Facts – Alternative Facts – Post-Truth – Truth, Composing, 23/01/2017

I’ve kept thinking about that project on the idea of post-truth that we’ve been tossing around the Reply Collective. There’s one approach that I want to explore for this piece – I thought of it over the weekend, and I want to mull it over with some folks to see if it has legs.

Here’s how it came to me, first of all.

Pictured: A collective experience of truth-expression.

So I was at the Toronto Women’s March to protest Donald Trump’s existence Saturday, and I saw plenty of signs mocking the idea of ‘post-truth.’ In a very basic sense, this is the opposition of truth and lies.

* I wish I’d gotten a picture of it. They were good and sarcastic, just like a lot of what I saw during the march.

In one dimension of the ‘post-truth’ problem, that looks like it’s all it comes down to. A trivial assertion of lies by government figures. The press secretary blatantly lies about the facts – how many people attended Trump’s inauguration – and chastises the White House press corps for their outlets’ honesty instead of reporting what they were told to report.

We told you what we wanted you to say, says Sean Spicer, and I paraphrase – and it was your moral failure and your disloyalty to the office of the President for not doing what you were told.

The most popular followup was Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press interview with Kellyanne Conway. Anti-Trump Twitter particularly blew up over Conway’s contention that, “We presented you with alternative facts.”

Orwellian? Most definitely. But ultimately, Orwellian doublespeak is trivial.

Reactionary contempt for critics now has free reign.

Even the typical recourse to postmodernist thinking about the slippery meanings of language is ultimately trivial. It’s a mere stereotype that ‘postmodernist’ attitudes and philosophies imply that there is no truth and there are no facts. Or rather, that facts are defined solely through discourse.

So factuality becomes no longer about what is and isn’t the case. It becomes a matter of duelling visions of the world – a pro-Trump set of facts means enormous inauguration crowds and violent protestors, while an anti-Trump set of facts means anemic attendance and police brutality on the streets of DC. One is an alternative to the other, and you’re free to choose between them as you’re inclined.

So you’re stuck with the oversimplified, misunderstood popular understanding of postmodernism. If you want a philosophical investigation into what post-truth can be to produce something more interesting, more useful than this, you need a different direction.

Inside the volcano.

Here’s that different direction.

Ask yourself: What truth do the women’s marches demonstrate? We are talking about a demonstration, after all.

We have a set of facts that can be described in propositions of language – statements about women’s needs, fears, vulnerabilities, and strengths; statements of political and moral beliefs that oppose them to Trump’s presidency and what it represents in wider society; biographical timelines and events in the lives of the people in the march and the wider anti-Trump movement.

While all those statements may be true, you have to ask whether they’re adequate to the situation. If you were to list all these statements, would they alone suffice to describe – completely – what the marches actually demonstrate.

A set of statements leaves out the visceral power of a person’s experience itself. The emotional and mental impact of material events in your life on your own person, personality, and subjectivity. It leaves out the force of what shapes your character, even as it describes that shape and its changes.

A cinematic philosopher.

The closest I can come to naming this kind of visceral, material, truth-in-unfolding-experience is to riff on a term from Werner Herzog – ecstatic truth. A kind of truth that’s beyond factuality, and communicates a deeper truth than an isolated fact of the matter.

An ecstatic truth communicates the power of forces that shape subjectivities and situations of life. Such a truth is the majesty of an Antarctic mountain range or the peaks of Mount Erebus and its bubbling crater. And such a truth is the terror of being lost in the jungle, with violent armies around every corner.

Such a truth is also the yearning for dignity of a poor immigrant lost in the desolation of his new country. Or the bliss of giving in to evil.

It is the human experience of sublimity, but recognizes that the sublime can appear not only in terrifying or awe-inspiring natural formations and phenomena. Sublimity is also in the daily experiences of human lives.

An incredible power can come from communicating that sublimity.

Friedrich Nietzsche's Casual Greatness; A History Boy, 23/06/2014

This weekend, I read Nietzsche’s essay “The Case of Wagner,” largely because I felt like it. Nietzsche has been a major philosophical influence on me, to the point where I can say that if I hadn’t read him, I would be a completely different author and person. Nietzsche is another figure in the history of philosophy that I’ve never been taught in class in any great detail. I started reading his work on my own, without any detailed direction from any other professors or similar authority figures. 

The egotistical, German nationalist, anti-Semitic
Richard Wagner. History has come down on
Nietzsche's side in this dispute, I think.

The Wagner essay is a little minor, not exactly a home of Nietzsche’s most profound or influential ideas, but it’s a beautiful piece that demonstrates his skill as a writer and thinker. But it uses those central ideas in an essay with a specific purpose, a critique of the enormous cultural power of Richard Wagner’s aesthetics in the Germany of his day. Wagner’s art, goes the essay, is an assemblage of pathos. His character arcs are reactive and rather unoriginal (every one of his women, says Nietzsche, has essentially the same narrative arc as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary). His art exists to impress you, to overwhelm you with emotion.

And that’s basically fine, but holding this set of aesthetic goals, as Wagner’s works were, as the pinnacle of a culture’s artistic achievement, speaks terribly for the culture. For me, at least, this gets at the heart of what Nietzsche means when he calls Wagner’s art an expression of cultural decadence. To call an art that revolves entirely around cookie-cutter narratives whose presentation is solely to evoke strong emotion the pinnacle of the form, ignores the multifaceted power of art. To say that this is all you want out of your art reveals how shallow you are.

Because art can encourage philosophical and moral thinking, fiercely radical ideas on personal, moral, political, and even cosmological scales. My girlfriend and I were watching Slavoj Zizek’s new documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,* which included a discussion of Beethoven’s Ninth. Zizek discusses how the climactic choral movement switches from a bombastic explosion of instrumental and vocal power to a carnivalesque jaunt (in other words, it switches from the famous enormity we’re familiar with from the Ninth to the music that was playing in the record shop where Alex DeLarge picked up those chicks in A Clockwork Orange).** Beethoven here lets his own art critique the bombast of symphonic music; the music moves you and simultaneously carries out a dense task of philosophical aesthetic criticism.

* That’s how cool my girlfriend is; we watch Zizek documentaries together.

** Another aspect of A Clockwork Orange which makes it infinitely superior to the novel, a book remarkable in itself, in that its own author ruined it. It took a fearless filmmaker to bring it to its true greatness.

Fitzcarraldo was sublime in its imagery and fascinating in
its philosophical density.

My own rant about A Clockwork Orange is a Composing post for another time, which will focus on the importance of thematic multiplicity as a necessary condition for a truly great work of art. Werner Herzog is actually a counterpoint to Wagner, as far as explaining the power of the operatic. Arguing against Wagner makes Nietzsche in this essay rather hostile to the operatic form of art itself, which I can understand. So much of opera truly is about the evocation of enormous feeling above all else, an emotional sublime. This is a power to be reckoned with, but Herzog’s art is a creative answer to Nietzsche’s criticism of opera as able to be little more than this.

In his quest for the most remarkable images in the world, Herzog was creating a cinema of opera. Only during the production of Fitzcarraldo did he realize that much of what he had done in his own art was an operatic mode: searching for incredible intensity to capture and put before an audience. One reason he made fewer films in the 1980s was because he was in Germany making operas. 

But Herzog’s films were not only acts of emotional intensity; his images evoked concepts and sparked chains of thought that encompassed so many philosophically vital aspects of life. Here are just three examples. An ecologically philosophical meditation on the weakness of simplistic human imperial drives in the face of an implacably complex nature: Fata Morgana, Aguirre, Grizzly Man, Lessons of Darkness. The alien nature of human madness: Stroszek, Woyzeck, Heart of Glass, My Son My Son What Have Ye Done. An exploration of the pinnacle of human virtue and the creation of new moral paradigms through implacable situations: Signs of Life, Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn, Invincible, Bad Lieutenant. This is operatic cinema with the philosophical power of which Nietzsche thought opera was incapable.

• • •

I doubt my own thoughts on “The Case of Wagner” are all that original, however. Werner Herzog has long been associated with existentialism in cinema. The relationship of Nietzsche with Wagner, both the man and his art, have been the focus of works by many philosophers and historians of art and culture. Nietzsche’s concept of decadence as it applies to culture and art is the subject of countless articles across several specialties of modern academic philosophy. Since I’ve been locked out of university libraries for the last year, I’ve had no access to any of the databases whose journals could corroborate my ideas, or indicate just how unoriginal they are.

Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated not
only many ideas of 20th century
philosophy, but also hipster fashion.

This is part of why, when I was more firmly inside the academic system, I was always hesitant to focus my research on the history of philosophy. The major and minor figures of the philosophical tradition have been the object of so much scholarship already that it’s difficult to find your own place. You almost have to contort yourself in a ridiculous shape to find anything original to say at all. I was most interested in producing philosophically original work, and still am, which is why I focussed my research on problems from which I could draw upon a wide range of scholarship across debates, disciplines, and fields of knowledge. 

Another problem regarded relevance. Nietzsche himself wrote a wonderful character in Zarathustra, the man who was the foremost expert on the brain of the leech. He was brilliant and knowledgable, but his knowledge was so intensely specialized that it was practically useless, and he couldn’t even coordinate his knowledge of the leech’s brain with other biological, neurological, or ecological studies. He knew his narrow corner intimately, but the rest of the world was darkness.

This is how I felt when I learned what kind of scholarship would be necessary to become an expert in a specific figure in the history of philosophy. Reading the primary material of the thinker in question was no problem — these were the philosophically dense and interesting works that started the firestorm of the self-named sub-discipline in the first place. 

The ancillary material was a different matter. One would not only have to become an expert in philosopher X, but an expert in all the other experts of philosopher X. This, especially for a central figure in the tradition like Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, would essentially make you into the leech brain expert. Brilliant and knowledgable, but unable to connect any of his work to outside applications. You lived in a brightly illuminated bubble which could light nothing of the darkness around it. 

I chose a disciplinary specialty outside of the history of philosophy or the production of secondary material on a historical figure because I wanted my works to contribute to the tradition of which those primary texts were a part: a tradition of philosophical writing and thinking that sought to understand and change the world. Even, perhaps especially, now that I'm outside the formal academic system of the modern university, they still can.

The Torture Hidden in Beauty, Research Time, 08/11/2013

Another smattering of crackerjack ideas from Edward Said. An idea that caught my eye yesterday was how he can spot a subtle imperialist attitude, how Said is able to recognize a terrifying presumption hidden in an incidental detail of a culturally noteworthy work. Even less than an incidental detail, he literally sees the terror of a moment that doesn’t even exist.

One lesson we can take from Fata Morgana: if there is any
true universal in humanity, it's the tendency of children to
pose for a camera.

You can get a clue as to what kind of idea he’s talking about by the name of a book he cites in the text, Walter Rodney’s 1972 work of political history, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. You don’t get much more confrontational than that. Having watched Herzog’s Fata Morgana again just before starting this research into imperialism, the notion hits me much more viscerally. Its images of desert desolation and poverty provide the required emotional weight to understand the human legacy of empire.

Arendt puts the beginning of the, definitionally speaking, imperialist period at 1884, the first year the “scramble for Africa” hit its full force. Said puts the start of this period at 1878, but he point is clear. Typically, imperialism is conceived as beginning with the mass military colonization of Africa. But the attitude and the socio-economic structures existed for centuries before that. Said cites a series of small, recurring discussions in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park about the source of wealth for the titular English estate: a slave plantation in Antigua. The aesthetically joyful shenanigans of the English idle rich depend on money imported from slave labour.

It only gets worse on the same page. Here’s a quote Said gives from John’s Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. Remember that Mill is a great democratic reformer, one of the first activists for the rights of women in the West. Regarding the overseas colonies of Britain, they are—

“hardly to be looked upon as countries . . . but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with productive capital of their own [but are rather] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other tropical commodities.”

The racism and ethnocentrism of one of the central philosophers of the politics of individual liberty is clear. This is the legacy of imperialism. The attitudes of condescension and devaluation of foreign peoples persist even in those who are otherwise the most progressive people. It’s so insidious, we don’t even know it’s happening to us.

If I could give one critique of Said so far, it’s that he considers the imperial activity of American military interventions and business interests of the same type as the imperialist activity of the old European empires. And I think, following my friendly influence from Antonio Negri’s theory of empire, that’s incorrect. If I could describe Negri’s idea in a tweetable (and necessarily very inadequate, if punchy) form, he conceives of empire, as distinct from imperialism proper, as an ecological economic globalization. Imperialism without a head, without intention, without direction.

Memories that Haunt and Linger, Composing, 30/07/2013

Of everything that My Son My Son What Have Ye Done suggests, one aspect on which I want to concentrate is how it depicts mental illness as a kind of haunting. Herzog never meant to depict what he called “clinical insanity,” giving an accurate picture of what medically goes wrong in a case of violently deranged mental illness. He wanted to create a kind of lyric poem of violent mental illness.

This post is the first in over three weeks about my fiction writing. For the moment, most of my projects in fiction are either with editors, under review, or still so nascent that I don’t have much to say. But Herzog’s film made me think about some of the themes in my novella that have become more obvious to me after I’ve gone back over the manuscript.

When it comes to my writing, I’m a meticulous planner. In terms of plot and character, all the points are very specifically assembled. And my novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, is the most tightly planned of them all. I wrote it in five months, the shortest time it has ever taken me to assemble a project of this size and detail. In its initial conception, and throughout writing, I had several key ideas in mind. First was its nature as a genre collision, or more accurately a genre explosion. This is another idea that I sourced from Phil Sandifer, that genre fiction best progresses not by executing genres, but by mashing them into each other and seeing what new narrative shapes emerge. His analysis of Rose, the first episode of the revived Doctor Who series, illustrates this technique in excruciating and fascinating detail.

Imagery related to ants is also very important for Under the
Trees, Eaten. But this post isn't about ants.

Under the Trees, Eaten does this with the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. I was reading Lovecraft again for a philosophical essay I was working on in late Fall when the man who is now my editor contacted me to see if I had any novella-sized ideas. I read his email in the morning, and by the time I wrote back that afternoon, I had the entire book sketched out. It collides the structure and setting of a typical story in the style of Lovecraft with a middle-class intelligent female protagonist often created by Joss Whedon or Russell T. Davies. A Rose Tyler who lives in Boston, never met the Doctor, and became a property manager. She instead meets the mysterious man who takes her to a town that should not exist.

My central focus in designing the novella’s narrative and writing it in detail was the genre collision. The Lovecraft aesthetic is about our ordinary world being invaded and pressured by the totally alien, epic monstrosities that overwhelm the human. The story of Under the Trees, Eaten shows how the violence of this alien invasion is no match for the destructive force of humanity’s petty cruelties. Cthulhu’s power is abstract and empty compared to the visceral terror of domestic abuse or rape. 

Yet when I went back over my manuscript, another idea jumped out at me, which I hadn’t noticed before. I take this as a good sign, that a piece of writing contains so many interpretive possibilities that even its writer doesn’t see all of them at once. Under the Trees, Eaten also examines how we are haunted by our past: regrets, missed opportunities, personal tragedies, loss. The character whose actions are the catalyst for the main plot, the protagonist’s father, is haunted by the death of his wife to the point of mental instability. The protagonist herself is haunted by the death of her mother, and then the derangement and death of her father. This isn’t a spoiler: the first sentence of the first chapter describes her father’s funeral. This haunting transforms the world into a hostile place, filled with dangerous and destabilizing spaces. The protagonist’s legs collapse out from under her as she faints on entering her father’s apartment for the first time in years, which is paralleled at later, genuinely spoiler-constitutive, events. 

The traumas of her past weigh her down and halt her movement. And the arc of the novella is her regaining power over her past. Most stories about overcoming trauma I find quite unrealistic, because they tend to speak a language of getting rid of the past, leaving the tortuous parts of your history behind you. But one can’t leave the past behind this way. Your past isn’t like an article of clothing, but like a part of your body. Your past, your memory, makes you who you are. Her traumas are still heavy, and they are still with her, but she deals with those traumas in the way that I think most people do, or at least attempt to do, in real life. 

She grows strong enough to carry them.

The Consequences of Intention, A History Boy, 18/07/2013

In writing news, I finished my edits of the first chapter of my ecophilosophy manuscript, and it didn’t require quite the radical changes that I worried I’d have to make this summer. I still couldn’t find a place to put that orphaned paragraph, but maybe I can find one for the idea elsewhere in this book, or in another project.

One of the typical divisions in contemporary moral philosophy is between deontological or duty-based and consequentialist moralities. These are often held (at least in mediocre undergraduate introductory courses) as the two pillars of moral thinking. Evaluating the goodness of an act will depend on what benefits or pains it produces as a consequence, or as well as it follows some moral duty arrived at through reasoning on moral intuitions or principles. In duty-based thinking, one’s intentions play a key role in determining the rightness of an action. If you did a beneficial or morally right act, and you intended to do so or you intended to follow a moral duty, then that counts as more upstanding than if you’d done it by accident. You can see how our legal systems work as combinations of intentions and consequences. Accidental harms engender lesser punishments than intentional harms. 

But I’ve always thought there was more to morality than this. It makes me something of a virtue ethicist, but I’m hesitant to identify as a virtue ethicist either. See, most of the discourse in virtue ethics today is on trying to figure out what the true virtues are. The discussions try to isolate the virtues in the same way, in deontological moral philosophy, thinkers try to isolate what the true moral duties are. And the expectation is that the virtues, like the duties, will be simple character traits that are unerringly and universally virtuous. 

My own thinking about moral virtue is more complicated. (Do you see why I don’t usually write straight articles about moral philosophy?) Because I don’t think virtues are necessarily universal across all situations of action, or that the virtuousness of particular character features can be considered in isolation of the biological and psychological nature of humans. And when it comes to considering individual acts, I still think the psycho-biological context of human nature is important to consider ethically.

George Zimmerman, smiling
ambiguously

This murky ground between intention and consequent was floating in the back of many of my own reactions to the Zimmerman trial. Because ultimately, I can’t judge how ridiculous Florida’s self-defense and stand-your-ground laws are. Law isn’t my area of expertise. The case was decided on the matter of who provoked the fight, and what constitutes provoking a fight. Throwing a punch? Or stalking someone down a dark, alienating suburban street? And some key jurors seemed to live in a state of reasonable doubt about reality, let alone the malicious intent of Zimmerman’s actions.

What enrages me about Zimmerman is even more horrifying than the fact that he killed a 17-year-old young man, and that his racial prejudices probably motivated his suspicions of him. It’s that he never seemed to feel bad about what he did. His brother’s nonchalant dismissal of Trayvon’s life in his Piers Morgan interview was a key sign. Killing someone shocks you; it’s a destabilizing, terrifying, traumatizing event. It’s a sign of your emotional health that if you kill someone, whether or not in self-defense, the event haunts you. Or at least upsets you. 

Fred Allen, former supervisor of executions for the state of
Texas, and in many ways a broken person.

Zimmerman seemed calm. The act of killing never upset him or made him sad. In Werner Herzog’s documentary Into the Abyss, one of the most powerful interviews is with Fred Allen, a former officer in charge of executions in Texas. He would strap down inmates and supervise the doctors administering lethal injections. He dealt every day with death that was entirely legitimated by his country’s laws and his society’s morality. One day, playing a part in so many deaths weighed too much, and he snapped. He had a nervous breakdown and had to leave his job, giving up his pension and financial security because he couldn’t take part in killing anymore. I contrast Fred Allen with George Zimmerman, and I see something missing in Zimmerman. There’s an obliviousness to the gravity of his actions. Leaving aside questions of legal accountability, killing a human is a weighty act. 

And I think this aspect of human ethical life isn't considered by a lot of contemporary philosophy. The question always seems to be a matter of conformity to a moral principle to determine rightness, investigating the effects of an action to determine its benefits and harms, or whether it was motivated by virtuous or vicious character. The ethical weight of trauma does not seem to be widely considered, at least by the moral philosophy in which I've been educated over the last decade. Trauma ethics I think can be far more insightful than the tried-and-believed-to-be-true conceptual frameworks of the rest of moral philosophy. While I'm not yet sure where to start such an inquiry, I think it could be very intriguing for some philosopher out there to consider.

Zimmerman seems to have no personal remorse, no sense that he did anything wrong or even out of the ordinary. Philosophically and personally, that disturbs me.

Sometimes There's a Man. I Won't Say a Hero, Because What's a Hero? Composing, 14/07/2013

One unfortunate side-effect of having a mind that’s constantly buzzing with crazy ideas is that a fair number of them don’t really pan out. My Werner Herzog project was one of those. I was put in mind of this because earlier this week, my copy of My Son My Son What Have Ye Done arrived in the mail. I was ecstatic, as I am whenever I decide to buy a new Herzog, see a Herzog in the cinema, Netflix, or the lawless high seas of the internet. I have seen 27 Herzog films, and legally own 20. Beyond being a favourite film director of mine, he’s a favourite artist, a favourite personality. I am in awe of his talent, drive, and casual courage. There are few people I admire more simply as a person. He’s the closest thing to a hero I have among non-fictional people.

After all that praise, you might ask why I abandoned my philosophical project about him. See, the original conception of the Herzog project wasn’t an analysis of his films according to their technical construction or a theoretical exploration. It was an ethic, a philosophical account of how best to live as a person in the twenty-first century. It was a project of how to stare down the likely decline of humanity and the slow wheezing death of our civilization as we drown in a sea of our own shit and choke on a stream of our own bullets. How to stare down our end with dignity and a mischievous smile. I called it a happy existentialism.

If you’ve ever seen Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn, Into the Abyss, the Kinski films, especially Fitzcarraldo, or even Bad Lieutenant: POCNO, you understand how his films can fit into such a project. His Holocaust film, Invincible, is beautifully fitting to such a project in this regard, and even includes a critique of more mainstream traditions of understanding fate, death, and life. Humanity is of a wholly different nature than our ecosystems, but he films jungles and animals as if they were characters, and captures the nature of the creatures and ecosystems he films. In this sense, he offers an existentialism that goes beyond humanism. Existentialism in Sartre’s tradition never got beyond the human world, but Herzog’s films offered a conceptual groundwork to build a philosophy that makes existentialism ecophilosophical. I saw it as the natural next step of my ecophilosophy project: now that we had an ecological ontology, we next build a complete account of the ecologically virtuous person that combines respect for all the creatures and environments of Earth, but combines them with the highest virtues of creativity and nobility in humanity. 

Even beyond this was Herzog’s profound courage as a person, his impeccable integrity in his devotion to art and creativity, humanity’s noblest justification for its existence. He’s the only director to have made a film on all seven continents. He has risked his life, had his life threatened, threatened his own life, suffered through horrendously painful injury (like his snowmobile crash that cracked half his ribs while filming Encounters at the End of the World; he got himself bandaged and was filming again within two days; he was 64 years old at the time) for the sake of his art and the safety of his casts and crews. 

His morality is of creativity, practicality, and respect. His film school was all about instructing young filmmakers in the mercenary lawbreaking required to make art. Herzog Film School 1000: How to Forge a Shooting Permit. He still owns his very first camera, which he stole from a warehouse on the grounds that he was going to make films with it, and it would otherwise have just sat on the shelf. He considers this act entirely justified for that reason. Look up the story of how he dragged Joaquin Phoenix out of a wrecked car. To me, there is no man more ethically admirable than Werner Herzog.

If, in the course of this long, meandering, hopefully entertaining post, I have encouraged at least one of my readers to seek out some Werner Herzog films they hadn’t thought to watch before, I will have made the world a better place.

After all that Herzog love, you might ask why I abandoned the project. It’s because of his women. I had my idea for the Herzogian existentialism project in late 2009, and in early 2012, as I watched Invincible for the second or third time, I had a terrible realization. Every woman who was a major character in a Herzog film was either a riff on the Virgin archetype, or a riff on the Whore archetype. The male protagonists were drawn with all the singularity and petty uniqueness of real human life. But the women were archetypes. And in the plots, the only real importance the female characters served for the narratives were how they affected the men.

Virgins: Helena Rojo and Cecilia Rivera in Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Sonja Skiba in Heart of Glass, Isabella Adjani in Nosferatu 1978, Marta in Invincible (a Virgin who Tim Roth treats as a whore), Frankie at the end of Bad Lieutenant.

Whores: Eva Mattes in Woyzeck and Stroszek (especially weird, given their long-term romance in the 1970s to 80s, and his being the father of her daughter), the daughters of the plantation owner and the dungeon full of sex slaves in Cobra Verde, Frankie throughout most of Bad Lieutenant.

There are more complex cases, of course. Mattes’ character in Woyzeck may have been raped; her scene with the drum major in her bedroom makes consent ambiguous at best. And her character in Stroszek tries to give up her life of prostitution, but her arc in Wisconsin is clearly one of increasing desperation and hopelessness. Kinski’s character in Cobra Verde who rapes the plantation owner’s daughters and runs the Ghanaian sex dungeon acknowledges that he is an objectively reprehensible and incurably evil man. Claudia Cardinale in Fitzcarraldo is faithfully devoted to Kinski’s character, but also runs the best little whorehouse in 1890s Peru. And his own relationships and ethics regarding the women in his own life show an immense respect for women, and his knowledge that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to being true Übermenschen.

But compared to the complex paradoxes of ambition, strength, frailty, terror, and joy that are Hombré, Aguirre, Kaspar Hauser, Hias, Bruno, Fitz, Zische Breitbart, Dieter Dengler (the real guy in the documentary and Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn), Tim Treadwell, Terence McDonagh, and I am leaving people out because this list is already too long? The women are almost all cookie cutters or else utterly absent from his films. And I am too devoted to the importance, beauty, joyfulness, and strength that a similarly complex female character can be to paper over this problem with Herzog’s body of work. No matter how much I admire him, this is a dealbreaker when it comes to the new existentialism.

So that project is getting an overhaul at some point. I don’t yet know what to turn it into or how to structure the project. I still love Herzog, and I admire him as one of the great artists and most dignified men of the human race. But this perennial flaw in his work keeps me from engaging with his films for the happy existentialism project. And without that centre, the project has nothing really holding it together in its writing.

Despite it all, nonetheless, I believe in Werner Herzog.

Now, if so much of this post is about old ideas and the past, you might ask why I labelled it Composing instead of A History Boy. It’s a fair question. Because the History Boy posts are matters of influence, stories of how I got to where I am today. The Herzog project is more than just an idea that never really developed into something I could work with. Because that would imply that I’ve left it behind. But Herzog’s art and life is still vitally important to me. 

More than that, the happy existentialism project that Herzog’s work originally inspired is still an ongoing concern. It’s fundamental to the ethical elements of my entire philosophical perspective. Whether or not there will ever be a work in my bibliography specifically devoted to it doesn’t really matter. These ideas inform my life. They’re what I aspire to as a person. Even a man as great as Herzog himself can’t live up to the ideals his work has inspired in me. To hold those ideals in the face of all the madness and terror the world can throw at you, and in the face of the weaknesses that lurk in your own heart on your darkest, most hopeless days, is an expression of the noblest strength of which humanity is capable.