Osamu Dazai and Andy Warhol

Together for the first time. I doubt they knew each other. But for some reason I read them one after the other. The Philosohy of Andy Warhol was really fun to read. I felt really hip reading it on the train. The cover has a really cool picture of him with a skull on his head. The first thing that comes to mind about this book is
shopping. He talks a lot about Americanness, if there is such thing.

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see coca-cola, and you know that the President drinks coke, Liz Taylor drinks coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, The President knows it, and you know it.

In Europe the royalty and the aristocracy used to eat a lot better than the peasants-they weren't eating the same things at all. It was either partridge or porridge, and each class stuck to its own food. But when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham palace a better hot dog than the one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark. Because there is no better hot dog than a ballpark hot dog. Not for a dollar, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred thousand dollars could she get a better hot dog. She could get one for twenty cents and so could anybody else.

Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can- you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American.

The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is. For instance, a lot of places give you special treatment when you're famous, but that's not really American. The other day something very American happened to me. I was going into an auction at Parke-Bernet and they wouldn't let me in because I had my dog with me, so I had to wait in the lobby for the friend I was meeting there to tell him I'd been turned away. And while I was waiting in the lobby I signed autographs. It was a really American situation to be in."

So thats Andy's idea of America. I don't know if I agree with it, but its funny to me. I think I'd rather read that than Karl Marx. There are also some good chapters on topics, such as, Beauty, Economics, Fame, Work, Love, Time, and Buying Underwear. One chapter is really odd, where a woman is going into a quite detailed description of how she obsessively cleans her apartment in the nude. Apparently he used to tape all his telephone conversations and claims to have married his tape recorder. I really just like how natural it all feels. I think Andy Warhol saw things purely, and I mean that he saw them his own way. In a way its quite Buddhist. On the one hand he can seem very superficial, but there's something everlasting as well. I think perhaps most people who write a book called a philosophy are very serious, but this philosophy is easy to understand, funny, and not pressing.

I'm not sure yet exactly what Osamu Dazai has in common with Andy Warhol, but I'm sure I could propose some relationship. His book, No Longer Human, is a story about a man who is so ferociously uncomfortable around other human beings. He is a fine actor to the people around him, but feels very differently on the inside. In one passage he talks about going to a communist party meeting for the mere pleasure.

"Horiki also took me to a secret communist meeting. A secret Communist meeting may have been for Horiki just one more of the sights for Tokyo. I was introduced to the "comrades" and obliged to buy a pamphlet. I then heard a lecture on Marxian economics delivered by an extraordinarily ugly man, the guest of honor. Everything he said seemed exceedingly obvious, and undoubtedly true, but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed.
I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics. Terrified as I was by this weird element, I assented to materialism as naturally as water finding its own level. But materialism could not free me from my dread of human beings; I could not feel the joy of hope a man experiences when he opens his eyes on young leaves.

Nevertheless I regularly attended the meetings of the Reading Society. I found it uproariously amusing to see my "comrades," and their faces tense as though they were discussing matters of life and death, absorbed in the study of theories so elementary they were on the order of "one and one makes two." I tried to take some of the strain out of the meetings with my usual antics. That was why, I imagine, the oppressive atmosphere of the group gradually relaxed. I came to be so popular that I was considered indispensable at the meetings. These simple people perhaps fancied that I was just as simple as they-an optimistic, laughter-loving comrade-but if such was their view, I was deceiving them completely. I was not their comrade. Yet I attended every single meeting and performed for them my full repertory of farce.

I did it because I liked to, because these people pleased me-and not necessarily because we were linked by any common affection derived from Marx.

Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.

People talk of "social outcasts". The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a "social outcast" from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness."

I don't know if this explains the mood of the book, but I really like this passage. I like the way he is so important to the Communist meetings, but really doesn't give a damn. I like the exposure of his deception. I think we often say one thing and think another. Which, however, I think this acting, helps keep some peace. If everyone said how they felt all the time, there would be a whole lot of nothing happening. "Think before you speak", I think the phrase goes. I think it does us some good. But I also think language is real slippery. What's good is sometimes bad, and vice versa. After reading this story of one's individual self-pitying alienation, I don't think that good and bad are opposites at all. I think language itself really messes things up because it separates. Good and bad are really no different from one another. Acting one way and feeling another aren't really separated either. Its all part of the individual.

He goes on later to say that the problem of society is the individual. If we are something at all like this charachter in the book, we are at war with ourselves. We have an ideal that we are constantly chasing. We want to do better. We live in hope that tomorrow will be better than today. I haven't met anyone who is truly content and satisfied. If we were all satisfied, I think that World Peace would be possible.

I constantly think about why there is so much violence in this world. Why are so many people just killing each other. Of course some wars could be avoided, like the American invasion of Iraq, but I think that individuals are at a root of something much much larger than themselves. But is this a problem to be solved? Could it be solved if we tried. I wish I could say that War could be finished forever, but the only way thats going to happen, is if humans become extinct. I think Hereclitus said that War is of the essence of Human Beings. We are at war with ourselves and the world around us. I don't use guns, but then again guns have never been around me.

So there it is Andy Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, two really great books. One light, one heavy. I think both of them have something unique and powerful to say.