In my last entry I made the brief (but oh so compelling) argument that I'd found the true difference between liberals and conservatives, the atomic philosophical point that fuels the perpetually antagonistic stalemate of partisan politics and compels the twenty-four hour news channels into unyielding fervor. It is not about gun control, or abortion, or varying emphases on the term "freedom," nor any other conveniently superficial issue. No, it's simply a preference of expression - whether you believe that the 'answers' to the world's 'problems' should be expressed in terms of absolutes or thoughtful relativity, black and white or shades of grey. I'm going to write more about this now (and this time we'll see if I'm familiar with English words other than 'nuance' and 'distinction').
Even if you buy my first premise, you might be asking why I insist on linking the monochrome/greyvie population with the two major political parties. Won't such cavalier oversimplifications of people's hard-fought worldviews satisfy none and alienate all? Maybe. Actually, ironically, I bet that only the monochromes will feel put-off. The grey-vies will probably be pretty into it. Let's continue.
Black and White means Good and Evil, the basic proposition of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Sure, everyone makes both good and bad decisions throughout their life, but at the end of the day you end up in one of two places: perpetual bliss or eternal damnation. There's no middle ground in finality, despite the middle ground of most people's decision-making career. Perhaps it's a matter of weighting percentages, as in you just need to shoot for 51% good to make the cut, but that seems a little arbitrary. For many it's a matter of having been saved by belief, so that their less-than-perfect track record on Earth is given a dramatic (and some would say unfair) boost in the final tally.
Eastern religion is usually attributed with the 'grey' slant on good and evil - there's no judgment here, both bad and good are necessary aspects of life, caught in an eternal dance where one never surpasses the other and neither ever disappear. This is the ying and yang, Shiva as Creator and Destroyer, and a whole rainbow of reincarnation options when it's all said and done. If you're kind of good, maybe you'll get to be a lion. If you're kind of less good, maybe you'll be a gazelle instead. There's no angst here as to whether the morality switch has been flipped on or off, because it's really more of a dimmer. The mood lighting of the soul. Am I saying that all liberals are Hindu at heart? Well, yes, but that's not very American, so no. I'd go with "kind of Christian," but...forget it, let's just call it Anglican and move on, shall we?
(I do think there is middle ground here, especially if you bring Emanuel Swedenborg into the discussion. Here we have a view of spirituality and the afterlife that seems compatible with both worldviews - DT Suzuki hailed Swedenborg the Buddha of the North for this very reason. This casting of heaven and hell still presents a basic dichotomy: Heaven is Good, and Hell is Bad. But, and here's the rub, there are infinite degrees within heaven and hell. Some people live "on the outskirts of heaven," others in the lower earth, or the desert, or to the north. There's a whole other heaven for polygymast Muslims who had the other nine commandments down. It's a varied place, with many shades.)
So this gets back to the political thing. I don't really care if you or I are grey or monochramtic in how we consider the minutiae of our lives, because we'll work with whatever we've got, but what kind of leader do you want? That's the question that I think most election rhetoric is really trying to get to. Do you want someone who will take a hard line on anything and everything, or someone who will thoughtfully muse on the possible repercussions of a given subject? Warrior chief or a philosopher king?
And I know you think I'm overstating the point, I hear your complaints, but in this case you're wrong. There are such thing as thoughtful conservatives, true. But when a grey-vie is reflecting on a situation, he knows there's no ideal outcome, and has already resigned himself to a compromise based on the various mitigating factors. The final decision is probably something like "okay, the best we could have done under the circumstances." A monochromatic worldview still allows for moral ambiguity, but only in the short term. The goal isn't to reach a compromise, but to make a decision - everything considered, is this good, or is it bad? And 'bad,' in this case, is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once the discussion's over, that thing, whatever it is, is not with us. Therefore, it is most likely against us (if you're unconvinced, just think Freedom Fries). And there's a good reason why most black-or-white decisions fall mostly onto the conservative platform. There are certain concepts that seem *obviously* good, like having babies. When you make the subject more complex, it becomes ambiguous, and there's no obvious good on the other end of the spectrum (not having babies?). If we're just shooting for 51%, this will fall back on the simplest good nine times out of ten. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Now, the next obvious question: aren't there hard-nosed liberals in the world, who make black-or-white statements about those very same ambiguous outcomes? Yes, there are athiests who get together in groups just so they can all not worship a god together. Yes, of course, and these people really are the worst human beings on the planet.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Election Special!
Like many people (specifically the kinds of people who also do this), I spend a lot of my time shoehorning other members of the species into neat little boxes. I’m not in any way proud of this, but when I’m interacting with people I don’t know very well I often find myself sizing them up, cataloging and indexing them for easier future reference. It comes out of insecurity I suppose, as if I need to make sure that their existence won’t shatter my preconceived notions of the world, that I can go on thinking the way I do about society and culture despite the addition of a new and unmeasured variable.
For the sake of efficiency I would really like to know just how many boxes there actually are, and I devote altogether too much mental bandwidth on this specifically fruitless pursuit. In many ways my mythology acts as a kind of workbook for this process, and I have the unfortunate tendency of burdening my characters with entire fundamental philosophies just so I can put them in a room together and watch them hash it out. Unless you’re George Orwell (and you’re probably not), that’s probably one of the surest ways to ring a subject completely dry of any potential nuance or depth.
My favorite classification system is the two-box model, always expressed as a fully contained absolute, as in: “There are two kinds of people in the world: the haves and the have-nots; those who have read Dostoevsky and those who haven’t; people who wash their hands after they pee, and people who don’t pee on their hands, etc.” I enjoy the audacity of these statements, the unapologetic finality of their formulation. There’s something invariably compelling in believing that a two-box declaration could be true, even if it does demean its subject by suggesting that an issue can be neatly divided into two mutually exclusive and polar opposite properties. I believe this is why so many of our foundational institutions are based on the premise of a two-box declaration - liberal or conservative, rich or poor, saved or damned, us or them - because they’re fundamentally easy to grasp.
My two-box-set of choice comes from Borges, who claimed that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I often pull this out when I reach an impasse in a debate, because I really do think it encapsulates an insurmountable difference in world view. And if I just can't agree with someone, I content myself with the admission that they're probably just a member of the other group (I'll leave you to guess which party I subscribe to, though I will say that Aristotle strikes me as a bit of a prick). The nuances of the distinction could make a blog entry (or a series of books) on their own, but it basically comes down to this: an Aristotelian believes that meaning and truth are found only in front of the eyes, and a Platonist believes they’re found behind them. Either the world exists on its own, and we’re here to observe it with our limited senses and do our best to describe our findings, or we’re the ones creating and experiencing the meaning all along, and we simply project our creations out onto the world. This is often recast as science vs. faith, or rationalism vs. empiricism (if you're a philosophy dork). Either way, I'm a fan.
In the past couple weeks, however, I’ve stumbled across what may be a new favorite. It’s a fairly basic formulation, but I think it neatly summarizes the national divide that dutifully rears itself every four years (much more often for most people) as Americans again decide whether it’s the Republicans or Democrats who will save/destroy the way of life that they’ve come to enjoy and rely on. Of course, many people are too mature to be goaded into this debate; they’ll tell you that all politicians regardless of title are liars and shameless opportunists, and these people are obviously correct. But for me that makes national politics just another interesting component of the American mythology, be it one that has further reaching implications (arguably) than what’s currently happening on Lost.
And no, my revelation is not that all people are either liberal or conservative. That’s flagrantly obvious and not even true on its face - very few people are explicitly either, though they may back one side or the other when up against the fence. No, I’ll let you guess the parameters of my new divide, as it occurred to me during the first official McCain/Obama debate a few weeks ago, hosted by Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren. When asked at what point a human fetus becomes a human life (which is an ever-so-slightly more nuanced way of rephrasing the pro-choice/pro-life debate), Obama answered,
“Well, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something I — obviously, the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one. But point number two: I am — I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe v. Wade. And I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors, or their spouses, or their doctors [and] their family members. And, so for me, the goal right now should be — and this is where I think we can find common ground — and by the way, I’ve now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform — is: how do we reduce the number of abortions? Because the fact is is that, although we’ve had a President who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down. And that, I think, is something that we have to ...”
And then McCain, for his part, answered:
“At the moment of conception.”
This was basically the tone of the entire debate. And it was useful to me, because it revealed a fundamental difference between the two candidates that I wasn’t expecting to see. That distinction has blossomed in a couple conversations I’ve had since then, to the point where I’m now willing to embrace it (until I’m forced to move on) as probably mostly true, and it goes like this: there are two kinds of people in the world (or at least in this election cycle) - those who believe the world is black and white, and those who believe it’s shades of grey.
Discuss.
I was going to expound on this further, but I think I’ve reached a logical word limit, so I’ll write more in a followup post.
For the sake of efficiency I would really like to know just how many boxes there actually are, and I devote altogether too much mental bandwidth on this specifically fruitless pursuit. In many ways my mythology acts as a kind of workbook for this process, and I have the unfortunate tendency of burdening my characters with entire fundamental philosophies just so I can put them in a room together and watch them hash it out. Unless you’re George Orwell (and you’re probably not), that’s probably one of the surest ways to ring a subject completely dry of any potential nuance or depth.
My favorite classification system is the two-box model, always expressed as a fully contained absolute, as in: “There are two kinds of people in the world: the haves and the have-nots; those who have read Dostoevsky and those who haven’t; people who wash their hands after they pee, and people who don’t pee on their hands, etc.” I enjoy the audacity of these statements, the unapologetic finality of their formulation. There’s something invariably compelling in believing that a two-box declaration could be true, even if it does demean its subject by suggesting that an issue can be neatly divided into two mutually exclusive and polar opposite properties. I believe this is why so many of our foundational institutions are based on the premise of a two-box declaration - liberal or conservative, rich or poor, saved or damned, us or them - because they’re fundamentally easy to grasp.
My two-box-set of choice comes from Borges, who claimed that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I often pull this out when I reach an impasse in a debate, because I really do think it encapsulates an insurmountable difference in world view. And if I just can't agree with someone, I content myself with the admission that they're probably just a member of the other group (I'll leave you to guess which party I subscribe to, though I will say that Aristotle strikes me as a bit of a prick). The nuances of the distinction could make a blog entry (or a series of books) on their own, but it basically comes down to this: an Aristotelian believes that meaning and truth are found only in front of the eyes, and a Platonist believes they’re found behind them. Either the world exists on its own, and we’re here to observe it with our limited senses and do our best to describe our findings, or we’re the ones creating and experiencing the meaning all along, and we simply project our creations out onto the world. This is often recast as science vs. faith, or rationalism vs. empiricism (if you're a philosophy dork). Either way, I'm a fan.
In the past couple weeks, however, I’ve stumbled across what may be a new favorite. It’s a fairly basic formulation, but I think it neatly summarizes the national divide that dutifully rears itself every four years (much more often for most people) as Americans again decide whether it’s the Republicans or Democrats who will save/destroy the way of life that they’ve come to enjoy and rely on. Of course, many people are too mature to be goaded into this debate; they’ll tell you that all politicians regardless of title are liars and shameless opportunists, and these people are obviously correct. But for me that makes national politics just another interesting component of the American mythology, be it one that has further reaching implications (arguably) than what’s currently happening on Lost.
And no, my revelation is not that all people are either liberal or conservative. That’s flagrantly obvious and not even true on its face - very few people are explicitly either, though they may back one side or the other when up against the fence. No, I’ll let you guess the parameters of my new divide, as it occurred to me during the first official McCain/Obama debate a few weeks ago, hosted by Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren. When asked at what point a human fetus becomes a human life (which is an ever-so-slightly more nuanced way of rephrasing the pro-choice/pro-life debate), Obama answered,
“Well, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something I — obviously, the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one. But point number two: I am — I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe v. Wade. And I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors, or their spouses, or their doctors [and] their family members. And, so for me, the goal right now should be — and this is where I think we can find common ground — and by the way, I’ve now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform — is: how do we reduce the number of abortions? Because the fact is is that, although we’ve had a President who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down. And that, I think, is something that we have to ...”
And then McCain, for his part, answered:
“At the moment of conception.”
This was basically the tone of the entire debate. And it was useful to me, because it revealed a fundamental difference between the two candidates that I wasn’t expecting to see. That distinction has blossomed in a couple conversations I’ve had since then, to the point where I’m now willing to embrace it (until I’m forced to move on) as probably mostly true, and it goes like this: there are two kinds of people in the world (or at least in this election cycle) - those who believe the world is black and white, and those who believe it’s shades of grey.
Discuss.
I was going to expound on this further, but I think I’ve reached a logical word limit, so I’ll write more in a followup post.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Superheroes and Death Rays
Ah, back from my summer hiatus (pretty tidy excuse, everything considered).
I've been on a bit of a superhero comic kick lately, which is as notable for me as it is decidedly not-notable for people like me, for most every other white male twenty-something bachelor who grew up in the 80's. I've never really been into comics. I'm very into the concept of comics -- I find their ADD-friendly form factor fantastically alluring, but I haven't come across too many that pack the kind of soul-battering psychological heft that gets me through the day. The new Batman movie helped, spiraling me into a week-long mini obsession with the more 'distinguished' Batman comics: The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, what have you. The best of these for me was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, where Batman visits the Joker in Arkum Asylum because he's genuinely concerned about their relationship. He's realized somehow that he and the Joker are not really people but actually the manifestations of polar opposite logical extremes, and as such will be perpetually locked in battle until one finally kills the other. This is really disheartening to Batman, and he wants to see if they can't just talk it out.
In general it seems like the Batman archetype has been especially fertile soil for comic writers, and almost every heavy hitter in the medium has had a crack at telling the Bat story at some point in his or her career. This might be because Batman is one of the few A-list superheroes who isn't actually a superhero, doesn't have any superpowers to speak of (other than the dubious power of 'super detective', attributed him whenever writers have to explain why Superman would ever want his help with anything).
Now, I'm not going to turn this into some kind of Batman blog (for the same reason that I am never going to ever mention Star Wars), but I do think superpowers are kind of a strange literary creature when you really think about what they are. I think about science vs. magic alot, how science has gradually replaced magic as our goto tool for causing miracles in a non-religious context. Literature (and perhaps reality) once relied on magic to both invoke and explain away supernatural phenomena - teleportation, curing disease, levitation, etc. At some point, maybe once Frankenstein was convincingly brought to life, we switched our metaphor from magic incantations to chemical formulas, the wizard traded in his wand for some brightly coloured test tubes, and we haven't really looked back since. My mythology relies heavily on technology as a foil for spiritual or supernatural 'magic,' and I'd argue that most allegories choose either one or the other (sometimes both) to get their ham-fisted point across.
But superpowers, they aren't really either. They've got elements of both, and sometimes lean more generally towards science (as in the cases of those countless misfortunate souls who fell into a vat of radioactive something-something and came out the other side with glowing eyes and a sweet leotard), but Superman's not a biological aberration, and he's definitely not a wizard. Maybe he's from a magic planet or something? I'm not really sure what to do with superpowers, but they're a pretty firmly entrenched pillar of the American mythology. If you're just following pop culture, watching the seemingly endless train of superhero blockbusters that grace our cineplexs, you might think that they were the only form of escapist fantasy the western world was really into. Maybe they're popular just because they require no background. They don't echo the traditions of ancient cultures or reflect the strange possibilities of human invention, they just simply are. Superman can fly, the Flash can run really fast (because of a ring? What's that all about?). End of story. Bring on the bosomy villainess and let's get on with this thing.
So, yeah, that's all I've got on that. In an almost unrelated note, I'd like to briefly mention some real life technological magic that's pretty entertaining. I'm referring of course to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (read: massive death ray), taking up 27 km of prime real estate on the France-Swiss border. I don't have any real reasons to bring this up, but I do have two fake reasons that I'm willing to justify if I must.
1) This thing actually might help bridge the disconnect between superpowers and technology, since photographs of it look eerily like they were pulled straight from a comic book:
(more photos here)
2. Trying to grasp even a basic understanding of what this thing does requires accepting statements that sound like the brainchild of Arthur C. Clarke on his third cup of coffee.
From wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons...When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics..."
The best bit is where the article admits that because an experiment of this magnitude has never before been attempted, no one knows for sure exactly what might happen. It has been cited by some (yes, actually) as a doomsday device, "as high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles." If you have any free time I would really encourage you to pursue the fractal depths of this subject. I've found that the deeper you go, the more the material shakes off its conservative scientific mantle and fully embraces the pure indulgent joy of magical surrealism.
I will leave you with this gem, from the wikipedia article on vacuum bubbles (one of the apparently plausible apocalyptic repercussions of flipping the switch on the LHC). I will have you know that this excerpt is both a) properly cited from an honest-to-goodness scientific journal, and b) "the best piece of English writing" that my friend with a PhD on the subject of English literature has ever heard.
"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."
Alan Moore's got nothing on that.
I've been on a bit of a superhero comic kick lately, which is as notable for me as it is decidedly not-notable for people like me, for most every other white male twenty-something bachelor who grew up in the 80's. I've never really been into comics. I'm very into the concept of comics -- I find their ADD-friendly form factor fantastically alluring, but I haven't come across too many that pack the kind of soul-battering psychological heft that gets me through the day. The new Batman movie helped, spiraling me into a week-long mini obsession with the more 'distinguished' Batman comics: The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, what have you. The best of these for me was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, where Batman visits the Joker in Arkum Asylum because he's genuinely concerned about their relationship. He's realized somehow that he and the Joker are not really people but actually the manifestations of polar opposite logical extremes, and as such will be perpetually locked in battle until one finally kills the other. This is really disheartening to Batman, and he wants to see if they can't just talk it out.
In general it seems like the Batman archetype has been especially fertile soil for comic writers, and almost every heavy hitter in the medium has had a crack at telling the Bat story at some point in his or her career. This might be because Batman is one of the few A-list superheroes who isn't actually a superhero, doesn't have any superpowers to speak of (other than the dubious power of 'super detective', attributed him whenever writers have to explain why Superman would ever want his help with anything).
Now, I'm not going to turn this into some kind of Batman blog (for the same reason that I am never going to ever mention Star Wars), but I do think superpowers are kind of a strange literary creature when you really think about what they are. I think about science vs. magic alot, how science has gradually replaced magic as our goto tool for causing miracles in a non-religious context. Literature (and perhaps reality) once relied on magic to both invoke and explain away supernatural phenomena - teleportation, curing disease, levitation, etc. At some point, maybe once Frankenstein was convincingly brought to life, we switched our metaphor from magic incantations to chemical formulas, the wizard traded in his wand for some brightly coloured test tubes, and we haven't really looked back since. My mythology relies heavily on technology as a foil for spiritual or supernatural 'magic,' and I'd argue that most allegories choose either one or the other (sometimes both) to get their ham-fisted point across.
But superpowers, they aren't really either. They've got elements of both, and sometimes lean more generally towards science (as in the cases of those countless misfortunate souls who fell into a vat of radioactive something-something and came out the other side with glowing eyes and a sweet leotard), but Superman's not a biological aberration, and he's definitely not a wizard. Maybe he's from a magic planet or something? I'm not really sure what to do with superpowers, but they're a pretty firmly entrenched pillar of the American mythology. If you're just following pop culture, watching the seemingly endless train of superhero blockbusters that grace our cineplexs, you might think that they were the only form of escapist fantasy the western world was really into. Maybe they're popular just because they require no background. They don't echo the traditions of ancient cultures or reflect the strange possibilities of human invention, they just simply are. Superman can fly, the Flash can run really fast (because of a ring? What's that all about?). End of story. Bring on the bosomy villainess and let's get on with this thing.
So, yeah, that's all I've got on that. In an almost unrelated note, I'd like to briefly mention some real life technological magic that's pretty entertaining. I'm referring of course to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (read: massive death ray), taking up 27 km of prime real estate on the France-Swiss border. I don't have any real reasons to bring this up, but I do have two fake reasons that I'm willing to justify if I must.
1) This thing actually might help bridge the disconnect between superpowers and technology, since photographs of it look eerily like they were pulled straight from a comic book:
(more photos here)
2. Trying to grasp even a basic understanding of what this thing does requires accepting statements that sound like the brainchild of Arthur C. Clarke on his third cup of coffee.
From wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons...When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics..."
The best bit is where the article admits that because an experiment of this magnitude has never before been attempted, no one knows for sure exactly what might happen. It has been cited by some (yes, actually) as a doomsday device, "as high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles." If you have any free time I would really encourage you to pursue the fractal depths of this subject. I've found that the deeper you go, the more the material shakes off its conservative scientific mantle and fully embraces the pure indulgent joy of magical surrealism.
I will leave you with this gem, from the wikipedia article on vacuum bubbles (one of the apparently plausible apocalyptic repercussions of flipping the switch on the LHC). I will have you know that this excerpt is both a) properly cited from an honest-to-goodness scientific journal, and b) "the best piece of English writing" that my friend with a PhD on the subject of English literature has ever heard.
"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."
Alan Moore's got nothing on that.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Back from the Brink
Oh yeah, I have a blog. I guess I should update it.
I've been incredibly drained lately, and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm worried that it might be the wearying hangover of indulging too much in my bloated and unwieldy mythology. Perhaps my brain has become so saturated with the desperate impossibility of turning my inner world into a full-time proposition that the remaining gorged pink mess is slowly suffocating my will to live. Faced with no escape from perpetual escapism, I'm now drowning somehow in the epic failure of my obsessive and unforgiving imagination. Or, more likely, I was bitten by a tick and have Lyme disease. I really hope that's what it is. I'm kind of obsessed with insects, and having such an intimate relationship with one would be pretty satisfying.
Anyway, before I die (or fall asleep forever), I'd like some opinions on whether fiction is a good idea or not. I go back and forth between the two camps - that good fiction can transport you to another world of ideas, perspectives and adventure, or that fiction is fun for little kids but otherwise pretty self-indulgent and irrelevant to the concerns of money and life and stuff adults are meant to think about all the time if they hope to retire / buy a house. This isn't an especially original debate, and I could fill my gullet with it by perusing Yahoo! user-groups if I so chose, but I'm actually not really interested in that question. At all. In fact, I don't know if I really buy that that debate even exists. Sorry I brought it up. Let me start over.
Obviously there is fiction out there that's meant for kids and undiscerning escapists, and this can take the form of genre novels or TV shows or movies or whatever. People don't really read anymore, so let's lump video games in there too. I think people used to be interested in "serious" fiction as an extended thought experiment, or applied poetry - the works of the Greats are all studies in language, classical philosophy and morality. But those topics are pretty much covered now, and so modern literature, or post-modern literature, or post-literature...whatever...books written in the past twenty years that do have swear words but don't have vampires, those books are left with a pretty uncertain place in our culture. I've tried getting into them, and they tend to be about nothing, except for maybe the wisp of an experience. They're fun sometimes, but they're not very relevant to my life.
I would bet that most people read a lot more non-fiction than fiction these days because it's okay to care about it, because it actually exists. Documentaries are quickly catching up with traditional narratives in the box office, real-life blogs dominate the Internet, and Reality TV is so big and obvious that even mentioning it seems like a waste of everyone's time. But there's a catch to all of this, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and that's what I'm trying to get at. Real life isn't really inherently interesting; it only becomes interesting once you can put it into a story, contextualize it and impose on it all of the themes and arcs and plot of fiction, cut it down and carefully edit it so that the pacing is more palatable and identifiable. Non-fiction is only enjoyable once it has all the characteristics of fiction, at which point the difference between those two concepts is somewhat moot; a small quibbling difference in scripting and authorship and little else.
The reason I bring all of this up is just to encapsulate a major frustration in thinking about this mythology all the time: creating a world is pointless, because it's never going to be as good as re-editing the real world.
But here's another thing: I'm obviously not the first person to be frustrated by this, and we're now starting to see the classic process of fictionalizing non-fiction working in reverse. Follow me here, that would entail the non-fictionalizing of fiction. There are some basic examples - the whole fake documentary thing, This is Spinal Tap and The Blair Withch Project. But the process is also sublimating itself into regular narratives. The British version of The Office was meant to be a fake documentary, but when it came over here, the American producers ditched the premise but kept its trappings. The camera shakes and goes in and out of focus, it catches awkward angles and occasionally spies on people unawares between the blinds of a window. Arrested Development uses all the same techniques. Movies, too, have been doing this a lot - filming in real locations rather than back lot sets, permitting bad or awkward lighting and shaky angles. Adding YouTubey content, trying to emulate the runaway success of YouTube, itself yet another supposed nail in the coffin of purist fiction. I think glossy filming is the visual equivalent to careful prose; in both cases people instantly know that they're being sold something, that they're not just observing some version of real life. Take away the gloss and you've got something. Reality TV, if nothing else, exists at the perfect crossroads between these two approaches; at any point in time you can't tell if what you're watching is more real than it is fake - is it real people forced into unrealistic scenarios, or actors playing parodies of themselves in real life? The Real Housewives of Orange County truly is the transcendent medium of our culture. I'm glad we've got that settled.
So then, that's got fiction and non fiction squared neatly away. Now the real question: how does one de-mythologize a mythology?
I've been incredibly drained lately, and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm worried that it might be the wearying hangover of indulging too much in my bloated and unwieldy mythology. Perhaps my brain has become so saturated with the desperate impossibility of turning my inner world into a full-time proposition that the remaining gorged pink mess is slowly suffocating my will to live. Faced with no escape from perpetual escapism, I'm now drowning somehow in the epic failure of my obsessive and unforgiving imagination. Or, more likely, I was bitten by a tick and have Lyme disease. I really hope that's what it is. I'm kind of obsessed with insects, and having such an intimate relationship with one would be pretty satisfying.
Anyway, before I die (or fall asleep forever), I'd like some opinions on whether fiction is a good idea or not. I go back and forth between the two camps - that good fiction can transport you to another world of ideas, perspectives and adventure, or that fiction is fun for little kids but otherwise pretty self-indulgent and irrelevant to the concerns of money and life and stuff adults are meant to think about all the time if they hope to retire / buy a house. This isn't an especially original debate, and I could fill my gullet with it by perusing Yahoo! user-groups if I so chose, but I'm actually not really interested in that question. At all. In fact, I don't know if I really buy that that debate even exists. Sorry I brought it up. Let me start over.
Obviously there is fiction out there that's meant for kids and undiscerning escapists, and this can take the form of genre novels or TV shows or movies or whatever. People don't really read anymore, so let's lump video games in there too. I think people used to be interested in "serious" fiction as an extended thought experiment, or applied poetry - the works of the Greats are all studies in language, classical philosophy and morality. But those topics are pretty much covered now, and so modern literature, or post-modern literature, or post-literature...whatever...books written in the past twenty years that do have swear words but don't have vampires, those books are left with a pretty uncertain place in our culture. I've tried getting into them, and they tend to be about nothing, except for maybe the wisp of an experience. They're fun sometimes, but they're not very relevant to my life.
I would bet that most people read a lot more non-fiction than fiction these days because it's okay to care about it, because it actually exists. Documentaries are quickly catching up with traditional narratives in the box office, real-life blogs dominate the Internet, and Reality TV is so big and obvious that even mentioning it seems like a waste of everyone's time. But there's a catch to all of this, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and that's what I'm trying to get at. Real life isn't really inherently interesting; it only becomes interesting once you can put it into a story, contextualize it and impose on it all of the themes and arcs and plot of fiction, cut it down and carefully edit it so that the pacing is more palatable and identifiable. Non-fiction is only enjoyable once it has all the characteristics of fiction, at which point the difference between those two concepts is somewhat moot; a small quibbling difference in scripting and authorship and little else.
The reason I bring all of this up is just to encapsulate a major frustration in thinking about this mythology all the time: creating a world is pointless, because it's never going to be as good as re-editing the real world.
But here's another thing: I'm obviously not the first person to be frustrated by this, and we're now starting to see the classic process of fictionalizing non-fiction working in reverse. Follow me here, that would entail the non-fictionalizing of fiction. There are some basic examples - the whole fake documentary thing, This is Spinal Tap and The Blair Withch Project. But the process is also sublimating itself into regular narratives. The British version of The Office was meant to be a fake documentary, but when it came over here, the American producers ditched the premise but kept its trappings. The camera shakes and goes in and out of focus, it catches awkward angles and occasionally spies on people unawares between the blinds of a window. Arrested Development uses all the same techniques. Movies, too, have been doing this a lot - filming in real locations rather than back lot sets, permitting bad or awkward lighting and shaky angles. Adding YouTubey content, trying to emulate the runaway success of YouTube, itself yet another supposed nail in the coffin of purist fiction. I think glossy filming is the visual equivalent to careful prose; in both cases people instantly know that they're being sold something, that they're not just observing some version of real life. Take away the gloss and you've got something. Reality TV, if nothing else, exists at the perfect crossroads between these two approaches; at any point in time you can't tell if what you're watching is more real than it is fake - is it real people forced into unrealistic scenarios, or actors playing parodies of themselves in real life? The Real Housewives of Orange County truly is the transcendent medium of our culture. I'm glad we've got that settled.
So then, that's got fiction and non fiction squared neatly away. Now the real question: how does one de-mythologize a mythology?
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Under the Influence
I've been traveling a lot the last couple weeks - France last week, back in Pennsylvania for a couple days and now in western Canada for a friend's wedding. Between the time zones and work thoughts I can't really tell whether I'm coming or going; without downtime to meditate on anything in particular I've been taking things more at face value, navigating life one moment at a time. Which is nice. Travel is about the closest thing I've found to true therapy for my affliction, because whenever I can take my daily situation for granted I immediately do; once stimulus is down I give my thoughts permission to wander off in richer pastures of their own. Which is also likely why I seek stressful work - it keeps me present. But with travel, all this travel - it also means a lot of airport and train time, and in those interstitial moments I've been fully enmeshed in the mythology, careening haphazardly through it as it touches off of bits of the landscape fleeting by the train window. I'm so deep in it right now that I couldn't even encapsulate it without signing a three-season sixty-episode contract, so I'll focus instead on something a little less indulgent (at least a tiny bit less indulgent).
My thoughts have still been swarming around the idea of a TV show, a serialized story about people in an office and the weird things that happen to them. The show takes place at an indeterminable point in the future, and though it starts innocently enough it invariably ends (about three seasons later, mind you) with one man at the center of the earth confronted with the controls to the planet. But I haven't been focusing on the whole arc recently, just the initial setup, the first few tactical movements that get the plot moving in an engaging direction, making it familiar-but-captivating enough that my hypothetical audience will track its inevitable path into weirder territory.
I'm going to get into the non-indulgent part in a minute, but first, how's this for a setup? In the intitial half-hour we establish that this show takes place some time in the future (when exactly isn't clear, nor is it vital), and that there are interesting, normal-seeming characters working together at the large and ambiguously motivated Spigot Corporation in some big city. Some are more motivated than others, more entrenched in the office politics of making and selling competitive and cutting edge hand-held electronics, worried about the overseas and youth demographics, worried about streamlining the interfaces and functionality of devices so that they can create a seamless work experience for the consumer, etc. Others are more focused on making their colleague's lives less pleasant and/or finding love in the cubicle across the aisle. Others still are hotly debating the course of government, worried about the larger scale issues of the world that can't be immediately felt in the daily grind of the office. This is normal life in the twenty-first (?) century. And then, suddenly, there are explosions, and lights going off and on, and network-tv sparks flying from computer monitors. People are running around and screaming and hitting their heads on the fluorescent lamps, and when everything finally settles down we find out that everyone is basically okay, but they are now trapped in the building. What's going on outside is unclear - it's political and societal, but by and large it's out there, and in here the lights are still purring and the walls are still intact. And for at least the first season, the Spigot Corporation's employees remain trapped in their sprawling work complex, living together and eventually even continuing their work. And the tensions of close-quarters relationships ensure enough melodrama for at least a 35% crossover audience with Grey's Anatomy, while I slip weirdly mythological science fiction material into the B-plot (and eventually the A-plot) of each episode. I could sell that, right?
But here's the deal. I'm not concerned with the structural padding of the show, only the themes that I'm able to introduce along the way. Among these are all the things I've mentioned earlier in this blog and countless more - the jungle, Internet spirituality, the forms, time travel, all of it. Even a space-adventure TV show fabricated from the unconscious workings of one employee's mind (though help me, I'd never explain it like that). And with all of these things, I'm completely convinced that I've hit upon original ideas never before imagined by the unsuspecting TV audience. While I know statistically that there really are no original ideas left (and philosophically, that original ideas aren't even a desirable goal), I still can't shake this obsession, firmly attached to the mythology that it is, that these characters and settings and plot-points are my own and no one else's. I don't think the ideas behind them are, or even the general themes, but there's still an undercurrent of elitism here that I would just as soon nip in the bud and get on with getting over myself.
So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to a couple protagonists from the show, and then tell you about the blatant literary influences that informed their creation in my mind.
The main character - let's call him Jack, because he's played in my mind by the same actor who plays Jack in Lost (whose season finale I'm pretty friggin pumped about). Jack's a higher-up middle manager at the corporation, in charge of overseeing the activity of many divisions. His mind is torn in so many directions by his work that he can no longer keep track of the chronological narrative of his life. Like the protagonist of Quantum Leap he wakes up every morning in a bed in some strange city and tries to piece his life together by the commitments on his schedule and the meetings he's reminded to attend. The only fabric holding him together is his own internal narrative of relationships and personal themes; otherwise he's one of the first true victims of post-time, moving back and forth through the time line of his life according to the dictates of his mind, and oblivious to the essential problems or exploitable opportunities of such a skill. I have all kinds of justifications for how this works, but none as evocative as the absence of justification in Slaughterhouse V. For all extents and purposes, Jack has become unstuck in time. So it goes.
Then there's the "other" main character - let's call him Locke, for the same reasons listed above. He works in the coding pit, exploring and defining algorithms of wireless connectivity and intuitive usability. His job is to make devices that will work the way that people expect them to, and even intuit what the consumer will want before they know they want it. According to the statutes of network TV stereotyping, this means that Locke is really into math and patterns (but unlike the statues of network stereotyping, he's more casually philosophical than humorously nerdy). In the course of his duties he's recently hit upon a very specific pattern that's been coming up repeatedly. It comes up especially whenever he's been able to distill certain complex functions (such as, "what people want") down to their basic formulas. Yes, just like the protagonist of Pi, Locke has discovered the "ultimate sequence" that holds within it the secret to life. And yes, just like in Lost, it can probably be expressed in a series of numbers, or at least some kind of wave pattern, that occurs repeatedly throughout the show.
I've also been thinking about a kind of "other world" that the characters of the show discover and explore through most of the first season. It's kind of like a virtual reality, kind of like the Matrix, kind of like a culmination of the Internet's potential, kind of like a half-dozen episodes of Red Dwarf, kind of like the spiritual world, kind of like a lot of things that probably aren't as connected as they are in my head.
My thoughts have still been swarming around the idea of a TV show, a serialized story about people in an office and the weird things that happen to them. The show takes place at an indeterminable point in the future, and though it starts innocently enough it invariably ends (about three seasons later, mind you) with one man at the center of the earth confronted with the controls to the planet. But I haven't been focusing on the whole arc recently, just the initial setup, the first few tactical movements that get the plot moving in an engaging direction, making it familiar-but-captivating enough that my hypothetical audience will track its inevitable path into weirder territory.
I'm going to get into the non-indulgent part in a minute, but first, how's this for a setup? In the intitial half-hour we establish that this show takes place some time in the future (when exactly isn't clear, nor is it vital), and that there are interesting, normal-seeming characters working together at the large and ambiguously motivated Spigot Corporation in some big city. Some are more motivated than others, more entrenched in the office politics of making and selling competitive and cutting edge hand-held electronics, worried about the overseas and youth demographics, worried about streamlining the interfaces and functionality of devices so that they can create a seamless work experience for the consumer, etc. Others are more focused on making their colleague's lives less pleasant and/or finding love in the cubicle across the aisle. Others still are hotly debating the course of government, worried about the larger scale issues of the world that can't be immediately felt in the daily grind of the office. This is normal life in the twenty-first (?) century. And then, suddenly, there are explosions, and lights going off and on, and network-tv sparks flying from computer monitors. People are running around and screaming and hitting their heads on the fluorescent lamps, and when everything finally settles down we find out that everyone is basically okay, but they are now trapped in the building. What's going on outside is unclear - it's political and societal, but by and large it's out there, and in here the lights are still purring and the walls are still intact. And for at least the first season, the Spigot Corporation's employees remain trapped in their sprawling work complex, living together and eventually even continuing their work. And the tensions of close-quarters relationships ensure enough melodrama for at least a 35% crossover audience with Grey's Anatomy, while I slip weirdly mythological science fiction material into the B-plot (and eventually the A-plot) of each episode. I could sell that, right?
But here's the deal. I'm not concerned with the structural padding of the show, only the themes that I'm able to introduce along the way. Among these are all the things I've mentioned earlier in this blog and countless more - the jungle, Internet spirituality, the forms, time travel, all of it. Even a space-adventure TV show fabricated from the unconscious workings of one employee's mind (though help me, I'd never explain it like that). And with all of these things, I'm completely convinced that I've hit upon original ideas never before imagined by the unsuspecting TV audience. While I know statistically that there really are no original ideas left (and philosophically, that original ideas aren't even a desirable goal), I still can't shake this obsession, firmly attached to the mythology that it is, that these characters and settings and plot-points are my own and no one else's. I don't think the ideas behind them are, or even the general themes, but there's still an undercurrent of elitism here that I would just as soon nip in the bud and get on with getting over myself.
So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to a couple protagonists from the show, and then tell you about the blatant literary influences that informed their creation in my mind.
The main character - let's call him Jack, because he's played in my mind by the same actor who plays Jack in Lost (whose season finale I'm pretty friggin pumped about). Jack's a higher-up middle manager at the corporation, in charge of overseeing the activity of many divisions. His mind is torn in so many directions by his work that he can no longer keep track of the chronological narrative of his life. Like the protagonist of Quantum Leap he wakes up every morning in a bed in some strange city and tries to piece his life together by the commitments on his schedule and the meetings he's reminded to attend. The only fabric holding him together is his own internal narrative of relationships and personal themes; otherwise he's one of the first true victims of post-time, moving back and forth through the time line of his life according to the dictates of his mind, and oblivious to the essential problems or exploitable opportunities of such a skill. I have all kinds of justifications for how this works, but none as evocative as the absence of justification in Slaughterhouse V. For all extents and purposes, Jack has become unstuck in time. So it goes.
Then there's the "other" main character - let's call him Locke, for the same reasons listed above. He works in the coding pit, exploring and defining algorithms of wireless connectivity and intuitive usability. His job is to make devices that will work the way that people expect them to, and even intuit what the consumer will want before they know they want it. According to the statutes of network TV stereotyping, this means that Locke is really into math and patterns (but unlike the statues of network stereotyping, he's more casually philosophical than humorously nerdy). In the course of his duties he's recently hit upon a very specific pattern that's been coming up repeatedly. It comes up especially whenever he's been able to distill certain complex functions (such as, "what people want") down to their basic formulas. Yes, just like the protagonist of Pi, Locke has discovered the "ultimate sequence" that holds within it the secret to life. And yes, just like in Lost, it can probably be expressed in a series of numbers, or at least some kind of wave pattern, that occurs repeatedly throughout the show.
I've also been thinking about a kind of "other world" that the characters of the show discover and explore through most of the first season. It's kind of like a virtual reality, kind of like the Matrix, kind of like a culmination of the Internet's potential, kind of like a half-dozen episodes of Red Dwarf, kind of like the spiritual world, kind of like a lot of things that probably aren't as connected as they are in my head.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
En Francais
I'm in France this week, filming a promotional video for an exchange program our college has with the University of Bordeaux, and doing my best to play the role of a jet-setting photog type. I think I'd need one of those ratty Turkish neckerchiefs to do the part justice, maybe some chest hair and gold-rimmed sunglasses. Oh well. C'est la vie.
I've found that the mythology usually recasts itself significantly while I'm traveling. The worlds I create in my mind are like a strangely-wrought defense mechanism; they help me contextualize the events of my day in a way that I can process without constantly overturning my foundational beliefs. Though the parts generally stay the same (with periodic additions), the construction of the whole mythological world is always shifting to accommodate the needs of the moment. I'm inclined to think of this as a weakness, an addiction even, because it means I'm often not really taking things at face value, only selectively digesting those useful to my secret project. But it also may be a bit of a wash - I'm not convinced that anyone can fully embrace other cultures without some filtering through their own, and if my system doesn't lend itself towards hasty judgment of others' actions and beliefs than I could probably be doing a lot worse. This is my first time in the land of the frogs, so naturally my addictive self has been on the lookout for new mythological fodder.
Last night Sean (my colleague) and I attended a speech at the Bordeaux museum of modern art. It was being simul-translated by our correspondent with the University here, so we were there out of respect to her, not knowing ahead of time anything about the actual presentation. The subject was utopian architecture, focusing on a post-modernist "anti-architect" from the 1950's by the name of Yona Friedman and his gang of like-minded anarchist buddies. The work itself consisted of a series of crude geometric shapes overlaid on crappy photographs of Paris. But with each variation of that theme, with each minute change in sloppily applied color, the presenter had prepared a lengthy and exuberant discourse on the pure bliss of Friedman's genius. It was really about the most pretentious thing I've ever experienced, and I don't say that with disdain as much as with bemused wonder that the speaker could deliver the whole thing with a straight face. What looked to be a five-year-old's scrawled rendition of the planet became a prophetical journey into the networks of the future, an environment-creating machine, a discourse on the horizontal and vertical ideals, a land of dreams created by dreams, a confused, uncertain meditation on desire, private property and sex.
And the room was pretty full - and people were listening to the French translation through their headphones, enraptured. Sure, it was interesting in a removed, intellectual sort of way, but I was wondering the entire time how this phenomenon could have spear-headed an entire movement, when none of it, literally not a scrap of it, even existed. It wasn't even style without substance, but simply nothing. There were no buildings, no plans, no output. This man had devoted his life to the absence of a concept. Some lines on paper, and the words dream and architecture volleyed back and forth in every permutation available. In my professional opinion, we were listening to a lengthy justification of one man's creative reaction to his own personal experience of the world around him. And because we were doing that, his work existed a little more than my own mythology does. The difference being, this guy's life-long dedication to self-indulgence made him a hero (at least, in the eyes of this largish French audience).
I'm not jealous, if that's the reaction I seem to be getting at. I doubt this Friedman guy is very happy, after being allowed to delve this much for this long into his own disconnected psychological musings. What I am wondering, is whether someone like this could achieve the same level of fame now. In the 1950's I think trends were probably easier to pick up on. Mass media was still a debatable concept, and culture was more localized, more easily manipulated by some especially charismatic figure. By contrast, culture no longer faces a glass ceiling of exposure. The internet means that every idea in the world is equally available to everyone at any given time, and people can hop on and off of thought-trains on a whim; there's no scarcity of culture to drive the demand. It also means that people can wholly invent their own culture, which I think I've more or less done.
In a broader sense, I think the internet means that everyone must invent their own culture, that this activity is no longer limited to nihilistic post-modern artists. For example, living in France doesn't necessarily mean that you subscribe to French culture, except for maybe the stereotypical trappings clung to tightly by tourist bureaus: cheese, duck-fat, chain-smoking, etc. There's no reason that a person in France isn't wearing American jeans, watching Japanese TV shows and drinking Chilean wine. In fact, I think that's exactly what French people are doing. Or some of them, anyway. Others have chosen a different mish-mash of cultural elements to call their own. As is everyone else in the first world, choosing the bits of culture that resonate personally with them. This is one of the things I'm most obsessed with, and it feeds directly into post-time.
Now, what I'm suggesting here hasn't yet been fully realized. There are still swatches of culture that can be pinned down pretty neatly to certain geographical areas (like, for example, the fame of Yona Friedman, on a night when Grey's Anatomy was probably on). But I think that's where it's headed, and I defy anyone to come up with a convincing argument that it's headed some place else.
I've found that the mythology usually recasts itself significantly while I'm traveling. The worlds I create in my mind are like a strangely-wrought defense mechanism; they help me contextualize the events of my day in a way that I can process without constantly overturning my foundational beliefs. Though the parts generally stay the same (with periodic additions), the construction of the whole mythological world is always shifting to accommodate the needs of the moment. I'm inclined to think of this as a weakness, an addiction even, because it means I'm often not really taking things at face value, only selectively digesting those useful to my secret project. But it also may be a bit of a wash - I'm not convinced that anyone can fully embrace other cultures without some filtering through their own, and if my system doesn't lend itself towards hasty judgment of others' actions and beliefs than I could probably be doing a lot worse. This is my first time in the land of the frogs, so naturally my addictive self has been on the lookout for new mythological fodder.
Last night Sean (my colleague) and I attended a speech at the Bordeaux museum of modern art. It was being simul-translated by our correspondent with the University here, so we were there out of respect to her, not knowing ahead of time anything about the actual presentation. The subject was utopian architecture, focusing on a post-modernist "anti-architect" from the 1950's by the name of Yona Friedman and his gang of like-minded anarchist buddies. The work itself consisted of a series of crude geometric shapes overlaid on crappy photographs of Paris. But with each variation of that theme, with each minute change in sloppily applied color, the presenter had prepared a lengthy and exuberant discourse on the pure bliss of Friedman's genius. It was really about the most pretentious thing I've ever experienced, and I don't say that with disdain as much as with bemused wonder that the speaker could deliver the whole thing with a straight face. What looked to be a five-year-old's scrawled rendition of the planet became a prophetical journey into the networks of the future, an environment-creating machine, a discourse on the horizontal and vertical ideals, a land of dreams created by dreams, a confused, uncertain meditation on desire, private property and sex.
And the room was pretty full - and people were listening to the French translation through their headphones, enraptured. Sure, it was interesting in a removed, intellectual sort of way, but I was wondering the entire time how this phenomenon could have spear-headed an entire movement, when none of it, literally not a scrap of it, even existed. It wasn't even style without substance, but simply nothing. There were no buildings, no plans, no output. This man had devoted his life to the absence of a concept. Some lines on paper, and the words dream and architecture volleyed back and forth in every permutation available. In my professional opinion, we were listening to a lengthy justification of one man's creative reaction to his own personal experience of the world around him. And because we were doing that, his work existed a little more than my own mythology does. The difference being, this guy's life-long dedication to self-indulgence made him a hero (at least, in the eyes of this largish French audience).
I'm not jealous, if that's the reaction I seem to be getting at. I doubt this Friedman guy is very happy, after being allowed to delve this much for this long into his own disconnected psychological musings. What I am wondering, is whether someone like this could achieve the same level of fame now. In the 1950's I think trends were probably easier to pick up on. Mass media was still a debatable concept, and culture was more localized, more easily manipulated by some especially charismatic figure. By contrast, culture no longer faces a glass ceiling of exposure. The internet means that every idea in the world is equally available to everyone at any given time, and people can hop on and off of thought-trains on a whim; there's no scarcity of culture to drive the demand. It also means that people can wholly invent their own culture, which I think I've more or less done.
In a broader sense, I think the internet means that everyone must invent their own culture, that this activity is no longer limited to nihilistic post-modern artists. For example, living in France doesn't necessarily mean that you subscribe to French culture, except for maybe the stereotypical trappings clung to tightly by tourist bureaus: cheese, duck-fat, chain-smoking, etc. There's no reason that a person in France isn't wearing American jeans, watching Japanese TV shows and drinking Chilean wine. In fact, I think that's exactly what French people are doing. Or some of them, anyway. Others have chosen a different mish-mash of cultural elements to call their own. As is everyone else in the first world, choosing the bits of culture that resonate personally with them. This is one of the things I'm most obsessed with, and it feeds directly into post-time.
Now, what I'm suggesting here hasn't yet been fully realized. There are still swatches of culture that can be pinned down pretty neatly to certain geographical areas (like, for example, the fame of Yona Friedman, on a night when Grey's Anatomy was probably on). But I think that's where it's headed, and I defy anyone to come up with a convincing argument that it's headed some place else.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Overthinking the Interwebs
"Mythology creep" is a big issue for me. I spend most of my time fostering a massive internal mythology, and this process is largely flavored by my current environment and activities; the world around me seeps into my brain's deeper mechanics and the mythology-of-the-day paces itself by this rhythm. These days I work a lot with media; my job is really just the ongoing process of funneling media, diverting it off the main reservoir and redirecting it along a series of more focused streams and riverbeds. This means that I spend about eight work-hours a day in front of a computer, in addition to two or three hours of computer-based personal activities (including my twelve-step therapeutic regimen). So when I tell you that technology has played a prominent role in the mythology the last few years, you'll understand the emphasis with which I use the word 'prominent.'
Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.
I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.
So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.
The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.
Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.
I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.
Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.
I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.
So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.
The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.
Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.
I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.
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