They tell one themselves

Here's a nice passage from Anscombe:

So far as I know, the only places where Wittgenstein considers the expression itself to be what it expresses are aesthetic. A musical phrase, a bed of violets: such things may strongly give one the impression that they tell one something. What is it that they tell one? They tell one themselves, not something else.

(from "Frege, Wittgenstein, and Platonism", p. 163 in the electronic version of From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe).

Compare Schopenhauer's idea of all phenomenal things as embodied music (that perhaps sing or dance themselves), and Larkin's "The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said."

Water

Fire, at least in the form of burning incense, is important in several religions. But water is pretty big too. Here's Larkin on the subject:

If I were called in 
To construct a religion 
I should make use of water. 

Going to church 
Would entail a fording 
To dry, different clothes; 

My liturgy would employ 
Images of sousing, 
A furious devout drench, 

And I should raise in the east 
A glass of water 
Where any-angled light 
Would congregate endlessly.

That's all Christian-influenced, of course. The Taoist version is interesting too. Here is a nice introductory video (24 minutes long, on Taoism and martial arts), and here is the water-related philosophy of Bruce Lee.

And here's some of the Tao Te Bing:

28. Be a valley

.
Be a valley to which, by nature,
water flows

Be an example to which, by nature,
the lives of others flow

Keep in view the child’s mind which,
like water, flows

To be whole see whole
Consider opposites
See finite and infinite

Be newborn.  Being man
understand being’s portal, woman,
through which new life  flows

See dark and light
In honor be humble
In strength be weak

To have integrity means to know outer and inner
because to each the roots of selfhood reach

In the newborn, as in an uncarved block,
are imminent possibilities waiting to be formed

Wisdom keeps its wholeness
being many

(h/t http://www.3quarksdaily.com/).

Tempo house

When I think of the word 'temple' now I think of it as said by the man at Ounalom Temple, who pronounced it roughly: tempo. In this post I want to think out what it is that I like so much about temples, particularly Buddhist and Taoist ones. It's the Taoist aesthetic that I like, but my beliefs are closer to Buddhism, and that makes a difference. I feel less strange in a Buddhist temple. I was about to add "but it's the strangeness that appeals," but that isn't true. What appeals is strange, but it isn't the strangeness. It's the vitality.

Compare:

Protestant

Taoist

Actually these pictures don't quite make the point, but I'll try to put it in words below. The kind of church I grew up with tends towards minimalism, like Apple products and much else that is revered in our culture. Perhaps rightly so. But minimalism has to do with silence, and silence does not speak the ineffable. It might be tasteful, very tasteful indeed even, but it says nothing. A contemporary church (and I'm no expert, but I suspect there is little difference in this regard between Protestant, Catholic, and even Orthodox churches being built now) might be "the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, an expression of great understanding (of cultures, etc.). But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open—that is lacking." Wittgenstein (in the same passage I've just quoted) links wild life striving to erupt (a very Schopenhauerian image, to my mind) with health. And I think what I like, or one thing that I like at least, about Taoist (and some Buddhist) temples is this sense of health and of life. 

They are full of gods and life. Spiral incense sticks hang slowly burning from the ceiling, drooping into cones that drop brown ash below. Shorter, straight incense sticks poke out from urns of sand as offerings to the gods. There is a large bell and a large drum that are occasionally sounded, after an offering has been made. Every part of the ceiling is painted brightly or carved elaborately. There are ranks of lanterns and prayer flags hanging down, banks of memorials to the dead line the walls (possibly with the ashes of the deceased behind each one--I don't know). There are large statues of armed gods standing near the back of the temple, and paintings of similar figures on the doors as you enter. Entrance is through a gateway blocked by a step to keep out ghosts, which have no knees and so cannot bend their legs to get over it. The main gods are presented (or represented) at the very back, with lesser ones along the walls, sometimes in glass cases. Before them are offerings, usually of fruit but also expensive treats (Ferrero Rocher and Toblerone, for instance, but I also saw Guinness). And of course people praying and giving incense, robed and performing ceremonies, selling incense and paper goods to burn (it is all about fire as well as smells and color, and there must be sacrifice), or just waiting in attendance while eating lunch or having a smoke. Life is here, even if this life revolves around death. I don't know, but my sense is that most of the prayers are either for the dead or the dying, or at least sick. One of the most popular temples in Hong Kong is dedicated to Wong Tai Sin, who is believed to have been able to cure all illnesses and to help with other troubles too. Outside one temple two elderly people offered pieces of paper supposed to bring luck by their red color and propitious symbols (they wanted money in return). Temples are places for the grieving and the unfortunate to grieve and indulge in superstition. But the grief, the sacrifice, and the respect for forces not of this world are all real. (How do I know? Partly because people go there alone and at any time of the day to make their offerings and say their prayers. This isn't a performance, as some church attendance is.) All day every day people come and pray, and the temples are right there among the businesses, each of which (as well as each home) typically contains its own spirit house. Merely for luck, perhaps, but this isn't the luck it takes to win the lottery. It's luck that's linked to heaven or the Buddha, and to one's ancestors. I don't mean to deny or even downplay the superstition in all this, but it isn't all superstition, and even the superstition itself (give me money and I'll give you luck) is not pure superstition. It's a corruption, a corrupt form, of something much better. Or so it seems to me. 

Larkin's "Church Going" is relevant to these temples:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in
If only that so many dead lie round.

But the question of obsolescence that runs through Larkin's meditation just isn't there in Hong Kong and Cambodia (or it didn't seem to be there to me). The temple next to the Mercedes dealership feels like a necessity, not a relic.

I don't know that I really have a point here, or if I do I'm not sure exactly what it is. Something about the pre-modern age has tremendous appeal, for me and for others. And religion, or perhaps religion of a certain kind, strikes me as essentially, perhaps definitively, pre-modern. It also seems closed off though. I can just about imagine becoming a Buddhist (of a very minimal kind), but not a Taoist. Probably all I mean is: death of God/disenchantment of the world/the good old days/the exotic Orient/etc. etc. But I mean it as the expression of a real experience. The best temples in Hong Kong felt like oxygen to me, in a way that works of art sometimes, and wild animals always, do. 

Here's an otherwise irrelevant video to explain the post's title:

Reprehensibly perfect

Whenever I go to the bathroom in the night I think of Larkin's poem "Sad Steps," or a misremembered version of it anyway. This essay by Michael Wood reminded me of the title and prompted me to look up the whole poem. Here it is:

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.

There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can’t come again,

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

The last lines recall the last words of "The Whitsun Weddings" ("somewhere becoming rain"), with the echo of somewhere and the words that rhyme with rain. There is strength and pain, too, in the arrow-shower that Larkin imagines turning into rain. The real action, or life, takes place elsewhere, of course. He presents his life as a sequence of events that didn't happen, and he seems to regard the non-event almost as a duty.

This comes out in another poem that Wood quotes, "Poetry of Departures":

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off,

And always the voice will sound

Certain you approve

This audacious, purifying,

Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.

We all hate home

And having to be there:

I detest my room,

It's specially-chosen junk,

The good books, the good bed,

And my life, in perfect order:

So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd

Leaves me flushed and stirred,

Like Then she undid her dress

Or Take that you bastard;

Surely I can, if he did?

And that helps me to stay

Sober and industrious.

But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,

Crouch in the fo'c'sle

Stubbly with goodness, if

It weren't so artificial,

Such a deliberate step backwards

To create an object:

Books; china; a life

Reprehensibly perfect.

Two types of perfection are contrasted here, the detested life "in perfect order" (like the sentences of ordinary language (see Investigations 98)!--incidentally, searching for the relevant passage led me to this paper on "Wittgenstein, Ethics and Therapy," which I must read) and the reprehensibly perfect artificial life of someone who runs away from home. Home is full of junk, albeit specially chosen, which is not the same as well chosen. Larkin once said that he disliked or distrusted homes without junk, without tasteless souvenirs on display because of love of the place or person they came from. Staying at home is not audacious (is it cowardly?), impure, not elemental (so is it molecular, synthetic, characterized by aggregation or accumulation?), but always what we have to do. It is a kind of burden, a messy or unclear one. But the bold move is both phony (or is it willful?) and retrograde. At least I think that's what he is saying.

I can't help but connect all this with religion, which might be one of the laughable immensements of "Sad Steps," and with Samuel Beckett, who seems to have some similar interests in the ordinary and in junk. (I'm going by this article, which reads like a sort of collage of quotations to me, but probably because I don't know Beckett well enough). Not that religious belief is always artificial or retrograde. But I think that for some of us it would be. Our job is to stay in our room, however detested, and to lie in the good bed we have made.

Wood writes that in Larkin's verse:

The ordinary becomes poetry but not “poetic.” “I don’t want to transcend the commonplace,” Larkin said, “I love the commonplace.” He loves it enough to get it into his verse, and also enough to allow it its own unruly life. 

Which is good, I think. It's too bad that Wood ends with the ending of the poem about an Arundel tomb, which is a little too commonplace now, but it's a useful and refreshing review all the same.

Out there in the ether I suppose

This essay by Ron Rosenbaum about Auden and Larkin on love is worth reading if only for the picture of the Arundel tomb that Larkin wrote about. Rosenbaum's penultimate paragraph is disappointingly metaphysical though:

And then there's the unanswered question that's been troubling me personally and is perhaps the reason I’ve been a bit obsessed with these lines. What happens to the love between two people when it’s over? Seriously, where does it go, all that feeling, all those memories—do they dissolve into the air or do they survive somewhere, in some way—perhaps in a parallel universe?

The best thing about this question is that it calls to mind Tracey Thorn's song "By Piccadilly Station I Sat Down and Wept," which contains these lines:

Do you ever wonderWhere love goes?Out there in the ether I supposeSometimes it burns enough to leave a trace in the airThe ghost of me and you in a parallel world somewhere

Thorn isn't being serious, though, or at least isn't speaking literally ("I suppose" shows that she isn't trying to answer the question seriously--it's like Morrissey's "I dunno" in response to "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?"). Rosenbaum seems to be engaging in sentimental metaphysics while Thorn is expressing feelings. Or perhaps Rosenbaum is just an inferior poet doing the same thing as Thorn. (Of course Thorn might not strike you as being much good either, but song lyrics rarely seem good when written down.)   

But back to Larkin. His poem describes a stone tomb that shows a knight and his wife lying side-by-side and holding hands. Rosenbaum wants to think that Larkin's reaction is to believe that amor vincit omnia, but that is quite far from what he says. Here's the last stanza of the poem:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

Time has transfigured them into untruth, not revealed the truth about them. Although perhaps this untruth has more to do with how the times have changed so that contemporary visitors to the tomb miss a lot, such as the meaning of the Latin inscription on the tomb that people no longer even read. Instead of the full truth about the earl and countess, only an attitude remains. The stone fidelity they hardly meant was a) not meant, but only something thrown off, b) meant, but perhaps something of an afterthought (the sculptor was commissioned, after all, and couldn't just do whatever he liked), and c) meant in a way that is as hard as stone, very much meant. I think Larkin is suggesting all three meanings, though not necessarily at once--they come in waves, in the order I have given them (or that's how they come to me, but how else can I read?).

What does it all prove? Supposedly that "what will survive of us is love" is almost true. What has survived of them is love because that is what is timelessly understood and that is what they chose to show to the world. We don't make such tombs, though, and churches themselves are relics of the past, as Larkin sees them (in "Church Going" he implies, with regret, that belief is bound to die). Larkin's own relationships are somewhat notorious. What will survive of him is not love. But he's there in the poem all the same, assuming that the rhyme of 'eye' with 'I' is not just coincidental:

Such plainness of the pre-baroque    

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still   

Clasped empty in the other; and   

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,   

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They are linked, he says (calling to mind my least favourite part of  "Aubade": "nothing to love or link with"). This connection with another, he does seem to think, provides a sort of immunity to death or the worst of death. What, if anything, will survive of us is love. But Larkin seems to think that both God and love are more or less dead (see "Annus Mirabilis" and "High Windows" for his views on the state of love). Now (since the sexual revolution of 1963) "bonds and gestures" are "pushed to one side," and everyone goes down the long slide to happiness, endlessly, enjoying an unlosable game. Presumably Larkin thinks there must be some price to be paid. (I wonder whether he knew the Tom Lehrer song about "sliding down the razor blade of life"? I imagine he did.) So that, I think, is what Larkin is getting at here. Love conquers more or less all, but love is very far from being something we can take for granted. I suspect also that there is some play on the similarity between 'armour' and 'amour': the tomb shows "jointed armour," but we live in "an unarmorial age."

What we know, have always known, know that we can't escape, yet can't accept.

There's some good and some less good thinking about what is bad about death for the person who dies here. Shelly Kagan writes that:

Death is bad for me in the comparative sense, because when I’m dead I lack life—more particularly, the good things in life. 

As I think Nigel Pleasants has pointed out, there's something funny about claims like this, like the idea that "death is bad for me ... because when I'm dead I lack life." We don't seem to be getting anywhere. The idea that what's bad is the lack of "the good things in life" sounds more promising, but might be even worse in fact. Don Marquis argues that abortion is bad because it deprives the fetus of future good experiences, and this plausible-sounding claim leads to problematic ideas, such as that aborting a fetus with an exciting future is worse than aborting one likely to be born into poverty. Life, I would say, is not good because of the good things in life, unless we count everything as belonging to that set (God's good air, for instance, as Morrissey says). Life just is good. Death is not bad because of the opportunity costs involved, as Kagan suggests. It is the loss of all opportunities, including the opportunity to have opportunities. But to see this as the reason why it is bad is to see life as good because of the opportunities it brings. And that is right only if we count everything, every logical possibility I want to say, as an opportunity. Life isn't good because in 7th grade you get to go on a ski trip to France, for instance. That kind of opportunity, good as it is, isn't what makes life good. Recognition of the value of opportunities might shed light on the value of logic, the value of appreciating possibilities, but it doesn't get beyond tautology to explanation. Life can be defined as the opportunity to have opportunities, or perhaps just as the having of opportunities. It doesn't get its value from being what it is (although perhaps you could put it that way as a way of denying that anything worth loving gets its value from anything else).

Anyway, Bijan Parsia's comment reminded me of Larkin's poem "Wants":

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites
The costly aversion of the eyes from death---
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs. 

While Jean K.'s comment here reminds me of Larkin in a (possibly) different mood:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. 
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. 
In time the curtain-edges will grow light. 
Till then I see what's really always there: 
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, 
Making all thought impossible but how 
And where and when I shall myself die. 
Arid interrogation: yet the dread 
Of dying, and being dead, 
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse 
- The good not done, the love not given, time 
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 
An only life can take so long to climb 
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; 
But at the total emptiness for ever, 
The sure extinction that we travel to 
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, 
Not to be anywhere, 
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. 

Which in turn (because of the weight on "here" in "Not to be here," because of the images of flashing, blinding light, and because of the general theme of presence and absence, of the space or range of possible actions and lives) reminds me of "Here":

"Does he have to like the...?

...Jesus and Mary Chain!" is a line from the song "Do You Want a Boyfriend?" by the Tender Trap. (It's a good song, but the video is self-consciously amateurish, featuring people my age pretending to be teenagers, so it's a bit uncomfortable.)

There's another reference to the Jesus and Mary Chain in "We Looked Like Giants" by Death Cab for Cutie ("Do you remember the JAMC?"). They (the JAMC) were my favorite band for a while in high school. I used to listen to "You Trip Me Up" and "Never Understand" getting ready for school in the mornings (12" singles--do they still exist?). The band was famous for causing riots by playing for only 15 minutes when people had paid money and maybe traveled miles to see them live. Comparisons were made with the Sex Pistols. Apparently they are still iconic or considered representative of some age or mindset (I almost wrote "vibe").

Their look is very 1980s (especially the hair), combining 1960s elements (I waited every year for the always-predicted psychedelic revival that never came) with goth-y black. And the sound is presumably inspired by the Velvet Underground: '60s innocent niceness plus feedback and lots of noise. Everyone in those days copied the Velvets in one way or another, because they were about the only band from before 1977 that you could admit to liking. (That probably sounds like an exaggeration, but as I experienced it punk happened almost literally overnight and changed completely what was socially acceptable in clothes and music. I was only about ten, and not exactly hip, but even I noticed it.) It's the noise that I'm interested in right now.

Dave Maier has an essay on noise music here. He's talking about this kind of thing:

Unlike the Jesus and Mary Chain, I can't really see this being used in a romantic Hollywood movie. Philip Larkin judged music by this criterion: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" (All What Jazz, p. 28) The JAMC deliberately went for both (as, I think, do The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, although they blend the two, while the JAMC gave you one in one ear and the other in the other). Noise music, as far as I can tell, wants to be like broken glass. I vaguely approve of this, but I can't honestly say I like it. There's a grumpy Larkin in me that rejects it, and a skeptical Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein who wonders what Europeans who claim to appreciate African art could say about it except "How charming!" Would they, for instance, be able to offer critical suggestions while such a work were being made, telling the creator to add more here or take some off there? If not then it all seems a bit shallow. And I feel that way (I emphasize 'feel' as opposed to, say, 'judge after much careful thought') about noise music.

I'll try to let a series of quotes from Maier explain what the point of noise music is meant to be. He begins with a paraphrase of an argument by Nick Smith:

According to Adorno, language, art, and philosophy are all manifestations of underlying sociocultural phenomena.  Everything Adorno deplores – the economic inequality and social oppression which he sees as the inevitable result of capitalist economies based on the principle of abstract exchange-value – can thus be diagnosed in the analogous ills afflicting the corresponding spheres of culture, including philosophy itself. The engine of capitalist culture is instrumental rationality, which abstracts from individual things and persons for the purposes of economic and social efficiency

Adorno sees art's [...] independence from conceptual understanding as a possible way to resist the cultural hegemony 

Unfortunately, as Adorno recognizes, this role for art is futile from the beginning.  First, there is an irresolvable tension in using art as a tool to combat instrumental rationality. Similarly, even to the extent that it succeeds, art is in constant danger of succumbing to its own success, which commodifies it and subjects it to the same concept of exchange-value that it was its cultural task to overcome.

All that art, even the best art, can do is to mourn the loss of meaning to those who are capable of mourning with it (that's us), and to dramatize the current desperate situation in the vain hope of shocking the rest of us out of our complacency and complicity with the system. 

If this is right, then the mourning seems to have some possible value, but the attempt to shock seems like more instrumentality. Maier goes on:

If there is to be effective resistance to the pop-cultural juggernaut, it must be sought in a different place. Smith locates the contemporary battlefront at the interface of music and noise.

Like Adorno – on Smith's interpretation, anyway – Smith seems to assume that only in total subversion of traditional aesthetic standards can the virtuous resistance to commercial culture take its (here regrettably final) stand, and that every other kind of music (except perhaps those few dogged academic serialists?) is fatally complicit with ruling-class ideology and thus aesthetically worthless (and vice versa).

One thing I don't get here is how virtuous resistance to commercial culture (and nothing else) can be one's reason for putting on some music. Why bother? The JAMC approach makes sense to me: you listen for the nice tune, the horrible noise makes it culturally palatable. But why would anyone choose to listen to just the noise (except to annoy their parents, impress their peers, etc.)? But wait.

Smith’s picture is much more pessimistic than Adorno’s, essentially conceding defeat by the forces of consumerism.  However, his conception of the aesthetic significance of noise is neither sufficient as it stands nor shared by all noise artists.

Spanish sound artist Francisco López [says]: “I think this [listening to a waterfall or radio static, "sounds that initially appear as a solid mass but slowly reveal themselves to be made up of myriad micro-particles"] is actually completely different from the traditional conception of listening to music, in which you want to listen to melody or rhythm or whatever.  What I want to do is something that is more blurred, something that does not have a definite structure.  But it has some inner richness that you can appreciate, if you listen carefully.  If you do this, you’ll discover many things there.  This is a question of going really deep into the listening experience.’ 

After we become accustomed to the necessity of listening in more than one way at once, this experience itself becomes a single, expanded way of listening.  Such expansion results in greatly expanded possibilities for the pointed disruption of interpretations-in-progress.  Our concepts need not be overwhelmed by an object for dislocation to occur, but simply eluded, if this can be made to happen in an appropriately subtle way – and thus by sounds potentially quite unlike those made by that unfortunate cat with his tail in the blender.  

There are a few issues here. One is the problem of instrumental thinking again, but I think this is not fatal. If artists aim at creating disruptive or dislocating works, or if consumers of such work consume in a conscious attempt to achieve disruption or dislocation, then the kind of instrumental thinking that is meant to be avoided has not been. But if people make or listen to this stuff just because they like it and the reason why they like it is its liberating or dislocating effect, then that seems OK. The remaining questions that occur to me (apart from whether the Adorno/Smith thesis is right in the first place) are whether that is why people like this stuff (and they aren't just being fooled or fooling themselves) and then the practical problem of how one gets to like it in the first place. I would much rather listen to rainfall than noise music inspired by the experience of listening to rainfall. This could get boring, of course, but a walk is usually more pleasant if you (i.e. I) turn off the iPod and listen to the birds instead. But there's no reason why you couldn't do that and then go home and listen to noise music, if that's your cup of tea.

A study of reading habits

In Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein, p. 62, Malcolm quotes a letter in which Wittgenstein says that:

reading aloud well, i.e. carefully, teaches one a lot! E.g. how rotten & slapdash most people, & the newspapers, write; & they write as they think.  

I thought of this when I read Timothy Garton Ash's obituary of Václav Havel in the Guardian. Speaking of "the European project" he writes there that:

Looking at the mess that project is in today, one can only cry: "Havel! Europe hath need of thee."

Really? That's the only thing one can do? More charitably: Really? That's the only thing one can cry?

Jean Kazez and Matthew Pianalto read slowly, as do I. I wonder whether this is common among philosophers. It seems possible that slow readers are more careful about uses of language, and perhaps less likely to produce (a certain kind of) thoughtless claptrap. I hope we are.

Irrelevant video to explain the title and provide an opportunity to hear Larkin say "dude":

Midnight in Paris

A few nights ago I saw Woody Allen's latest movie, which is lightweight but fun, and features lots of very appealing views of Paris. While I was watching it some thoughts I've been having lately seemed to come together, so let's see if I can connect the dots now, in the light of day.

Larkin said once that there are two types of poetry: the kind that tries to say something new, and the kind that tries to say something old in a new way. (He aimed for the latter.) It seems to me that all speech/writing/thought is like this. If you aren't saying something (that at least seems to you to be) new or putting an old idea in a new way then you aren't really saying anything at all. You are parroting others, being a mouthpiece for them.

Larkin's preference for new ways of putting old ideas is somewhat like Wittgenstein's ideas that more facts won't solve the big questions of life and that living longer (even forever) won't help make life meaningful either. What you need (if anything) is a new way to think of the facts or to talk about life, a new way to see or conceive of things. I think he takes it as given that it must be possible to live a meaningful life at all times, so, while culture or civilization might make a big difference to how you live, when you live is irrelevant to whether it's possible for you to live a good life. It always is possible. (And it's always possible to fail, too: nothing, like something, happens anywhere, as Larkin says.) But it takes imagination or a special kind of gift to express yourself in the right way. Which I think connects with this:

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot do what he would like to be able to do.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman), trans. Peter Winch, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1980, p. 24e.)

Midnight in Paris is about a man who cannot do what he would like to able to do, because he feels that he belongs to a different time and place (Paris in the 1920s). But then he finds a way to do it, so all ends well. It's not very deep (with possibly one exception, every character is two-dimensional), but it's optimistic and it looks nice.