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Michelle Yeoh, Platonist? Thoughts on "Everything Everywhere All at Once"

How do you find meaning in a life that seems absurd?

This is the question the film Everything Everywhere All at Once keeps asking. Such a query, of course, is one that has haunted modernity since at least the days of existentialism. But the way the film goes about answering it is distinctly contemporary: it presents us with a blizzard of spectacular imagery from which to draw our conclusions.

The film’s basic plot is reminiscent of classic visionary narratives of the past, such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and especially The Wizard of Oz, except that it updates the dreamlike quality of these classics with the popular new trope of the multiverse.

If you haven’t seen it, the narrative works like this: Evelyn, the central character portrayed in a virtuoso performance by Michelle Yeoh, begins the film as a stressed, small business owner. She is trying to run a laundromat without much assistance from her spacey husband, rebellious teenage daughter and demanding father who has come to live with the family. To make matters worse, their enterprise is facing an audit from the IRS, and they are being grilled about receipts and expenses by a stern agent, played tongue-in-cheek by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Amid this turmoil, Evelyn discovers a new ability: she can travel through alternate universes, each of which presents a different version of her life. Such variations, we are led to understand, are the result of small choices she’s made. In one universe she is an opera singer, in another a high-society Brahman, in yet another a kung-fu messiah who is faced with the task of saving a world. The threat, in this case, comes from an alternate version of her daughter who is manipulating a black hole (that takes the hilarious shape of a cosmic “everything bagel”). There is even a universe where everyone’s fingers take the shape of rubbery hot dogs.

Shifting with Evelyn at eye-blink speed from one universe to another, the film calls to mind an experience a lot more banal than a multiverse: you feel like you’re searching for something to watch over our constantly proliferating streaming media choices. But whether scary, goofy, comedic or dramatic, the worlds presented in the film share a common trait: each seems more fun than the one she’s living in. This is why it’s mildly surprising that in the end, the universe where Evelyn finds the most meaning is the one where the film began: the laundromat business.

Plato’s advice on choosing between alternate lives

As I alluded to, such an outcome recalls the end of the Wizard of Oz film, where Dorothy concludes: “there’s no place like home.” But the film brought to my mind a more ancient tale. I am thinking of “The Myth of Er,” the fable that ends Plato’s Republic. In this afterlife parable, souls are asked to choose their next life from an array of possibilities (such reincarnation tales seem a predecessor to today’s more “scientific” myth of alternative universes). The lives offered in Plato’s myth, as in Everything Everywhere…” range from the glorious to the mundane. Souls are counseled to make wise decisions. Here is from Alain Badiou’s hyper contemporary translation of the classic:

“let us learn above all how… to choose an admirable life rather than a degraded one. For then we will have learned that a life, regardless of how lowly it may seem, is admirable when it’s oriented toward justice and that being oriented toward injustice, no matter how brilliant and famous one may be, is tantamount to ensuring one’s own degradation. That’s the only criterion. We must hold this conviction in ourselves, even into the world beyond…"

In Plato’s tale, a great hero of the past has seemingly learned this lesson better than most. Here is how, in Badiou’s translation, Odysseus chooses his next life (he is last in the line of souls making a “next life” selection):

“The memory of his arduous wanderings had cured him of all ambition. He spent ages trying to find the life of some ordinary person who’d been completely uninvolved in public affairs. With difficulty he managed to ferret out, off in a corner, the hard-working, never-changing life of a poor, industrious check-out woman at More Is Better, who, as she was the single mother of four children, got up every day at 5 a.m., did the housework, mended the clothes, washed the sheets, counted her pennies out one by one, and had nothing but the routine of domestic life to fill up her existence. Needless to say, none of the other dead had wanted that life. Odysseus immediately took it and said that even if chance had given him first dibs, he would have made the exact same choice.”

 Where Evelyn, a contemporary Odysseus, concludes her journey is not so different from this ancestor. Like this heroic figure, she ends up at the end of the film as head of a family that struggles like hell. One of the reasons she is dissatisfied with more “glorious” lives is precisely their lack of justice. In the alternate life in which she is the universe’s savior, for example, the way she is to accomplish her mission is by murdering her daughter (which she refuses to do).

Further, in the final few scenes of the film, Evelyn shares with her daughter the discovery she’s made through her “arduous wanderings” across alternative universes. In the film’s most Platonic moment, she states that, despite the absurdity of this excess of lives, one ideal still holds out as truth/meaning: the love she feels for her daughter and family. Thus, it is only her more worrisome and mundane life as laundromat owner that answers the question of “what does it all mean?” In his book on love, Badiou comments:

“Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something that he calls the Idea… In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that.”

The moral of both The Republic and Everything, Everywhere…then, seems to be: to find meaning, one must become immersed in something bigger than one’s own self-interest, something “universal” as Badiou puts it. In this light, compared to the truth of love, the many alternative lives flashing through the film at warp speed seem like so many bullshit media images—or, in more classical terms, illusory shapes projected over the walls of Plato’s Cave.

But certain details in the film cast a shade over such a sunny conclusion. Before Evelyn went on her universe-hopping journey, her family was on the verge of disintegrating because of the financial and emotional stress running a small business created. It would seem that even traditionally unassailable ideals such as love require material support to flourish.

All of which leads one to conclude that leaving the cave of illusion for the land of truth is certainly desirable—if you can afford the admission fee.

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.

 

Why are we whispering? Thoughts on "Blade Runner 2049."

I finally saw Blade Runner 2049 on cable the other night. Beautiful to look at, sometimes moving, but what really struck me was the degree of low-talking going on.

At times I thought of those comic bits in films where two characters find themselves needlessly speaking in hushed tones. One of them inevitably notices and blurts out, “why are we whispering?”

There are lots of answers you could give to such a question. Perhaps the characters in this dystopia feared surveillance (but would a whisper really mask your speech to the future’s presumably hyper-sensitive bugs?).

Or maybe, since the main characters are androids, they speak in even, quiet tones like AI traditionally does (think of Hal in 2001) in science fiction films. I guess this is to connote emotional control — an inhuman equanimity. But then again, the replicants in this case seem desperate, rather than icy cool.

Or perhaps the voices of these beings are simply muffled by the ambient noise of their chaotic urban landscape, which sometimes seems scored to a track reminiscent of the Beatles’ classic “Revolution number 9.”

None of these answers satisfied me, though. There was something holy about their quiet. Combined with the dark lighting (as I remember it, the movie takes place mostly at night), the whispering made me think I was in a church. I could almost smell the incense.

The religious vibe of the film is inescapable; it’s literally dripping with the biblical. The narrative is centered around a miraculous birth, as a subculture of replicants is excited to discover one of their own was “of woman born.” The mother is Rachel, Sean Young’s character from the first film. At one point, a replicant describing this birth alludes piously to a verse from Genesis: “And God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and allowed her to conceive.”

Religious themes are common to science fiction. Reverential awe often underscores that moment when the wonder of a new technology is revealed: some new device or process cool or horrible enough to promise utopia or threaten apocalypse. The genre never tires of extrapolating on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But Blade Runner 2049 is not that kind of film. The technology isn’t really new.  These androids have been around since at least 1982, when the original film was released. Add to this the fact that the movie centers on a specific form of technology.  Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t feature alien craft, doomsday weapons or time travel devices. It’s object of meditation is the digital.

This focus is unmistakable, as revealed in a particularly poignant scene. Ryan Gosling’s “Officer K”, a replicant cop, views a comparison of android “genetics” to human: the former binary, the latter triplicate (the nucleotide groups of three that make up the human gene). K says something like, “That’s the difference between us and them…” in a despairing tone.

Alexander Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital

A book I’ve been reading recently, by cultural theorist Alexander Galloway, addresses what might be called the “digital despair” alluded to in the film. In Laruelle: Against the Digital, Galloway argues that the way digital technology shapes our worldview produces a sort of alienation — one of the symptoms of which are weird fantasies of transcendence.

Galloway’s argument is complex, and I can’t do it justice here. But to simplify it greatly, he makes the case that digital technology, based in a binary code, is the latest in a tradition of Western thought, from Plato to Heidegger to Derrida, that attempts to describe the real by dividing it into two. Typically, a thinker decides upon two elements as key (whether these be mind/body, being/nothing, self/other, etc.). We are then shown how the two interact, synthesize or build into bigger structures, and voila, how reality “works” is defined.

The problem is, of course, that the “real” is an unwieldy beast, that refuses to be corralled into such schema. In the case of digital media, Galloway traces two results from such framing. First, it produces a feeling of unreality, for “digital relations are always already fake or simulated, for they arise from radical standardization at the atomic level.” And this leads to a second result: a drive to transcend.

A good example of the way this theory plays out, as Galloway alludes to, might be the widely accepted theory that the brain functions like a digital device — i.e. a computer.  This leads to thoughts of transcendence, i.e., the search for a “ghost in the machine.” Or better yet, the fantasy that immortality will one day be attainable, once we upload our “minds” into heavenly digital clouds.

This dynamic is at the heart of Blade Runner 2049. The replicants, aware they are digital products, feel “less than.” They have been programmed to serve rather than to decide. They are alienated beings seeking, in contemporary pop lingo, to become “authentic.” In other words, like us chromosome-based machines, they struggle to be free. 

And I guess there’s nothing holier than that.

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?

Artifice as a Path to Authenticity: Thoughts on Chuck Close, Charles Bernstein and Video Realism

Continuing to think about our habit of reading into facial expressions (see last post), brought to mind an experience I had once viewing an exhibit of visual art.

I was at MOMA a few years back, checking out the Chuck Close retrospective.  In the room that housed his early works from the 60s, I came across the giant, photorealistic portraits for which he is well known.

I had an odd experience viewing these huge "heads" together in one place.  Close has made it clear that his portraits are paintings of photographs -- not studies from "real life."  Because of this fact, you'd think you were several steps away from attributing psychological presence to these works.  In fact, I'm told that if you view them up close, you can actually see the grid of tiny boxes through which they're created; it's as if you're looking at a mosaic made of hundreds of tiles, each with a miniature abstract painting inside.

Yet, oddly, the paintings also seemed to carry symbolic messages.  In the portrait of Philip Glass, for example, the swirling patterns of Glass's hair and skin rhymed, for me, with the epic, circular movement of his music.  It seemed as if his face were some sort of medieval emblem, in which the spirit of his inner creativity manifested in the flesh.

What I found striking was how this inner spirit fought its way through the artificial quality that Close foregrounds.  It was as if a certain presence would not be denied -- even if the artist telegraphed this was a simulation of a simulation; even if you knew the painting's effect was the result of Close's own "smoke and mirrors."

It was almost as if the artificial aspect of the work was precisely what made it more absorbing.

Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"

An especially lucid analysis of the phenomena I've just described is found in a piece I alluded to in the last post: Charles Bernstein's essay-in-verse titled "Artifice of Absorption."  Toward its end, Bernstein describes the experience of watching Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

In this play, the character "Krapp" listens to autobiographical diary entries he made via tape recordings during earlier periods of his life.  But just as he, and we, as audience, begin to be absorbed in these accounts, Krapp reminds himself and us of their artifice.  He frequently switches off the tape, interupting the narrative flow, fast forwarding at times, stopping at others to make sarcastic comments on his own youthful naivete.

But our heightened awareness of the mechanical device through which Krapp's "heartfelt" confessions are communicated, rather than make us more distanced, draws us in.  Bernstein comments:

"Indeed, the very jagged moments when the tape is
abruptly turned off -- moments in which the 
listener's absorption may seem to be
ruptured -- only serve to heighten the dramatic power
of the play.  Beckett's incisively spliced
dislocations have a spellbinding
theatrical effect..."

The emotional content of the performance seems more real, then, precisely because the work refuses to become "absorbed" in the "vain hopes" of the stories the character once told himself.  It's as if a higher degree of honesty -- and hence authenticity -- results from the very acknowledgement of the ephemeral quality of the stories Krapp tells himself.

And the presence of a tape machine in the play underlines the fact that even our most basic sense of our lives and identities is unavoidably mediated -- that an immaculate perception of ourselves is impossible.

Video Realism

Both Close and Beckett come from the realm of high art, but I've also seen forms of popular culture that achieve "realism effects" by doing something similar.

Recently I watched an indie horror film titled Alien Abduction (about so-called true events involving disappearances and "strange lights" that occurred in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina).

 

The story, of course, was far-fetched.  But what made it gripping, nonetheless, was the technique through which it was told.  As we watch this tale of alien abduction involving a small family, we are constantly reminded, by its shaky, hand-held quality (and occasional blackouts) that we are watching a homemade video (in this case, one filmed by an autistic boy).  The camera, in fact, is as much a character in the movie as the people.

As such, the movie is the latest in a low-budget genre that began with the Blair Witch Project, in which outlandish tales gain a degree of realism by seeming to be filmed by "real" people on poor quality equipment.

All of which leads me to wonder whether if, today, in order to achieve a "suspension of disbelief," it helps to have a recording device somewhere nearby.  Thoughts?

Also of Interest:
My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, is now available from Small Press Distribution.  Click here.

Review of The Cheapskates by David Lehman,  click here, and another by Michael Lally (with my poem on Chuck Close),  click here.

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...

The Unreal Thing: Thoughts on the Perfect Polly Infomercial (with Help from Alexander Pope, David Trinidad and John Dewey)

In the insomniac wasteland of late night TV, the infomercials are often the most entertaining programs. Recently, I caught one with a mix of humor and science fiction worthy of a Philip K. Dick. It's for a pet named "Perfect Polly":
 

What's amusing about this little film is, of course, the cheesy, low-tech feel you get with so many infomercials.  And then there's the choice of soundtrack: the William Tell Overture (the same theme that began the classic Lone Ranger TV show).

But what I enjoyed most was the sci-fi quality I mentioned.  Doesn't Perfect Polly bring to mind all those Twilight Zone episodes where people get emotionally attached to some type of robot surrogate? 

And despite its comical quality, doesn't this gadget fascinate by the way it subverts the natural with the artificial?  After all, what's perfect about Polly is the fact that this plastic bird is an improvement over a real parakeet.  No feeding, cleaning or bird shit to deal with!

Perhaps Aristotle was right when he insisted that it's part of our nature to be drawn to acts of imitation.  Maybe that's why Perfect Polly got me thinking about "high culture" takes on the relation of the artificial to the real.

Recently I've been reading Windsor Forest, a beautiful long poem by Alexander Pope.  As he muses about the "green retreats" of this idyllic place, the poem's forest seems anything but natural.  Along with its flora and fauna, it houses allegories of British history, moral lessons and a variety of mythological stories.

One of my favorite moments in the poem is a passage where Pope acknowledges that the forest he so loves has been created, not only by nature, but by the descriptions of poets:

I hear soft music die along the grove;
Led by the sound, I roam from shade to shade,
By god-like Poets venerable made:
Here his first lays majestic Denham sung;
There the last numbers flow'd from Cowley's tongue.

Despite the fact that Pope's appreciation of these woods has been aided by his favorite poets, this in no way detracts from the richness of his experience.  In fact, it's probably a mistake to draw a line between nature and culture in this poem.  The poets he speaks of, as natural beings, are merely doing their job in giving voice to the forest.  This is why he wonders, with their passing, whether the beauty of the woods will still be appreciated:

Since fate relentless stop'd their heav'nly voice,
No more the forests ring, or groves rejoice;
Who now shall charm the shades, where Cowley strung
His living harp, and lofty Denham sung?

To return to our own, media-saturated, time, it's safe to say that our culture today so informs our thoughts about natural beauty, that it's doubtful you can have one without the other.  That's one takeaway I get from the following conceptual lyric poem, constructed entirely out of movie titles, by David Trinidad:

Nature Poem

Till the Clouds Roll By
A Patch of Blue

How Green Was My Valley
Splendor in the Grass

The Petrified Forest
The River of No Return

Lilies of the Field
The Bad Seed

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Autumn Leaves

Lost Horizon
Gone with the Wind 

Early in the 20th century, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey already acknowledged the constructed quality of our experience, remarking that "the sense we now have for essential characteristics of persons and objects is very largely the result of art" [in its widest sense].

With Dewey, as with Pope, this feature of or lives can enrich our perceptions. However, often, he argued, the opposite occurred.  Rather than add to our experience, this fact of contemporary life detracted from it -- because what we perceived was not richness, but the iron cliches of tradition. This was one way Dewey accounted for the stale, boring quality produced by so many scenes of modern life.

In fact, he felt one task of his philosophy was the act of "intellectual disrobing" -- to help people recogize how much of their experience was framed by cliches.  And though he admitted that we could never totally free ourselves of "the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place", he hoped to make possible a sort of "cultivated naivete."

I wonder if the knowing irony with which we process much of contemporary life might not function as a kind of "intellectual disrobing", in that it's a way for us to acknowledge how prefabricated much of what we experience is.  Might irony itself help us see things in a fresh way?

Not sure.  But I have to admit that once I brush aside all the cheesy qualities of Perfect Polly, there's something about the bird that's seems kind of cool. 

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?

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?