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Book Party, Sunday June 5 - 3PM

Book Party,
Sunday 3PM
June 4

Come Celebrate!

5 Books - 5 Poets

Martine Bellen
Ruth Danon
Jordan Davis
Caroline Hagood
Jerome Sala

Books available
Refreshments

Jefferson Market Library
425 6^th Avenue, NYC
FREE

Find out more here!

The War on Sleep: Dreaming in a 24/7 World

Dreams aren’t what they used to be.

Once upon a time, they had the power to invade daylight. Here’s Walter Benjamin, from the beginning of One-Way Street, published in 1929:

“A popular tradition warns against recounting dreams the next morning on an empty stomach. In this state, though awake, one remains under the spell of the dream.” Benjamin goes on to caution that unless there is a definite break between the dream state and waking life “the grey penumbra of the dream persists”, and the daytime and nocturnal worlds get mixed, leading to confused states of mind.

My experience of dreaming is the exact opposite of what Benjamin describes. Instead of worrying that my dreams will occupy my day, it’s my waking life that colonizes my sleep. My dreams replay daytime situations, often work-related, in scrambled form. In my sleep, I am worried about missing deadlines or meetings — just like when I am awake.

As a result, the whole romance around dreams — that they’re a source of deep psychological insight, creative inspiration, or even mystical truth, is lost on me.

But I’m not the only one. In the last few decades, it seems there’s been a devaluation of dreaming. Michael Cornwall, a Jungian analyst who writes for the blog Mad in America, remarks that we live in a strange, new world where “dreams have lost their place in fostering healing and enriching our personal growth." He adds,  "most of my therapist friends and co-workers in the mental health field over the past thirty years haven’t asked for or listened to the dreams of those they serve.”

Owen Flanagan, a scholar influenced by evolutionary psychology, describes the skepticism about dreams more bluntly:

“Leave dreams be, the critic might argue. Dreams are of minimal importance to the philosophy of mind and to cognitive neuroscience because they are just a kind of silly-thinking; the mental analog of a ‘gurgling stomach.’”

But the closing off of the royal road to the unconscious is a dramatic cultural event, especially when you think of all the great artwork, poetry, films and mysticism associated with dreaming. So much so, that it makes me wonder if the devaluation of the dream is itself symptomatic of a larger historical change.

The Great Awakening, 21^st Century Style

Perhaps our century is irritated with dreams because they are part of a larger problem: sleep itself.

In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes a world where business operates around the clock. Day encroaches upon night.  Just compare the number of hours we sleep with those of our ancestors:

“Over the course of the twentieth century there were steady inroads made against the time of sleep — the average North American adult now sleeps approximately six and a half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a generation ago and, (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century.”

It’s not just that people sleep fewer hours; there’s something almost shameful, or at least old fashioned (which amounts to the same thing) about sleeping in the first place. Crary writes:

“Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization.”

With all the social pressure now exerted upon night time, it’s no wonder that my own dreams seem more like a continuation of day, by other means, than a search for some deep insight.

An Encounter with the Dream Police

In search of richer dreams, I once attended a Jungian dream workshop. If there’s any system of thought that still believed in the power of dreams, I reasoned, it had to be Jungian psychology.

To participate in this two-weekend seminar, you were required to write down your dreams. The Jungian approach to this exercise was more thorough than those of other dream workshops. No waiting for morning to jot down your recall notes; you were to train yourself to do so as soon as you had a dream — even in the middle of the night.

Judged by the vivid, bizarre quality of the dreams I captured, this method certainly worked. The only problem was that the dreams got increasingly scary. It was as if the dream state itself was fighting off my curiosity.

Worse yet, what began to occur was something like Benjamin writes about. I’d be at my desk, working as a copywriter, and freaky dream images from the night before would start blasting, uncontrollably, through my mind.

A particular nightmare I had during this experiment, though, made me wonder if the resistance I experienced to this exercise was caused more by the pressures of the waking state, rather than some mysterious, unconscious force.

In this dream, my street was flooded with police cars. The gumball machine lights at the tops of their vehicles were flashing furiously, as I watched from my window. I knew they were coming for me. And when they finally pulled up in front of my apartment and pointed their big flashlights toward my building, I noticed that these weren’t just any policemen, but skeletons in cop uniforms, with jaws locked in angry grins.

What law had I broken?

In retrospect, my interpretation is this: by altering my sleep (by waking up to record dreams), and inviting the distractions of night into my working day, I was in danger of hampering my productivity.

In a 24/7 world, that’s a very serious crime indeed.

 

The Poet as Thinker: Michael Lally's Swing Theory

The final poem of Michael Lally's moving new collection, Swing Theory, keeps coming back to my mind. I think this is because it illustrates so well what's uniquely cool about poetic thinking. Check it out:

SWING THEORY: 5

When I first read about string theory I thought
What about swing theory? The ways the uni-
verse is secretly governed by the same laws
that sparked The Big Band Swing era, park
swings and taking a swing at something or
someone. I thought of "Swinging on a Star"
or Swing Time I mean the ways reality swings
not just in the Hegelian sense but in the re-
galing sense and sensitivity to the ego swings
and mood swings of The Creator or whatever
force initiated this swinging cosmic vibe we
call Being Here Now, always, where every
sound's a note in the song of everything, ev-
ery moment a scene in the movie of our lives.

String Theory, of course, is supposedly notoriously difficult to fully grasp. It's a theory, as I (dimly) understand it, whose ambition is no less than to integrate the discordant elements of contemporary physics (quantum theory vs. Einstein's version of gravity) into an elegant, visionary whole.

But rather than be struck speechless in the face of the "scientific sublime," the poet here, as thinker, uses it as springboard for inspiration, offering his own "grand unified theory" of the cosmos--presented from what the proto Beat performance artist Lord Buckley might have called the hipsomatic angle.

And that Lally's poem draws from music for its metaphors is no accident. String Theory itself is a sort of reinvention of the "music of the spheres." Here's how that authoritative text, The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, describes it:

"String Theory...proposes that subatomic particles are sub-sub-subatomic strings. If we zoom in on the particles closely enough, what we usually think of as little billiard balls reveal themselves to be tiny loops or lengths of a more primitive material. These strings vibrate like miniature guitar strings, and each type of particle corresponds to a string playing a certain pitch--as though quarks were middle C, electrons were E flat, and the world around us were a symphony of unimaginable intricacy."

All of which is to say that poetic thought shares some deep similarities with that of science. In their impatience with conventional realities, both scientists and poets are thinkers who make a habit of (as philosopher Richard Rorty put it in another context) "looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature."

Freethinkers Unite!

The jazzy, improvisatory freedom of a poem like "Swing Theory: 5" becomes especially striking in the context of the other poems in this book, some of which specifically address the reality of a brain not functioning as freely as the thinker would wish. This is the result of recovering from a (successful) brain surgery the poet underwent to remove a growth.

In "So, And" for example, a longer poem written specifically for a performance at DIA, the speaker remarks "I wanted to write/a special poem for/this night like I/sometimes have before/to tell what I know/as well as I know/my heart's scars". The poem continues like this:

"but my brain's scarred
now too and it doesn't
work as well as it once
did, nor do the connections
between my thoughts
and the fingers typing this"

As the poem continues (sometimes leaving in the errors that register the side-effects of the surgery), the speaker describes how even the shape of his desires has been modified. All of which throws another light on ideas of self-will, agency and even identity--or, put another way:

"[the] mysteries of what I always
believed was me
but now know as merely
electric impulses in
the thought battery
that's the hybrid
of my brain..."

These observations gain even more significance when you consider that they are part of a poem that ponders the struggle for artistic freedom (with the Chinese government) by the artist Ai Weiwei. From this perspective, the poet's internal fight to write the way he wants can be seen as a metaphor for preserving one's freedom against bigger forces beyond one's control--whether these forces take the form of physical or political laws.

And one way writers, artists and scientists all try to preserve this freedom is to step outside of the situations they face, by observing and reflecting upon them. As Rorty puts it, "mechanism stops, and freedom begins, at the point where we go metalinguistic--the point at which we can discuss which words best describe a given situation."

Swing Theory goes "meta" like this: the poems here are often encounters--with politics, one's past, or, in the examples I've given, scientific reality and its laws. But rather than let the nearly overwhelming power of these forces have the last say, the writing here re-describes them, translating them into a language of its own. One that swings.

Tony Trigilio Interviews Jerome Sala on The Cheapskates

I'm very happy to be part of Radio Free Albion's series of podcasts with poets.  Thanks to Tony Trigilio for interviewing me on my new book of poems, The Cheapskates.  Check it out here.

The Poetic Blending Machine 2: Thoughts on a Poem by Ko Un (with Ideas from Mark Turner)

In a recent issue of Poetry Magazine, I came across a translation (by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock) of a poem by Korean poet Ko Un.  It caught my eye because, in a few brief lines, the poem created a whole, mysterious imaginative world.

EAR

Someone's coming
from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone's going there now.
The two are sure to meet.

One way to read this poem is as a reflection on birth and death.  A sort of balance is envisioned; one person leaves the world, another one comes (or perhaps returns).  What interests me most, though, is that moment when the poet imagines both persons meeting.

Where is it, I ask myself, that this meeting occurs?  I suppose it is a kind of Bardo state, a liminal space visible to the poet when things are murky (like on a rainy night) in the ordinary world.  But as mysterious as this imaginative space may be, it insists itself upon the speaker's consciousness, hissing into his awareness.

The Riddle of the Two Buddhist Monks

The alternate world that the poem creates is the result of a blending of two states that normally don't occur in a single space: coming/going or birth/death.  By blending these opposites, a third state is created -- one that transcends both.  (Note: "Conceptual blending" has been covered earlier on this blog, here).

This all reminded me of a riddle I came across recently in a book by Mark Turner, a literary scholar who draws on coginitive science, entitled The Origin of Ideas.

The riddle, said to originate with Arthur Koestler, goes like this:

"A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top overnight until, at dawn, he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset.  Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips.  Riddle: is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two trips?"

The answer is yes, but what interests Turner is how our minds go about finding it.  He shows us that one way to do so is to compress the two trips and envision, in the mind's eye, not one, but two Buddhist monks (though they are the same person) -- each traveling a different direction (up or down the mountain path).  Then, through our imaginative visualization we see for ourselves that...

"...no matter how the two monks move, so long as they start at dawn, end at dusk, and traverse the path without leaving it, the monks must always cross, or meet, somewhere, at least once, and that meeting point will be the location that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two successive days.  We do not know what point it will be, but we know that there must be at least one such point."

To solve such a riddle, Turner points out, we suspend time and space as well as the way we normally think of personhood.  For we blend two days and two directions into one moment in one location -- and clone a single person into two.  Like in the Ko Un poem, we create an alternate world where coming and going meet, except this time it's the same person who meets himself coming and going.

The theme of Turner's book is that this sort of conceptual blending (of which poetry provides the richest examples), is something we all do everyday to solve mundane problems, or even (or especially?) to help us come to terms with existential riddles.  In the case of Koestler's riddle, such imaginative blending enables us to solve a thought problem without having to resort to a laborious mathematical proof.

And when it comes to a poem like "Ear", the "blend" offers a way to think about what's normally unthinkable: the infinite.  Through creating a space outside of life and death, the speaker -- and we readers -- get a handle (at least for a moment) on the incomprehensible.

The revolutionary writer, Lautreamont, once insisted that "poetry must be made by all."

What fascinates a fan of poetry like myself is that the notion of conceptual blending suggests that Lautreamont was right, but in a way he couldn't have anticipated.  For according to writers like Mark Turner, eveyone, of necessity, uses their own, innate metaphor-making and, and in this sense, poetic abilities everyday, to create blends that aid in navigating and reconstructing the many clashing worlds we all inhabit.

In other words, it takes a hell of a lot of imagination to get through the day.  Any day.  Thoughts?

On the Eyes Not Being Windows of the Soul: Gertrude Stein, James Franco and Mind Reading

I've recently been reading The Making of Americans the way Gertrude Stein says she wrote it: little by little, day by day.  Stein loves to teach, and some of my favorite moments are when she shares bits of wisdom, practical and artistic, in her witty, hypnotic fashion.

The other day I came upon a passage which makes the point that a person's facial expressions don't necessarily reveal his or her moods:

"Sometimes the boy had a way with him, and it would show clear in spite of the fair cheery sporty nature he had in him, a way of looking sleepy and reflecting, and his lids would never be really ever very open, and he would be always only half showing his clear grey eyes that, very often, were bright alive and laughing.  Later such a way of looking could be of great service to him.  It would not matter if he never really could have wisdom in him, this look could help him always in his dealings with all men and be of much service too to him with women.  He will listen then, and with his veiled eyes it will be as if he were full with thinking, and with himself always well hidden, and so he will be wise; or for a woman it will be as if he were always in a dream of them.  Wisdom and dreaming, both good things when shown at the right time by a young grown man, who wants to be succeeding, always, in every kind of living."

Even though we know that a person's demeanor doesn't always reflect his or her state of mind, as Stein's passage indicates, we often assume it does.  So much so, that she suggests her character can potentially use this assumption to his advantage: if he cultivates his tendency to "look sleepy" he can make himself seem more wise or romantic than he really is.

The cognitive cultural critic, Lisa Zunshine, attributes our habit of reading outward expressions as indicative of inner states as the result of what she terms "the myth of embodied transparency."  This is the traditional belief that not only the eyes, but the face and bodily attitude, are windows to the soul.

In Zunshine's view, our tendency to make this assumption -- almost like a reflex -- says something about our lives as social beings: we are constantly compelled to try to "read people's minds" by hints like facial expression because we need to guess at others' thoughts and intentions in order to make our way in society.

Is James Franco Bored or Stoned?

One of the reasons why I found the Stein passage amusing is that it brought to mind an actor known for his sleepy look: James Franco.  It seems much of the irritation surrounding him has to do with whether he "embodies transparency" or not.  His detractors claim he does; they read his demeanor as signifying boredom or intoxication.  But Franco claims his face doesn't mean what it appears to; he says it's the result of a medical condition.

Whatever the truth is, the ambiguity of his look seems to fascinate.  On a recent Comedy Central Roast, it was a touch point for many of the jokes.  "If at any point James fully opens his eyes tonight, there will be six more weeks of summer," said one roaster.  And another: "I've heard of a lazy eye, but that left one is collecting unemployment."

But despite the habitual pull of the idea of embodied transparency, there are moments, Zunshine argues (in her book Getting Inside Your Head), when our belief in it evaporates.  As she puts it:

"As soon as a culture becomes aware of an established niche for representing embodied transparency, this niche is vulnerable to subversion and parody."

One "niche" where this occurs in our times is Reality Television.  As a genre, such programs promise a raw look at the inner emotional states of their characters.  As Zunshine writes, because the people on such shows are not professional actors, "the assumption...is that participants...are not good at faking or concealing their feelings."

Yet, because the emotive situations and gestures seem overdone (and are repeated with such regularity on so many reality shows), the genre is frequently mocked for being "stagy."  As a result, though Reality TV aims for authenticity, it's often written off as artificial or manipulative.

But then, to make things even more complicated, there are also times, as Charles Bernstein has described in his now classic essay, "Artifice of Absorption," when literary or artistic works can actually heighten their emotional impact precisely by making us aware of their aesthetic devices; i.e., when creative work gains authenticity by admitting to its artificiality.

More on this fascinating twist in the next post...

Sneak Preview: Here's a Sample from Jerome Sala's new Poetry Book: The Cheapskates

My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, will be out soon (see below for a sample).  There's a book launch party, April 13th at 6PM at the Bowery Poetry Club.  The book will be available there at a special discount.  Come one come all!  Details:

Book Launch Party for
The Cheapskates by Jerome Sala

April 13, 6PM

With Readings by
Jerome Sala
and Guests:
Bob Holman
Vincent Katz
Elaine Equi

Kimberly Lyons, publisher
of Lunar Chandelier Press, will host.

at The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
(between Bleeker & Houston)

Special Discount on the new Book

FREE

Advance Praise for The Cheapskates:

Wayne Koestenbaum writes:  "Jerome Sala's cheeky, splashy poetry seems never seems to be in a bad mood: he sails through profound political and historical issues with a tone of insouciance that -- like an erudite carnival barker's -- successfully lures us into the tent.  Indeed, The Cheapskates has a Cecil B. DeMille fullness, each of its sideshows masterfully spacious within close quarters.  I hear in Sala's voice the lovable sound of a storyteller-trickster who wants to beguile listeners into a reverie with no strings attached.

Joanna Fuhrman writes: "Jerome Sala's brilliant and hilarious poetry perfectly distills how it feels to live at the sparkling, flashy, hollow heart of late capitalism.  His poems make ideas rattle and zing.  This isn't 'neo' anythin', it's actually new."

Sample from The Cheapskates

Here are the first three poems in the book:

LATER, CLIFF

when I was a mouse
in a cartoon
chased by a cat

I said, "later, cliff"
as I ran into midair

but the cat followed me out
into the mighty void

of
(I thought)

escape

and we stayed there
above the infinite drop

feet and paws pedaling
long and short noses gasping
tails whipping into the great cool
nothingness

perpetual popular machines

until
we
looked
down

--------------------

WHO WILL BE AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MANNEQUIN?

in the commercial
men and women audition
to become mannequins
for a chain of stores
that sells casual party clothes

it's easier to work in the "Service Industry"
with a perpetual smile, hands frozen
in a greeting that broadcasts happiness
with professional grace

once people begged to be awakened from their roles
now they must prove
that they can sell in their sleep

there's an elegance to their somnambulism
a courage and a confidence:
that it's possible to achieve warmth with a blank stare

one that never bumps into the wall
of a customer's personality

one that reflects all interpersonal affection
back onto the clothes at hand

---------------------------------

REALITY EVERYTHING

The great thing about everything becoming public
is that this means nothing is.
You are traceable like a cigarette at night,
but no one is there to enforce the no smoking sign.
The lights are on, but no one's on the phone.
Those peaceful scenes after the plague
has annihilated the small town,
and no one's left in the restaurant or department store,
have all come true -- and yet no one's dead,
the market is more crowded than ever,
the street packed with stalled traffic,
the sky dark from flocks of planes,
punks in the overpopulated corners, the gangways,
under the street lamps, still sniffing glue --
but no one's there to get high --
all gone somewhere far away
leaving their lives behind
to go on living without them.

The Cheapskates will soon be available through Small Press Distribution (SPD) and Amazon.  Better yet, come to the party on April 13th, and get a signed, discounted copy.



 

Being Joseph Ceravolo: Thoughts about the Poem "Great Plains" (from Collected Poems)

The other morning my wife, the poet Elaine Equi, read me "Great Plains" from the newly published Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo:

Great Plains

What, no one here?  No one
around here?  No buffalo?
Like sleeping on the toilet bowl...
Drifting toward love...

The dogs are out this morning
jumping on top of each other
Is there a real release with them?

But, no one here.
There's no buffalo, only dogs,
this morning, where dawn
and a wild wild bird fly away.

She wanted to know my thoughts about this poem, and immediately I offered my surface impressions.

Recalling cold mornings in Chicago where I grew up -- and in fact remembering dogs, if not screwing, at least growling at each other in the icy street -- I placed the poem in winter (although there's nothing in it to indicate a season).  Perhaps the white of the toilet bowl made me think of snow (and the fact that it was cold outside).

I also knew that Ceravolo lived in New Jersey, but was part of the New York poetry scene from the 60s through the 80s.  So I sensed a touch of loneliness in it, as if Ceravolo, comparing NYC to Jersey, felt it to be rather desolate, with a touch a natural wildness to it.

I injected "wildness" into my reading because of the title and the mention of buffalo, but also because of something my Jersey friends have told me about the state: that just 100 miles outside NYC, you can still see bears and coyote (though they may have been pulling my Midwestern leg).

But what interests me, in retrospect, about this unremarkable 30 second interpretation was the paradoxical feeling state that came with it.  Even though my reading of the poem was really about me -- assembled more from my personal memories and associations than anything Ceravolo had in mind -- I identified with him. 

In fact, I felt I was actually inside his mind -- looking out through his eyes, seeing what he saw on that morning.  And therein laid the enjoyment I derived from this poem: the experience of seeing things from the perspective of a poet I admired.  (Perhaps a bit of his magic would rub off on me...)

And as I mentioned, all this happened in less than half a minute; my imagined projection into the poet's mind was automatic, instinctual -- I could not not do this.

This reaction brought to mind two books I've been reading that offer interpretations of literature informed by cognitive psychology.  The first (covered in a previous post) is by Lisa Zunshine, titled Getting Inside Your Head.  Zunshine argues that one of the pleasures literature offers is precisely this feeling that we're really seeing into the minds of others -- observing people's thoughts with a clarity we aren't granted in everyday life.

The second, a book about Shakespeare's Sonnets by Brian Boyd, connects this impulse to what he sees as the raison d'etre of the poetic lyric.  As a form, lyric poetry makes us feel not only that we're reading a mind, but doing so in a particularly intimate way.  It does this in part because, unlike other genres, it is not hampered by the necessity of telling a story.  Stripped of narrative conventions, lyric poems seem to reveal bare thought itself.

Both of these writers argue that our desire to read minds is an evolved trait.  As social and political animals, our survival depends upon accurately guessing the intentions of others.  So when we're offered an insider's view, it delights us.

Being John Malkovich

The drive to dissolve the barrier between our mind and another's can, of course, get rather obsessive, as the many parodies of fan culture suggest.

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about my experience of this poem, the now classic flick Being John Malkovich aired again on cable.

In it, you may recall, a character discovers a secret portal that allows him to get inside the mind of the actor and experience life as he does.  Soon, like a good entrepreneur, he merchandises the portal -- selling tickets to trips inside the Malkovich mindscape.

But even this invasion of privacy isn't enough.  Eventually, like a malevolent spirit, he takes over not only the mind, but the life of Malkovich, making him abandon his acting career and become a puppeteer.  All of which I take as an allegory of how in popular culture, keeping fans happy can pressure a celebrity to begin living out their projections.

Of course, poets today don't get famous enough to have to worry about such problems; we can fall into and out of identification with our favorite writers without harming anyone.

When it comes to mind reading, the contemporary lyric gives all parties a free ride.  No wonder, despite periodic claims of its obsolescence, it persists!  Thoughts?
 

Reading Joe Pesci's Mind: Thoughts About Lisa Zunshine's "Getting Inside Your Head"

I've just started reading Lisa Zunshine's Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture, and I'm already intrigued by its central idea.

Zunshine, a literary studies scholar, states early on that "we can predict...that no cultural form will endure unless it lets us attribute mental states to somebody or something."

She bases this bold statement on findings that arise from cognitive psychology and evolutionary theory.  According to cognitive psychologists, "...to make sense of any human action, we must see it in terms of a mental state that prompted it."  She adds "psychologists have a special term for [this] evolved cognitive adaptation...They call it theory of mind, also known as folk psychology and mind reading."

Zunshine goes on to explain that we've been "mind reading" for hundreds of thousands of years.  According to evolutionary psychologists, this trait helped our ancestors "make sense of the behavior of other people in their group, which could number up to two hundred individuals."  By now, this feature of our make-up is so habitual that much of our "mind reading" is an unconscious reflex.

But this ability stops far short of telepathy.  No matter how important it is to know the intentions of others, we can't be certain of what's actually in the mind we're reading.  As Zunshine puts it elsewhere, rather than "mind reading" we might call this habit "mind groping."  This is why, I take it, our culture is so obsessed with the inner thoughts and confessions of people.

As I haven't finished reading Getting Inside Your Head yet, I'm not yet convinced that what makes cultural productions last is their appeal to this trait.  This is a pretty big claim.

But as a metaphor, "mind reading" is certainly potent.  So much so that I find myself spontaneously thinking of examples that support the author's case.

Consider, for instance, this iconic scene from Goodfellas.  Its suspense and humor seem to arise from a little "mind reading" test that Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) gives Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).  The scene begins right after Tommy tells a hilarious story and Henry compliments him for being so "funny."

 

Henry makes an assumption  about Tommy's "mind state."  He thinks Tommy enjoys telling humorous stories and getting laughs.  He also assumes their relationship is one of easy familiarity.

Tommy then pulls the rug out from underneath Henry, making him question his interpretation.  This is why the seconds of silence in this scene are so gripping.  As I watch it, I'm drawn into Hill's mind; I identify with his uncertainty about really knowing what Tommy's thinking.

The laughs that erupt once the silence is broken and we find out that Henry really could see into Tommy's mind (judging finally that Tommy is putting him on) arise from the release from anxiety (for both the characters and viewers).  And after watching that scene, I found myself thinking of many social situations where such awkward silences occurred whenever I've said something in jest and was not quite sure how others took it.

Zunshine also argues that "mind reading" is so habitual that it's activated not just by people -- but their representations.  When we see a statue, we are compelled to interpret what this piece of stone is thinking.  Or, to return to my example, there's the scene from Goodfellas where Tommy plays art critic to his mother's painting:

 

Pesci's character is quite specific in deciphering this work.  He even tells us what the guy on the boat is thinking! (See the Art, Life, TV, Etc. blog for more on this scene.)

Another example that came to me of the expression of this trait is the psychological novel -- particularly the convention of "stream of consciousness" narration.  Here's a paragraph from Joyce's Ulysses that I found in an essay on "theory of mind" by Deirdre Wilson:

"What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal from, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?  He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not."

And such mental gyrations are not, of course, confined to the novel.  Literary critic Brian Boyd, for example, argues that one of the reasons why lyric poetry persists -- despite the common criticism that it is no longer influential -- is that that it "allows us the illusion of access to another's thought" unconstrained by the conventions of story telling.

Somewhere in all of this I sense a fascinating new functional definition of the arts.  But that's a topic for other posts.  In the meantime, I'm wondering if anyone would like to share their thoughts about these thoughts about thoughts?

Are We Cynics or Realists? Thoughts on John Barnes' "The Lost Princess Man" (in The New Space Opera 2)

To relax, I keep going back to a big paperback anthology I bought a few months back titled, The New Space Opera 2.  (Earlier post on this book here.)  The gem I found found this time is a story by John Barnes, called "The Lost Princess Man."

One of the things I love about the science fiction genre is that, through its allegorical tales, it offers real insight into contemporary social attitudes and ideology -- often via satire.  In keeping with this Swiftian agenda, "The Lost Princess Man" captures a key aspect of our contemporary structure of feeling.

It tells the tale of an interplanetary con man who navigates his way through a vast and incredibly dangerous totalitarian empire by working a specific scam.  And it's a particularly heartless one.

He preys on destitute young women.  He picks out a victim, and then attempts to convince her that he's been sent from on high because he has evidence that she's of a royal bloodline, and may be the "lost princess" for whom the Imperial government has been searching (to perpetuate its lineage and reign).

Once his prospect agrees to travel with him (to claim what's hers), she is drugged, turned over to plastic surgeons who make her irresistible (according to current fashion), and installed as a high-class prostitute in a ritzy bordello.  "The Lost Princess Man" collects a bounty for every "recruit" he delivers.

But then, we find out something surprising.  He says this of his marks:

"They're blunt, not easily fooled, and hate authority.  After listening [to his con] for a while, the girl says, 'I think you are working the lost princess con, and the minute you have me off the planet, you will pump me full of drugs, and I will wake up chained to a bed with a large number of Imperial troops lined up and  waiting to have a turn on me.'  At which point, I say, 'Well, of course.'" 

Asked by his interlocutor why he actually admits he's pulling a scam, the "Lost Princess Man" replies that, on balance, what he has to offer is a big improvement over the impoverished lives these young women lead.  Further, they don't get "gang banged", but instead, are considered "luxury goods" -- and (according to "sumptuary laws") their service can only be sold to a limited number of very well off individuals.

As part of the deal, they recieve an education, their artistic and intellectual talents are developed, and they become fluent in multi-planetary cultural manners.  This is why many of those he approaches agree to go along with him voluntarily.

Cynicism or Realism?

The story continues to take wild twists and turns after this (especially after we find out that the Empire really is looking for a "lost princess"), but I'll stop at this passage, because for me it rings all sorts of ideological bells.

The first thing it reminds me of is the way cultural critics such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek characterize the ideology of our moment.

In the old days (according to their writings), when our glitzy, consumer culture promised us it held the key to our self-realization (in the form of eveything from cool clothes, to tech devices, to self-help schemes, to designer drugs, etc.),  we sometimes believed that such enhancements would help us find our inner lost princess or prince.

Now, we're supposedly too hip for all that.  Yet, we continue to use such props anyway -- and in this sense, "go along with the pitch", but now, with a sort of cynicism.  "I know very well," we think, "that this won't help me find the well-being I want, but, what the hell, you gotta have something."

As Zizek puts it: "Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it." 

On the other hand, you could argue that the "marks" in this story, rather than cynics are realists about their actual prospects. I'm thinking here about a remark the philosopher Jacques Ranciere made on contemporary exploitation.  As he put it:

"The dominated do not remain in subordination because they misunderstand the existing state of affairs but because they lack confidence in their capacity to transform it."  He adds, though, that getting such confidence depends upon there being a credible politics that offers a way out.

In the absence of that (or, say, some trustworthy form of inner transformation), perhaps the compliant folks in this story are merely being (wisely) strategic.

Nevertheless, such a tale raises a provocative question.  In our "seen-it-all-before" time, when we make our own Faustian bargains, are we being cynics or realists?  Thoughts?