{"id":41991,"date":"2012-11-16T14:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T19:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=41991"},"modified":"2013-04-22T17:53:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T21:53:20","slug":"i-opened-the-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/16\/i-opened-the-door\/","title":{"rendered":"I Opened the Door"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab\u2019s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2014about Robur\u2019s doomed enterprise in Verne\u2019s Ma\u00eetre du Monde<\/em>\u2014about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Eleven thousand words in, and may God grant that I learn it sooner next time or else not at all, I understood with blinding clarity that my book itself was another doomed enterprise. <\/p>\n

\nAs Don Quixote said: y yo hasta agora no s\u00e9 lo que conquisto a fuerza de mis trabajos<\/em>\u2014I do not even know what I am conquering. <\/p>\n

\n\u201cMaster of the world\u201d! Robur-le-Conqu\u00e9rant!\u2014what a delusion! what a farce! The quintessence of megalomania: Richard Wagner named his dog Robur.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nYou know you are in trouble when you turn to the business best-seller section of The New York Times<\/em> looking for help. <\/p>\n

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength<\/p>\n

\nGetting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity<\/p>\n

\nAdmired: 21 Ways to Double Your Value<\/p>\n

\nSwitch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard<\/p>\n

\nThe Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

And how about The Power of Concentration<\/em> by Theron Q. Dumont, aka William Walker Atkinson, aka Theodore Sheldon, aka Swami Panchadasi, aka Baba Bharata, aka Magus Incognito, aka Yogi Ramacharaka, aka Swami Bhakta Vishita\u2014<\/p>\n

\nThese are self-help books, no matter how many case studies they may present, no matter how much neuroscience they may seem to include. It is not cheap to keep reading them: not in terms of literal money, not in terms of time that could be spent in other pursuits, and not with regard to the temporary deformation of your working vocabulary. No one wants to hear about your emergent strategy any more than you want to hear them talk about their chakras.<\/p>\n

Self-help books are, in my extensive experience, self-replicating, self-perpetuating, as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. Like newspapers, like televised election coverage, they have an incentive to contribute to the extension of the problem they claim to resolve: tune in tomorrow, don\u2019t miss the next exciting episode. Attend another seminar. Have another drink.<\/p>\n

The best self-help book I ever read was by Jiddu Krishnamurti. I read its first paragraph.<\/p>\n

Krishnamurti in 1955: \u201cWe want these problems to be solved, and we look to others to solve them\u2014to religious teachers, to analysts, to leaders\u2014or else we rely on tradition, or we turn to various books, philosophies. And I presume that is why you are here\u2014to be told what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nSchool for Scoundrels<\/em> in 2006: \u201cShow of hands. How many of you retards own a self-help book? That\u2019s your first problem. You can\u2019t help yourself, because your self sucks. Helping yourself? That means you\u2019re being helped by a complete asshole. So ignore yourself. Do what I say instead.\u201d<\/p>\n

I saw that film on an airplane several years ago, flying home after having spent a week in Brazil getting my head kicked in. It used to be my hobby: getting my head kicked in by Brazilians.<\/p>\n

\nSimenon in 1971: \u201cI haven\u2019t read a novel since 1928. I swear it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nDaniels in 2012: I read Unamuno on Cervantes, and Girard on Dostoevsky, and Gombrowicz\u2019s diary (\u201cIs it an assignment,\u201d Roman Szporluk asked, \u201cor do you read it solely for your own confusion?\u201d), and Patrick White\u2019s letters from 1912–1976, and Mann\u2019s letters from 1889–1955, and the Burroughs letters from 1959–1974, and Erikson\u2019s Young Man Luther<\/em>, so interesting that a third of the way through I wiped the sweat out of my eyebrows and began again at page one. <\/p>\n

\nAnd I read a lot of self-help books. It appears to be my new hobby. Sometimes I miss getting my head kicked in.<\/p>\n

\nIs Ortega y Gasset\u2019s \u201cMan Has No Nature\u201d self-help? Is Schopenhauer\u2019s \u201cOn Thinking for Yourself\u201d? Is Twilight of the Idols<\/em>? Are Goethe\u2019s Proverbs in Rhyme<\/em>? Are Augustine\u2019s Confessions<\/em>? Is The Revelation of John<\/em> self-help? Did it help? Who did it help?<\/p>\n

\nYou began with the intention to address a given problem. You have not addressed it, you have deferred it; you have not even replaced it, you have forestalled it, overlaying it with another. Another self-help book is just more information, and more information will not help you solve the problem, not if the problem is too much information.<\/p>\n

Malcolm Bowie in 1988: \u201cFreud speaks in the closing pages of his \u2018Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis\u2019 (1909) of the neurotic patient\u2019s need for uncertainty and doubt and of the elaborate manoeuvres that he is often compelled to adopt in order to remain uncertain in a world where accurate measuring devices and reliable sources of information exist.… the cult of self-preservation by uncertainty may be taken to a self-destructive extreme.\u201d This is self-help as self-harm, or kicking your own head in.<\/p>\n

Howard Nemerov in 1965, from his Journal of the Fictive Life<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

\nIf Stendhal could shrink from the thought of autobiography because it would be obligatory to say je and moi such a number of times (he shrank; but he wrote the autobiography), consider how that kind of objection has grown in force in our day, when to write in the first person will give you the somewhat limited option of sounding like castoff Proust or Mike Hammer. There is, in fact, so much Literature that even the simplest and most natural expressions might have to be condemned because they have a faint flavor of Style: \u201cI opened the door.\u201d The fear of being ridiculous from want of knowledge. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But it is not clear that \u201csounding like castoff Proust or Mike Hammer\u201d is such an utterly detestable fate.<\/p>\n

The Welsh novelist Russell Celyn-Jones took pity on me. We went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to look at something more attractive than our various personal problems: he to continue his study of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and I to stand dumbstruck before Fra Angelico\u2019s Death and Assumption of the Virgin<\/em>, swimming in the blue of her shroud. Celyn-Jones suggested Hans Belting\u2019s Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art.<\/em> I bought the serious, impressive book and set it aside to read later—perhaps after finishing Reinhold Niebuhr\u2019s serious, impressive two-volume The Nature and Destiny of Man<\/em>. My God, what have I been playing at for all these years? Did I think I would one day put down Volume II: Human Destiny<\/em> after I had made an end of turning its many pages, with my wrists aching, and say, \u201cGood. Now that\u2019s settled\u201d?<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t grow up reading Hegel; I grew up watching ThunderCats<\/em>, with its \u201cageless devil-priest of First Earth, Mumm-Ra\u201d—it is more comfortable for me to view the Medusa of art as she is reflected in a burnished shield of trash. <\/p>\n

\nAnd so we turn to Taschen\u2019s Men\u2019s Adventure Magazines in Postwar America<\/em>, and to Adam Parfrey\u2019s It\u2019s a Man\u2019s World<\/em>. I adore Fra Angelico\u2019s Death and Assumption of the Virgi<\/em>n, but I cannot bear it; I am afraid her splendor will incinerate me, as Semele was incinerated before the unmasked Zeus. How much less exacting, then, to gaze upon the disordered men\u2019s-magazine \u201csolution\u201d to the mysteries of virginity and suffering:<\/p>\n

I Saw Them Sacrifice Virgins to the Giant Condors<\/p>\n

Deep Freeze Virgins of the White Hell<\/p>\n

Helpless Virgins in the Land of Torture<\/p>\n

The Wanton Blood Sacrifice of the Lusty Virgins<\/p>\n

Virgin Brides for Satan\u2019s Orgies<\/p>\n

Virgins of Agony in the House of 1,000 Ecstasies<\/em><\/p>\n

\nTo recite these formulas is something like the Vishnu sahasranama from the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata, the Thousand Names of God\u2014but this god is a trash-god, like the garbage-eating robot from the animated science-fiction cartoon who lived on his garbage-planet and could speak only using the slogans from TV transmissions he had overheard\u2014or perhaps only by quoting Cervantes, Krishnamurti, Simenon, Nemerov, etc.<\/p>\n

\nI Watched Myself Die<\/p>\n

The Man Who Wouldn\u2019t Drop Dead<\/p>\n

Satan\u2019s Pigs Ate Us Alive<\/p>\n

Death Orgy of the Leopard Women<\/p>\n

The Flames of Hell Are Frying my Flesh<\/p>\n

I Heard the Sacred Statue Scream<\/p>\n

Spider Monkeys Tore Me Apart<\/p>\n

I Watched Them Eat My Flesh<\/p>\n

The Day I Was Roasted Alive<\/p>\n

Showdown on Cannibal River<\/p>\n

I Was Doomed by the Monkey Gods<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Skin Me Alive
<\/em><\/p>\n

Death and immortality; freedom and constraint; oral violence and cannibalism, even unto autocannibalism; and the consoling secret of the popular possession-themed horror film\u2014which is that the assumed reality of a devil tends, at bottom, to imply the reality of a god. <\/p>\n

\nI Fought With Sadists on the Cliff of Death, I Was Slashed by Devil Hooves, I Fought the Borneo Water Devils<\/em>—I projected my disowned weaknesses and baffling desires into another, whom I then destroyed, earning a temporary victory over fear by doing so. That\u2019s the emergent strategy, then: melodrama. <\/p>\n

\nTrapped in a Blizzard of Mink Clad Nymphos, The Man Who Ate Himself<\/em>—just to read the titles makes me so happy, like a pig eating tomatoes. It seems to help.<\/p>\n

J. D. Daniels lives in Massachusetts.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab\u2019s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick\u2014about Robur\u2019s doomed enterprise in Verne\u2019s Ma\u00eetre du Monde\u2014about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole. Eleven thousand words in, and may God grant that I learn it sooner next time or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[2059,7427,9244,7348,9242,952,9245,6705,9243,282],"class_list":["post-41991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-don-quixote","tag-howard-nemerov","tag-jiddu-krishnamurti","tag-jules-verne","tag-maitre-du-monde","tag-moby-dick","tag-russell-celyn-jones","tag-self-help","tag-the-black-hole","tag-the-new-york-times"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Opened the Door by J. D. 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