge?

Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything.

We’re at the point where we ought to stop fearing that, stop eschewing a whole realm of knowledge just because it spooks us out. That is backward; that is unscientific. Why refuse to consider that the world is complex, and that full comprehension of reality (if even possible) may require pluralistic systems of knowledge, of which those that can be shared are done so through science and those that can’t are equally valid?

And now here’s where I characteristically insist that the bridge between these realms of shared and private knowledge is the technologies of art, music, and literature. To move consciousness forward via a holistic epistemology that doesn’t reflexively reject either empiricism or enthusiasm, those must be at the foundation of our reformed society.

So start funding them, bitches.