DelicateMonster

One of the pioneering intellectuals of American industrialization had this to say about history:

“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

That man was Henry Ford, of course, and his singular description that ‘History is more or less bunk’ has been taken as one rallying point for in-shop intellectuals (i.e. academics) to assail the anti-intellectualism of American Industry. No less a person than Aldous Huxley used the quote and the man as the basis for a sharply satirical novel Brave New World; a world in which Ford is named God. It seems clear now that of the two influential anti-utopian novels to come out of this century, 1984 and Brave New World, it was Huxley’s effort that was the most prescient. The McWorld of our currently over commercialized West, as Benjamin Barber has cleverly described it, is essentially a fondling of the blue print that Huxley laid out for us. True we don’t have Soma pills but we do have Ecstasy and Prozac. True we don’t have singular savages beating themselves shamelessly for the cameras put we do have shock jocks and Jerry Springer. With the advent of Reality television we can glimpse with delight the salacious details of our own neighbor’s disgust. Titillation is the ulimate reward that McWorld brings us. But in exchange for this inexhaustible titillation what are we willing to pay? The answer, it seems, is our attention spans, our sensitivity to life, our souls.

When Henry Ford made his famous quote in 1919, the past was painful and filled with the political machinations of an ignoble aristocracy. (Ezra Pound referred to the entire culture swept away during World War I as ‘That old bitch, gone in the teeth.’) So at that point ‘history’ for the industrialist as well as the intellectual was burdened by its own mediocrity. Everyone wanted a clean slate. From Henry Miller to Henry Ford. This was the era of the Dadaist who gave way to the Surrealist. Freud was discussed and Jung was discovered. Relativity as a postulate was proved in the spring of that year when photographs of a solar eclipse taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil confirmed the truth of Einstein’s amazing new theory about the way the universe worked. But that generation needed no Einstein to prove what it knew in its heart: everything had changed.

We live with the ramifications of that era and its misinterpretations. When Aldous Huxley set about writing his satire, he took the base prescriptions for Henry Ford’s industrial revolution and extrapolated them into the future. Assembly line processing became the rule for human life as well as cars. Ford’s ruthless efficiency became the prescription for human reproduction. In that insane laboratory, human lives were incubated and grown like chicks in a hatchery. Throughout their existence, humans of the Brave New World were spoon fed information and comforted from the harsh realities of existence. The urge to know, to understand their own condition had been stultified seemingly at birth. History in such a world truly is bunk; a separate reality that cannot touch the place where you exist, emotionally deadened with Soma, secure among the surface of images and manipulating verses. Except for the detail of Soma and human hatcheries, the exact prescription Huxley has given us for a reality removed from the harsh requirements of actually living have been met. It is brought about by a combination of sensory depravation and sensory overload. The processes that we need to live, killing/catching our own food, growing our own crop, building our own houses, have been ‘industrialized’ which is to say, specialized, a group of people do these things for us in the name of efficiency. So we are greatly deprived in our tactile experience of the world. On the other hand, we are greatly over stimulated in terms of our audio and visual experience of the world, and thus, mostly numbed to it. How soon after 9/11 were people rerunning the videos of the plane hitting the tower and exclaiming in perverse disbelief “it’s just like a movie” More than a century ago, Nietzsche observed the phenomena in the youth of his day and had this to say:

“the massive influx of impressions is so great, surprising, barbaric and violent  things press so overpoweringly in the youthful soul ; that it can save itself only by taking recourse in premeditated stupidity.”

The anti-hero of Brave New World is a hero precisely because he rejects the tantalizing overload of McWorld and opts for a narrower, but authentic existence, without the numbing passage of images, but without stupidity as well. In McWorld, his act is the equivalent of turning off the television.

Huxley’s savage is patterned after Shakespeare’s Caliban, one of the more interesting characters in The Tempest from which Aldous Huxley borrowed the title of his book (the exact line uttered by Miranda is, O Brave New World that has such peope in’t!).  So too, is Delicate Monster, a phrase Stephano uses to describe Caliban in The Tempest as well (ActII, scene ii). Curiously, the phrase delicate monster also makes another appearance, but in the French.  In Baudelaire’s Au Lecteur (To The Reader) he uses the phrase ce monster delicat. Commonly the phrase gets translated that monster frail or that frail beast. The monster Baudelaire has in mind is ennui, an experience our little magazine is trying to prevent. An exercise in de-numbing, if you will. Delicate Monster, in sum, is meant as an antidote for a pervasive cultural stupidity; stupidity in the sense that Nietzsche uses the word, as in anesthetized, numb.

What can you expect from Delicate Monster? An effort at clear discussions, well organized and rational, mostly without subterfuge. That the discussions may be biased goes without saying, but the bias will be obvious and a discriminating reader should be able to evaluate its merits. Better a biased argument with substance, than an unbiased report with no substance at all.

On the cultural front, it has been argued that Caliban was inspired by Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals one point of which is man’s inadequacy in “beauty making” or “art” before nature’s effortless beauty and power, the other, that we hastily judge other culture’s faults while being blind to our own. I hope that Delicate Monster can address, if not answer, both of these issues. Towards this end we offer current English fiction and poetry as well as fiction and poetry in translation from around the world. We also offer illustrations, graphics and video of varying degrees of beauty and brilliance. You can brush up on your critical skills explicating Timothy McVeigh’s last words, or read beautiful new translations of Endre Ady from the Hungarian. Our travel section takes a tour of the Le Marche region of Italy, while our satire asks where do rejected Barbies go? You can dip into current politics with a discussion of the etymology of the word evil and examine certain under-reported reasons to be in Afghanistan. For those of a conservative stripe, we offer a hard look at the US Green party. It would be dishonest of me to not deliver the full lines from Baudelaire’s poem for those of you who may not know it. The lines from which our little magazine title originates read as follow:

Ennui, that delicate monster
a chance tear gleams in his eye, he dreams of gibbets,
while smoking his hookah, with a dainty smile
–you know him, reader, –hypocrite,–my twin!

So go savage, oh delicate reader. Turn off the television. Enjoy.

What I want in a Monster
(polls)