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The Natural Confidence of Frank O'Hara (with ideas from John Dewey and Jackson Pollock)

Re-reading Frank O'Hara recently, I came across these grand lines that open part three of his "Ode to Willem de Kooning"(1957):

"Dawn must always recur
                                      to blot out the stars and the terrible systems
of belief"

Living in our age of rampant obscurantism, one can only hope O'Hara was right.  But reading these lines, I couldn't help but wonder what enabled him to speak so boldly -- almost Homerically -- in the first place.  And the mood doesn't let up.  "Dawn, which dries out the web so the wind can blow it,/spider web and all, away", it continues.  And then: 

"Dawn,
           erasing blindness from an eye inflamed,
                                                                         reaching for its
morning cigarette in Promethean inflection
                                                                 after the blames
and desperate conclusions of the dark..."

Was this optimism a reflection of a booming economy, not to mention the cultural renaissance of the New York art scene of the 50s?  One can only speculate.  But a look at the lines themselves reveals another source of their faith.

O'Hara places his bets on the idea that art movements rhyme with nature's rhythms: just as the dawn inevitably follows the night, so cultural enlightenment is sure to overcome the reactionary darkness.

Portraying culture as a sort of natural force is not an unfamiliar gesture on his part.  Who can forget the end of his great poem "On the Film Industry in Crisis": "Roll on, wheels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!"

In any case, the use of such metaphors brought to mind a book I've been slowly working my way through lately, John Dewey's classic Art as Experience.

Like O'Hara, Dewey often ignores the borders between culture and nature (along with any other barrier that would separate the arts from common experience).  "The true antithesis of nature is not art," he writes, "but  arbitrary conceit, fantasy and stereotyped convention."

Dewey insists that both the sciences and the arts, in fact, art motivated in part by our response to natural rhythms.  Scientific and cultural evolution, in his mind, are both spurred by our increasing knowledge of nature and the changes this causes in our experience.  As he puts it:

"The history of the progress of natural science is the record of the operations that refine and render more comprehensive our grasp of the gross and limited rhythms that first engaged the attention of archaic man...Today the rhythms which physical science celebrates are obvious only to thought, not to perception in immediate experience...Yet a common interest in rhythm is still the tie which holds science and art in kinship."

The invisible (to the unaided eye/senses) rhythms Dewey has in mind here (in 1934) are of the cellular and atomic level.  And you could argue that in the arts, Modernism provides some rough analogies -- whether authors explore the molecular roots of language, as in Stein, or the interior, heretofore invisible spaces of the unconscious.

But closer to O'Hara's time, this all made me think of the art movement his poem is praising here, Abstract Expressionism.  In Art as Experience, Dewey argues that "significant advances in technique occur...in connection with efforts to solve problems that are not technical, but that grow out of the needs for new modes of experience." 

The Naturalism of Jackson Pollock

O'Hara's poem is addressed to de Kooning, but with Dewey's ideas in mind, it also made me think of Jackson Pollock.  You could argue that Pollock's drip technique arose in part from the need to discover, at a time of nuclear gloom, the sublime qualities of the immediate moment.  But on a more direct level, you might also say that it expressed a desire to experience the act of painting in a less conventional, i.e., more natural way.




In this light, a work like Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" might be seen as a reinvented naturalism for the bomb era, where the work offers itself to the viewer as a sort of seismograph of the artist's interior impulses during the act of creation itself.  The painting even looks a little like the tendril-like structure of a group of the brain's synaptic cells:




But such a concern for discovering rhythms of psychic space (the terrain of thought itself) makes me think that despite the countless ways that naturalism is rediscovered in each era, there's an element that's almost classical about its pursuit.  Didn't Aristotle (the original naturalist) insist that the highest pleasure of human nature was mental -- i.e., intellectual contemplation?

Or as O'Hara puts it in his poem "Heroic Sculpture" (1958):

We join the animals
not when we fuck
                or shit
not when tear falls

but when
             staring into light
             we think
                                        

Keeping It Weird: Thoughts on the film Dark Skies (with help from the philosopher Graham Harman)

Just saw an alien abduction film via Pay-per-view that received mixed reviews, but that I found a provocative, even philosophical treat.

It's called Dark Skies.  It's produced by the people who developed the Paranormal Activity series, and incorporates some of the "video realism" technique of those films.

 

What I liked about the movie was what some reviewers hated: its vagaries and slow pace.  Rather than following action/horror film conventions, i.e., lots of special effects and overly-long chase sequences, it builds to a slow boil.  When the aliens do appear, they're mostly in shadows, probably due to cost constraints.  But rather than look cheesy, this just adds to their menacing otherness.  And its the chill of this otherness that intrigued me most about the film.

The movie centers on a middle-class suburban family, down on its luck because of the economy.  The father (Josh Hamilton) is looking for a job.  The mother (Keri Russell) sells Real Estate but, since her conscience won't let her hype dingy properties to close a deal, her career is hurting too.  Their adolescent son is becoming alienated from these "losers"; their younger kid is haunted.   He draws pictures of strange beings holding him by the hand.

Disturbing signs build as the movie proceeds.  Flocks of birds dive bomb into their windows.  Some mornings, they find toys, canned food and kitchenware built into bizarre towers in their living room, as if some outsider artist were at work.  Menacing bruises appear on the kids' bodies and behind the ears of the grown-ups.  A web search by Russell reveals that these are all signs of an alien home invasion.

This discovery results in a trip to the city to visit the local ufologist, who, judging from his even dingier apartment, is even more down-on-his-luck than our suburban couple. (Whom the alien gods would destroy, they first make unemployed.)

After reviewing the family's symptoms, he offers a dire prognosis.  They're being readied for the abduction of one of their members.  This can only be prevented if the family sticks together to fight off the alien invaders.

During this scene comes the most crucial conversation of the flick: "why" Russell asks, "did they choose us?  What makes us so special?"  To which the abduction expert tells them that there's actually nothing at all special about them, and that, in fact, mere humans can't understand why they choose who they do.  This would be like being  lab rats trying to understand the mind of the scientist performing the experiments on them.

It's this sentiment, I think, that justifies the murky, vague quality of much of what goes in this this film.  If there are beings we never see clearly, and clues and loose ends that are never tied up neatly, this all goes to support the general incomprehensibility of the characters' experience.

H.P. Lovecraft's "Weird Realism" (According to Graham Harman)

All of which brought to mind a book I've been reading by the philosopher Graham Harman.  Titled Weird Realism, it examines the stories of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Though some consider Lovecraft Poe's true successor, others complain that his "purple prose" is merely sensationalist, kitschy and most of all, vague.

Harman defends Lovecraft on this score, arguing that what his work is actually about is how impossible it is to capture reality through our representational systems.  And in this light, the garish, literal approaches of much conventional pop culture often miss the boat.  As he puts it:

"The meaning of being might even be defined as untranslatability.  Language (and everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion or indirect speech, a metaphorical bond with a reality that cannot possibly be made present.  Realism does not mean that we are able to state correct propositions about the real world.  Instead, it means that reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action or anything else."

This explains why, in Dark Skies, though an alien figure is eventually recorded by the elaborate home surveillance cameras the father sets up, he doesn't go to the police -- insisting he won't be believed.  Because he won't be.  What appears on video is too traumatic for a mere camera to represent.  Presumably, the police wouldn't believe their eyes, even if they saw it.

And what makes the film scary is in fact this pervasive "unstranslatability."  This quality even adds a touch of horror to the precariousness of the characters' economic prospects (that seem controlled by incomprehensible forces as well).

In short, what makes the fear in Dark Skies seem real is the fact that the film can't fully articulate what it's scared of.  Thoughts?