On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, by Eric Santner
by Guy Zimmerman
The shiver of political anxiety that winds through Eric Santner’s book OnCreaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald arises from the work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose theory of the “state of exception” figured prominently in the juridical foundations of the Third Reich. Santner’s anxiety is shared by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his important work Homo Sacer, and by Jacques Derrida in his lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, and it concerns the way Schmitt’s thesis is once again expressing itself in the world, particularly in America’s “war on terror.” Santner contextualizes Schmitt’s thinking by examining an impressive slate of German writers that includes Holderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Kafka, and also the more recent work of the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald. The Jewish “psychotheologist” Franz Rosensweig also figures prominently in the discussion. It’s a heady brew, in other words, and one of the most impressive aspects of the book is how deftly Santner manages to illuminate the nuances that differentiate these big glaciers of thought while also mapping their continuities.
While the book has no direct relationship with modern drama, Santner’s thesis sheds light on how dramatists from Beckett to Pinter, Fornes and Sarah Kane have depicted “creatureliness” on stage. Moreover, this subject matter, and also Santner’s treatment of it, can usefully be examined via complexity theory as marking the emergence of a new “structure of feeling” that connects to political, social and ecological realities confronting us as a species today. “Structure of feeling” is a term Raymond Williams defines in his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht as “the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.”[i] Writing in 1969, Williams’ language is reminiscent of how complexity theoreticians would define “network thinking” some twenty years later[ii], and that is resonant also with the “intelligent materialism” attributed to Deleuze and Guattari by eco-theorists such as Bernd Herzogenrath and Hanjo Berressen.[iii]
Those who have read Sebald’s novels The Emmigrants, Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, or his book-length poem After Nature will perhaps have been struck by how deeply embodied the experience of his writing is. A kind of exquisite melancholia arises from Sebald’s text, which drifts across the boundaries that typically separate memoir and fiction. This powerful affect is also actually the subject of Santner’s inquiry. He tracks this “structure of feeling” back through Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama to Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy and links it to a mode of being in which we internalize the alienating and oppressive weight of sovereignty by way of a “petrified unrest” typical of creatureliness. Santner calls this mode of being spectral materialism.
The intent here is to undermine the alarming analogy Schmitt makes in his political theory between the role of miracle in pre-modern theology and the power of the sovereign to suspend the force of law, and, in a unilateral fashion, reduce human beings to the extra-legal status of animals. Santner closes his book with an analysis of Rilke’s famous poem the Archaic Torso of Apollo, an analysis that posits a way out of the Oedipal dynamic that, arguably, animates Schmitt’s thinking. “Self-being-in-Otherness,” is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, a state of neighborliness one finds also in Deleuze and Guattari under the rubric of the “group-subject.” Santner’s argument about the role art plays in opening this “miraculous exception” from authoritarian domination is arguably an attempt to re-direct Schmitt’s thinking toward an anti-fascist agenda.
The continuities between the “spectral materialism” described by Santner and the “intelligent materialism” of Deleuze and Guattari underscore the tectonic cultural shift we are currently undergoing in this age of global bio-politics. The test of this new materialism is its capacity to illuminate the intricate subjectivities of art, and particularly the new(ish) structures of feeling that imbue certain works of art with a sense that they exist beyond us, in a future we are destined for. Though as a psychoanalytical work, On Creaturely Life orients itself quite differently than anything in Delueze and Guattari, I believe this only makes Santner’s work an ideal vehicle for illuminating these continuities. To even mention Deleuze and Guattari in the context of a psychoanalytic text is to suggest that there’s a baby in with the psychoanalytical bathwater we are in the process of discarding.
What is this “baby in the bathwater?” Perhaps how the creature of “bare life” conceals within himself a source of innate and irreducible freedom. As Santner puts it, “The question raised by all of Benjamin’s work pertains to the possibility of actively mobilizing the resources of remembrance in a post-Proustian world without direct or immediate recourse to the language and structures of religious life. And once again, what is at stake in such a mobilization is above all the possibility of suspending that dimension of our lives where we are delivered over to our creatureliness.” [iv]
Intriguing as it may be, one has the sense Sebald’s “spectral materialism” tells only half of an important story, and that what must still be addressed are the ways man is in no way separate from “nature.” Santner’s assumption that this split exists is itself problematic, suggesting a nostalgia for familiar psychological forms that convey a sense of being cheated, a case of Lacanian longeuers in which we pine for unattainable jouissance, and that impossible reuninon with petit object a. An intoxication is perhaps at work here, a Jones for ineffable longing. This passivity of affect tends to blunt the book’s arguments, particularly toward Part 4 where the analysis trails off like a very interesting but unfinished sentence. The psychoanalytic frame tends toward a reductive focus on the phallic function rather than an opening out in which the book’s undeniably valuable insights might contribute to an expansive discourse that includes other disciplines and the promise of transformation.
And yet, if On Creaturely Life feels a bit like a fragment, a beautiful ruin, this perhaps only serves to amplify Santner’s analysis of the feeling-tone of stunned awestruck-ness that characterizes German modernism from Holderlin through Celan, and its baleful significance for contemporary politics. In the technical jargon of complexity theory, Santner identifies an “adaptive” cultural discourse that is still in the process of emerging today, and he sheds light on hidden connections between this discourse and our fractured contemporary scene, and the potential for change it conceals. Given how forcefully On Creaturely Life reveals the linkages between the particular artistic-literary system that is its subject, and the dominant cultural and political systems that shape our experience, we can perhaps afford to cut Santner some slack on his occasional over-reliance on psychoanalytic reasoning.
NOTES
[i] Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 17
[ii] Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 233
Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier, 2011
by Guy Zimmerman
Far away among the stars a planet holds your image in its heart. You met on a summer night. A single glance was all it took. Later, in your dreams, your heart fatally divided, you beamed out a signal of erotic distress, a covert invitation. And now the planet is on its way, a wanderer, dark and brooding – a Hamlet-planet traveling a winding path toward you. The date has been set. Lying back naked on a bed of moss you wait and hope and pine, as luminous as Ophelia. Wagner, of course, loops in the background – the awe-struck Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. Your first and only embrace will be a Germanic dream – the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, a final all-totalizing work of art. You will not survive but nobody else will either…
When I go to the movies these days I find it useful to embrace the notion that we are witnessing the conclusion of an art form. Like the fresco during the late Renaissance, I think to myself, cinema came into being through a confluence of economic, sociological and aesthetic factors that have now shifted such that the “movie” is no longer evolving as a cultural form, but instead branches out into new, emergent forms still waiting to be named. There continue to be movies made, but they are actually re-makes of other movies (or TV shows)…or they are late stylistic distortions, like the “mannerist” painters who brought the High Renaissance to a close. I’m thinking here of Rosso Fiorentino, Tintoretto or Pontormo, the painters who closed out the great arc of the classical fresco that had sprung into life with Giotto two hundred years earlier, and reached its peak with Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian.
Characterized by compositional extravagances and chromatic excesses of one kind or another, the Mannerists explored the outer reaches of the form. The funders of art, meanwhile, moved from the Church to the private elite, and commissions for large altar pieces gave way to portraiture and still lives better served by paintings on canvas. Likewise, I think to myself, to the extent that cinema continues to evolve as a large-screen public projection (as opposed to cable, Netflix, or YouTube), it does so in a mannerist direction. One of the best examples of a “mannerist” auteur would be Lars Von Trier, and Exhibit A might be his recent film Melancholia.
Anchored by Kirsten Dunst’s strong performance in the lead role, the film tracks the final months of human life as a rogue planet, Melancholia, completes a collision course with planet earth. The film opens with a long sprawling disaster of a wedding, Dunst’s Justine ditching the groom at the last moment, newly committed to the planet she has glimpsed eclipsing a star in the tail of Scorpio high above. This abortive wedding is staged by Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsburg) and her billionaire husband John (Keifer Sutherland), and takes place on the grounds of John’s lavish estate. The long second act involves Justine’s return to the estate some months later as the errant planet approaches. She looks on with great sadness as Claire and John reassure their young son that the planet will safely fly-by, a unique event to be savored later in scrap books and stories by the fire. They devise a sad little hoop contraption out of wire that gets placed on the heart like a cartoon valentine to gauge the advance or retreat of Melancholia. The planet looks so delicate in John’s fancy telescope that Claire whispers to her sister “it couldn’t hurt anyone.” Justine smiles mildly, knowing her lover’s true intentions.
Justine councils Claire to embrace the end of terrestrial life, which she views as inherently evil. In her melancholic logic she echoes Conrad’s Kurtz here, or Celine writing from the depths of the Congo about the nefarious fecundity of the jungle. Von Trier expands these downbeat self-assessments to a planetary level, creating in Melancholia a cinematic antonym for the interplanetary subjectivity of James Cameron’s feel-good Avatar. I think also here of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which Tarkovsky (and, later, Soderberg) made into a film. Fresh in our minds will be the decade of socio-political malfeasance we have just lived through, the transparent villainy of our elites having given us all a Boschian sense of human malice. Watching the film we experience the covert self-flattery of apocalyptic plots – all others will be punished, as we, the virtuous elite, observe the apocalypse unfold from a safe remove.
In formal terms, Melancholia is “about” the slow motion montage of its stunning title sequence; the rest is denoument. Here is slow motion that assaults our sense of temporality, the foundation of cinematic art. In Sauve qui peut (la vie)Godard famously turned to slow motion in an attempt to extend the life of cinema by driving it forward into something new. In Melancholia, Von Trier uses the technique to free-fall away from the art form itself; a different way of knowing, non-cinematic, animates the work.
One way to view Melancholia is that the apocalyptic collision it depicts is a goodbye to classical cinematic form – a final and complete Eisensteinian collision. In Melancholia, the cinematic line of flight completes itself in global oblivion, and we shift into a register of collapse, disintegration, the formation of a cloud of earth dust between Venus and Mars, the ember of the earth’s core disappearing with an interplanetary hiss. The film’s subject is itself: the end of things, the dissolution of forms under the threat of extinction. Von Trier’s slow motion puts the issue of time into abeyance – the planetary collision is a foregone conclusion sometime later, a completion that arrives for the species that, consumed by lack, continually says “no” to its own self-completion.
The film depicts a becoming-planet that can only happen in the shadow of calamity, a becoming-planet that, like all becomings, involves an embrace of impermanence – to become a planet is also to become the end of a planet. Every true marriage, says Melancholia, is a marriage of destruction, a move out of the terminal ambivalence of depression, toward a new embrace of mortality, particularity, immanence. The state of melancholy is a doorway to a different mode of being, continuously emergent, a distributed awareness that feels non-human or post-human, a state that opens out, perhaps, into the “immeasurable” of sympathetic joy untainted by self.
Close to a year ago I posted a longer dramatic monologue called Snout. I recall being anxious about deploying creative work in the TQ space, where I had been posting thought pieces on culture, but the experiment seemed interesting to readers, a welcome complication to the line of posts I had made. Djinn, presented below, is a companion piece to Snout and part of a triptych I expect to complete in the next few months. Djinn looks at the reductive power of a name, the trap of a name. The djinn in the piece is a trapped party girl, but also a deity figure – a djinn or genie. The element of nostalgic reflection in Djinn does make it seem like a fitting piece for this time of year, and I think its environmental themes pertain also to life as we are living it here in America on the cusp of 2012. Barbara Eden’s sitcom genie was a fixture of the past in which Djinn is anchored, and one of the many things I admire about Elizabeth Greer’s work here is how she could do justice to the ideas I’m preoccupied with, while also making Djinn into a cosmetics ad gone very wrong. As always I am in debated to Jeffrey Atherton’s visual artistry, brought to life this time by Brad Cooper’s inspired editing. —Guy Zimmerman
DJINN
Sometimes I think I was born at a very special time
When everything for a brief moment attained this kinda like
Perfect alignment
Do you have that?
Wild
They said that about me
That I was wild
I used to like the clubs yeah
And the sun coming up over Brooklyn to the East
I loved getting lost in the spell of those nights
That soft wild dark because we all can sense
A golden perfect place around the next corner
Do you know what it’s like to be caught in a trap?
Course you do – why am I asking?
Hey now, we’re all in a trap one way or another, my friend
You don’t have anything to worry about
Not from me
The trap releases when you learn to love the trap
Isn’t that how it works?
(titles)
You again – ha ha ha
But really
Look at me blushing
Was that really us?
Did we really do those things?
On the other hand I don’t know you at all
We never met
(then, listening)
Hear that…?
You definitely look familiar
Did I see you at the horseshoe bar?
Did we share a drink together?
Did you shower me with money on some dance floor?
Did I pass you on the street downtown?
Did you feel me in your heart?
Do you feel me there right now?
When I was a girl I used to get these high fevers
My brain would cook and bubble in my skull
I’d have this one hallucination where I’m standing at the edge of a field
In the shadows at the border of this little clearing in the woods
This meadow
And the grass is so wild and green it just throbs with color
Making my eyes ache there under the bright sun
But I have come on a crucial mission
I have been given the knowledge that somewhere in this field of grass
Is the single molecule, and on the molecule the single atom
Where the end of the world is about to begin
And it’s up to me to find that little atom and stop
The world from bursting into flames
Igniting into a storm of nuclear fire
That consumes the planet and everyone on it
All those I love and the millions of strangers too
And all their dogs and cats and all the wild animals too
The mice, the doves on the wing all consumed by fire and heat
Melting, turning to smoke and ash
And at the very last moment I suddenly know
My fever vision suddenly zooms in on this one blade of grass
In the middle of the field and I just fly there
Zero in on that single molecule,
Tunnel in even further to find
That pesky little apocalyptic atom
And I reach out toward it and suddenly of course I wake up
The fever has broken
I’m drenched in sweat, a soft breeze
Blows in through the window
Warm spring air, the sound of birds, my brothers
Throwing a baseball
You know, this air you breath is really delicious
It’s really starting to change me
I can definitely feel it kicking in
You thought I was about to say something about “the edge of chaos”
I wasn’t going to say anything about the edge of chaos
You made bad choices in life
You’re going to have to deal with the consequences
Me, I always hear the roar outside the door
The roar of romance and danger
The ecstatic parade of the divine
Money raining down on the dancing girls
A shower of gold falling from the purse of a god
“Happy New Year” tapped out in white dust
The lines Hoovered off a closet mirror laid out like a table
(Hears something distant. )
You know those magic shows they have in certain old movies?
The magician in the black top hat and the wand
And he has an assistant, a smiling woman
Who gets sawed in half
I always wanted to be that woman sawed in half
That woman in the box that hinges open
Where I’d be in on both sides of the magic trick
Both sides of the illusion, the sleight-of-hand
Half of me in the world of the audience saying oooh and aaah
And the other half in the world of the magician
Leading these suckers by the nose
But the world is not a magic show, is it
Or…mmm…what do you think?
Is the world a magic trick?
Or is it the kind of place where a thing is what it is
And we can rely on that
Where, for example, lip gloss is lip gloss
Simple and direct
And the same goes for me or for you
We are what we are…or…but…
We grow, we change, but something is unchanging too, huh?
Our soul, our essence is what it is…but it changes…?
And isn’t that confusing because things have to be…the way they are…
Or something…right…?
The silk scarf becomes a white dove
And we love it because it’s a total lie that also tells the truth
Things are always shifting into other things
The lie becomes the truth
The truth becomes a lie
Talk about freedom, a high wire act
Floating on air
We give things a name, “wild”
The name never changes
The name is a trap, a jar for the spirit of the thing named
The name that we are given accumulates a story
A history, a little narrative that is a prison
And what you see when you see me
Is a woman learning to forget her own name
A woman intent on being free once more
Venus, web, fly, magic, trap, silent –
What is my name do you think?
Do you even remember it?
In general I’m a mystery
A mystery woman
Some men don’t like that
Some men want to pierce the mystery
They said I was wild
That’s what they said
Me
They don’t say that any more
Is it wild to love the sky, the forests, the seas?
Pricks
Wild
Maybe I’m a just a lover!
Maybe I’m just in love with humanity!
Eh
Life is an ebb and flow
And what if I can see the future
My future, your future
Sure, you want closure
Questions that get answered
You’ve been that way since the pilgrims
You goddamn Americans
Always the same
You won’t stop ‘till you’ve covered the whole goddamn earth
In asphalt and for what?
A waste what a waste
And you won’t stop you won’t ever stop
I’d rather bang every last one of you
Than talk to you
Or know what’s in your mind
Drown me if you have to
Burn me or drown me, do what you want
Just don’t show me the contents of your mind
Ever again
Maybe I’m just pretending to be your captive
Because it turns me on
Master
Do you like it when I call you that?
Master? Listen…!
Can you hear it now?
Sure you can
You can hear it coming, a hot wind
All the way from that meadow long ago
I can do lines now without even doing lines
Every breath is like a line now for me
And God holds the mirror except he’s a goddess
And she approves of me violently
And my sinuses are all stuffed up
It’s from giving you all I have
Over and over and over but I still like you
Would you like a drink?
Would you like some pills or to take a crap?
No? You’re good? Okay.
There are 521 ways to forget
I know because I counted
Trapped away in here all these years
While the rivers baked into streams
I mean someone please pull the plug
Yank the trigger tug the rope
I can’t speak for you but
I’d rather get dragged behind a car
Quite frankly
I’d rather get gutted by a boat hook
In all honesty
Someone give me a hammer
I’ll break open the sky, let all the air rush out
In Central Park at the break of day
I used to go sit by the side of that still lake
In the black water the mutant goldfish
Would slowly emerge
Big bulbous eyes and skin mottled orange and white
As if they had survived the radiation
As will a small percentage of humanity
Transformed into shuffling beasts and monsters
That hobble along the floors of deep smoking valleys
Bellowing to each other
Mating in the rocks and in the ditches
But I could stop all that
And sometimes I think I really did
I was big on recycling
I knew it was just a start
We needed to get to full sustainability
It would be like a dance
We’d be dancing with the planet
We’d restore the jungles and the prairies
Bring all the species back and mid-wife a few new ones as well
Unintended consequences were gonna be our middle name
It would be like a beautiful and terrible dream
We couldn’t ever wake up from
And no more wars because they’re boring and ugly
How to let go
How to sink back into the dark we rose out of
The warm dark of the womb
Tim Crouch’s England, Skirball Cultural Center, November 9, 2011
by Guy Zimmerman
We’re in the atrium of the Skirball Cultural Center atop the Sepulveda pass in Los Angeles when the tall Englishman begins speaking to us. His voice is clear, his diction flawless, sharpened by the cheerfully aggressive precision of high British elocution. An Englishwoman is with him, and she speaks to us also, her voice equally clear and certain. The two of them describe their love of art. They both have a boyfriend who is an art dealer, and they talk about him too. After a few lines volleyed in this fashion, we realize they are two performers inhabiting the same character, and, listening as closely as we can, it remains impossible to know which of them is the “real” character. As we are pondering the implications of this bifurcated persona, both performers abruptly stop speaking and stand looking at us, smiling. Their silence is friendly and welcoming, but dangerous nonetheless, the way all silence is dangerous when attention is drawn to it. After a time they speak again, trading lines with each other as before, and then, once again, they pause. After another long silence, the tall, smiling Englishman invites us to follow him to where the “show” will begin. As the woman hangs back to take up the rear, we follow the Englishman out through a set of glass doors, along corridors and down a set of steps to an exhibit space on a lower floor. There, we gather again and, as the last stragglers arrive, observe each other, we, the audience of Tim Crouch’s new play England.
Crouch and his female counterpart (played by the actress Hanna Ringham) begin again, telling us more about the boyfriend and his world class art collection. There are more long, smiling pauses too. Silence on stage, as many will know, is the repository of energetic mysteries, full of miraculous potentiality. When enough of this potential energy is tapped by the quality of a performance, silence can spill off a stage and flood an audience with the weight of time as it passes, and with the news it delivers of our own mortality. The silence in the gallery space of the Skirball Center during England was that kind of pure, high-grade theatrical silence. We in the audience shuffled and blinked, our eyes playing around the room, waiting uneasily for the two smiling Brits to pick up again.
The story our host(s) convey now begins to darken. We hear about a medical situation, a crisis that is testing the intense love the speaker(s) feel for their remarkably wealthy and supportive boyfriend. With each long silence the story leaps forward in time vertiginously. And now a boundary is breached; the happy, carefree days with the wealthy, art-dealing boyfriend are now a distant memory. After a shift of position toward another part of the gallery space, we come to understand that the story involves a coronary condition, the threat of certain and quite possibly imminent death, and very little to be done. The boyfriend is upset, enraged by his absurd powerlessness in the face of this, and yet, for the moment, remains loyal still. As the urgency mounts, an unpleasant sound begins to build off-stage, a whirling, crashing storm full of shattering glass. And now Crouch is off again, asking us to follow for Act Two of the performance.
Following Crouch upstairs we reconvene in the front rows of the large main stage theater space of the Skirball that have been taped off for us. Crouch and his female counterpart take up positions in the narrow aisle between the front row and the lip of the stage. Again, the tone has shifted, this time toward relief and gratitude – we have jumped forward again and the medical crisis has now receded. The two actors playing this oddly bifurcated character again stand looking at us, smiling. But the way they relate to us, in the audience, has changed – we are now being addressed as if we were a specific character rather than an undifferentiated, sympathetic Other. They thank us for coming. They tell us that they dreamed of this encounter, and announce that, after their long coronary ordeal, they are now at ease and full of joy. It becomes clear that the Crouch/Ringham character has received a heart transplant, and that the person they are now talking to is the wife of the organ donor. This donor, it also becomes clear, was critically injured in a recent terrorist attack – that crashing sound we heard downstairs. The Crouch/Ringham character was rushed to this foreign country – Pakistan, probably – to receive the fresh heart transplant. Crouch/Ringham’s encounter with the wife of the man who’s heart now beats him his/her chest becomes strained, awkward. Though a large sum of money was paid for this organ donation, all but a few pennies of this money went to the “agent” who arranged the transplant. The woman has lost everything, and her children have been all but orphaned. Worst of all, the woman does not even believe that her husband was truly dead when his heart was removed.
England is a play about transplants. The concept came to Crouch when he was commissioned to create a theater piece that could be “transplanted” into a gallery space intended for visual art. The narrative trajectory of the piece is elegant and sure, but the truly astonishing aspect of the play is how Crouch deploys his intensive pauses to “transplant” the audience across the boundary that typically separates stage spectacles from those who observe them from the safety of the seats. Over and over again, Crouch and Ringham come to a sudden halt, and it’s as if the unique and energized essence of the stage space keeps moving over us like a tide. It’s no accident that the organ being transplanted in England is the heart, the organ ubiquitously associated with human feeling, compassion. Crouch is linking compassion to the intensely present aspect of being on stage, and to the state of heightened, embodied attention we encounter there.
As the evening progresses I find myself looking around at the group of us in attendance, two dozen at the most, and noticing in each face the kind of complex and distinct humanity I might observe in a fictional character isolated and framed within a staged drama. There’s the old woman with the ginger-dyed hair who interrupted Crouch with acerbic questions like “so, what is this all about? What happens next? What was that long walk all about?” There’s the old man in the angora sweater with the craggy features and the kind, twinkling eyes. There’s the smiling, neatly dressed man from somewhere abroad, the Indian subcontinent, I imagined. There’s very tall slender man with the long hair and the weary, handsome face, and his statuesque companion dressed all in black. At another moment I notice, on the face of a playwright I know, a look of unbearable sadness come and go, a small symphony of feeling. With an astonishing economy of means, Crouch has carried us into the heart of our own mortality where we encounter the ineffable beauty of our connection with each other. And yet, the strength of England’s impact has to do with how Crouch has deployed this remarkably effective strategy to underscore, in the most visceral way, our moral jeopardy in West today, and our responsibility for the collateral damage of the global economy.
Sara Driver’s You Are Not I and a Visit to Paul Bowles
By Guy Zimmerman
I first saw Sara Driver’s film You Are Not I, which is based on the story by Paul Bowles, over twenty-five years ago now. The film was shot quite beautifully in black and white by Jim Jarmusch and features the actress Suzanne Fletcher (who, as it happens, I work with today in LA). A few months after seeing the film, I made a trip to Tangier to meet Bowles, and packed in my luggage a bulky 16mm print of You Are Not I that Driver asked me to pass along. After Bowles screened it, this print disappeared from sight. It was discovered in 2008 by Francis Poole, head of the Film and Video Collection Department at the University of Delaware Library, on a shelf in a vacant apartment in Tangier where it had spent the intervening decades gathering dust. A new, re-mastered print of the film was just screened in the Master Works section of the New York Film Festival on October 6th. Later this year You Are Not I will be seen again in a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, alongside Driver’s three other features. The film is such a strong piece of work I still find it surprising that more of Bowles’ stories have not been adapted for the screen.
Set in the vicinity of New York, You are Not I chronicles a possession, the aggressive conquest of one consciousness by another. This dark, shamanistic aspect can be found in many of Bowles’ stories, most of which take place abroad at the edges of the “civilized” world. Through shape-shifting, psychotropic drugs, spirit possession, occult conjuring, and plain old aggression, powerful forces of a primal nature are focused on vulnerable Westerners. Bowles’ characters, often tourists or travelers who have wandered too far off the beaten path, are so used to playing the dominant role they frequently fail to recognize mortal danger as it approaches. They are, in fact, often drawn toward their doom like the proverbial moth to its flame. Perhaps the most complete embodiment of this Bowlesian paradigm is A Distant Episode, in which an American linguist, eager to purchase an exotic trinket, is taken captive by a tribe of desert nomads who train him as a kind of clown-figure, hung with tin cans and chains, prancing and capering, his tongue severed at the roots.
The pitilessness of Bowles’ attitude toward his Westerners is balanced in the stories by the sensitivity he displays toward the Indians and North Africans who play out their lives in accordance with older rhythms. Vulnerable to charges of an exoticizing Orientalism, Bowles was arguably animated by a kind of reverse Colonialism, one that seeks to valorize the indigenous cultures he writes about at the expense of the West. With a great economy of means, each sentence in a Bowles story underscores the paucity of the Western mindset when compared against those it typically ignores and subjugates. Stylistically, Bowles turns the objectifying gaze of our positivist culture back on itself, using the tools of empire to undermine empire. The pre-modernist simplicity and directness of the language Bowles uses in these tales can be seen as a strategic choice, a way to lend a comforting normalcy to the terrain as Bowles guides us into the shadow lands where the Western ego will be dismantled. Bowels’ fiction nonetheless provides an experience of space that can offer a deep relief. His rejection of the West, and especially the West’s image of itself, is refreshingly fundamental and complete.
When I first encountered the elegant Bowles’ persona I thought of him as an American version of Michel of Andre Gide’sThe Immoralist, or perhaps an American version of Gide himself. Famously, Bowles was close with Isherwood, Capote and Tennessee Williams. He had been mentored by the composer Aaron Copland in Paris, and had spent time with Gertrude Stein. Later, during his long sojourn in Tangier, Bowles offered safe haven to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and other members of the Beats, becoming an eminence grise to the artistic elite of the Post-War era, that great cultural tumescence of American wealth and possibility. Later still, in the 1990s, Bowles’ profile attained the altitude of celebrity when Bernardo Bertolucci adapted his first novel, The Sheltering Sky into a film starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger.
Today, pondering the strong impact Bowles’ work had on me, I cross to the bookshelf and pull down the volume of his Collected Stories that Bowles himself gave me on that trip to Tangier in the 1980s. Tattered and coffee-stained, its spine buttressed by a strip of black camera tape, the book, remarkably, retains the distinctive scent – is it sandalwood? – that filled Bowles’ small apartment on an upper floor of the Immeuble Itesa hi-rise near the center of Tangier. Travelers who visited Bowles there could hear him hold forth with great urbanity over cups of mint tea, cookies and kif. It was winter when we arrived, and quite cold. In the living room you’d sit on low couches facing the window across the room. In my memory Bowles stands at the hearth rolling a cigarette between his thin fingers while delivering a dry anecdote, the loose tobacco gathering in the palm of his hand. The tobacco goes into the fire with a small burst of blue flame, and then Bowles packs the empty cigarette with kif, lights it up and passes it around.
Edgier somehow than plain marijuana, kif leaves you more alert in ways that explain how Bowles could have used the drug so extensively in his writing process. My companion on the trip, the poet Brandel France (now France de Bravo), had known Bowles as a girl. Her father, Alec France, had spent a year in Tangier working on a dissertation on Bowles’ fiction. We visited Immeuble Itesa several times before heading South to Agadir and Essaouira, and then inland to Ouerzazate and the edge of the Sahara. When Brandel went back to Cairo, where she was living, I stayed on in Tangier and saw Bowles a few more times before returning myself to New York City. Surprisingly, what made the strongest impression on me after all our visits was how alive Bowles’ wife Jane still seemed in his inner life, despite having died a decade earlier. He referred to her casually, as if she might arrive a bit later in the day, and with a palpable tenderness that seems at odds with the way their marriage is often viewed.
Strange patterns permeate the boundaries between life and art. The porousness of identity is a motif common in Bowles’ work, and it can also be detected in the story of his life, especially that part of his life which he shared with Jane Bowles. Married in their twenties, Paul and Jane were clearly more erotically inclined toward members of their own sex. And yet their marriage involved far more than simple convenience. The author of Two Serious Ladies and several other works, Jane was a heavyweight in her own right, and arguably a more innovative literary voice. Once Bowles began to publish – he had been a composer when they met – Jane was quickly eclipsed. The eeriness of the Bowles’ union is perhaps captured best by Millicent Dillon in the biography A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles where Jane is quoted as saying that Paul “wrote music and was mysterious and sinister. The first time I saw him, I said to a friend: He’s my enemy.” Almost obsessively fearful, Jane nonetheless followed Bowles abroad into arenas she was perhaps poorly suited for, settling finally in Tangier in the arms of a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. Drinking heavily, Jane had a series of strokes and, embodying the nightmare she seemed to have spent her life dreading, became aphasic and progressively incapacitated. Her life ended in 1973 after a long convalescence in a convent in Spain.
Returning from Tangier I found my relationship to Bowles’ work changing, my interest shifting from the writing to the writers themselves. I found myself especially intrigued by the odd psychic economy I now sensed in Paul’s relationship with Jane. Their bond seems to have been based in part on a shared sensitivity to an extra-personal realm of presences that Paul could navigate with much greater ease than Jane. In The Sheltering Sky, Paul’s surrogate (Port) dies in the empty wasteland of the desert while Jane’s surrogate (Kit) is transfigured and survives; in life it was the other way around. It didn’t seem possible that the author of You Are Not I would have been blind to the disturbing aspects of Jane’s fate – her fearful prescience, and also his own role in that fate, however inadvertent it might have been. It also seemed clear to me too that, however vehemently Bowles rejected his class, he was still of his class, whereas Jane was another creature altogether. Perhaps she played a crucial role in his creative metabolism, such that when she died Bowles slowly lost the ability to stand apart from the values that had formed him, and the fiction began to abandon him.
I find it instructive now, as the Occupy Wall Street movement announces a sea change in our cultural history, to look back again at Bowles and his work. Against the backdrop of our current dysfunction, the economic inequities and environmental depredations that threaten and confine us, it’s a relief to connect with a perspective in which the moral confusion of the West is a given. And, of course, the stories are beautiful, clear and unflinching in their inclusive scope, gem-like perhaps. Iconicized by his encounter with Bertolucci, Bowles remains for me a deeply human figure. And this humanity is connected most of all to the fidelity I sense he maintained for Jane, as if in observance of a connection between them that continued, below all the structures of identity and beyond the reach of the passage of time.
The United States of Stanley Kubrick
by Guy Zimmerman
Aspects of ourselves that we don’t know how to care for give rise to the complex patterns of distraction that we call our personalities. This notion came to me courtesy of Brittany Spears in a small burst of insight that happened also to illuminate the closing moments of Stanley Kubrick’sFull Metal Jacket, a film that has always haunted me. I was surfing around on Facebook and I happened to catch a clip of some Marines from the 266 Rein Division lip-synching Brittany’s song Hold it Against Me on a supply base “somewhere in Afghanistan.” One of my characteristic distractions is to locate something conservatives (or the military) are doing, and use it to climb up on my tub and start thumping. This is a habit-of-distraction I picked up as a child of the 1960s, and because conservatives have been ascendant ever since, it has served me quite well. I found it interesting to track how this critical impulse of mine reacted to the immediate vitality of the 266 Rein Division dancers.
Watching these homesick kids bust all those familiar music video moves will strike you as adorable or annoyingly vapid depending on your mood. I suspect, however, that the Corps is only too happy about this kind of R&R activity – these frisky youngsters will make many want to sign up and ship out right away. I got into trouble in the comments section on Facebook when I gave voice to some qualms about the context of this little piece of social media – an armed conflict we have no business waging, a conflict defined by staggering high-tech violence and civilian casualties. I also mentioned the fact that these kinds of fun-loving, extra-curricular video antics have been forever tainted by the depravity of Abu Graib. And yet I foundmyself honestly conflicted. Homesick kids having fun and expressing a kind of erotic joy in a collaborative performance piece; a surreal expression the infantilizing effects of American culture in an era of global capitalism – both statements embody equally valid responses to the video.
I’ve often had a kind of delayed reaction to the films of Stanley Kubrick, who is an anomaly in the pantheon of great American directors. Without question a major artist, Kubrick distilled the psychological and cultural contradictions of our time into a series of intellectually intricate and formally brilliant, multi-million dollar, studio-sponsored art films. From The Killing1956 through Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, Kubrick’s films explore the kind of double-bind Freud laid out in his late work Civilization and Its Discontents. Man is the creature who must repress his libidinal energies in order to co-exist, but doing so makes life into a pointless charade. Our sublimated energies give rise to technologies that only amplify our disconnection from experience, leaving us as dissatisfied as ever, especially when our repressed violence returns in the form of devastating conflicts. The best we can do, given our situation, the story goes, is to endlessly distract ourselves, and here, at least, technology is our friend.
The visual motifs Kubrick deploys to explore this fertile set of ideas retain a remarkable consistency – the Classical architecture of the chateau in Paths of Glory returns in the statuary of Claire Quilty’s home in Lolita…and in the ornate décor of the eerie after-world that closes 2001…again in the theater fight in which Alex and his droogs wage war against Billy’s rival gang in Clockwork Orange…throughout the 17th century European settings of Barry Lyndon…the Colonial buildings of Saigon in Full Metal Jacket…and the Boschian mansion where the oddly non-erotic orgy takes place in Eyes Wide Shut. The “Ophuls-ian” tracking shots through the maze of trenches in Paths of Glory repeats in the chase through the labyrinth of The Shining, Nicholson’s Jack Torrance limping after his son in an Oedipal rage that shows up somewhere in every Kubrick film, chin tucked, eyes gazing up in a rictus of primal aggression.
Kubrick’s work is devoid of lyricism and he was uninterested in dramatic narrative, or character as it’s usually understood. Kubrick’s interest was the formal beauty of his films, which often achieve the internal integrity of a work of plastic art. They are art films, truly, and they achieve the object-ness of a painting or a sculpture while playing with the temporal and performative aspects of cinema. I wish Kubrick’s films seemed dated, but I can’t count how many times the lurid characters who shuffled through the corridors of power in the Bush-Cheney regime reminded me of Strangelove’s primitive Generals Buck Turdgison or Jack D. Ripper, or the smug Joker from Full Metal Jacket, or the self-satisfied yuppie doctor played by Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut or even, in rare cases, the noble but deluded Colonel Dax who Kirk Douglas brought to life in Paths of Glory.
If Kubrick is vulnerable to criticism it’s that his work is almost autistic in its chilly formalism – he’s all shell, no mollusk. But if you want to write him off you must at least consider his continued relevance. This relevance was cemented when I saw a report on the infamous meeting in June of wealthy conservatives in the Rocky mountains. Hosted by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire Hardy Boys of the American right, the group gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Resort at Bachelor Gulch, a dead ringer for the Overlook in Kubrick’s masterful 1982 horror film The Shining. The Koch brother’s faux grassroots Tea Party movement strikes me as the sociological embodiment of Jack Torrance, played memorably by Jack Nicholson. In thrall to the ghosts of oligarchies past, and driven crazy by an indolent paranoia, the Tea Party limps after poor Barak Obama through the frozen labyrinth of our political discourse dragging an axe.
There’s one camera move in particular that seemed to unlock The Shining for me. It’s about two-thirds of the way through. Wendy goes looking for Jack and she finds his psychotic “work” all typed up beside his typewriter. As she looks at the one line of prose Jack has repeated for page after page, we cut to a SteadyCam shot that pulls out from behind a pillar. The camera moves forward subjectively for a few steps and then the figure of Jack detaches itself from the field of view. The subjective shot has shifted into something quite eerie and odd – we have become the “Overlook” hotel. And this begins to explain quite a lot. The scene unfolds and Wendy knocks Jack unconscious and drags him into the walk-in freezer. A short while later one of the “ghosts” unlocks the freezer. Again, something has shifted. We, in our ghostly form within the film, have become corporeal, able to do things like open freezers so that the “horror story” can continue towards its climax. What Kubrick is commenting on directly here is the aggressive bloodlust that drives audiences into theaters to see “horror” films. Our concealed sadism wants to be satisfied and Kubrick wants to draw that out and capture it in the act, so to speak, in order to show us what lies beneath this particular form of distraction.
What is it, finally, that we are so intent on avoiding? If my own experience is any guide, beneath our distractions we can usually locate an amorphous unease, an undefined feeling of lack. As I’ve noted before in this column, writers like the historian David Loy view this feeling of lack as a major player in the course of history, appearing as the Original Sin of traditional Christian cultures, the alienation cited by Marxists, and the dukkha or “suffering” described by Buddhists as our fundamental challenge. If I resist the impulse to disengage via my characteristic distractions and instead allow my attention to settle down, I often discover that this feeling takes somatic form in some specific part of my body. If I rest there long enough a shift happens, the sense of lack opening out into a kind of quiet but expansive feeling of joy. What had been a source of visceral fear, a dark ground common to jealousy, hatred, greed – all the contracted states that reach up and seize us in the course of daily life – now becomes a portal to a vibrant immediacy.
I think again of Full Metal Jacket, which examines the process by which a human being is transformed into an agent of destruction. The film is loosely based on the book by Gustave Hasford, but as usual, Kubrick has taken the script in unexpected directions. The first half of the film is devoted to the institutional sadism of Marine Corps training, complete with an Oedipal murder and suicide. In the film’s second half we find ourselves in Vietnam on the eve of the Tet offensive. Mathew Modine’s Joker, who has secured a cushy job with the press office, finds himself on the frontlines with a platoon that is gradually reduced as it battles to regain lost territory from the Vietcong. Like the Marines in the Brittany Spears lip synch, these characters do not come off as deluded in any special way. Kubrick has gone to great lengths to establish their humdrum humanity. They find themselves in Vietnam for a complex of reasons (including the draft), many of them economic, as do the Marines in the Rein Corps video forty years later.
The film closes on an extended sequence in which Joker’s platoon gets pinned down in a warehouse district by sniper fire. As man after man gets picked off, it becomes clear that Kubrick has crafted this sequence to incite our aggression toward the unseen sniper. After losing several soldiers, Joker and a marine named Animal-Mother gain entry to the building and discover that the sniper is, in fact, a Vietnamese girl. Wounded, chased to ground, the girl lies on her back, plaintive, utterly vulnerable. The shot is eerie, intimate, and almost unbearably sad, the two Americans gazing down as the girl writhes in pain, begging for death. Our galloping aggression has suddenly been met by an equally powerful, equally primal compassion, and the resulting dissonance is what completes the “full metal jacket,” our slippage past any possible structure of stable, coherent values, any mental construct that distracts us from the full vulnerability of the immediate moment. Kubrick then cuts to a shot of the surviving marines marching through the night across the rubble that once was a city singing, in unison, the Mickey Mouse Club song. The rubble the Marines march across is the final ruin of Western culture, that elaborate cityscape of intricately justified distractions and evasions keeping dark oceans of lack at bay. The ruins are the work of a freedom long denied and pushed away, as implacable as the blankness of the supply base of the 266 Rein Division. With Kubrick, we have gotten more than we bargained for, those of us who are so accustomed to using our values as the basis for distraction.
I remember lying around in the living room of the house on West 3rd Street in Lexington, Kentucky where the phonograph, the record player, commanded the space below the windows that looked out toward the holly tree. I remember the album covers stacked beside the speakers – 12×5 by the Rolling Stones, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and many others that were only slightly less emblematic of that era. Set apart a little in my memories is the album cover with, on the b-side, the picture of the naked woman engulfed in flames. Dark haired and voluptuous, the woman raised her eyes toward heaven, transfixing my ten year old imagination with her beauty, her nakedness, and with the mystery of the broken chains that hung from her wrists. When I turned the album cover over I could contemplate the face of the singer, a close shot, the focus a little soft, of a man with dark hair and liquid, sensual eyes that made a strong impression, I could tell, on my older sister. The songs on the record seemed almost old-fashioned, the lush imagery salvaged from melodrama by the singer’s precise phrasing – the way his voice relaxed into its own depths and broke a little, not taking things too seriously but never ironic in its sincerity either. On the one hand there was the sense that these songs were offerings, confessions that moved as far as they could in the direction of prayers, and on the other hand they made no such extravagant claims and were content to remain ordinary ballads with catchy melodies – no big deal.
Thirty years later, in 2001, the singer’s new CD arrived, a Christmas gift I think, from my older sister probably. Ten New Songs it was called. I listened to it once or twice but it didn’t grab me. I thought the singer-songwriter –Leonard Cohen – had lost his edge, and the songs seemed over-produced and un-hip. Plus, without really knowing why, I had fallen out of the habit of listening to music. It wasn’t a choice, really, but at some point during the Bush-Cheney fiasco playing CDs disappeared from my daily routine. Listening to music had started making me feel like a consumer perhaps, at a time when I couldn’t stomach that identity. The counterculture had long since been emptied of juice and abandoned, conceding its irrelevance to the course of things in a “real” world that had been seized by ghouls and demons. Also, all the young artists making a bid for striking relevance had begun to seem inherently irrelevant to me: the packaging of persona, the pageantry of personality, the new combinations of moves emblematized by artists from Elvis to Iggy Pop seemed trite and over-worked in the corporatized era of the new century.
I don’t know why I put the CD in the player a few months back, but I was instantly struck once more by the deep ease in Cohen’s voice. The same seductive and disarming intimacy that had set that earlier album apart so many years before had been amplified so that now the voice seemed to emerge from some place the other side of a whisper, or from deep within the structure of the singer’s cells. The lush arrangements that had seemed over-the-top to me when I first heard Ten New Songs now seemed like a smart choice, a covering of ones tracks. “Can I experience this and be at ease at the same time,” the songs seemed to ask, examining love and death and other highly charged and defining experiences of humanity. Over the top but also somehow irresistible, this is music that aims to transform surreptitiously, shifting weight into ease, reconciling us to our situation.
As many will know, Cohen is a Zen adept in the Rinzai tradition who lived for many years in the monastery on Mt Baldy under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Having practiced in a related tradition for some time now I found myself listening to the ten songs with the ears of practice, appreciating the way Cohen was able to convey the experience of dharma via the over-familiar forms of the popular ballad. To my ear, songs like In My Secret Life and A Thousand Kisses Deep seem written and delivered in a purely meditative mode, all the forms of a long and successful career as a commercial musician are engaged with and purified simply because that’s what this particular trajectory entailed. All the songs on the album now seemed strong to me. Love Itself, the fifth song, is perhaps the clearest expression of the kind of affective experiences that come with a daily practice.
But it’s the 8th song on the album, Boogie Street, that had the strongest impact. “Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One,” the song begins, a soulful refrain, “you kiss my lips and then it’s done.” Death is being addressed here by a man old enough to be cultivating that acquaintance. I think of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the eerie accounts it contains of what our last moments look and feel like as we sip that final breath. I think of a sequence in my own daily practice where the instruction is to examine those very last moments – how the five stages of grief tend to seize the mind then, and what steps one can take to move through denial, bargaining, anger and despair toward acceptance and a return to presence. It’s always instructive to observe which steps in a meditation sequence we skip or gloss over in distracted, auto-pilot mode. Often in my own practice it’s this step, the one involving an encounter with the moment of death, the moment Cohen has, with rueful humanity, re-christened the moment of boogie street.
Boogie Street, Ten New Songs Leonard Cohen, Sony 2001
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The aim of such “impermanence” meditations is hardly morbid – these practices do not enervate so much as provide relief and release, and are actually among the most energizing and liberative meditations. We are turning to confront in its purest form one of our shaping anxieties, an anxiety that has always hovered at the edges of our conscious awareness. Under the tent of that encounter we can finally assess what we are to each other, how we should behave, even what music is worth the investment of time.
So come my friend, be not afraid
We are so lightly here
It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear…
Listening recently to Ten New Songs I was struck by the sophistication of what Cohen has accomplished, and by the way authentic understanding can permeate simple artistic forms. The rap about Cohen was always that he was a published poet first and a songwriter second. It always seemed to me Cohen used his literary credentials to inoculate himself against those aspects of pop celebrity that would have been a burden, preserving himself from the parade of shtick that got in Bob Dylan’s way, for example. But with this new work I found myself appreciating the songs on a purely poetic level. My sense was that Cohen’s celebrity was now serving to protect that essential poetic quality of repose in the grip of tension, a quality that now seems in danger of receding from our world. Who has time to read poetry anymore? Who has the mental space required for that contemplative experience in a world defined by frenzied business of the internet? Well, we still know how to tap into iTunes and Cohen’s ten songs are waiting for us there. The strength of the commodification that had drawn me away from commercial music seemed suddenly providential – a gift preserving our link to the essence of that more vulnerable literary cousin. Cohen’s voice, the deeply embodied way it lays back into the shadow-ground of love and mortality to give form to the simple truths it finds there, now seems to make a powerful case for the relevance of poetry in general. Along with the repose comes insight and compassion, life as a song full of sadness and glory.
The Politics of Internal Transformation
By Guy Zimmerman
The following is Part 2 of a two-part series. In this piece I take up the challenge of beginning to apply the theory of adaptive cycles to the processes by which we weave our perceptions into a coherent world. If Part 1 was on the academic side, this is decidedly more personal, exploring subjective states I have experienced, and their possible implications in terms of social history. Click here for Part 1
When I look out my window I see houses across a small valley, and the leafy tops of the trees that grow between the houses. The morning is hazy, and all the different surfaces of this landscape reflect the soft light toward me. The rays of light pass through my retina and become impulses along the branching lines of my optic nerves. My brain weaves these various scraps of visual sense data into a stable and familiar picture, and the sounds of birds singing and traffic on the 101 get woven in as well. My mind does all this work constantly, building on all the similar work it has done for years, re-composing a coherent-seeming world in which I can continue to seek out the things I need and want, preserve myself from what I do not want, and tune out all the rest.
One surprising recognition I have had lately is that the world I perceive – the houses on the hillside across the valley and all that surrounds them – is not, in fact, truly separate from me in the way I typically assume. When I look, I find that there is no me apart from these sense impressions and the memory of similar experiences of contact back through time. And, like other human beings, I myself am the product of a long, complex evolutionary emergence that has shaped my eyes and ears and mind to receive the sense impressions out of which I weave this picture of the world. It would be just as true to say, in fact, that those sense impressions of the houses across the valley ARE me, at least as much as anything else – my memories, my image in the mirror, my name – are me. And this basic error, this mistaken assumption of separation, explains why the kind of self-interested engagement described above – where I seek more of what I like and less of what I don’t – is always a deeply frustrating experience. When I stop making this error – when I open to the way in which that hillside across the way is not separate from me – I experience a sense of presence that arrives with an intensity verging on the ecstatic, but that also remains stubbornly mundane. A shift take place, an easing of tension in my shoulders. Often, a small bubble of elation will rise from the center of my chest to lift the corners of my mouth. Something stops not-fitting would be one way to describe this experience, but, at the same time, the mortgage still needs to be paid, my daughter needs to be delivered to dance class on time, and, at any moment, the Spanish Inquisition may show up at my front door. But perhaps the most interesting thing about looking out and being greeted by a world not-separate from me is how the experience registers not as a new discovery but, rather, as the affirmation of something I have always known.
The kind of fleeting recognition I’m describing here happens more often when I’m alone. It’s more challenging to have this experience of non-separation when other people are around, and the reason for this is how confusing and mysterious it is that they too could be not-separate from the world, which suddenly includes me as one of its minor details. Above and beyond the abrupt and, in my view, totally scandalous demotion this represents for me, I really just don’t get it, don’t understand how I could be so central and also so peripheral at one and the same time. In my confusion I assume, quite embarrassingly, that I was imagining the whole not-separate thing. Immediately I collapse all the way back into a hard-shelled creature scuttling along in search of the best deal I can claw for myself in a long, competitive haggling with an uncaring world. My sense, lately, is that this subtle cycling through states of connection and collapse – analogous to the four stages of adaptive cycles I wroteabout in Part 1 of this post – happens continually, right on the edge of my conscious awareness.
Lately, I’ve found it helpful to view this odd fact about other people – that they too are not-separate from the world of their experience – not so much as a puzzle I must solve, but rather as a mystery I can be curious about. It occurs to me that I experience then something like the sense of wonder that can be found in the wide eyes of infants when they catch your gaze – that studious intensity it’s so much fun to get lost in. For a baby to recognize another being looking down over the edge of the crib, they must already be entering what the influential psychologist Jacques Lacan termed the “mirror stage.” This is when the period of “symbiotic” union with the world of experience ends and the child begins to impute his or her own existence as a separate ego-form or self based upon what he or she sees in the eyes of the Other. The infant will become very interested in how the eyes of the Other respond to what they see. If those eyes are lit up with love, kindness, perhaps even longing, a warm bath of comfortable endorphins will wash over the infant’s nervous system. And if the gaze of the Other is full of anger and aggression, a buzz of destructive adrenalin courses through the infant instead. As the child matures, he or she will begin to theorize about what causes positive versus negative reactions in the gaze of the Other.
It’s generally assumed that infant development is a series of steps in the “right” direction, the direction of “reality.” But some modern cognitive scientists, Francisco Varela, for example, tend to agree with the non-dual wisdom traditions of Asia that our sense of separation is itself deeply delusional. Lacan, certainly, viewed the mirror stage as the beginning of a long flight away from the real into the neurotic alienation that is viewed in the West as “normal” ego development. For Lacan, the confusion of the mirror stage is cemented by the acquisition of language, the symbol system that allows us to navigate the social sphere, but that also seals us from our own groundless being. After this fall from Eden we are pursued by a sense of lack and diminishment, and a longing for completion. In our confusion we do crazy, destructive things like construct huge civilizations that drag the planet toward what Paleontologists now refer to as the third “great extinction.”
“Emptiness is the ultimate protection,” the Tibetan saying goes. “Emptiness,” as you may know, does not refer to “void” but rather to “empty of form.” Knotted with philosophical subtleties, the idea basically underscores the way any object or separate thing can be viewed as a complex set of factors arising together in an interdependent fashion that includes your perception of it. Part of the reason it’s so hard to express the nature of “emptiness” elegantly in a post of this kind is that words themselves are so much about the separateness of things, the “form” aspect of the pen that is, insistently, a pen. From the point of view of Buddhist psychology both these poles of the pen – its form aspect, and its emptiness or co-emergent aspect – are equally valid. The famous “middle way” of Buddhism involves holding both extremes in mind at the same time. Our problem, our “suffering,” arises from our inability to maintain this balancing act. Specifically, we have a strong bias in the direction of form.
It’s easy to see the Darwinian survival value of this bias – seeing the “form aspect” of the cave bear galloping toward you is central to your ability to pass your genetic material on to future generations. Today, though, the interlocking challenges of environmental degradation and social injustice that threaten the species can be traced to this same bias. I’m persuaded that this little glitch in human software explains certain mysteries – such as how, on our astonishingly abundant jewel of a planet, we could be so bent on self-elimination, and be pursuing exactly that with such single-minded fervor and devotion. It seems fitting that the urgent issues confronting us would prove so difficult to solve precisely because they are so complex and emergent – so much a result of the interconnectivity our reductive rationalism – our bias in the direction of form – runs counter to. Time to rebalance, in other words, in the direction of a protective “emptiness.”
Many people find it easier to form an emotional relationship to a state of mind when it is reified into a deity figure. Do that with this slippery concept of “emptiness” and you end up with the deity worshipped for millennia in large parts of Asia – Shiva. In the West the ancient Greeks handed down to us a version of Shiva, and we call this deity Dionysus, god of madness and ecstasy. You might be more intimately familiar with Dionysus than you realize – Sigmund Freud smuggled him into the culture in the guise of the subconscious mind, which he derived, to some degree, from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. From this point of view, when you go visit a counselor or shrink you are actually talking to a kind of priest mediating your relationship to this powerful archetype.
For me, an even better place to worship Dionysus is at the theater. Whatever the specific content of the play or performance, what we cherish most, if only covertly, is the conjuring of an illusion of “reality” that we can experience fully, form and emptiness reconciled. Buttressing each other, shoulder to shoulder in our seats, we discover the courage to witness together the appearance of reality rising up out of nothing to dance for a while under the lights, and then dissolve again into nothing but the memory of our applause. Here we find Shiva, the dancer, who, in the Tantric traditions articulated over a millennium ago, weaves continuously through a cycle of creation, preservation, concealment, revelation and destruction. I find it comforting to note how well this sequence harmonizes with the four stages of adaptive cycles – rapid growth, conservation, collapse and renewal. The fact that some environmental thinkers have arrived at insights similar to those of ancient Asian wisdom traditions would seem to underscore the strength of these ideas, and to encourage us to revise our habits of mind accordingly.
Human “Nature” and the Theory of Adaptive Cycles
by Guy Zimmerman
Part One of this post was written as part of the Master program in Urban Sustainability at Antioch University Los Angeles. I imagined a conversation between the Post-war Marxist critic Raymond Williams and the Marina Alberti, an urban design professor at the University of Washington who applies complex systems thinking to urban eco-sytems. Click here for Part Two
I am meeting with Raymond Williams and Marina Alberti at the concrete picnic tables atop Mt. Hollywood. Mt. Hollywood is the crest of Griffith Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the world, and a crucial refuge for my wife and I since we moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. These hills are vitally alive. We’ve seen them shift and change with fires, floods, earthquakes – the whole SoCal array of environmental stressors. Visually, the park is a chaotic tangle of the natural and the manmade, marked by crumbling roads, cracked drainage ditches and culverts, looping power lines and grafitti-ed water tanks. The park also includes a multitude of jackrabbits, mule deer, owls, coyotes, hawks, rattlesnakes and pebbled, darting lizards. Latino families, elderly Asian speed walkers in shaded visors, amorous gay ramblers, and members of every other ethnic and social grouping travel the park’s roads and trails daily. The result is a dynamic, complex array of human and “natural” systems.
Williams, Alberti and I sit and look out across the Los Angeles basin and talk about the trajectory of history as it pertains to issues of sustainability. The view from the crest is panoramic, with vistas South toward the Catalina Islands, and then East to the smog banks that lie close against the distant San Gabriels. But we are not here just to enjoy the view. Williams and Alberti have joined me to discuss my notion that ecology’s four stages of adaptive cycles – rapid growth, conservation, collapse and renewal – can be applied to psychological systems and processes, as well as to sociological and natural ones. If my idea is valid, I ask them, pointing to the city below, might it then be possible to construct a “unified theory” that elegantly explains the entire set of processes that have transformed the Los Angeles basin from sparsely populated semi-desert ranch land to a sprawling metropolis, within little more than a single human lifetime.
Williams opens the discussion by explaining how my idea about adaptive cycles and human psychology joins a long effort to reintegrate our thinking about man and nature. He goes on to review how man, eager to uncover the laws that govern natural systems, split off the idea of nature from that of God. The strange effect of this split was that Western man, in his ideas about himself, became progressively alienated from his own nature. “Most earlier ideas of nature had included, in an integral way, ideas of human nature,” Williams states, quoting himself. I suggest that the Tongva Indians who inhabited this region before our arrival would have found our habit of reifying the “environment” into a thing that needs to be defended or exploited to be a very eccentric view. Whether or not this holds true in the particular case of the Tongva, Williams responds, the salient issue has to do with how we relate to our own “nature.” To what degree are the forces driving unsustainable urban development manifestations of basic psychological dynamics such as ego development and alienation? Do we “reify” and split off from our own “nature” in the same way that, at the cultural level, we have separated from the environment? What would it mean to heal this inner split?
I ask Alberti for her response to these ideas. She and her partner Marzluff have described how urban ecosystems “consist of several interlinked subsystems – social, economic, institutional, and ecological.” Conspicuously absent from the list is the subsystem of individuals as psychological beings. And yet elsewhere Alberti and Marzluff have discussed the crucial importance “feedback mechanisms” between human decision makers and ecological processes, each informing and shaping the other. On the face of it, Alberti sees no reason why psychological well being can’t be defined in terms of “equilibrium,” “resilience” and “innovative response to crises.” But, she admits, the issue of psychology is problematic. Value statements about things like “well being” lead naturally toward prescriptive norms, and the specter of coercion begins to raise its head. Science is typically viewed as a refuge from this danger, a realm of fact, with values directed toward the separate realm of religion. But after nearly a century of scientific research into psychological dynamics, perhaps it would be possible to define a set of “green” psychological (or even neurological) factors in a pragmatic, empirical mode that doesn’t spin off in the direction of values. We at least can all agree that the resilience of the city spreading out at our feet would be enhanced by an understanding of the psychological systems that are helping to drive its continued development.
Given the recent midterm elections in the US, Williams is more pessimistic. Deep-seated psychological tendencies would certainly need to change before we could make a meaningful shift in the urban landscape toward sustainability. But the sheer historical momentum of coercive social relations leave Williams feeling skeptical that this is even a remote possibility. It’s all fine to discuss such ideas in the abstract, but real psychological opposition only manifests when there’s the threat of actual changes in who owns and controls which resources on a material level. The near certainty of environmental collapse, for example, has only fueled the determination of oligarchic forces in the US to darken the public mind with sophisticated disinformation and cognitive dissonance strategies. I ask Williams again about the four stages, and whether they relate in any way to the dialectical materialism of Marxist theory, where history proceeds by huge reversals, thesis and antithesis colliding always toward new syntheses, the entire process governed by social conditions. Progressives seem often to assume we are en route to a disruptive and traumatic collapse, and that, given our attachment to comfort and stability, deliberative processes will only take us so far. Who’s to say, however, that we won’t look back twenty years from now and discover that the “let ‘em eat cake” conservative intransigence of 2010 ended up energizing the movement to revise corporate law, unleashing a new era of progressive policy innovation?
While not exactly optimistic on this score, Alberti finds it interesting to think about resilience in terms of psychological and cultural analogues. What defines the “resilience” of an individual psyche as it relates, for example, to habits of consumption? What, on the level of individual psychology, echoes the “basin of attraction around a stable state?” Does the degree to which an individual psyche can tolerate alteration before “reorganizing around a new set of structures and processes” pertain in any meaningful way to sustainability? I point out how many of the cutting-edge green building initiatives originate today in Germany. Only 60 years ago Germany had been reduced to a field of rubble. Remade along with Germany’s infrastructure were the psychological paradigms that govern the Germans’ basic attitudes toward consumption and social justice. How much psychological resilience would be required by a similar shift in American sensibilities, and how might this resilience be cultivated? We need to understand how the demands of such an effort compare to the demands of coping with the environmental calamities that otherwise confront us.
Returning to my question about Marxism, Wiliams points out that the science of complex systems is so consistent with dialectics that it almost seems like an extension of it. He quotes the influential biologist Stephen Jay Gould about how Hegel’s laws concerning “interpenetrating opposites” and the “transformation of quantity to quality” line up closely with central tenants of the new science. The whole notion of a paradigm shift, where small quantitative changes accumulate in a stable system until finally forcing a rapid transition to a new state, arises from basic Hegelian dialectics. As Williams dryly points out, if there’s nothing new in complexity theory there’s little reason to expect policies that grow out of it to deliver new results. The task then becomes one of optimizing results given what’s possible. What simple actions can be taken, for example, to move us, even incrementally, toward a new paradigm defined by sustainability? It’s interesting to imagine visiting Mt. Hollywood another lifetime from now and looking out at a new kind city, one that balances economic dynamism with ecological viability. On a psychological level, what would be required to make that vision a reality? Or, to put it another way, is there any way to gain significant control over our urban future without an internal shift of this kind?
We discuss this further, Alberti suggesting that one feature setting complexity theory apart from dialectics is the concept of emergent form – how simple processes can generate new systems at much higher levels of complexity. There seems to be an adaptive capacity built into these emergent systems – they naturally seek to preserve, enhance and propagate themselves. Clearly, we’re back in the cycle here of growth, conservation, collapse and renewal that could usefully be applied to the processes by which we assemble our sense data, memory, emotion and thought into a public identity engaging in the social arena. Likewise, a truly sustainable city could turn out to be an “emergent form” produced by a multitude of small behavioral changes combined with larger paradigm shifts gathering force and complexity over the next few decades.
As a scientist, Alberti views elegance to be a feature of truth. She quotes the Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to support the idea that symmetry across different scales tends to be a reliable indicator of real advances in our understanding of scientific laws. In terms of ecology, symmetry would suggest the same basic dynamics are at work in psychological processes of individual actors as in the “natural” processes that govern fluxes and pools in urban areas like LA. In other words, we encounter the fundamental dynamics of over-consumption and environmental degradation as we navigate our lives and our relationships as psychological beings on a daily level. The advantage of arriving at some kind of clarity about this kind of “symmetry” is that steady, pragmatic steps could then be made toward a qualitative shift in the direction of sustainability.
I have not always been a big Country-Western fan, but someone posted a clip of Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris performing Earle’s Goodbye on Facebook a few months back, and it’s been haunting me ever since. Goodbye is hill people music, a Scots-Irish ballad that aims for an ideal economy of expression in which hard-won truths and lessons learned are delivered without adornment. Earle is singing about the ravages of heroin addiction, how a woman left him and he didn’t even notice. “I can’t remember/if we said goodbye,” is the simple refrain. It’s a line that reverberates endlessly against itself in ways that convey us to the heart of our own vulnerability. The reason Earle didn’t notice is that he was too high at the time; he was too high because of the intensity of his vulnerability, which is exactly what made the woman’s departure inevitable. Regret leading to self-medication leading to more regret – it’s the self-entailing nature of addiction that is being lamented here, a cycle we can all relate to because of how, in an amplified, technicolored way, it mirrors the neurotic knots we are all bound by, to one degree or another.
The visual aspect of the YouTube clip is as gripping as the musical content. The performance is from sometime in the mid-1990s, and Earle looks terrible at the mic, his face puffy and moist from poor health and too much comfort food. For most of the song he seems only provisionally present in his own body, as if at any moment an eviction notice might arrive. Emmylou, singing backup nearby, seems, by contrast, luminous and angelic, the sharp contours of her porcelain beauty achieving a kind of Scots-Irish perfection that helps pin Earle in place under the lights. We sense she’s here exorcising ghosts of her own – the loss of her cherished Graham Parsons, who “forgot” to say goodbye when he died of an overdose in ’73, for example.
Elsewhere on the web, Earle describes how he wrote Goodbye coming off a four year long heroin-cocaine binge he refers to as his “vacation in the ghetto.” He hadn’t written anything for years when, as part of a court-mandated treatment program, he was briefly given access to a guitar and Goodbye quickly emerged. The song belongs to the category of work created entirely outside the boundaries of any professional, or even artistic, ambition. It’s the kind of nothing-to-lose gesture artists learn to trust and value most, devoid of self-image agendas. In Earle’s case there’s the sense that Goodbye was a kind of Hail Mary pass that somehow enlisted the energies of grace, pulling him up out of the abyss. Standing there under the lights we see a man confronting the ultimate trigger of psychic collapse – the loss of connection to love – and singing about it.
The rhetoric of recovery is familiar to most of us today, either because we have embraced that process directly, or have read the fiction of Raymond Carver, or watched our share of Oprah and Doctor Phil. The enemy here is toxic shame, a distilled 12-step version of the amorphous sense of lack that is referred to in various wisdom traditions by words like original sin, dukkha and alienation. Here the violent energies of the psyche are turned inward. The bewildering loss of the “responsive Other” is a crisis explained by the idea that the self is somehow fundamentally deficient. A pervasive regime of self-punishment ensues, the discomfort of self-persecution being preferable to the challenges of groundlessness and ambiguity. The heart begins to collapse in on itself, forming an armored ball locked in place. Jets of inky black emotion get woven into the fabric of self images that accumulate a perverse credibility. Among the many seductions of heroin to a creative person is how effectively the drug cuts through all that, anaesthetizing the anxiety and neutralizing the self-punitive campaign. For a time, at least, the heart-mind opens again toward knowing…and then, of course, the merciless mechanisms of dependency begin to kick in.
If the Country-Western ballad is a perfect vehicle for the “discourse of recovery,” the clip of Earle and Emmylou performing Goodbye also sheds light on broader social correlates of the kind of collapse described above. Raised in West Texas, Earle has always seemed both authentically Southern and also a man resisting the knee-jerk nativist attitudes and corrosive sentimentality common to many Country-Western singers. One wonders how central a role heroin abuse played in his ability to walk that line in a region growing increasingly intolerant of dissent, and increasingly mesmerized by the vapid moral primitivism of homespun proto-fascists like Sarah Palin. In the YouTube clip, Earle radiates sorrow and regret, and his vulnerability illuminates some of the deeper and more alarming tendencies in our collective history, tendencies that can be traced back to colonial times, when Scots-Irish immigrants brought this kind of music from the British Isles.
The Scots-Irish were the last of the four waves of immigration from Britain during the Colonial era, arriving in the early 18th century to Pennsylvania primarily, moving inland toward the cheaper land and spreading South along the spine of the Appalachians. They were from Northern England mostly, the borderland between England and Scotland, a blood-soaked battlefield for hundreds of years until King James the 1st unified the two realms in 1603. Keeping the peace involved shipping huge numbers of people from these highly volatile border clans to Ulster County in Northern Ireland, where their warlike proclivities were used to control the local population. Within a few generations, tens of thousands began to move again, this time to the wild American colonies, where they quickly made life difficult for the indigenous people. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1829 marked the emergence of the Scots-Irish onto the national stage. Jackson promptly launched the infamous “trail of tears” in which tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw died on forced marches West in violation of treaties signed and agreements made long before with the US Government. The Southern aristocracy, Royalists who had arrived in America decades before the Scots-Irish, supported this rejection of Federal prerogatives. A few decades later the Scots-Irish returned the favor by shedding blood to defend the “peculiar institution” of slavery they had little to do with in any direct way. Their fighting prowess is part of what made the Confederate Army a force to be reckoned with, and to this day they populate the US Armed Forces, an informal warrior caste with a taste for ballads about hard times, true love and a refusal to capitulate.
Earle has always been vocal in his opposition to the ways Country-Western has been co-opted by a political system embracing militarism and hegemony for ends that have nothing to do with the egalitarian clannishness of hill people. The faux-populism of wealthy elites like George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh culminates a long seduction that began in the 1930s after Roosevelt ran over the American aristocracy like a locomotive. Over the course of the intervening decades Southern man has been slowly seduced by the corporate right, indulged by dog whistle rhetoric aimed at directing the Scots-Irish hostility towards outsiders. Violent rhetoric is remarkably effective at polarizing a discourse, and it is currently being used with abandon by the right to buttress a repressive social hierarchy that betrays the interests of poor whites as thoroughly as anyone else. When we act with violence, even rhetorically, we create a feedback loop that alters the world we encounter in ways that are easy to overlook. Our violence infuses the world with a sense of menace and threat, making it likely that further violence will soon be called for. In subtle ways, violence removes us from the shifting ground of experience, sealing us within paranoic forms of the ego, armored by self-justifying narratives of resentment that cement coercive social hierarchies. Progressives are blind to the ways those brassy put downs from Sarah Palin represent a bid for social control.
Steve Earle, Goodbye, Big Bad Love Soundtrack, Released Dec. 28, 2004
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The spectacle of the violent, self-excoriating soul encountering grace involves strong and visceral emotive contrasts. One way to view Steve Earle’s “vacation in the ghetto” is that it was a dogged exertion of integrity, a long campaign to counteract the ways a tradition of music-making was being distorted, and then redeem that tradition via the 12 Steps. Watching Earle you see a suffering, clammy, worm-like human with stringy hair and zero pride. You see the wound, the basic anxiety of insecure human form, and this allow Goodbye to bring us to the edge of transformative recognitions of our own. We all want relief from this kind of imprisoning anxiety, and Earle offers us a balancing action that cuts against oppressive current that dominates human affairs. He reminds us that it’s actually crazy how we are, shifting continually between sovereign states that are irreconcilable to each other, and suppressing all knowledge of our discontinuities. The trajectory of Earle’s career, hinging around Goodbye, suggests ways a toxic cultural pattern can be dissolved via expression. One of the pleasures of the age is that one can, in a matter of seconds via Google, turn from this clip of Earle in the mid-1990s to a more recent clip where, trim and on his game, he sings the same song ten years later. Change arrives, is the message here, in ways we might be wise to replicate on a collective level, exorcising the demonic cultural forces that darken our horizon.
Paul McCarthy, Wallace Shawn and a Mountain I Know
by Guy Zimmerman
There are beefy guard rails now on the road up Mount Lemmon, outside Tucson. When I was a boy the drive was more of an adventure, the steep canyons littered with the skeletal remains of cars that had lost control on the tight curves. Often my grandfather would have been at the wheel, bent hands steering the pickup or, at other times, the big Cadillac he’d earned with hard labor and quick wits. I’d watch as the topography outside the windows shifted from saguaro and mesquite to pine forest, and the big rock formations came and went, spinning majestically as the road took us around and upwards toward Summer Haven near the summit. Today my father’s wife Elena is driving and my father, nearing ninety now himself, sits in back telling familiar stories about the mountain, tales of heartbreak and family conflict – an American saga rich in betrayals, regrets and petty intrigue. And the mountain itself has changed, the tall forests reduced to ash and bare rock by the fire that raged here six years back, its fury stoked by global warming and the lowering of the water table. I’ve only been here a few times since the 1970s, and the country itself has changed along with the topography.
The covert victories of art are everywhere. Near Bern, Switzerland in the summer of 2008, a gust of wind swept down from the North across the grounds at the Paul Klee Center and lifted the massive inflatable dog turd into the air. As big as a house, the turd, entitled Complex Shit by its creator, the international art star Paul McCarthy, eventually came to rest, in a shower of sparks, on nearby power lines. At RedCat some months back McCarthy’s work was celebrated by Wunderbaum, a young Dutch theater company, in a piece called Looking for Paul. I didn’t see the production, but people were laughing as they told me about it. From what I gather, Looking for Paul begins as a tirade against the misanthropic obscenity of a McCarthy sculpture called Santa Claus in Rotterdam, a thirty foot high bronze replica of a kitchy Santa figurine holding, in one hand, a Christmas bell and, in the other, an immense butt plug. The Wonderbaum piece then turns 180 degrees and becomes a raunchy bacchanal, a homage to McCarthy involving lots of ketchup, fake feces and simulated copulation. Wonderbaum, in other words, devotes an evening to a collective exploration of the mysteries of McCarthy’s appeal – how an artist so obviously venal and obscene, so flagrantly corrupt in his intentions, has come to seem also so vital and essential, restorative even.
The history of art is full of surprises, but so, of course, is everything else. The meaning of what we experience is never fixed in the way we expect it to be. Our ability to arrive at a clear and definite interpretation of what happened yesterday is forever compromised by what happens today, and also by what will happen tomorrow and all the days after. This is true on a personal level and it’s also true on a historical scale, and we tend to shrink from this alarming tsunami of “groundlessness,” and to cling to ways of seeing the world even when they no longer serve us. As we wind our way up the mountain, Elena, a working psychologist, is telling me about recent insights into the nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that suggest a neurological basis for this “stuckness.” The issue is the frontal lobe, our big cortexes packed with banks of neurons that hold the imprint of traumas long after other mammals would have shivered vigorously and gotten back to the demands of the moment. Tattooed on our gray matter, the tigers that leap at us continue to do so long after we have escaped immediate danger. Listening to Elena talk, I ponder how the curves of the road she navigates were set long ago by my grandfather and his compadres as they pursued their very American dreams. The particular vistas reeling past the car windows, I realize, were also set by these asphalt encodings, vistas that now provide a backdrop for the impressions of tourists and, occasionally, for the memories of traumatized grandchildren like myself.
We fool ourselves into thinking that the settling of the wild West really settled anything. The “nature” our forefathers were intent on taming has simply receded into a new kind of wilderness that rises up within us and in our collective future. Paul McCarthy leads us to the edge of that dark and so does the playwright Wallace Shawn, another transgressive shaman-clown energizing the cultural scene. Both McCarthy and Shawn plunder the rich vault of fairy tales, combining that plangent, Disneyfied imagery with dank and lurid sexuality. A gnomic figure, Shawn’s aesthetic MO is to locate darker threads in the zeitgeist and dramatize them in such a way that they can no longer be ignored. Shawn’s recent play Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a violent and erotic dream along the lines of Bataille’s infamous Story of the Eye. Basing his text on a 17th century French fairy tale, Shawn concocts an apocalyptic saga of a scientist who has altered the food chain in vague and destabilizing ways that allow for cannibalism on a mass scale. The sexual escapades of this chatty sociopath are perverse and alarming, but no more so than the cocktail of lies served up 24-7 by Rupert Murdoch’s minions. Compared toFox News, the violent and raucous obscenity of McCarthy and Shawn is refreshing in its candor, and often deeply restorative, offering engagement with our shadow material. And the timeless historicity these artists lift so shamelessly from the fairy tales our children read implicitly raises the question of how exactly we got here.
– 2 –
I consider myself one of the lucky white Americans in that my ancestry does not include slave holders or Indian killers, at least so far as I know. But I’ve read my grandfather’s memoirs, his accounts of a boyhood spent on a sequence of farms in Kansas at the beginning of the century, and violence lights up the edges of the story. His father, August, worked his sons hard. The continual, incessant physical labor – scything, threshing, baling, plowing, planting, herding and tending and canning and all the rest – came with physical abuse as well, discipline enforced with the aid of a bullwhip. In their teens, my grandfather and a few of his brothers confronted the old man about this violence in a primal scene worthy of Sigmund Freud. Striking back, August sold the farm out from under them and rode off with the furniture for Mexico, where he bought a ranch and prospered for a time. When the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, August relocated to Northern California and died at the age of 105 after slipping on a cow pat in his barn and breaking his pelvis, a death sentence back in those days. My father met him there as a boy. A family trip North, a brief sojourn from his own boyhood of continual labor, soft only in comparison to what had been the norm in the preceding generation. Thrift and hard labor, a focused assault on the future in order to heal the wounds of the past – isn’t this what fuels the American engine of continual growth that is blighting the planet?
Complex Shit
In the carnival freak show of contemporary American life, I believe our shamen take the form of clown-artists like McCarthy and Shawn. Theirs is an art of violent juxtapositions and discordances, one that threatens to spill over into our “normal” lives and destabilize our false sense of solidity. I think of the painters Phillip Guston and Francis Bacon here. I think of R Crumb and William Burroughs. Donald Barthelme certainly also. I think of the playwright Irene Fornes and of the novelist Jane Bowles too. I think of Franz Kafka most of all – his gift for creating living dreams that only accrue relevance with the passing decades. These are artists of the “middle way,” artists who keep one foot firmly planted in the wretchedness of knowing we are completely in thrall to the worst things that happen to us, the childhood traumas stored in our cortexes; the other in the joy of being radically free in the embodied present, in touch with a limitless grace. How is it possible we could embody so completely both of these contradictory qualities at once? Such mysteries are made to be addressed by shamen or clowns…or a hybrid of both.
Driving through Summer Haven at the summit of Mt. Lemmon is painful. For me, these scenic vistas are littered with Proustian triggers that explode in great arcs of emotional energy above the darkened landscapes of my own shadow land. Here’s the rock formation called “Punch and Judy” where the tourists stop to snap photos, the scene for me of an old humiliation. Here’s Inspiration Rock, where I fled once in the grip of despair. Here’s the site of my grandfather’s old sawmill where I was almost bitten by a Black Mountain rattlesnake hiding beside the sawdust dump. It’s a helicopter pad now, maintained by the ever-vigilant fire department. The sense of being shackled to the past, the mechanistic cause and effect of emotional neglect leading to dysfunction, makes me long for the openness of dreams and art. I am drawn to work that reconnect us to thelimitless freedom that is also our birthright whether we use it or not. The hillsides are blackened now, denuded by that catastrophic blaze, but lit up already with the green shoots of new growth emerging through the ash.
As I say, the world has changed along with the mountain. I have, in fact, spent my adult life witnessing a long crime. In thrall to the delusions of Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss and the to blind imperatives of the Capital markets, the right wing stooges in the Supreme Court and Congress are working over time to reduce the American middle class to the penury of those in India and China. And yet, capital, always fluid, has fewer new frontiers today and there are signs that labor is beginning – despite everything – to recognize itself on a transnational scale. Something is shifting, perhaps, in the root paradigms of modernity, even as we collide now with very unforgiving limits in terms of basic resources. And while I agree with those who believe that a tipping point is being reached, I don’t think we can assume the familiar model of revolutions since the 18th century will still hold. Our time perhaps resembles the 17th century in that regard, and it might be good time to re-imagine our sense of our possible futures, and to break the hold of the “dictatorship of no alternatives” that shackles us internally. We turn to transgressive artists like Shawn and McCarthy for an honest mirror in which to track the pornography that is taking place around us. Clowns are uninhibited in dangerous ways, but they can teach us about the tangle of the heart, and they pull off in art a trick we are all called upon to perform in life. The past must be confronted before we are released into our freedom. The violence inflicted on others long ago must be experienced fully before love can be discovered there, and then, perhaps, all becomes possible once more.
I met Patrick Halm in 2003 at plays I produced in which our mutual friend Barry Del Sherman performed. Patrick and I spoke a few times before he let me know he made films himself. When I asked if I could see some of his work, he showed me Pulse. I found it intriguing.The imagery is instantly arresting, but what struck me most is the coherence of the piece as a work of art. The challenge with experimental films of this kind often has to do with completion and closure.The sudden contrasts and juxtapositions create the moments of surprise we look for in art, but we also want the full trajectory of a piece to have a revelatory quality of its own, the sense of an organized, cumulative impact.And Pulse had that for me. It formed a single and unsettling thought about perception and mortality, and the relationship between them. This year I looked again at Patrick’s films, and found they had only gained in relevance, as has the Brackage-Frampton tradition they continue and extend. It’s as if the steady flood of conventionally structured visual narratives has created a need for the associative openness these films embrace. The experience of viewing them raised several questions, and Patrick was kind enough to answer them.
Patrick Halm: Guy, I’m glad you asked about the relationship of film to theater and particularly experimental theater. One thing I often remember is that the first film ever shown was of a man sneezing. Then, a little later, the newly invented motion picture camera was turned to look upon a naked woman. Third in line came the theatrical stage.
Guy Zimmerman: The link to theater is interesting. When I see this work now I feel an oddly visceral kind of relief. We’re so continually assaulted by what might called “over-determined” visual narratives that the kind of open space here feels very welcome.
PH: Yes, you asked earlier about the different approaches between making commercial films vs. experimental films. For the record, I do not really like the term experimental. If it has to be categorized it seems to me that Scott MacDonald’s “critical cinema” is a better fit for the genre over all. It is all just film making to me. It’s true that separating out styles and approaches into different venues and stages ultimately does everyone a disservice, but I will get to that later. The main difference in approach, to me, is the role a script plays in the creation of the piece. All filmmakers write and work out their ideas in some form or another. Making a film outside of the charted waters of narrative often involves inventing a new method of organizing themes and concepts. The creative experience is much more upfront, even automatic at times. Filming a rehearsed, blocked-out scene is much different than experiencing even the most mundane activities through the eyepiece of a camera for the first time. Just the act of filming, watching and reacting, at least for me, can be a very intense experience much like playing a musical instrument in an ensemble. Filming pre-planned, blocked out sections of rehearsed scripts is often nothing more than a technical exercise. Still difficult, no doubt, and a practiced craft, but a different experience with a more predictable result.
GZ: Typically, people stress the differences between film and theater, but to you film seems almost to be a subset of theater.
PH: The early films shot of stage plays were meant as “recordings” to preserve the performance. All the major early innovations of editing and camera position were quickly needed to make it less boring and better represent the experience of the theater audience; and that is a crucial point, I think. The medium was being employed to replicate an existing experience — not to create a new experience. The relationship of the subject being photographed to the photographer is always present, and every photo is, to some degree, about that relationship. In commercial, narrative film this is what directors have to negotiate. The good ones make it work. But right away you can see the difference. Also you can see how it would be natural to want to remove or reduce this false relationship or façade, and explore a more direct and personal cinema. In some of my films I have played with this relationship and have more than once explored bumping up alongside the “façade” of scripted film. This has had mixed results. I’ve found that once viewers are given even the slightest wisp of narrative will, on their own, concoct the most incredible storylines to “make sense” of what is, by any definition, completely devoid of narrative.
GZ: What can you tell me about how this kind of “experimental” work relates to “experimental” theater? I was intrigued by your ideas on that.
PH: To a large extent we are talking about non-narrative works. I feel that once the trappings and hangers of narrative structure are removed, the piece itself, both in theater and in film, takes on a much more dimensional, spatial quality. The film or performance becomes an object in the room that must be negotiated. This negotiation goes on in real time, not in the programmed time-space of commercial narrative. When I say “negotiated,” I am suggesting that the viewer has to come to some conclusion on their own about how they want to experience the piece. This, to me, is the classic modern art, “anxious object” experience. At its best, the real-time space is transformed by the work. It’s that bolt of lightning that hits you when discovering a poem that has quietly been in your presence for years, dormant, until that certain moment arrives. The next thing is that, in both cases, the experimental film and theater mediums turn back onto themselves through a kind of self-examination. They both seem to aim at examining the medium itself by celebrating it and criticizing it. Also, in both cases, the abandonment of narrative allows a wider range of exploratory freedom. Curiously, the narrative structure is often one of the elements that gets explored or critiqued by the artist.
GZ:: I want to ask about really great narrative and how artistically crafted stories transcend the limitations of narrative. Whether it’s Fellini or John Ford or Val Lewton or Kurosawa – how do they do that?
PH: Guy, this is a great question. I would also add Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder here. When filmmakers talk about abandoning the narrative, they are talking about breaking down walls. They are talking about a narrative line that jumps tracks. All these filmmakers were in total control of the narrative source and limits in their films. They find and focus the point they want to get across in more places than just the story line. They allow the narrative line to be picked up entirely by the costumes, or the landscape, or a characters pattern of speech, or allowing some of the greatest character actors of all time the space to do what they did so well. OH HOLLYWOOD WHY HAVE YOU ABONDONED THE CHARACTER ACTOR!!! Not every line or page in a script is, or can be, gold. My point is that these filmmakers were not servants to the story line in their script. They drew out the themes they wanted to highlight from a multitude of artistic resources, not just the story line. The narrative served the filmmaker.
GZ: When, speaking about the strategies experimental, non-narrative artists use, you say, “Curiously, the narrative structure is often one of the elements that gets explored or contrasted to.” I often think that’s because of how central narrative is to our way of relating to experience, and how closely it is linked to issues of identity. The self images that shape our behavior are narrative constructions, to be specific. Can you comment?
PH: Yes, film’s linear presentation and form has lent itself very well to the “historical narrative”or “timeline narrative”, as it might be called. I wonder if this narrative link to our collective identity, as you call it, has not been usurped by an identity linked to entertainment or to “being entertained”. To me, the result of watching a film does not have to be entertaining, but most audiences are preconditioned to this, and expect to “be entertained” the second the lights go down. This is, of course, due to film’s early relationship to the theater. I think theater has in many ways moved on. What do you think, Guy?
GZ: I’ve always thought it was cinema that relieved theater of the need to be entertainment first and foremost. Or at least it revised the necessary ratio of art-entertainment in the theatrical equation. The difference between art and entertainment is, in my view, one of intention – the artist wants to wake us up; the entertainer wants to help us fall back asleep. Film and TV are much better at delivering that kind of sleep, the sleep of distraction and palliative emotions. The encounter with art is much more complex, though entertainment can certainly be an important part of the experience.
PH: Yes exactly. I read many types of things; novels, poetry, instruction manuals, blogs, emails, phone bills, computer code, street signs, etc. All of these types of printed material are full of signs and symbols, and complex with layered meaning. I read and take them in for different reasons, not just to be entertained. Not all of what I read was meant to be entertainment, but I might read it for that reason etc. (I take pleasure in reading antiquated instructions for games and operating machinery, for example.) For me, a narrative timeline is a hold-over from our oral tradition of storytelling. It is a useful device, like an outline on cue cards, for remembering the segments of a long story. All we are currently left with is the antiquated device and have lost the sophisticated cultured content. This ties in a bit to your last question about high and low narrative. Where is the film equivalent of “The Wrath of Achilles”? And I do not mean ”film adaptation”. The human device for remembering a sequence can be replaced by the medium itself. The film remembers for you. (Maybe that is a bit too scary for most.) With film, thought can take form and can be archived. I recommend “San Soleil”, by Chris Marker, from 1983 in this context.
GZ: Can you also give me an account of how you stumbled onto this work at the beginning and how you got involved?
PH: I have always approached making my films like objects. I have never thought of them as programs. Although there is a linear order to the images, to me that is nothing more than a delivery mode. For me, the approach is based on the study of art history and modern art. I am also interested in symphonic musical structure. I have never been much interested in making low narrative. It has always seemed over represented and limited in creative scope. There are many great films that fit this approach, but to me it seems the equivalent of creating all sculpture only in bronze, six feet tall, and of a realistic human form. After a while you just get tired of it. Many years ago, in a single afternoon, I experienced for the first timeMeshes of the Afternoon (1943), Anticipation of the Night (1958), and Wait (1968). At the time all these films were over twenty years old. I realized I had a lot of study and work to do if I wanted to join the conversation.
GZ: . I’m curious if this, along with technological shifts involving the internet – YouTube, etc – don’t create new opportunities to explore this “lineage. For example, we are having this exchange in the context of Times Quotidian – isn’t this the kind of “space” that might help you cultivate an appreciation for this aesthetic?
PH: I don’t have any conclusions about the internet as a creative environment. It certainly, like television, has potential. But more and more I see it becoming closer to a television experience. What the internet and YouTube, etc. seem to be good at is documenting and enshrining; seemingly into infinity. Finding a meaningful creative experience on the internet suffers from the same problem the commercial sites have selling soap or vacations – getting lost in a vast sea of meaningless data. Without an outside curatorial force the internet can only take you to where you desire. The very personal mental space that is formed while surfing the internet feels small and very circular to me. The opportunity of the internet I think, is to archive and catalog. The disadvantage of being a drop in the ocean is an advantage of equality. The smallest unknown, unseen act of creative expression can live documented and archived on an equal footing by any robotic search engine after a bit of time. The open space, perhaps, is best created by insisting and corroborating on it’s existence.
GZ: In your view, who are some significant filmmakers in this “experimental” lineage, decade by decade?
PH:Sidney Peterson 40’s, Jerome Hill 50’s -60′, Stan Brackage; Hollis Frampton 60 -70;s, Ernie Gehr 60’s-, Barry Gerson 60’s-, Larry Gottheim 60’s- Jonas Mekas 60’s , Abigail Child 80’s-, to name a few favorites. One thing interesting about the “lineage” is that it is very much a work in progress after the 80’s. There are still many undiscovered gems out there. This is in part because most of the work is screened for one night, if shown publicly at all. The result of this is that art critics seldom write about film and video in a way gallery shows or theater productions might enjoy. When a longer-running museum show gets mounted, the critics and the public are so ill-prepared that the show goes largely unnoticed in terms of artistic significance and gets reported more as a curiosity. To even have an opinion about where things are going you would really need to travel and seek out the work. Not a bad way to spend one’s life, if you think about it. So-called non-narrative film and video is the last gasping remnant of the original avant-garde lineage. Perhaps it’s best that it’s quietly bubbling under the surface waiting for its next moment.
GZ: When you say: “The main difference in approach, to me, is the roll a script plays in the creation of the piece,” I want to ask about documentary film, which is at least supposed to be non-scripted.
PH: Well, many documentaries are scripted, some more so than others. Many documentaries currently set out from the beginning to endorse a point of view. The documentary form has been often used as a way to present an activist point of view in a light that seems unbiased. A closer example of unscripted documentary would be something like Salesman or Sweetgrass. This dovetails nicely into what I was saying about narrative structure in an earlier conversation. To really document something objectively as possible, the filmmakers has to be willing to follow the subject line or narrative wherever IT wants to go. Documentary filmmakers with this more objective approach all talk about having hours and hours of shot film for a project, but have been unable to “find the cohesive story line” that they need to complete the film. They just keep shooting. Life does not always produce a story; but that doesn’t mean it’s any less interesting, or that there is no subject. Life often abandons the narrative, and yet remains a real experience worthy of exploration.
Patrick Halm received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School Of Design. His work has been featured in solo and group shows in London, Berlin, Hamburg, Vancouver, and throughout the U.S. Selected film works are distributed through Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. He has been living and making his work in Los Angeles since 1990. He is also an enthusiastic beekeeper.
Lemi Ponifasio / MAU: Tempest: Without A Body, REDCAT April 18-20, 2011
By Guy Zimmerman
The man slowly materializes, broad-shouldered, out of the darkness upstage. As he strides toward us into the light we see that he’s wearing a business suit and that his feet are bare and his face tattooed in looping, Polynesian designs. He stands and looks out at us and then begins to dance, moving his large body in quick, birdlike steps and sudden pivots. He rolls his eyes and his long, pointed tongue unfurls in the demonic gestures of ritualized Maori warfare. And now the man begins to shout, a long passionate lament or exorcism in a language we don’t know. In his business suit the dancing, shouting man makes the familiar sight of the human figure strange again, full of mysterious capacities. You can feel a weight lifting, the weight of assumptions we make about our true nature, a set of errors we cling to out of blind momentum and the fear of change and where change comes from. This remarkable dance arrives toward the climax of Lemi Ponifasio /MAU: Tempest: Without a Body, a version of Shakespeare’s final play stripped of words but conveying the wild spirit that hovers around the periphery of the original.
The dancing, shouting man might be a version of Prospero, the shipwrecked sorcerer of Shakespeare’s play, or he might be a version of the enslaved native of the island, Caliban. Also on stage at various times are a stunted angel, a golden man writhing on his back, a continual procession of monk-like figures gliding in and out, a man moving with an animal gracefulness on hands and feet as the droning industrial score gathers and releases sonic energy – it’s hard to know exactly how to interpret Ponifasio’s staging, and probably a mistake to try. The effects are primal and dreamlike but you can also feel the presence of sophisticated critical discourse underneath, and in interviews Ponifasio is quick to cite the work of Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil and the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben as sources of inspiration. Ponifasio also describes The Tempest: Without A Body as a response to the way enemy combatants were stripped of legal rights in Post 9-11 America, a development whose disturbing implications we currently seem happy to ignore. But on a deeper level, what Ponifasio illuminates for me is a Western habit of mind that has come to haunt the human species. He is using the stage to cast a spell, a prayer for sanity, and a shamanistic lament. And the reason Shakespeare’s play is a good vehicle for this project is that Shakespeare himself was a kind of shaman casting spells, using the mechanism of the stage to do so.
It’s curious how things happen. Small shifts get magnified over time. Choices become habits, and then grow into patterns that unfold and are sustained for a few minutes or for years or centuries, before degrading again into what has no pattern. If the capitalist system that emerged from England shortly after Shakespeare’s era is a complex pattern of this kind, can we locate any one quality that expresses its essential nature? Addressing this question in his 2007 book The Enemy of Nature, the End of Capitalism or the End of the World, activist Joel Kovel writes, “Separation/alienation/splitting is the fundamental gesture of capital.” Kovel goes on to detail how this essential “gesture” permeates the structures and processes of Capitalism across the various scales.
How did this work in practice? The reductive, analytical frame of mind that characterized Enlightenment rationalism allowed mankind to tap or exploit the energy stored in various bonds across a broad spectrum of human experience — everything from the cultural “energy” stored in the social bonds of traditional societies, down through the chemical energy stored in the molecular bonds of the hydro-carbon molecules of fossil fuels, all the way down to the vast amounts of energy liberated by the ultimate “analytical” act – the splitting of an atomic nucleus. The culture of capital has always been about the breaking down of complex wholes into component parts that can then be reconfigured and re-combined in new and more efficient ways in order to generate growth. All well and good, perhaps, but it’s now clearly time to shift toward core values geared toward balance rather than toward endless growth. And just as Capitalism was based on the logic of analysis and separation, what replaces it will be based on the logic of unity and connection.
Watching Ponifasio’s work, I found myself wondering about the vast cultural patterns that lead back to the island off the coast of Europe where the historically potent citizens of England sat listening to The Tempest’s first production. What if the seed of these patterns is simply the habit of splitting heart and mind? This was a habit cultivated first among the scientists of that era – an esoteric subculture that emerged out of alchemists and other Prospero-like sorcerers. The English innovation, perhaps, was to embrace this radical gesture of splitting heart and mind and carry it broadly into other arenas in life. You can picture the scene. One day in the English countryside, a group of people looked at each other across cut stemware full of sherry and said, “What if what we’re really supposed to do is numb the heart.” Let’s give this group of earnest psychonauts the benefit of the doubt and assume they wanted to focus in, iris down, pull things apart in order to deliver change, solve problems, exert some control. “We’ll keep the mind alert but we’ll knock the heart hard with a mallet and put it to sleep. Then, later, the heart will wake up again and all will be well. Change will have happened.”
So they devoted themselves to the project, reminding themselves continually, “No, don’t feel that…!” And, “no, you can’t feel that either!” And the really devout among them, seeing God’s hand in this splitting of heart and mind, traded the mallet for a red hot wire with which to turn that tender heart into scar tissue. And it all seemed kind of ordained because, in fact, cauterizing their hearts conferred on them a kind of power, a power to make headway against problems such as disease and famine, but also power over other people too, the non-cauterized-heart people of the world. And when we jump ahead a couple of hundred years we see lots of powerful technologies and glittering machines…very little small pox or cholera…but also global warming, species extinction, deforestation and no end in sight to the machine of continual, unsustainable growth. Most troubling is that we are in the grip of the habit now, unable to access the freedom we once enjoyed with regard to our hearts and whether to cauterize them with red hot wires. The habit of self-heart cauterization on a mass scale – could it really be that simple, what ails us today?
Shakespeare, in my view, saw this pattern as it was just beginning to emerge in the Elizabethan culture of his day. Shakespeare, I believe, was alarmed by the potential consequences, the darker energies this newfound heart-cauterizing talent would tap. And he wrote a number of plays about it, Macbeth and Hamlet, King Lear and Julius Ceasar, and many others, ending with The Tempest. On the level of cultural psychology what we are talking about is an affective anxiety disorder playing itself out in historical time. We’ve never been able quite to handle our own capacity for awareness and the flood of compassion it brings with it. We are dependent as infants in ways that haunt us later in life. As a species we suffer from “abandonment issues.” This root emotional wound governs our response to the Other and is thus the driver of all societal dysfunction, such as alienation, social injustice, the inequality of wealth, war and international conflict, and environmental degradation as well. Most of us are not even aware of this wound, despite the fact that it, more than any other factor, has given shape to our lives.
I’ve written elsewhere about how The Tempest can be viewed as a “poem to the emergent unity of the world,” a poem linked to the science of complex systems and the new paradigm that science contains. And, for me, Ponifasio’s work participates in the move toward this new paradigm. Watching the play made me think that, in a paradoxical way, a world stripped of its sacred spaces is a world that has become entirely sacred. And that if you strip our lives of rituals what happens is that our lives become entirely ritualistic. If the planet is quickly becoming a necrotic mass of toxicity and broken eco-systems we must remember that history is never a fixed affair. What happens next colors and revises the meaning of all that has gone before. If the current blackening is the prelude to a greater flourishing some decades down the line, the actions we take now will seem providential rather than futile. Who knows, perhaps there is no way for us to avoid our own salvation. Viewed this way, the challenge ahead becomes perhaps a little less daunting.
Wedded to the World, A Continuous Encoding
by Guy Zimmerman
I’ve often felt myself to be a kind of visitor to the land of the present. Not a tourist, please – more like a kind of honored guest. Yes, an honored guest en route from the respected kingdom of the past toward the glittering land of the future, and it’s like I’m bearing important documents of state. As such, I expect certain amenities which the squalid land of the present often has a difficult time providing. I take a breath and check my watch – I won’t be staying long.
My daughter Eliza took a whack at this way of thinking before she was six months old. We were in the back garden and the first cat Eliza ever saw came across the ivy beneath the rubber tree and jumped up onto the cinder block wall and paused, looking back at us. Eliza’s plump, infant legs went rigid with elation. The cat raised a leg to clean its paw with a pink tongue. It had a sleek black and white tail that flicked and curled. And when the cat leapt down on the other side of the wall, Eliza turned to me, eyes wide, to see if I too had witnessed the miracle. Something was conveyed to me in that look of hers, a vividness I had lost touch with. I was struck by the fact that similar revelations parade past us every moment, and only very occasionally, in the presence of infants or works of art perhaps, do we manage to notice them. Where does that capacity go, and what does it mean to regain it?
I’ve written previously about Jeffrey Hawkins and his effort to illuminate the structure of the brain. According to Hawkins, Eliza’s experience of that first cat would mark an episode of neural encoding. The imprint of the experience would get instantly filed away inside the vast branching Xanadu of Eliza’s cortex. From then on, each time Eliza would encounter a cat, her brain would call up the previous encounter and add nuance from there. Hawkins, like the people who mostly make such discoveries, is driven by pragmatic aims that demand a tight focus on technical accuracy, but the underlying reality is rich in poetics. The “invariant” capacity of mind indicates how completely we are wedded to the world. What is the mind composed of, after all? The vast catalogue of references that encrust our awareness is made up of nothing but world, and there must be some basic capacity too, beneath all those barnacles of trauma and joy. That mind that is nothing-but-world runs back through our memories to the beginning of time, a luminous ribbon glittering with diamonds.
I remember the shift that took place when language arrived in Eliza’s mind. The words came in fast, falling across her experience like a steel mesh. Language gave her power – enhanced her ability to navigate the social sphere – but words also amplified the alienating effect described above. The neural encodings of experiences like the cat were now linked to symbols, and the symbols were themselves embedded in grammatical structures and then aligned into narratives that are linked to values – a huge Rube Goldberg contraption that spins and rattles beneath a sign marked “Civilization.” In dreams we loosen the sutures of meaning, of language. A cat becomes itself once more, reconnects to a not-knowing that invites immediacy and vividness – presence.
A year or so after the first cat, came a second encounter in the garden. I finished a phone call and saw Eliza pointing to the ground where the body of a dead honey bee lay curled in the sun. Eliza turned to me with an anguished, puzzled look and then back again to the dead bee, and I could tell the knowledge of mortality had found its way into her awareness and was now casting its shadow there. Whether we are born on a battlefield or in a lush palace, this knowledge inevitably finds us, and in that shock we tend to gather what we know into a kind of armor that removes us even further from the present. We flee faster now down the tracks of language toward consoling narratives and, too often, into the impregnable fortresses of ideologies and fundamentalist belief. We develop a stupendous capacity for compartmentalizing, such that grotesque crimes like 9-11, Abu Graib and Guantanamo become possible. I find myself curious about the terror that fuels this process. If one could access that original seed of feeling, experience that sense of abandonment and isolation in full awareness, would it release us? Is this perhaps what artists seek to do over the course of their life’s work?
When I reached this point in the post my plan was to take up a story by Kafka that haunts me. This story, The Country Doctor, is a vivid dream that conveys us to the edge of that terrain in ourselves. But I was diverted from this intention by my encounter, at the UCLA Hillel in Westwood, with the visual artist and poet Junko Chodos, and by an exhibit of her paintings and mixed media work there. Junko and I had never met before, and I’m new to her work. I was immediately struck, however, by how completely the show illustrated the way art springs from that initial blow I describe above. Junko, as it happens, was raised on a battlefield – Tokyo during the fire bombing at the end of World War Two. Each night, as fire rained down from the black sky, she took shelter beneath ground and wondered what dying might be like. This threat from above remained oddly abstract, Junko told me, until one day she wandered into her uncle’s butcher shop and saw, hanging from a rack overhead, a decapitated hen fountaining blood. The sight stopped her heart. She developed a phobia of birds and a mania for making art. The subject matter of her art, winged forms shaped from tangled, bio-morphic machine parts dripping blood and shadows – convey a decades’ long working-through of somatic trauma gradually releasing into awareness.
Deeply felt, this search of Junko’s has produced meaningful insights about our nature as complexes of reactive patterns – “soft machines” in Burroughs’ phrase – but also something more. Junko and her husband, Rafael Chodos, gave me an hardbound book they have made together called ”Centripetal Art.“ Impressive and weighty and festooned with reproductions of her work, the book explores Junko’s life and work and illuminates her insights into the relationship of art to other forms of empirical inquiry, including the sciences. At home, I open the book at random to a passage in which Junko describes the critical importance of a passage out of Rilke. And I smile because this exact passage from the 1stDuino Elegy long ago played a crucial role in my own engagement with creative work.
“…For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”
While Rilke often seems a bit stentorian to me now, I think of Nabokov’s comment about Shakespeare and how his “purple patches” were to be “rolled around in” with gratitude.
According to Hawkins, “invariant memory” is why the brain is such an effective tool with which to navigate a complex and ever shifting-world. This kind of info-processing shorthand weds us to pattern-based behavior in which we are absent from what is actually taking place. And yet for me the great mystery is why we aren’t completely determined, locked in by this continuous neural encoding. What accounts for the vividness of the cat? An underlying capacity for awareness still needs to be explained, and it’s not clear if this capacity can ever be measured or quantified. In Junko Chodos’s work I detect this awareness at work, conveying insights that can help us make peace with our mortal situation. In the end, isn’t it a separation from the vividness of Eliza’s cat that is born and that ages, frays with illness and dies? If so, is the death of a separation really something to fear? As the sages love to tell us, confronting terror can bring us home to a present that is not just a place we are forced to visit, but rather all that we have.
I tend to find “one person shows” somewhat deadly. The deadliness is not rooted in the banality or the narcissism that have characterized many (but not all) such spectacles. What I have always objected to most is how inert and unexplored the theatricality often is. For me, as for many people who work in theater, the stage is really a big deal – a sacred space – and it’s really not good to just plunk something down in that space and simply uncap it. I have always thought that most one-person shows would be vastly improved by simply placing on stage a second person, a listener. Suddenly, there’s tension, a sense of danger and also allure. The question, what will happen?, begins to animate the moments as they pass. By the end of the 1990s, which was the decade of the one-person show, I had developed a kind of dogma about this topic, which is why I instantly said yes when the actor Paul Mackley asked me, in 2007, to work with him on Wallace Shawn’s full-length monologue, The Fever.
Paul had performed The Fever in the 1990s and wanted to revisit the piece and then take it to the Prague International Fringe Festival. We worked on the piece fairly intensely for a couple of months, performed it a few times in Los Angeles, and off he went. From the first time I heard it through the last performance I found The Fever a completely remarkable dramatic text, totally free of any of the issues or problems identified above. Shawn was able to provide for the tension and to respect the energies of that open space by the sophisticated engagement across that magic and semi-permeable barrier between the stage space and the space we in the audience inhabit. After this experience, I found myself wanting to explore this divide more directly by equating it with the divide that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead, and my ten minute piece Snout is the result. The remarkable actor Barry Del Sherman was kind enough to perform the piece for DP Jeff Atherton and I, and this video is what came of the collaboration.
— Guy Zimmerman
(Lights up on Morgan, 40s, on stage alone.)
I woke up running through a forest
I woke up driving through the night
I woke up buried in an endless city earning the rent
I woke up on a mountain my head in the stars
A forest carpeted with pine needles, cool air…
(Pause)
There’s nothing I like more than sitting in a nice restaurant
Listening to another patron talk business on their cell phone.
About re-branding a law firm, say.
So that it’s better able to maximize profit in the age of globalization, say.
Or streamlining tech aspects of marketing.
You’re only as good as your story, after all.
Or how you could start a pro bono section at your law firm.
Crippled girl in a sun dress gets in a car wreck?
Talk about your heart strings…
(Pause)
Once you kill
You must kill again
It’s like nicotine
Crime takes you over
And leads to other crimes
Bigger crimes
You become a slave to your criminal acts
You come to long for an end
To the crime you have become
Every criminal craves his own downfall
It’s true what they say
All true
Every criminal wants to be free
It’s why I’m here now
It’s why we’re talking
(Pause)
We moved often when I was a child
For a spell we lived in a working class area of Upstate New York
Near Poughkeepsie, a region of endless, crumbling shale
Shale cliffs blocking every vista
Shale underfoot rattling with every step
And maybe because of my long hair I was instantly set upon
By the other boys in my 5th grade class particularly Kevin Brady
Who daily gathered four or five friends to heave chunks of shale at me
As I walked home
And I never complained to my parents or to the teachers
And within weeks
Kevin had to work a little harder to make me the butt of his jokes
Or to get the older kids to throw those chunks of shale
And before long I could tell Kevin
Was now growing afraid of me and I was now the one
Making jokes at his expense – how scrawny
How rat-like, Kevin, with those pointed teeth
And one day at recess Kevin ran from me
And I kicked his heel so that he fell to the ground
And I jumped onto him and
Pinning his arms, drove my fist into his face
I knew I could hurt him badly…
But I lost heart
The whole thing made me sick
I let Kevin up, he slinked away
And from then on avoided me
Something had died in him and the sight of me
Filled him with shame, with revulsion
(Pause)
They say life began in the seas
Below the level of water where it lay on the earth
In the gullies of the earth
The irregular places, the depths
Where the water gathered
There life began and remained for many, many years
The earth careening around the sun
Tumbling around the sun as it spun
On its axis like a top for many a year
Before the very first snout breached the surface of the oceans
The very first snout of the very first creature
Raised up above the surface
And pretty soon there were frogs, leopards, automobiles
Am I right?
And birds and last of all us
But what I want to focus on is that moment
The moment of the snout
Because it’s my impression that every moment
This one even and this one too
Is a moment of the snout
A moment on the edge of transformation
Irreversible transformation
The crossing of boundaries and no return possible
Allow me to explain
I was 13 and my sister had this friend
And I never thought too much about this friend of my sister
Except I noticed she liked to come over and wrestle me
And one weekend she came camping with us
With the family and she worked out a reason why
She had to sleep in a tent of her own
A reason why
My older sister had to sleep in a different tent
And she invited me to come visit in the night
Asked me to teach her the rules of poker
I kid you not
She was maybe two years older than me and my sister
I don’t believe
Has ever forgiven me for accepting that invitation
But how in the world could I say no?
So I’m there in the tent
And I’m holding my cards but neither of us
Are thinking about our cards
And with an infinite slowness we move toward each other
Our faces…
(Pause)
In that case the sea was desire
And me arching briefly above it
A dolphin or perhaps a sardine
In flight from the jaws of a barracuda
The barracuda of sex
(Pause)
The dead have problems being understood,
Don’t you agree?
(Pause)
A few of you might remember my name from the news reports
One of those atrocities that crop up now and then
In Africa for example
Many die
Genocide, some would say and all because of certain events
I set in motion
An airplane explodes in mid-air
Struck by missiles that come from who knows where
The demon of tribal animosity unleashed
Many die hacked to pieces in the street
I killed them
Sure sure why not say that
By providing the missiles and the training
I murdered them in cold blood
Why not take that view
It’s not a view, it’s a statement of fact
I was a soldier in the secret army
Of the United States of America
Or you could say instead
That they became dead
Because of their own stubbornness
They all want to come to this country
They all want a visa
Travel papers
Letters of introduction
You could say it had very little to do with me really
They had a choice and they made their choice
Which was to oppose American interest, American will
You could say I have no feelings of regret
About crossing that boundary
Into the land of evil beings so to speak
You could say it was no big deal to me
We are responsible all of us
For so much
Few among us
Are able to shoulder what we must shoulder
(Pause)
Dostoyevsky was an epileptic as well as a gambler
Listen, he would say
I would give ten years of my life, he would say
For the thirty seconds that precede my seizures
He would say, the mysteries of time
And the celestial order are revealed to me then
He would say
Fyodor, long dead these many years
Lost in the brilliance
What is belief?
An idea together with an emotion together with…energy
Don’t bother me, Fyodor, I said
With your beliefs, I said
My hat is off to you, I said
My hat is in my hands, I said
This was around Christmas outside Tucson
The forest had burned
The mountain had burned never to return
I was falling down through the rocks
In any event I arrived at a place where
The old prospectors used to mine gold from the rivers
With their mules, maybe a few cans
Of fruit in syrup, some hard tack
This friend of mine had recently been raped
On Elizabeth Street three local guys at knife point
She played bass in a band and she was a painter
Or maybe a photographer
This was long ago, she was afraid to be alone
And her mind was invaded by a kind of granular knowledge
That kept her company, she said
While touring Europe…
I thought none of it mattered
These stories, these things that happened to me
They were all random, without meaning, I thought
I didn’t feel implicated at that time
My daughter had not been born either
So I had nothing to lose
(Pause)
The Tibetans speak of the Bardo
The liminal zone between life and death
Where the spirit of the newly dead wander
Awaiting the calamity of rebirth
(Pause)
I’ve got an assignment for you so bear with me.
(Pause)
The surface of my mind flowed like angry, molten glass
Back in those days and I never noticed it
I would smile
Kiss my wife as I threw my keys
Into the basket by the front door
I would make a funny comment as I crossed into the den
To say hello to my daughter in her place
Before the television set
And I would tease her maybe, try to get a rise
As if my heart was not burning in my chest
I never noticed but for years destruction followed me
Through the world and many died because of
My anger and I woke up
I was falling as I said
Across a rocky plain with meadows and this was
Wyoming if you’ve ever been there
And the truck driver pulled off onto this side road
Leading off through the desert and I must have been 16 or 17
In around there and he just
Takes a left on a dirt road, this big gleaming tanker
And I’m thinking what the fuck
And I’m thinking of the Buck knife in my back pack
But lo
Up ahead a fuel depot and he pulls in and parks
And he looks at me and cracks a smile
Knowing how freaked out I was and this was twenty years
Before I finally died.
(Pause)
A woman will come find you
She’s looking for you right now
It’s important you do the right thing
Her appearance will be difficult to bear
You won’t want to look at her
But try to remember these words
You might want to write them down because
The temptation is to forget and another
Temptation is to hear different words like you see my lips moving
And you hear sounds but you misconstrue
The sounds so if I say “a woman will find you”
You might hear me say “A man walks into a bar”
But there’s very little time so I have to be direct
Nowadays you see people with plastic bottles filled with Spring water
She might have one of those
It will all seem so innocuous
But her eyes will shine with a golden light
Or maybe a white or red or green light
Because we are entering the age of drought
And I went 14 times to the same Starbucks in one day
There will be no difference between you and the woman
Listen to what I am telling you!
About when the fluid hits your lower abdomen!
She will have a head like the head of a lion!
When you look at her now you will be transformed!
Do not be afraid!
Windshields in that day and age had been tinted!
To filter out the ultra violet rays of the sun!
And this time her eyes will be pure white in color and luminous!
When you look!
A man walks into a bar!
He says to the bartender!
Bar keep, he says!
(Pause)
Let’s stop
Let’s go back
(Pause)
You might think anything can happen up here
Where I am
Over here with me
But I can only say
What has been written
It’s different, yes
You think oh
I must be wrong about that guy
But secretly you also think
No, I’m not wrong at all
That is a face marked by crime
Disfigured by sin, you think to yourself.
(Pause)
I’m not an epileptic, don’t worry
(Pause)
Fuck the young, he said
He actually said that to me, Dostoyevski
How they look at you kinda guilty
Because the world we’re leaving them, well…
And I found myself turning around saying who
Am I gonna lust after now?
(Pause)
If I could find someone who believed me
I’d ask them to listen without judgement
(Pause)
Of course we forget
It’s well known how we are
We forget, we avert our eyes
It’s a puzzle and lately I’ve been thinking
That what we need to do before it’s too late
Is to become impossible
Like children dreaming about the end of the world
Children with fevers, eye dull and shiny as metal balls, skin flushed
And your heart cannot protect them
From a single thing and the world is remorseless
And wide and full of wolves, marauding tigers…
But love often fools us
Love of a child can blind us to evil
(Pause)
I promised to make sense to you
I promised not to mystify or confuse because that would be
Counterproductive
I promised my friend this
Who’s on his way right now to join us
Dostoyevski himself
To explain it all to you and to me
(Pause)
This always happens but I have learned
Not to fear disappointment
(Pause)
My daughter is still living
In Pittsburgh of all places
Pittsburg…
(Pause)
Allow me to leave you with a story
Sinai in the desert
The land comes to a point in the Red Sea
Wonderful diving, wonderful reefs, parades of brilliant fish
And the galaxies of coral
I spent time there as a young man
I was in training
The Israelis had just pulled back and the Egyptians
Had yet to return to that boundaryland
I was not guilty of anything yet
And we camped on the beach my girl and I
Who would later give birth to my daughter
We were camping near where
The Bedoin tied their camels in the evening
And it’s true what they say about camels and tents
How the scent of food will bring them around in the night
And how once that snout is under the flap of the tent
There’s nothing you can do but surrender
Your food whatever else you own
To the camel of the night
Standing huge against the sky blocking out the stars…
Material and Mystery on a Bathroom Floor
by Guy Zimmerman
Ignoring their embedded-ness, complex systems relate to the environment with greed and aggression.
If world religions are based on any one experience, it’s the kind of night Wallace Shawn documents in his play The Fever. We’ve all had them. The harsh inner judge shows up with his clipboard and his tilted scales demanding full access to the heart. In flashes of self-recognition we glimpse the demonic patterns that have covertly governed the course of our lives. Cherished self-images collapse in on themselves as the mind swirls around in a soup composed of everything it feels disconnected from. Delivered as a single long monologue, The Fever manages to link an experience of this kind to material facts, uniting the personal and the political in a way that only high art can do well.
The son of wealthy New York elites, Shawn finds himself alone and ill on the tile floor of a hotel bathroom in a Latin American country where a Marxist uprising is in progress. Shawn uses the experience to locate his own life within a larger critique of how the “haves” conceal from themselves the brutality that supports their comfort and leisure. He remembers birthday parties, Mozart recitals and performances of Chekhov, all of which he once cherished but now finds bitter to the taste. The play is a plea for grace and deliverance, an effort to locate a new and elusive clarity about first causes. “Help me,” Shawn writes at the close, “I’m still falling.”
For years in New York, Shawn performed The Fever in the living rooms and salons of his well-heeled friends, many of whom wore their progressive self-images on their sleeves. Back in the late 1990s it was possible for the idealistically inclined to imagine social justice to be perhaps our chief problem. The momentum of institutionalized greed and aggression seemed like the major limiting factors to our collective well being. Today, in an era defined by grave environmental threats — global warming and the scarcity of fresh water — such concerns begin to seem simplistic, almost quaint. The world has shifted since Shawn wrote The Fever, and yet for me today the play suggests ways to draw the long menu of our concerns into a single, coherent framework. The key, and this will not surprise readers familiar with this column, is the new science of complex systems.
One of the things scientists say about complex systems is that they are emergent. You have a bunch of relatively simple operations going on among relatively simple elements…and at a certain scale of interconnectivity a new system “emerges” that exhibits entirely new and much more complex behaviors. The emergent properties of this new system cannot be reduced to the properties of the component parts. These qualities are entirely self-catalyzed and unique.Think of the coordinated behavior of a colony of army ants mowing through a jungle, or of a storm rising out of many small currents of warm air. Or think of how a sequence of minute neurological inputs and impulses unite to light up a child’s face as she smiles.
This emergent quality shows up at all levels of our world. The twisting, double-helix strands of our DNA are emergent forms that rise out of the protein molecules that compose them. Our bodies are a weave of much simpler biological systems – the pulsing circulatory system that moves our blood, the elaborate, branching nervous system that allows us to process information from our environment, and then to form predictive thoughts and conceptual models about that environment. We are embedded in cultural systems that support and inform our lives as social beings, and that connect us to the past. Upwards and downwards in scale, we are embedded within, and composed out of, other complex systems.
Another thing scientists say about complex emergent systems is that they are adaptive – they inherently seek to maintain and preserve themselves. This, to me, is a remarkable and intriguing thing. It’s remarkable because it suggests a basic continuity between non-living and living systems. It suggests, further, that many of the issues which trouble us as a species – the destructive externalities of corporate production, the ravenous greed of the consumer economy, the institutionalized aggression of the military-industrial complex – may actually be rooted in the dynamics of complex systems per se. Clarity about root causes might enable us to gain better traction against these threatening and intractable patterns of dysfunction.
Let’s look at the inherent tension here: every complex system is embedded in an environment from which it is also separate. Its adaptive aspect will tend to amplify this separation as the system draws energy and resources from its environment, and uses it as a waste dump as well. Think again of a hurricane dissipating as it travels inland, an ant colony dispersing as it runs out of food, or the smile as it fades on a child’s face – emergence followed by environmental depletion is what complex systems do. And when the environment gets sufficiently depleted, the system collapses. The emergent form is then re-acquainted with its connection to — it’s non-separation from — the underlying environment. In several religious traditions, such crises are called moments of grace.
Let’s take a complex system in the process of collapse: Wallace Shawn clutching his hotel room’s toilet bowl in The Fever. This WallaceShawn-system emerged out of the specifics of the Upper East Side in New York in the late 1950, and out of the background and biology of his family. In its adaptive capacity, this WallaceShawn-system has learned to “ignore” its intimate relatedness to the rest of humanity, as well as to the world of non-human things. And this capacity for not-seeing is what the fever unwinds as it takes hold of Shawn’s neurology on the floor of the bathroom. Shawn comes to see then how he has indiscriminately drawn energy and resources from the environment, helping in a multitude of ways to exploit and degrade that environment. And the WallaceShawn-system sees how it has lent its weight to attempts to eliminate any obstacle or potential threat to its continued comfort. And, although we would all use different language, we in the audience understand too: we are all similar to Shawn in our complexity as emergent, adaptive “systems.” We inherently tend to maintain and enhance our separation from the systems in which we are embedded. We draw the energy and resources we need to do this from our environment, impoverishing that environment.
I find it intriguing to recognize here, in the basic functioning of a complex system, what the Buddhists call the three poisons: ignorance (forgetting its embedded nature), greed (drawing energy and resources from the environment) and aversion (struggling against conditions that threaten its continued flourishing). I find it intriguing also how the root causes of our suffering may turn out to be hard-wired into the laws that govern the ways complex systems of all kinds operate. I’m using “suffering” as a blanket term to cover everything from individual neurosis, to intractable patterns of social injustice, to environmental degradation and war — the whole tangled hairball of human dysfunction. Perhaps our environment-degrading tendencies are simply an expression of this natural dynamic, as will be our transcendence of those tendencies.
The bare fact that there actually is a capacity for emergence, and that emergent systems then display an adaptive capacity, is, to me, an arena of great mystery. I find it interesting to view the great religious traditions as ways to explain this adaptive force, and also the mystery of why emergence is possible on any level. Even more mysterious is the question of what is left when the system collapses; what is the underlying capacity that allows for being per se? Perhaps that is where divinity lies.
Viewed this way, the opposition of the human from the “natural” begins to dissolve in a final way. A vivid clarity sometimes comes with fevers, so possibly the planetary fever we are currently running will deliver a substantial dose of the same thing. As we move forward into a era in which our resilience is tested, greater clarity about what we are would be an important asset. I believe it will be easier to address the fundamental imbalances when we strip away all self-delusions. To be aware of these dynamics is already to transcend them into a greater mystery…which is also fully “natural.” And a final promise here is how the scientific and the religious modes of thinking, matter and mystery, are beginning to converge. Let’s remember, the last juncture of these two arenas of thought launched the modern era.
Falling Back with Celine and Sally
by Guy Zimmerman
For whatever they may be, the gods manifest themselves above all as mental events.
Literature and the Gods – Roberto Calasso
As I fell back off the ladder I thought about unintended consequences and about the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The light bulb was still in my hand – one of those beefy exterior bulbs – and as I fell it swung around behind my back so that when I landed the stem of the bulb dug hard into the soft tissue above my left hip. Lying rigid on the hardwood floor I made odd bleating sounds until the firemen arrived some twenty minutes later and smiled, looking down at me.
My thoughts about unintended consequences had been triggered earlier in the day while reading an essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of Break Through Institute, an Oakland-based environmental think tank. In 2004 Nordhaus and Shellenberger wrote a critique of the environmental movement that caused a big ruckus, and they continue to lob provocative polemics at an environmental community primed for introspection. Forty years of committed advocacy, they say, has lead to very little change in the rubrics that really matter, such as the rate of increase in the amount of energy we consume. Whatever we’re doing it isn’t enough, and while the BreakThrough-ers aren’t the only ones to point this out (See Mark Dowie’s Losing Ground, for example) they’re audacious in how they implicate the mindset of the environmental movement in the riddle of its own failures. Attempting to shift the basic frames of the debate, Shellenberger and Nordhaus reject the dichotomy between man and nature. They challenge the critique of middle class norms that has become an orthodoxy among progressives (myself included), a critique by which we simply need to face the music and live with less, and the sooner the better.
Break Through’s description of our inability to alter patterns of consumption feels oddly familiar. Habits are tough to shake, and we all know this from direct personal experience. We take vows of abstinence, we fall off the wagon. We take new lovers, and watch them morph into new versions of our old lovers (who tend to resemble disappointing parents). We cringe as we find ourselves saying to our children precisely the same idiotic things that our parents said to us. We covertly engage in self-destructive behaviors large and small that always deliver exactly the result we had hoped to avoid. Eventually, we come to suspect that our whole self-improvement project is fueled by a subtle aggression against our actual natures, and is therefore simply an aspect of our neurosis. As we wrestle with our patterning, we eventually come to understand that real change requires a paradoxical immersion in the underlying web of somatic, affective trauma encoded in our neurology. To find freedom we must befriend our demons.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine made himself out to be a miserable cur, and that’s exactly why he’s so much fun to read. Celine is a merciless deflator of petit-bourgeois values and conceits, a hissing, spitting, ur-Punk provocateur who, in Charles Bukowski’s phrase, really knew how to “lay down a line.” Journey to the End of the Night, published in 1932, is his classic book. A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative, Journey uses a slang-heavy patois to mine the black comedy of nihilistic invective. Later on, Celine undermined his own credibility by embracing fascism and by writing, in the late 1930s, a series of horrifically anti-semitic screeds, but the trenchant style of Journey had an enduring impact on novelists across the globe: Henry Miller and anyone whom Henry Miller influenced; ditto Bukowski, Ken Kesey, Burroughs, Vonnegut and Philip Roth. Reading Celine you can cozy up your own moral turpitude, your ill-will toward the rest of humanity, and your wretched dysfunction. And it’s oddly liberating: we are working our way closer to the real ground of things where, despite the darkness, real change can happen.
As I fell back and positioned the light bulb in the soft tissue above my pelvis so that on landing I’d lie rigid making strange bleating sounds, I thought about the tantric adept Sally Kempton and how she won my undying loyalty during a break in one of her meditation workshops by mentioning Celine. I had presented the idea that modern art since the Romantic movement is a tantric lineage so covert it doesn’t even recognize itself, and with a smile Kempton invoked Celine in that context. This was sly and astute. If Dostoyevsky was the first writer to give voice to the nihilism dominating the psyche of modern man, Celine made the act of authorship itself an expression of that persona. In so doing, he completed the trajectory of the modernist movement, reuniting creative energy with the here and now of daily life.
In the early 1970s Kempton left a career as a young journalist in the Joan Didion mode to join Swami Muktananda, a master in the Siddha tradition. With Muktananda, Kempton immersed herself in the study of the full spectrum of Indian awareness and devotional practices, and especially a form of tantric Shiva worship that flourished in Kashmir from the 7th to the 12th centuries. Kashmir is where many of the Tibetan lamas would visit to learn about tantric and buddhist practices, and as someone who has practiced in the Tibetan mode for many years, I picked up strong resonances as I listened to Kempton. Devotional energies are powerful and transformative. Tantric traditions such as Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmir Shaivism deploy the imagery of gods and goddeses to generate devotional energy that can then be used to dismantle the conditioning that separates us from a more direct and vital connection to experience. The effect, hopefully, is to make us more responsive to what is actually happening in our lives.
Empirically speaking, meditation practices like the ones described in Kempton’s new book, Meditation for the Love of It, can be viewed as technologies for enhancing your neurology. Think of them as de-alienating technologies designed to cultivate new neural pathways and greater inter-connectivity in the mind body complex. The aim is to free the mind from limiting narrative frames that distort our understanding of what we are actually encountering in the world. And like all complex, chaotic systems, civilization exhibits self-symmetry across the different scales – affective anxiety disorders that challenge us personally have correlates on the collective level that are inflaming the planet. Liberate ourselves from such collective “conditioning,” and we will perhaps respond more effectively to real problems, such as the fact that we are pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that the ice caps are melting and the ocean currents are about to shift.
One key to altering behavior on a personal level involves changing how our brains are wired through various mindfulness practices. What would mindfulness look like were it to manifest on a collective level? Answering such a question even in the abstract might seem daunting. But what if we are already a ways along a collective “tantric” path without knowing it? What if we Americans have, all our lives, been covertly practicing tantra on a slow boil, not knowing we are doing so? To understand how this might be so, we must look all the way back to beginning of the modern era for the initial conditions that still inform dominant cultural patterns. The Romantics of the early 19th century viewed Cartesian rationalism, newly ascendant with the spread of the Industrial Revolution, as an unhealthy limitation of our ways of relating to experience. The Romantic inquiry culminated in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who depicted culture as an arena of conflict between Apollo, the god of rational thought, and Dyonisus, the god of unconscious drives. In the 20th century, Freud, together with Jung and many others, seeded what are essentially Nietzschian insights deep into the culture of the West. And Dionysus, let’s remember, is the Western counterpart of Kempton’s Shiva.
Initially viewed as dark and threatening forces, Dionysian, tantric energies have been hard at work in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapies and the entire mental health edifice they have informed. They have also been in play in the work of Madison Avenue as it has stimulated and manipulated our unconscious drives to launch, sustain and expand the consumer economy that now vexes us. Those who worked to create this economy famously used Freudian insights to conjure consumer appetites out of thin air. Hence, we have all been more deeply infused by this essentially tantric view than we might realize. So, in my little thumbnail culturo-spiritual history, long before the influx of Eastern practices and views in the 1960s and 70s, the ground of Western culture had been prepared for a vital impregnation.
As I toppled back to launch, in the soft tissue above my pelvis, weeks of stabbing pain as from the bite of a small wild animal, I thought about how the current courtship of East and West was in part arranged for us by Big Oil. The long hydro-carbon molecules of fossil fuels are phenomenally efficient and transportable receptacles for delivering nuclear energy from the sun. The oil-fat paradise of Post War America produced the leisure and affluence required for us to focus on our self-actualization. And before the interconnectivity of the internet age, you would have had to devote your life to the task of accessing teachings like those Kempton illuminates in a book now available on Amazon. Here we meet again the counterweight to Nietzsche’s Dionysus – the affluence and innovations that flow from our devotions to Apollo play a crucial role in our evolution too.
In their different ways, Western science and the wisdom traditions of the East both aim to enhance our responsiveness. We need better technology to gain more control over how our collective behaviors impact the geo-sphere; we need better “inner technology” to gain more control over the behaviors themselves. Both these versions of technology require energy. Immiseration and self-impoverishment, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus point out, are likely to deliver unintended consequences such as war and famine that do no one any good. Mastering our carbon output is itself likely to be a product of bi-directional innovation. And we can celebrate our growing capacity to think mythically and scientifically at the same time, with proper deference to both Dionysus and Apollo. I find it hopeful to read reports, for example, that the spread of social media has made transparency the value of the day in the business community. The growing recognition that businesses are intricately interconnected with the communities they emerge out of, is perhaps an indication that Apollonian boundaries are becoming more permeable.
As any fireman will tell you, unintended consequences are woven into the way things are. In fact, I was the second wounded light bulb-changer my three firemen had seen that day, and it was only 9 AM. As they looked down at where I lay on the hardwood floor I felt certain they knew exactly what had happened. “She was after you to change that bulb and you got pissed off and put the ladder on the table, right?” the older man asked, looking down at me over his resplendent mustachio like a tantric deity from on high. “Hey, you should be able to work this for a couple days at least.”
The Wooster Group, REDCAT, December 1, 2010 – December 12, 2010
By Guy Zimmerman
Art, like life itself, is an activity rich in paradox. The style of an artist, their aesthetic signature, limits as well as shapes their expressive energies. Great artists embrace and also rebel against their own style with equal ardor, and it’s this tension that creates the evolution, the trajectory of their work. Some artists tuck all that struggle behind the drapes; some let it become the direct subject matter of the work itself. Either way, this tension is exactly where we, in our self-created lives, connect to the artistic project in an urgent way. The struggles of the artist with form and style, hidden or shamelessly displayed, show us how to derive pleasure from our own life struggles in a mode of solidarity and generosity.
In theater you want to know that the text itself is rich in this illuminating tension. It’s best when a writer (rather than a director or an ensemble) has created this text, and when that writer is a poet as well as a dramatist. Then it’s best if the performing artists who bring the text to life experience it as both a shaping force and a limiting restraint; they must embrace and rebel against the text with equal commitment. That’s when you get these wonderful multiplying, double helix effects – the performers doing on their level what the playwright has done on his (or her) level – and the whole thing becomes worth the slog through traffic to get to the theater. The Wooster Group’s production of Tennessee Williams’Vieux Carré at REDCAT last week was a high culture cage match of this kind, and it was a pleasure to behold.
The play itself is a tortured miscreant. Williams took forty years to cough up Vieux Carré, and the play seems untidy, oddly unresolved in itself, a wounded limping thing…that the Woosters seize in their jaws like rabid wolverines. The Woosters have a Soho-bred distrust of sincerity, but for our sake they are stuffing themselves with it here. Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos are terrific in the production. Director Elizabeth LeCompte knows how well these two complement each other on stage, and both performers are building on physical vocabularies they have developed over the course of a decade. The night I saw the play Shepherd, performing two roles, was at moments so expressive physically I felt truly honored to be there. The huge mechanism of theater exists to create exactly those moments of presence, and it would be a mistake to underestimate their transformative value. In a quieter vein Fliakos was just as good as the writer, finding ways to be tentative and absent within the demands of the Wooster style. But Kate Valk, as always, was the one who fascinated. How to describe the minutely tuned irony of her delivery? With every breath she managed to lampoon but also honor the intimate angst of method acting. It felt like watching A-Rod cover first and third base at the same time – it shouldn’t be possible.
The challenges of depicting intimacy in theater have to do with the basic configurations of the stage space. In theater, the off-stage is where the unconscious resides, the dark matter that feeds and supports the luminous spectacle under the lights. Invite too much of that dark matter onto the stage and you drain the luminance. Or, if you want to adopt Nietzschean rather than Freudian imagery, it’s Dionysus who rules the off-stage and if you invite him onto the stage you had better reify him into a character…in which case you’re staging a version of The Bacchae and not a psychological melodrama rich in private regrets. You could make a case that Williams did write versions of The Bacchae – Streetcar, for example – but with Vieux Carré he’s really trying to tell the truth about himself in a non-paradoxical way and things get soupy. And that’s why the ironic force of the Wooster Group is just the right combination. The irony pushes all that unformed Dionysian energy back off stage where it belongs and the spectacle turns like a dancer and begins to lift.
You have to understand that the Woosters are not really people at all – they are complex aesthetic entities that self-catalyzed out of the cloud of irony that settled over the area between Houston and Canal in the 1970s and then condensed there for the next few decades. The fact that we must now look to the Woosters for ways to reconnect to our humanity might be to some a sign of how far gone we really are. But, ever the optimist, I actually view it as another indication that American culture is beginning to raise its gaze a bit after the ferocious horizontality of the post-modern, Warhol era. Change, one senses, is in the air.
I remember being enthralled in astronomy class the first time I heard about “dark matter.” This is the unknown mass out there providing the gravitational stability needed for luminous structures like spiral galaxies. Although thought to be many times larger than the visible matter in the universe, the jury is still out on what dark matter is composed of. Neutrinos must have mass, some people say, referring to the ghostly particles that burst from the guts of stars each time a particle of hydrogen gets cooked into a particle of helium. Others say the lit galactic arrays are surrounded by fields of Jupiter-sized planetary bodies. No, say others still, dark matter is composed of vacuum fluctuations, the sub-atomic particles that leap out of nothingness into existence, and then disappear again a nano-second later, cancelling themselves out. Whatever the reason, dark matter has always appealed to me as a correlate for the hidden emotional material that supports our distinctly eccentric, often unstable, and occasionally luminous personalities.
Do you know about the physicist Paul Dirac? If you’ve read accounts of how the quantum realm revealed its secrets to the gaze of science in the 1920s, you’ve encountered the Dirac allure. An odd stillness enters the room when other physicists describe how, in 1926, Dirac, then a doctoral student at Cambridge, “noticed” a crucial correspondence between the impossibly complicated equations of classical mechanics and the even more Byzantine and inscrutable equations of the new fangled quantum mechanics. The Dirac Equation he presented two years later made a major contribution to the quantum physics that allows your computer to process and display this text, and Dirac went on to win the Nobel Prize (along with Erwin Schrodinger) in 1933. Second only to Einstein in the esteem of his peers, Dirac seemed to embody with elegant purity the dispassionate restraint of the rational mind. And so it’s no wonder that Graham Farmelo, the author of the recent biography, The Strangest Man, opens the book with an episode late in Dirac’s life that shakes up this portrait of an arid genius devoid of emotional obscurations, and points toward the dark matter that supported, perhaps even informed, the brilliance of the Dirac array.
Farmelo begins with a story told by Kurt Hofer, a cell biologist and fellow faculty member at Florida State Univeristy in Tallahassee where Dirac, with great eccentricity, moved in 1970 to complete his career. Hofer had endeared himself to Dirac by helping the famous physicist solve the digestive problems that had troubled him his whole life. For some two years Hofer and his wife visited the Diracs almost weekly. During these encounters Dirac maintained the quasi-autistic reserve he was famous for. One night Hofer’s wife stayed home and Dirac brought Hofer into a back room where they sat in front of a fire and talked. Dirac corrected some minor error Hofer made while discussing his French ancestry and then began to speak about his own family background. The scene as described by Farmelo is uncanny, Dirac turning to face the open flames and, in a clear but quiet voice, telling Hofer “I never knew love or affection when I was a child.” Then, flowing out unabated came a long, molten indictment of Dirac’s sadistic father, who had cruelly abused Dirac and his older brother, who eventually committed suicide. As Dirac fell silent two hours later, the astonished Hofer excused himself and left. Discussing the encounter with his wife at home, Hofer decided he needed to reach out to Dirac and find out more. As it turned out, Farmelo reports, the subject never again came up – like Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot, Dirac’s fireside outburst seems to have been a unique event.
How does the brilliance of Dirac’s scientific achievements relate to these deep emotional wounds? In complex, co-emergent ways, no doubt. The issue came to mind again when I picked up Lyndall Gordon’sLives Like Loaded Guns, which is full of startling new insights about Emily Dickinson and her family. Sure enough, dark matter has been discovered in the shadows of Homestead House, which, it turns out, were lurid and alive with sweaty eros. The typical picture of Dickinson, primly composing her poems by the window of a sparsely furnished room, is suddenly complicated by the addition of a Vivid Video soundscape traveling up through the floorboards. Her brother Austin, often used the parlor of Homestead to entertain the very ardent, and very married Mabel Loomis Todd in adulterous liasons, bringing a storm of shame upon the family.
No doubt Dickinson’s reaction to her brother’s scandalous entanglement was complex and contradictory, but I suspect the urgency of the situation only energized her art, as life does when it’s most intense and unsettling. Although we can’t listen to Dickinson directly the way Hofer listened to Dirac, her poems are all about their own dark matter. Little machines constructed to cut through the murk of disconnected mental life, Dickinson’s poems find their way up toward open sky of direct experience. To read the work is to be taken along on this ride and left up there, closer to the light.
Part of what we long for in art is to be “returned to life more violently,” in Francis Bacon’s resonant phrase. And one function of cultural institutions is to impede this process, surrounding active elements with the microphages of banality. Brilliance in any field is celebrated as a thing apart, the artist made iconic in a way that renders them inactive in our lives as agents of change. Dark matter is precisely where we share ground with figures like Dickenson, and where our vital, liberative connection to their work can form.
Perhaps a fear of our own transformative capacity explains why we love to hang the sign of tepid mediocrity over the most generative artists. Compare, for example, the iconic portrait of Shakespeare depicted as a hapless, balding bureaucrat, with the formidably self-possessed and sharp-eyed Renaissance dandy in the portrait discovered recently in Ireland. Whether or not this is a true likeness of Shakespeare will be debated energetically for a good long time, but it is certainly as true to life as the familiar engraving. For me, the new portrait underscores how potent Shakespeare’s work remains. And so the question arises: in what ways do we connect with the dark matter that supported his brilliant galaxy of a mind, the light of which continues to illuminate human cultures around the globe?
As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, Shakespeare documented the affective anxiety disorder of the Protestant world as it began to form, and for this reason continues to be the reigning sage of the modern era. Want to understand the nature of life in Eastern Europe? Read Jan Kott’s classic Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Want to understand what happened on Wall Street in 2008? Imagine a whole industry run by Iagos, Edmonds and Richard the Thirds and it all starts to make a bit more sense. Who is Ayn Rand but the Lady Macbeth of modern Political thought, whispering her siren song into the ear of every boardroom cutthroat. Everywhere we look we are troubled by what a cultural shrink might call our “Iago introject,” our inability to love our own nature, as expressed via the famous “externalities” of the Capitalist economy. Our glittering achievements are supported by the dark matter of all their hidden costs – entire species dwindling to extinction, the oceans dying – as we desperately advertise our happiness to ourselves, galloping toward calamity.
The only way forward for us is perhaps encoded in Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, which can be considered a poem to the emergent unity of the world. The potential to reshape dark material resides in Prospero’s recognition that we ourselves are dreamlike, contingent beings, intricately inter-connected. The anger and avarice we direct toward the earth in a dark river of annhiliatory energy can be brought in and made into fuel for transformation. Turning to reach down through our own shadow material we may locate an emergent force that is both real and unreal at the same time, and wake up to find that the deepest ecstasy embeds the basic material of the world.
The Social Network, David Fincher, Director, Aaron Sorkin, Screenplay, 2010
By Guy Zimmerman
If you’re like me, you’re partial to narratives of hope. You want things to work out, for yourself certainly…but also for the people you care about and the traditions you identify with and think are healthy. From childhood on you’ve felt burdened by a sense that something is wrong, a little bit wrong maybe, or maybe a lot wrong, depending on your temperament. We can talk about that sense of wrong-ness as free-floating anxiety, dukkha, original sin – my point is only that, like me, you probably tend to assemble daily experience into story lines – narratives – that make a plausible case for why your world is moving in a less-wrong direction.
I closed a recent post on an upbeat note of this kind, constructing a hopeful narrative around the notion that the increased interconnectivity of communications in the digital age might mitigate somewhat the environmental degradation we see playing out nearly everywhere we look. The next day I opened The New Yorker and read a story by Malcolm Gladwell in which he argues that Facebook and Twitter are vastly over-rated as agents of positive change. As much as I hate to take issue with the formidable Gladwell, David Fincher’s new movie The Social Network has me pondering the question all over again.
When it comes to making movies, David Fincher knows what he’s doing. The casting of The Social Network, for starters, is spot on. Jesse Eisenberg specializes in being the most likeable unlikeable guy in history, and casting Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker is a stroke of genius. The narrative is elegantly constructed, the script by TV writer Aaron Sorkin undercutting the tendency toward nihilism that can reduce the impact of Fincher’s work. The editing by Fincher and Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, makes the complex crosscutting narrative unfurl with deceptive ease. The way the visual palette shifts from muddy to bright is deft. And it’s an amazing score, too, the composer Trent Reznor pushing back against the remarkable work Jonny Greenwood did in There Will Be Blood. Still, the critical response to the film has been so overwhelmingly positive I find myself curious about what deep chord has been struck.
A screwball comedy without the comedy or much of a sense of humor even, The Social Network opens on an argument between the Harvard geek Mark Zuckerberg and his earthy Boston University girlfriend. In the grip of toxic insecurity, Zuckerberg insults the social status of B.U. His date breaks up with him on the spot and storms off into the winter night. In this first scene the film sets up its fundamental opposition: social hierarchy on the one hand, erotic connectivity on the other. Wounded and resentful, Zuckerberg hurries home across the snowy quads to strike out at his ex through the internet, and the film follows as this initial act of aggression flowers a few years later into Facebook. Interesting, maybe, but hardly the recipe for a blockbuster. So, what are we to make of the film’s success?
Reviews I’ve read have focused on the lead character’s Asperger-y social ineptitude. And sure, Zuckerberg is brainy and insecure, alienated from his body and lacking in what used to be called the “social graces.” But his most important attribute, mentioned three times at least, is that Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money. This disinterest in money is what fuels Zuckerberg’s conflicts with the various partners he freezes out. The waspy Winklevos brothers, the shark-like Navendra and the nebbishy Saverin all want to make themselves some green, but Zuckerberg worships at a different altar. What he wants is inter-connection, which he astutely recognizes as the value most ascendant in our world. And, as the ultimate outsider, Zuckerberg is perfectly equipped to quantitize this connectivity. His lack of social affect is what allows him step outside the “norm” and produce the metrics by which human connectivity can be measured. Eros is available to him only via the quantifiable statistics of connectivity; he can win lawsuits without blinking, but he will never get the girl.
We see how The Social Network constructs a clash between separation (hierarchy, money, Thanatos) on the one hand and connection (horizontality, love, Eros) on the other. The thing about money is that it’s not only something I have, it’s also something you don’t have. Money is an abstraction of material control over a concrete thing that can be owned by only one entity, separate and apart from all others. Money emphasizes separation, the exclusive ownership of property, including, in the modern age, the labor of others. This emphasis on separation is why, in the Freudian tradition, money is linked to the death instinct (Thanatos). The opposite of Thanatos, to Freud, was Eros, the energy of connection, in which two previously separate things are united. Here again we find the fundamental opposition mentioned above: money and connection. Money is all about material ownership and control; connection is all about love, the making of erotic bonds.
So while, on one level, The Social Network is a story about an IPO, strip away several layers irony and what you find is a mythic struggle between the gods of love and death. Zuckerberg’s ambition is to create a horizontal network of desire to displace the vertical network of exclusion that shut him out, and that also, in the opening scene, made “love” get up and storm off. Wounded and full of longing, Zuckerberg lashes out briefly, then embarks on a fierce campaign to prove himself worthy and win love back. In love’s name he renounces his bond with the hierarchical forces of exclusivity and forges an alliance with Dionysus (Shawn Parker), the rock star god of good parties. Together they create a shrine to the goddess of erotic connectivity, and that shrine is called Facebook, which runs on desire, Eros. Dionysus goes too far, like he always does, with the drugs and the underage girls, and Zuckerberg ends up the youngest billionaire in history. But the story’s close comes as Zuckerberg, cleansed by his various trials, wins his goddess back, albeit as a different, yes, avatar. Sitting at his law firms conference room table and hitting that refresh button again and again…the film’s closing image can be read as a neurotic bastardization of love, but to me it’s also oddly hopeful.
This same willful optimist in me wonders if the film is showing how, with Facebook and other connective media, the concept of ownership itself is beginning to shift. By their very nature these media are continually underscoring how ownership is a social convention rather than a fixed natural law. The Social Network makes this point again and again; connectivity is the real value, not ownership and to some degree they are in direct conflict. Sean Parker in the film highlights exactly this opposition. “Look how I destroyed the music business with Napster,” he says more than once.What is going on, The Social Network asks, when a commodity with tremendous social value cannot be monetized? When, in fact, that commodity undercuts the exclusivity that the concept of monetization arises from to begin with? The fact that money is being made is beside the point here.
The last time this core concept of ownership was seriously reassessed was at the birth of the modern era. In the opening moments of the Protestant Reformation the full spectrum of modern attitudes toward ownership – from full bore Ayn Rand-esque libertarianism to radical collective anarchism – were laid out. Here we enter zeitgeist terrain and the response to the film begins to make some sense. Connection is not about ownership and it’s not really about control. The point is how the experience of connection shifts the way we relate to experience moment to moment. Drain energy from the concept of ownership and it shifts into the something more like stewardship – ownership minus ego investment. One senses a shift of that magnitude, which is why Gladwell may well be wrong.
Given my infatuation with the way the Buddhists view things, the subject of money and its relationship to connection reminds me of the Buddhist pairing of “form” and “emptiness.” “Emptiness” points to the common ground of all phenomenon that makes connection of any kind possible, and is, radically, considered quite limitless. If you want to see how the concept of “form” manifests in the social arena, ownership is exactly where you would want to look. The first thing we feel ourselves to “own” is the self or ego, despite the fact that this ego-self is entirely a projection. We then begin to buttress the shaky reality of this self-image by adorning it with possessions and property – if we can fool others, maybe we can ignore the fact that this ego-self never feels truly real.
Why are we like this? The demands of survival made us so, perhaps. A bias in the direction of form might be a intrinsic to evolution itself, in other words. And the large arc of human history – nomadic tribes settling into agricultural communities that grew into cities and empires until the explosion of the industrial revolution three hundred years ago really kicked things into high gear – is really the story of this bias toward form playing itself out over time. This is the imbalance we must learn to correct if we are to continue to thrive. Such, at any rate, is the hopeful narrative I find myself partial to today.
Reflections on Abraham and Isaac in Jerusalem Claire Trevor Theatre UCI, World Premiere, September 29 -October 2, 2010
by Guy Zimmerman
I’ve always hoped to dismiss any claims the artist Jeffrey Koons might make on aesthetic legitimacy, but a recent trip to UC Irvine to see Robert Cohen’s production, Abraham and Isaac in Jerusalem, has illuminated why, in all likelihood, this ambition will continue to elude me. For those who take theater seriously, UC Irvine occupies a special place. Since the 1970s, the program, which Cohen helped found, has been a haven for those who share a more European view of how theatrical expression connects to the ongoing project of “civilization.” Theater, from this perspective, is a uniquely embodied mode of feeling-thought that gives form to ineffable mysteries that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. Based on a medieval play, Cohen’s Abraham and Isaac illustrates this capacity, and manages to tap down into the deeper roots of our culture. Sadly, for me, the evening hinges on what can only be described as a Koons moment.
Are any stories as haunting as the one in which God commands Abraham to take the life of his beloved child Isaac? Harold Bloom uses the term “uncanny” to describe this haunting quality. As children we’re struck by this odd, elliptical intensity, which emanates from stories like Abraham and Isaac to suffuse the entire Old Testament. We notice also that the adults who present these stories to us do so in over-emphatic, rushing cadences, eager to cross terrain they know to be treacherous. And now, all these centuries later, three of history’s great religions battle each other over ownership and control of the site where Abraham raised his knife, and the conflicts regularly turn bloody. This is where Cohen has set his play: Rova Square in Jerusalem.
Robert Cohen
Cohen’s production features a company of gifted actors from the University’s master program, and the Choral work of UCI’s accomplished vocal ensemble, the Men In Blaque. As the huge stage doors swing open this chorus serenades us to our seats. The stage itself is a stark, raised altar. Toward the rear, above a tower of undressed scaffolding that represents Mt Moriah, hang an array of U.N.-membership flags. Further back, fixed to the rear wall, a set of kitschy, stained-glass panels depict familiar bible scenes. The Choral group re-appears, sheep-dogged here and there by a Stage Manager in headset. Various actors troop on and off to make pronouncements about how the evening will unfold. At one point someone apologizes to the audience for the late arrival of the programs…
The meta-theatrical conceit here is that we are watching the dress rehearsal of a production of, as advertised, Abraham and Isaac in Jerusalem. Monitoring the evening for anything that might stray into sacrilege are cultural commissars from the Jewish and the Moslem communities. The comedic effect of their endless, petty haggling aside, this is a world in which every utterance takes on political weight and where nothing can be freely represented. Feverish claims about the nature and meaning of history are choking the spirit, the collective mind spewing out concepts and definitions to justify an appetite for violence that was already there. The actual land of Israel, meanwhile, begins right off-stage, its mysteries intact.
None of this dramaturgical layering is particularly new, but Cohen lays it on with the invisible hand of a practiced director. Deft too is how he and the music director, Joseph Huszti, deploy the chorus, the singers grouping and dissipating repeatedly as the songs slowly gather liturgical weight. The actors play their various roles well, and in a savvy bit of casting that adds an oddly transgressive quality to the love at the heart of the story, Cohen has chosen a young woman (Erika Haaland) to play Isaac. The performance text, once it begins, is based on a medieval mystery play of the kind performed for centuries throughout Christendom. The sincerity of the simple rhyming exchanges stand out in high relief to the suburban Americanese tossed off by the actors in the dress rehearsal segments. The tension between high and low, sacred and profane continues throughout, working to draw us in toward the heart of the story.
It’s no coincidence that, at Cohen’s invitation, the patron saint of meta-theater, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, spent three years teaching at Irvine in the 1980s. Though Grotowski’s influence on world theater is deep and on-going, it’s hard to speak definitively about his aesthetic. Famously Hermetic, Grotowski worked hard to avoid any codification of principles that might lead toward the enemy terrain of conceptual dogma. But my sense is that, for Grotowski, life itself was a series of theatrical exchanges in which the participants become mesmerized by the appearances they themselves conjure out of thin air. Mislead by distorted projections, we wander away from our true nature. Theater becomes a means of shedding light on psycho-social dysfunctions that are already covertly operating, and the membrane separating stage events from “normal” life grows very thin indeed.
Grotowski notwithstanding, Cohen’s focus isn’t just the terrain Peter Brook calls the “holy theater.” Abraham and Isaac in Jerusalem presents the story as a religious narrative that is mysteriously active on the historical level. Cohen’s meta-theatrical framing builds on the foundation of all our previous encounters with the story of Abraham and his favorite son. And what we already know about the story acts as an unspoken counterpoint to what we encounter as we approach the sacrifice itself. For me, this included the drive South on the I-5 through the corporate wasteland of Orange County, where the toxic fluorescence of convenience stores are all that break the endless monotony of earth-toned corporate parks. In a quieter way than Rova Square, this is also a land choking on self-generated concepts of “the real.” The banality of the consumer cul-de-sac that Western history has delivered us to provides an ironic backdrop for the truly sacred mysteries still active in the mythic story of Abraham and Isaac.
The play of sincerity and irony in Cohen’s production reaches a climax in what I call “the Koons moment.” Isaac is kneeling, ready for the blow. Sword raised, Abraham is about to lay it on. Behind us comes the whirr of an electric engine, and, when we turn, Jehovah himself is rising up on a motorized aluminum “Genie.” Shrouded in mist and snowy of beard, this actor resembles nothing so much as a life-sized, talking version of the kind of saccharine figurine Jeff Koons loves to fabricate. In that moment, deep religious awe and ironic kitsch collide like atomic particles, illuminating the transcendent and immanent axis of a graph on which all religious experience might be plotted.
For me, as I’ve noted before, the writer who sheds the most light on the meaning and history of sacrificial rites is the anthropologist Rene Girard. To Girard, the unique trajectory of Judaism is linked to how the sacred texts evoke the scapegoat mechanism…but only in order to reject it. This rejection of sacrifice begins with the story of Isaac, but continues in stories like the one in which Joseph survives being assaulted by his brothers. This opposition to sacrifice was an important historical milestone, showing how violent impulses could be sublimated into the larger project of “subduing the earth.” Traversing the corporate gauntlet of Irvine toward Cohen’s stage, I thought of the moment in Kubrick’s 2001 where the hominid throws up a bone and the shape of it dissolves to become a futuristic space station; Abraham withholds the blow and history shifts from being a cyclical affair into a progressive advance. A few millennia later we get Irvine…and Rova Square. But while ritualized violence has been foresworn, coercive might retain its seat in the human heart, gathering its toxic energies in the shadows and forming into things like vast armories of nuclear weapons.
As I understand it Girard became a strange kind of Christian late in life, bowing to the scapegoat nailed to the cross while also looking ahead toward a “second coming” in which the species would foreswear violence even in its sublimated forms. The idea here is that the logic of cause and effect will demand that we transcend the distorting forces of greed and aggression in order to survive. This would be to make explicit what the very existence of the scapegoat mechanism implies – separation from the Other is an illusion, an error of the human mind. To one degree or another we are all Abraham, perpetually ready, in the course of our everyday lives, to strike our own hearts, blind to the reality of what we are doing, but haunted too by a secret knowing. That this critique still seems revolutionary only testifies to how far we need to go if we are to outrun the shadow of our own ignorance.
In Santa Fe dramatic thunderstorms are common late on summer days. Afterwards the massive banks of purple clouds will often part, allowing shafts of intense sunlight to angle down, creating sometimes vivid rainbows. At a house near downtown last summer I saw a rainbow like this, clear as a Technicolor dream. I was with a group of young scientists and I watched as their wonder shifted into analytical mode – here is an example of water molecules interacting with rays of refracted light – and then back again toward a more embodied appreciation. The sequence reminded me of the Buddhist saying in which a mountain becomes, for the meditator, something very different …and then, at a later stage, returns again to being just a mountain. Then, as the rainbow faded in the sky, we trooped inside to watch Charlton Heston chew the scenery (and a few other things) in the Sci-fi flick Soylent Green.
“Charlton Heston is an axiom,” said Michel Mourlet, the film critic, in 1960. Mourlet was a member of the French New Wave, and one must never argue with the French New Wave. “He constitutes a tragedy in himself,” Mourlet continued, “his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty.” This serenade comes as a shock to us today, given the political causes Heston shackled himself to late in life. But think of Heston playing Vasquez in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, or the title role in Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, the film that inspired novelist Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. And on a more iconic level there’s also, of course, the latex miracle that is the Planet of the Apes series, not to mention the be-sandaled epics Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments.
In all these films, Heston serves to emblemize aggrieved masculinity, the strong and righteous father-figure who recoils in disgust as evil and injustice are unmasked. As soon as the Hestonian visage enters the frame all problems, apocalyptic or otherwise, begin to whither of their own accord. If evil has flourished recently, it’s only because this man’s attention was occupied elsewhere. Even when Heston himself goes down to death and defeat, we know the forces of good will prevail in the end…because man, in his essence, is like this. If ever there were a man to teach us how to survive our own success as a species, wouldn’t it be Heston?
On a mythic level I would make the case that the iconic appeal of Charlton Heston is linked to the essentially Protestant archetype of man as a fixed and separate instrument of divine providence, taming unruly nature. With the Reformation, God was thought to be an immanent presence in this world, as well as a transcendent deity. Man’s destiny was to make God’s will manifest in a perfectible happiness. The Enlightenment was animated by this mythic ambition, and the scientist remains the most significant embodiment of the world-conquering, Protestant impulse. From Galileo forward, the view of science has been reductive, oriented toward locating the indivisible units of matter and energy upon which an edifice of fixed values could be erected and against which all things could be measured. This reductive inquiry culminated in the great discoveries of 20th century – General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – which seemed to deliver us, paradoxically, into a world defined by non-local, spooky effects our minds are not set up to comprehend in any direct way.
This breakdown of the Heston effect occurred to me at the screening of Soylent Green in Santa Fe. In case you don’t recall, the film takes place in 2022 in New York City, a time when overpopulation has resulted in frequent food riots and other horrors. Loosely based on a book by Harry Harrison, the film features Heston as detective Thorn, dispatched to investigate the murder of a wealthy industrialist named Simonson played by Joseph Cotton. Gum-shoeing his way through sweltering streets, Thorn discovers that Simonson was murdered before he could go public with a shocking truth: the new food product, Soylent Green, is made, not from a highly nutritious form of algae …but out of dead people. Driven by insurmountable environmental problems, the species has turned to cannibalism in its corporate form.
Dennis Meadows
Doyne Farmer, who hosted the screening, has devoted his career in physics to the new field of complex systems. After exploring this terrain in various contexts, including Los Alamos National Labs and Wall Street, Farmer has come to focus on the arena, rich in complexity, of environmental sustainability. The screening of Soylent Green closed out the second week of an annual Sustainability Summer School, organized by Farmer and hosted by St John’s College, to catalyze new research and debate. Presenting lectures were a roster of heavyweights in various fields, including economist Samuel Bowles, anthropologist Lisa Curran, paleobiologist Doug Erwin and the seminal environmentalist Dennis Meadows. In his presentation, Meadows looked back to the Club of Rome “The Limits of Growth” report of 1972, which he co-wrote. Surveying the forty year interlude since that talk, Meadows underscored how resource depletion and over-consumption have unfolded pretty much as predicted, with the most challenging patches coming at us now around the next corner.
The screening of Soylent Green was attended by young working scientists and post-docs, roughly the same demographic mix that would have heard Meadows speak 40 years ago. I had been wondering how they were bearing up under the steady barrage of dire predictions, and the screening was my first chance to meet outside the St. John’s lecture halls. When the lights came up there was a good deal of amusement about the costumes in the film, the sexual morays and the cheesy dialogue of the 1970s. But there was also an uncomfortable, deflated silence. Among the few comments people managed to make was the sobering notion that, given the problems that confront us, eating each other might turn out to be a decent idea.
But before you start measuring your neighbors for the tureen, Soylent Green, in its very dated-ness, revealed where we might look for the expansive energies of optimism. The bleak city-scape of the film seems dated when compared to the more prescient production design of, say, Blade Runner, which was made only a decade later. Working in the 1970s the filmmakers failed to anticipate the explosion in the speed with which human beings are able to process information, the computers and digital imaging technology that decorate urban landscapes today. This exponential increase in information processing – commonly known as Moore’s Law – is ongoing, and while it’s unclear how much it will weigh in the balance against large scale threats such as global warming, its transformative effects remains a wild card in a deck which is otherwise stacked against us.
The rapid spread of internet communications is itself an “emergent” aspect of the steady increase in our capacity to process information. No doubt political authorities are working overtime to figure out ways to put the genie back into the bottle, but our sudden ability to communicate with anyone on this planet, is a powerful and unpredictable force. We may discover that it’s harder to demonize people when you’ve friended them on Facebook. Also the Solylent company is going to have a substantially harder time hiding its tracks when one whistle blower is all it takes. In the era of complex systems, perhaps connective wealth will come to replace material wealth as the signifier of social value.
The internet has other surprising effects as well, including rich cultural cross-pollination. Insights from Asian wisdom traditions, for example, have been integrated with Western psychology and brain science in ways that shed new light on the psychological dynamics that are fueling over-consumption. Readers of this column will sense the approach of a plug for the “revolutionary” Buddhism historian David Loy advocates in his work, and they would be right to do so. I subscribe to Loy’s diagnosis of our root malady – that our problems arise from an inability to make peace with our fundamental groundlessness with respect to being. From this point of view the vast array of problems confronting us can be viewed as a single mistake we are making in a vast array of contexts: seeking to ground what can never be grounded.
Techno-pastoralism – the idea that salvation will arrive via new technology – is a dangerous tendency, no doubt. But in the view of some, the science of complex systems reverses the reductionist focus of the material science that first ignited uncontrolled industrial growth three centuries ago. Something may have shifted at the source of the problems of over-development, in other words. And looking back some years from now we may discover that this shift has transformed the scientific establishment into a powerful ally in the effort to reverse the dangerous trajectory we are traveling…and all Charlton Heston needs to do is get out of the way.
It’s hard to know what to say about Charles Koch after reading Jane Mayer’s astonishing expose in the August 30th issue of The New Yorker. American politics have been running hot for decades; finally we can name the source of the fever. Together with his brother David, Charles Koch owns Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the US; only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are thought to be wealthier. In a remarkably narcissistic and anti-democratic act, the Koch boys long ago anointed themselves the heroic duo who would “rip government out by the roots.” In the grip of this wayward intention, they have, for the past four decades, pumped billions of dollars worth of high-grade hatred into the bloodstream of American politics. From the PR campaigns against Jimmy Carter in the 1970s to the anti-Clinton crusades of the 90s, to the faux populism of today’s Tea Party, the Kochs have pushed the envelope on right wing propaganda while their corporation rakes in mega bucks on the progressive policies they have thwarted.
Until the New Yorker article the Kochs accomplished all this from the shadows via front groups with deceptive names like the “Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE)” and “Americans for Prosperity.” Now that they have been revealed, hissing, serpent-like, behind the drapes, it’s worth pondering what it is, finally, that has gotten them so pissed off. Forget about David, who plays the submissive role in the relationship; it’s Charles who emerges as a poster child for the neurosis of the Protestant male in its aggressive, active mode, a cartoon version of daddy Warbucks villainy, a caricature of the malignant oligarch in full bloom.
Feeling compassion for a man like Charles is challenging when you consider what his actions have done to working Americans…or why the nation is slipping from the first world to the second…or why our roads are pitted, our health care a global joke and our prisons over-crowded. Given the grandiosity and malice that have animated Charles’ mindless assault on our collective well-being, it’s hard to draw close enough to see clearly what exactly is being acted out. But only by drawing close will we see a way to ease the pointless suffering in the situation, Charles’ as well as everyone else’s.
When the wealthy embrace the principle of weak government there’s the obvious motive of greed, government being that which, via taxation and regulation, impinges on the pure sovereignty of wealth. Rich libertarians are simply feathering their already well-feathered nests when they espouse such “ideals.” In the case of the Kochs, Jane Mayer does a good job showing how their libertarian advocacy dovetails neatly with their financial interests. As one of the top ten US polluters, for instance, Koch Industries benefits directly from the fake controversy Charles Koch has rustled up concerning global warming. Mayer cites other flagrant examples, such as one Koch lobbyist making the ridiculous claim that air pollution reduces the risk of skin cancer by obscuring sunlight. She also cites how the Koch brothers, shortly after contributing twenty-five million to the American Cancer Society, began lobbying hard to prevent formaldehyde being named a carcinogen. She points out that Koch Industries had just become the nation’s largest formaldehyde producer, and stood to gain much more than twenty-five million if regulation could be derailed.
But to point out the transparent fallacy of libertarianism as a political “philosophy” is actually to fall into a tar baby trap. Libertarianism is not a coherent political theory at all – it is a tantrum masquerading as a political theory. Like all tantrums, its true intention is simply to generate opposition. Why the great need for opposition? Once again, David Loy provides an answer:
“… since the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure. The self is inherently anxious because it is not a “thing” that could ever be secure. We identify with things that (we think) might provide the grounding or reality we crave: money, material possessions, reputation, power, physical attractiveness, etc. This means that if, for example, a preoccupation with making money is my way to become more real, then no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough.” –Self Transformation, Social Tranformation, Tikkun Magazine
Afflicted by the groundlessness Loy describes, the libertarian strikes out aggressively at the dominant value system, generating a response that seems to provide, albeit in a negative way, a firm foundation for his existence.
Reading Mayer we learn that the Koch’s father, who was among founders of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, made his fortune building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. The Koch patriarch was harsh with his boys, traumatizing them in the classic authoritarian manner. One way to view the Koch trajectory is that Charles has devoted his adult life to exporting the pain of this emotional abuse on the rest of us rather than experiencing it himself. The anger at the father is split off and projected outward onto “government” that can be campaigned against. And victory is not really the point of the campaign because with victory would come the realization that this Other was just a stand-in for a battle long since lost: the pain waits in the wake of every triumph and the conflict begins anew with ever-higher stakes.
But mixed in with the self-exonerating contempt wealthy men like Koch seem to feel for those less fortunate, one detects an odd element of resentment. In extreme cases this resentment manifests, bizarrely, as a form of envy. To understand what might be at work here, let’s zoom in on a specific imagined event. Let’s imagine Charles Koch being driven through downtown Wichita toward whatever moated sanctuary provides his head with a pillow for the night…and let’s imagine at a stoplight Charles glances out through the tinted glass…and catches the eye of a homeless veteran begging with his cardboard sign. It’s easy to understand why that glance that might trigger in Charles’ heart feelings of disgust, annoyance, contempt, even guilt…but envy?
Perhaps the answer to this riddle lies in the different ways these two men relate to the experience of our common mortality. After all, there will come a time, in the dead of a night not so far from now perhaps, when death steals in through Charles’ bedroom window and makes a bee-line for that delicate, beating heart. There will be no bargaining then. Money will have no currency. And though that night has not yet arrived, Charles’ sleep is troubled already by the dark mystery of his inevitable death much as the vet’s sleep is troubled by the idea of dying. It’s not hard to imagine Charles lying sleepless disturbed by the realization that there will be no difference, finally, between the death of Charles Koch and the death of his newfound acquaintance crouching in his plywood shelter.
The insidious aspect of wealth is how it supplies an ability to arrange things in a way that encourages the delusions of the self. To a narcissistic personality this ability to arrange things seems to imply a control that he does not have, and can never have. When such a man encounters the “less fortunate” he discovers, in the moment, that the story of wealth is just that: a story. Having money does not, in the end, address the feeling of lack that we all hope it might address. As Loy points out, the homeless man on his street feels himself to be, in the moment, as “real,” as Charles does looking out his window. The vet is, if anything, more likely to be reconciled already to his own vulnerability such that he experience his life with some amount of presence. And this is why it’s not hard to imagine Charles looking out and feeling something like envy toward the vet…and being bewildered, scandalized even, by this feeling of envy.
If visualizing a homeless man introduces distracting issues for you, feel free to substitute any working American into the above scenario. The point is that the problem with wealth, adorned as it is with false promises, is how it can seduce us away from our true humanity…sometimes so far away there is no path back. Then we must confront our death alienated from our fellow man and feeling as though we have not been truly alive. This knowledge may be buried deep at the level of dreams, but it consumes our hearts with bitterness and regret. Spiritual leaders have understood this quite clearly. Remember, for example, Jesus’ famous dictum that it’s easier to “pass a camel through the eye of the needle” than to bring a rich man into heaven. Such statements point to how corrupting wealth can be when it is allowed to fuel the delusions of the self.
On one level, the levers of power must be removed from the hands of Charles Koch, and men like him, as quickly as possible. The power wealth gives these deluded souls will only add to the sum of human suffering, theirs included. But accomplishing this task will be easier when the curtains around Charles’ little Oz machine have been pulled aside. Then we will recognize how his affliction is just an amped up version of our own struggles with delusion, malice and longing…and we can move on and devote our common energies to the very real problems that confront us.
Brewsie and Willie, by Gertrude Stein – Poor Dog Group, UCLA Hothouse Residency
by Guy Zimmerman
When we share with a work of art an experience of presence, we come close to understanding art’s intrinsic value. Deploying skill and emotional force, the artist imbues the material with a living, emergent quality that engages the viewer fully, inducing an open stance toward the immediate moment. There is a small awakening to the radical freedom inherent in the embrace of the ever-shifting present.
In theater, this mark is being hit when you hear yourself say, “okay, now something new needs to happen,” and then immediately find that what you had in mind (three women enter, for example) is actually happening. This kind of small elation, for me, took place again and again while watching the Poor Dog Group’s production of Brewsie and Willie, by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Hats off to the director, Travis Preston, and to the ensemble for making me smile almost continuously throughout the performance.
“No thinking, no whores, nothing but jobs,” says Willie, a GI stationed in Europe after World War Two, as he contemplates the life that awaits him back home. Stein has a light touch and she appears to improve with age. There’s no pressure in her text here; it allows itself to be in a way that Hemmingway’s writing also does, when he’s on. The American lightness of spirit is there in her simple, direct sentences that aren’t concerned with anything that has a vertical dimension. Her lines are like sedans speeding West on a new interstate, eyes on the road that unfurls ahead, and no need to explain what they are doing because it’s so self-evident. The relationships in the play are very specific without being clear, but you don’t need them to be clear, it turns out, to find them compelling. A sexy physicality has been channeled into language by a seventy year old woman who lived through various cataclysms and somehow retained her sweetness of vision.
Brewsie and Willie and their company, both men and women, are stranded in the ruins of Western Europe. The destructive energies of war have opened a space where eros has free play. The Poor Dogs convey this right away, moving with grounded ease around a stage space defined by stacks of sand bags and a billowing white parachute overhead. Sometimes they undress. At other times they freeze in unison and quiver briefly, gripped by some unknowable collective trauma. Every once in a while they break into a dance – Dionysus, the god of “love and ecstasy”, is in the room. In the East they call this god Shiva, the creative ground of being from which all phenomenon arise. Preston understands how this works on stage. Nothing needs to be reached for – the deity is present already in the voltage between actors whenever they are fully grounded in their bodies. With well-trained actors, all that needs to happen is a relaxed opening alert to the moment. Dionysus arrives. He leaves again. The fact that no one tries to make him stay – no one tries to build on that ground – means he’ll come back real soon.
Brewsie and Willie speaks to an unshakable quality associated with being an American. It’s poignant, how in their thoughts about their plight these characters don’t lay claim to any privileged status outside the play of history. All the characters will be equally implicated; the “job-minded” world that awaits them back home will have its way with the human spirit. Brewsie’s earnest pessimism speaks to us across the decades, as does Willie’s ecstatic nihilism. And the humility of their voices makes the production an avant garde transmission that vaults the ditch of the 1960s. The energies at work in the writing – and now in the performances – have little to do with the long agon of that most bombastic of generations. The complacent self-regard that undermined the progressive impulses of ’68, and then delivered the energies of the generation to a right wing defined by Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes, does not show up here. And so, while Gertrude Stein’s politics were so bad you can almost hear Mel Brooks laughing in the wings, the politics in this adaptation by Preston, Eric Ehn and Marissa Chibas, are subtle and authentic. The production speaks powerfully to the Poor Dog generation, confronted as it is by radical dislocations and economic hardships.
It’s always interesting to look back at avant garde work and see what remains “avant” with the passage of time. For me, Lautréamont and Raymond Roussel hold up pretty well, as does William Burroughs. Like Stein, these writers continue to create the future even as the imagery they deploy to do so slips into the past. With Brewsie and Willie the continuous presenting that is the defining quality of Stein’s prose seems a perfect match for Preston’s Growtoskian approach to performance. In Grotowski’s view (and, yes, he is indeed an icon of the 60’s), theater has one foot firmly planted in the spiritual, which is inherently non-conceptual terrain. The conceptual mind with its representations of reality, the spinner of stories and myths, comes later. There’s a correlate here in writing, a ferocious integrity in the act of listening, and Stein shows what this looks like. Put them together on stage and something opens. Watching Brewsie and Willie in their erotic playground of post-war Paris, we come to inhabit the freedom that follows the great victory of our last out breath.
The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire, Getty Villa
by Guy Zimmerman
When, in a crowded casino, the endangered hero of a lousy movie grabs his girl and jumps into a car that’s on display to zoom out through shattering windows into the neon-lit boulevards of Las Vegas, it’s all about generating a moment of surprise. When Teardrop, in the film Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik, grabs his niece Ree by the hair and tells her “I told you to shut up once with my mouth” we are caught off guard, and in that shocked opening we engage anew with the world. When Shakespeare writes “And pity, like a naked new-born babe…” he varies the um-pah, iambic rhythm in the last three syllables to surprise us, and then focuses our opened minds on that vivid closing image. And surprise – subtle, awakening shocks – are what Velazquez is after when he drops the sharp diagonal of the table edge between the curving shapes that compose the Water Seller of Seville. With art (even in its degraded forms), it’s all about the surprise that frees us from conceptual filters and opens us to the seamless emergence of the present in all its vivid complexity. These thoughts came to me at the Getty Villa looking up into the vacant eyes of the Tzitzimitl, which is an artifact designed to do precisely the opposite.
A monument to the depravity of human beings in authoritarian mode, the Tzitzimitl leans forward in the main gallery, hands reaching out, grinning with a lecherous avidity. Small holes perforate the top of the Tzitzimitl’s head. Here, the priests would pour bowls of human blood, and the blood would seep down through the open ribs to drip off the pod-like liver that hangs below the rib cage like the clapper of a bell. A demonic figure dredged up from Aztec Mexico, this life-sized terracotta statue must have been terrifying in the shadowy dark of the temple pyramids, shrouded in smoke while those dying under the sacrificial knife wailed and groaned. The Tzitzimitl is an instrument design to deliver psychic collapse.
We mill around the Tzitzimitl’s legs, me and the other visitors to the Getty Villa, as if the dark and repellent energies that surround this grim artifact have entirely dissipated. But something in me is alarmed, as if I am crossing a line that should not be crossed. A feeling of dread rises up as I watch the tourists scan the explanatory plaque, and then shuffle off under those vacant but watchful eyes. No surprise here: you are defined totally by the reductive narrative of the social hierarchy, the Tzitzimitl whispers, and you must submit and obey its imperatives, even unto your untimely death.
Through the use of this kind of terror, the Aztec priesthood maintained a regime of conquest and domination for the two centuries preceding the arrival of Hernan Cortes in 1519. The curators of the show, “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,” take pains to connect the power structure and practices of the Aztecs with those of Imperial Rome, and I would not argue the point. The human urge toward conquest and domination observes no historical, regional or ethnic boundaries. In fact, I’d be willing to extend that analogy to the kind of overt, directly coercive American empire advocated by Dick Cheney and others on the virulent right wing of American politics. The comparison might seem outlandish…except if you are don’t happen to be an American. While thwarted, at least temporarily, in their overt political aims, the right’s communications infrastructure – the infamous, Fox-centered Right Wing Noise Machine – continues to seep polluted thought into the cultural mind stream like a malignant tumor. Rather than work cooperatively to confront the very real and quite alarming environmental and social challenges unfettered Capitalism has created, we are forced to battle disinformation at every turn.
I went to the Getty Villa thinking about the issue that’s come up in recent posts about how the brain is shaped by experience, and how concerted efforts must be made to to alter such “hard wiring.” I’m curious about the collective correlates of this individual effort, which connect for me with the very pressing issue of sustainability – our ability as a species to outrun our own destructive capacities. No doubt there were Aztecs, perhaps a great many of them, who recognized the inherent absurdity (not to mention the barbarity) of human sacrifice, but were powerless to alter a deeply rooted pattern of ritual that was also linked to the tangible benefits of a militaristic empire. In contemporary America we are not in the habit of cutting beating hearts from living victims…but we consume way too much of everything and it’s arguably a more destructive habit in the long run. Authoritarian elements in American cultural life are being energized by how desperate huge segments of the population are to avoid even modest changes.
Recent research into the fine-grain neuronal structure of the brain underscores the roles of “invariant memories” and pattern recognition play in human intelligence. To form predictions about what will happen next, the brain reaches back through the vast, neuronal archive and builds on what has happened before. When predictive statements about how the world operates reach a certain level of complexity we call them stories. Stories are comforting, but when we forget that they are also artificial, stories quickly lead us astray. Reality is inherently non-conceptual. If the stories we tell ourselves are not continually readjusted the invariant memories that drive them inevitably deliver imbalance.
As an institution, the Republican party seems to understand all this. Representing the interests of the top one per cent of the population they have become adept at manipulating the story elements buried in the national consciousness, and then frame every issue in narrative terms that resist the influence of reality. As we approach the 2010 midterms they seem determined to wring short term advantage from every situation regardless of how increasing imbalance leads at some point to a crash. Course corrections can be traumatic, involving opening to direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames.
For anyone familiar with tragic drama, “direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames” begins to sound like a description of catharsis, the shattering moment in which the tragic hero suddenly sees how radically off target his (or her) conceptual picture of things has been. The hero of tragic drama is forced down into the experience of the present moment. There he confronts the somatic voltage of unprocessed traumas directly such that they no longer distort his vision. The shock of this moment is conveyed to the audience watching the tragedy of Oedipus or Lear unfold on stage. The experience is cognitive but also deeply emotive, rooted in the collective body as well as the mind. It’s no accident that tragic drama flourished most powerfully in Athens and Elizabethan England, which are arguably the two most transformative and dynamic societies in the history of man.
As individuals, one action we can take to escape confining narrative and conceptual frames, is to go to the body. How we do this in a collective way is a big subject, clearly. But it’s hardly an abstract issue today. After my encounter with the Tzitzimitl, I found the opulence of the Getty Villa oppressive. Weighty panels of multicolored marble buttress the impression that in the hierarchy of social values you are near the very pinnacle. The last thirty years have seen a remarkable transfer of wealth up the socio-economic ladder and today income inequality is greater than it was in the 1920s. Many of my friends in the arts community are suffering today, their livelihoods in question. Our ability to inquire about root causes of our situation begins to ramp down as we are forced to focus on issues closer to home. In this way economic trauma confers a short term advantage to authoritarian forces, but only on the way towards the chaos of collapse.
Stepping back to look at the longer term I’m compelled to quote from the opening of Knowledge and Politics, by the remarkable Brazilian social theorist Roberto Unger:
“In its ideas about itself and about society, as in all its other endeavors, the mind goes from mastery to enslavement. By an irresistible movement, which imitates the attraction death exercises over life, thought again and again uses the instruments of its own freedom to bind itself in chains. But whenever the mind breaks its chains, the liberty it wins is greater than the one it had lost, and the splendor of its triumph surpasses the wretchedness of its earlier subjection. Even its defeats strengthen it. Thus, everything in the history of thought happens as if it were meant to remind us that, though death lasts forever, it is always the same, whereas life, which is fleeting, is always something higher than it was before.”
Unger, who until recently served as a minister in the Lula government in Brazil, certainly deserves several posts of his own. For now let us hope his former student, Barak Obama, learned enough to break some of the more destructive patterns clouding the American mind.
Talk to people about sustainability and you might notice them recoiling into a resigned stoicism. The momentum in the direction of over-consumption seems vast and formidable, as indeed it is. Better, when caught picnicking between the hi-speed rails, to avert your eyes from the onrushing bullet train, and focus instead on how the honey drips off the baklava. You can invoke Thomas Malthus while you do so. Malthus, the 18th century economist, who, extrapolating food supplies against population growth, predicted mass famine in Europe in the not-too-distant future. The resourcefulness of human beings in their economic activities has proven Malthus wrong again and again, and perhaps we will sidestep disaster this time too.
Indeed there are many places where human ingenuity continues to show bright magic – the sustained, exponential up scaling of our ability to process and convey information, for example. With such dramatic increases in interconnectivity, un-guessed at solutions to challenges like global warming and peak oil could be right around the corner. But perhaps we shouldn’t count on it.
Speaking of interconnectivity, right now, on your computer, you can find “Century of the Self” and watch a riveting four-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that sheds light on how we got here. Curtis illuminates a vast, decades long campaign, begun by Edward Bernays in the 1920s, to reshape human behavior so that it suited the aims of a vanguard elite. No, Bernays was not a Bolshevik. Rather, “fast Eddie” was the American nephew of the great Sigmund “Uncle Siggy” Freud, and his field was public relations, marketing, advertising. Bernays, working with colleagues equally schooled in how to manipulate unconscious drives, used psychological insights to shift America from an economy based on need to an economy based on desire.
As you might guess, Bernays and company did not lack for funding; Curtis quotes Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” Creating the churning engine of the consumer economy was every inch a conscious project, which also suggests it can be consciously reversed or, at least, seriously revised.
The Century of the Self follows the evolution of Bernay’s ideas as the post war paradise of an oil-fat America proceeded. The reductive Orthodoxy of the circle around Anna Freud and the crude behaviorism of BF Skinner gave way to the deeper, eros-based critique of Reich and Marcuse. And marketers hung on for the ride, reaping the benefits as the generation of the 1960s shifted from social rebellion to the life-style consumerism of the famous “me” generation. The series concludes with the focus group-based politics Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought to the world in the 1990s.
While as a whole quite strong, Curtis’ series can only cover such a large historical arc by engaging in historical shorthand. There’s the issue of Curtis’ starting point, for example. While Bernay’s certainly seems to have engineered a huge economic pivot toward desire, America was from the start pre-disposed in that direction. Amor is the root of our name, after all, and we have always been a land of desire, a garden of dreams. When the Enlightenment cut the roots of religion, heaven toppled westward and unfurled toward the blue Pacific, and all the hungry souls of Europe felt the sudden tug of self-invention. Happiness, freedom from lack, could be theirs, if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. The secular religion of progress was born long before clever young Eddie climbed up onto Uncle Siggy’s knee.
What Curtis does very well in this series is to underscore how responsive entire populations can be when their dream lives are massaged and stimulated in the right ways. Here we encounter the plasticity of social relations I mentioned in Part 1 of this post. It’s a correlate, on the collective level, of the plasticity of the neuronal structures in our brains that determine how we behave and the choices we make in the world. All the experts agree: change comes through steady persistent effort lit up now and then by shattering, transformative breakthroughs.
At the science writers workshop in Santa Fe a generational shift seemed clear to me. There was Tanya Elliott herself, speaking with focused passion about new approaches to the issue of sustainability. And the younger people in the group seemed to react differently to her presentation. About Elliott’s dire prognosis many older attendees expressed skepticism tinged with an oddly anxious condescension, while in private comments a number of the younger people spoke to me about how large the problem looms for them. They seemed more than prepared to re-examine established habits in return for a new and more sustainable paradigm. Sensibly enough young people want to know that their choices make sense in terms of irreplaceable resources. And the shadows of Exxon Valdez and BP are never far from their minds.
The key value in the consumer economy is progress, for which you need energy. To shift to sustainability, we must move toward balance as a core value. Respecting the motivational energy of desire while insisting also that the needs of the future must also be kept in mind? Call it the “middle way” economy. And just as the psychology of Freud fueled the shift to a desire-based economy, the neurology of happiness may be what fuels the shift to an economy of balance. Delusions of all kinds need to be left by the wayside. Elliott, for example, cited plenty of empirical evidence that, beyond a relatively low threshold, wealth ceases to provide well-being. Being the object of other people’s envy and seeing yourself as part of an elite – these emotions may feel good, but only if you presuppose an underlying neurosis of chronic, soul-consuming lack. This is the great, dirty secret of La Dolce Vita – it’s full of empty calories and leaves you unprepared and flabby in the face of death, which is, famously, no picnic.
So where then for happiness? The pragmatic approach to mindfulness practice that is flourishing in the West is based on empiricism, the direct observation of sensations, feeling, thoughts – the content of experience moment-to-moment. Stripped of unnecessary cultural baggage, it turns out that the wisdom traditions of Asia share a core value with scientific inquiry, an underlying faith in the world, and an embrace of the notion that we have to start any form of engagement with what is verifiably true. Both traditions have a healthy regard for how our picture of the world can be deeply distorted by the brain-structures and biases laid down by prior experience. As meditation teacher and writer Ken McLeod puts it, science and awareness practice both begin with the faith that we need to look at the truth and open to what we find there.
I began this two-part post describing being haunted by a memory of the cement stairs of the apartment complex my family rented in Santa Monica right before my parents split up. As a child I could already read how the patterns at work in my life might play out. It was certainly cause for some alarm. Indeed, for many years our summers came to resemble the close of one of those Antonioni films, full of mute devastation, the catastrophe extending out toward a distant, flat horizon. Or like a Joan Didion essay right at the end, when she has rolled you out into a thin ribbon of alienated sensitivity exposed beneath a hot SoCal sun. Divorce and dislocation, as we all now appreciate, can be hard on youngsters.
But there was also, standing there looking up at the stairs, already the recognition, hard to articulate but always close by, that on a deeper level I was entirely unaffected by what was unfolding in my family’s life. The sun was shining. The August sea was warm, and if you dug down into the sand with your toes you could feel the small sand crabs there, burrowing away. The world was alive and everywhere vibrant, and at moments I knew myself to be profoundly free. Comfort, for me, would lie not in some remembered security, but in the possibility of a more complete connection to that energized field of experience. This sense of being non-separate is what thinkers like David Loy and Francisco Varela describe as the actual truth of our situation. Learning to embrace the mystery of how this non-separation could be true opens toward an energizing sense that we are, moment by moment, participating in the story of how the material of the universe emerges upwards into self-awareness.
And so I have to note in passing that, wherever you are right now, whatever you’re doing, the world around you is luminous. In the name of social progress, Loy asks us to recognize that this luminosity is a crucial part of what we fundamentally are. We tend to forget this fact more or less completely, and identify instead with what limits and constricts us. Such limitations are, of course, real enough too, but we need to continue to investigate how they may be expressing themselves in the larger dysfunctions that threaten our common future.
No doubt correcting this massive imbalance seems unlikely…but then from the start life itself is utterly unlikely. As is the fact that a collection of splitting, looping protein strands would give rise to the kinds of thoughts I am expressing now, or to the fingers that tap these thoughts out into words…or to the optic nerves that, many miles away, carry these improbable symbol-marks up into your neocortex where they bloom out into something that approaches meaning. If it is miracles we need, we might begin noticing when they arise around us. It’s a task that might keep us surprisingly busy, and that might balance somewhat the other efforts we are now called upon to make.
On a visit to Santa Fe recently I read up on neuroplasticity and found myself haunted by the memory of a set of cement stairs. These stairs I encountered briefly when I was eight years old and my parents were hurtling toward their final separation. The stairs belonged to a monthly rental in Santa Monica where we had traveled for the summer from the East. They led up to a hallway and, at the far end, an apartment I never wanted to enter. At night the thin walls would shake with my father’s wounded bellowing and the sound of things breaking. We children would gather in the corner of the bedroom, the three of us, around our youngest sister as she cried from an ache in her chest that wouldn’t ease. There was no safety in the world for us, huddled there in the dark, and we knew it and were filled with fear.
I’ve come to Santa Fe to attend a workshop in science writing and I have been reading the recent books authored by the instructors. Sandra Blakeslee, one of the country’s top science writers, is leading the workshop, the 15th of its kind. Working with her is George Johnson, a writer duly celebrated for his ability to explain things like Quantum Chromodynamics in elegant, simple prose. On the first night the attendees gather in the courtyard of the Ghost Ranch for dinner and drinks. As I say hello I keep catching little glimpses of those cement stairs, the somatic charge of old remembered fears traveling up through my body.
You can’t pursue a meditation practice nowadays without bumping into a book on neuroscience. Advances in the technology of brain imaging have opened the inner realm of meditative states to empirical study. The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosche, first published in 1991, was a seminal text. A Buddhist himself, Varela, along with his co-authors, reviewed recent developments in the neuroscience of perception to buttress the core Buddhist concept of non-dualism. After The Embodied Mind, the stream widened considerably. Psychopathologist Richard Davidson began hooking Tibetan monks up to brain scan machines and recording the results. Davidson was soon joined by a growing circle of accomplished scientists and meditators including Jon Kabat Zinn, Daniel Goleman and more recent authors such as Daniel Siegel. Sensing the opportunity, the Dalai Lama lent his considerable weight to the endeavor, helping to create the Mind-Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where these investigations continue today. The controversies surrounding this research will continue for a time, no doubt. In the end we will arrive at a closer understanding of the underlying reality of how experience and neurology interweave. Also significant in this ongoing inquiry are non-Buddhist researchers into mind-body issues and brain science, such as Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Jeffrey Hawkins.
Dan Siegel’s book, The Mindful Brain, published in 2006, begins with an overview of the emerging field of contemplative neuro-science. Siegel then focuses in on how negative emotional experiences get hard wired into the brain, and how this wiring restricts our freedom and insures neurotic suffering. He presents a new explanation for how specific social and emotional circuits in the brain can be harnessed to transform our experience through basic meditation practices such as mindfulness. Here, I note in passing, are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to achieve its cessation – in modern dress.
Change comes hard, but it can come, is the message. Affective Anxiety disorders, like the one that sends images of the cement stairs reeling through my mind, can be addressed through concerted effort. When somatic emotional charges are fully felt in the present they release their grip. We no longer confuse such strong emotions with who we are in any real sense, and after a while the conditioning ceases to express itself in neurotic behavior. Engaging with experience in this kind of non-dual mode begins to cultivate within us a sense of inter-connectivity with other beings, and an authentic concern for their welfare. And over time the momentum of practice calls upon us to engage with a larger effort to ease suffering in the world.
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On our first day together the group of us visit Santa Fe Institute which overlooks Santa Fe on a hilltop just outside of town. Founded in 1984, SFI is devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. This study of “emergent” phenomenon widens the scientific gaze to include those complex processes that arise out of the interactions of much simpler elements. SFI’s Nobel-winning patriarch Murray Gell-Mann has summed up this view with elegant concision: “you don’t need more to explain more.” Whatever mystery there is in the universe resides below, in other words, in the basic particles and forces and how they interact, giving rise to miraculous complexities such as Gell-Mann’s intelligence.
At the Institute we gather around a very long table to hear Omidyar fellow Tanya Elliott talk about her current efforts to construct a model for sustainable development. Elliott is an inter-disciplinary researcher with a doctorate in theoretical physics and an on-going interest in language and cognition. The subject of her talk is how patterns of dysfunction have been hard-wired into the economic and social structures that are reducing our chances of survival. The coordinated, sustained effort required to undo this collective “wiring” clearly echoes the efforts we make as individuals to liberate ourselves from neurotic patterning. The tension between reductive patterning and expansive opening holds true across different scales, including the one where we live and breathe.
In his TED talk on Beauty and Truth in Physics, Gell-Mann points out the remarkable fact that beauty is actually a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory in physics. By beauty, Gell-Mann is talking about the distillation of complex phenomenon into equations with an elegant simplicity to them, E=MC2, for example. Our gradual approach toward a unified theory is like the peeling of an onion where the successive layers resemble each other. The equations derived to make sense of the last layer come close to explaining the new one: approximate self-similarity holds true across the different scales.
Listening to Tanya Elliott I wonder again what self-similarities underlie the long elaborate drama Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Psychologists often act as if emotional trauma were the exception to the rule, but perhaps trauma is, quite literally, our birthright. More so than any mammal we are dependent on our mothers for survival. The huge neocortex that provides our capacity for awareness is to blame. We can’t stay in the womb a moment longer than we do or our heads would grow too big to emerge. And so our sensitive brains are immature when we enter the world. A colt can get up and run at the end of its first day, while we must cling for dear life to our mothers into our second year. Whenever this external life-support system is unresponsive, even for a brief interval, we are viscerally traumatized, literally in fear for our lives. As they form, our brains are flooded again and again by this intense emotion, which shapes our neural pathways. Our sense of being an independent self is infused from the start by anxiety, and is perhaps entirely an expression of this anxiety.
Unflattering though it may be, embracing this view allows us to understand how the pursuit of “normal” happiness might lead to the collection of ills – nuclear proliferation, peak oil – that currently darken our horizons. Perhaps we need to redefine the paradigms of what constitutes “normal” if we are going to gain any traction over the large scale imbalances that threaten us. Perhaps it is this “background” anxiety hidden behind the “normal” self that is expressing itself in environmental degradation and our addiction to unsustainable levels of consumption.
In books such as A Buddhist History of the West, historian David Loy unpacks the issue of “lack” as a historical and cultural force driving human history. The history of the West, to Loy, is defined by our ongoing attempt to escape or explain away our experience of groundlessness in the world. We are not “real,” in the way we long to be, Loy writes in a remarkable essay titled “Self Transformation and Social Transformation” (Tikkun): “the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure… we try to bolster an illusory construct by focusing on something outside ourselves, which cannot provide the grounding we seek from it…no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough. The same is true for fame, power, beauty, and so forth.”
The foundation of Western political thought is the recognition by the ancient Greeks that political systems were themselves social constructions. Loy points out that this is, in fact, an invitation to rearrange our collective life so that it works better for us. Surveying our current situation Loy laments the mass suffering that arises when the “three poisons” of greed, ill will and delusion provide the foundation for social interaction. “Today,” he writes, “our economic system has institutionalized greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and our corporate media institutionalize delusion.” Such a situation might seem daunting and unworkable, but, as many of us know from direct experience, change truly is possible if we first have the courage to look at dysfunction in all its lurid glory.
A Prophet (Un prophète), 2009, a film by Jacques Audiard
By Guy Zimmerman
…in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.
Beowulf — Trans: Seamus Heaney
A culture like ours, rooted in the worship of a man whose hands and feet have been nailed to beams of wood, should be open to possible links between violence and the sacred. And yet in recommending A Prophet (Un prophète), the prison noir by Jacques Audiard that won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, I feel compelled to warn you about scenes of violence in the film. A Prophet is not a movie for the faint of heart. But part of what’s refreshing about the film is how it treats human violence with depth and integrity, rewarding our attention with some valuable insights.
There’s a premeditated murder early in A Prophet that is particularly harrowing. The protagonist, Malik, a prisoner of French-Arab descent, visits the cell of another Arab prisoner, an informant named Reyeb, for a sexual exchange. Malik arrives with a disposable razor blade concealed in his mouth and we have seen him coached by members of the Corsican mob on how to transfer this razor to his teeth, where it can be used to sever Reyeb’s jugular vein. Malik himself will surely be killed if he fails in his mission, and his visceral fear of the Corsicans overrides any compassion for his victim, whom he scarcely knows. The murder when it comes is brutal and messy, but Audiard has also given it the disturbing intimacy of a sacrificial rite. As James Joyce famously wrote about the tragic effect, pity and terror here combine to “arrest” our minds, uniting them with the sufferer, but also with the secret cause of the suffering.
In many ways the subject of the film is the odd intimacy that now develops between Malik and his victim. As the story unfurls, Reyeb returns in ghostly form, seeming to confer almost magical powers on the forlorn Malik. Malik begins to display remarkable talents as he navigates the power structure of the prison. Tutored by the Corsican gangster in charge of things, Malik forges alliances with Arab gangs on the outside. After a second spasm of violence, he takes control of the entire enterprise.
Violence on screen, or in any other art form, is upsetting. Adrenalin flows, our breathing turns shallow. It’s impossible to argue with people who don’t embrace to such material…unless it’s a pretext for a more general philistinism. From Homer to Sarah Kane, great art tends to wound us in one way or another. Moreover, our staggering gift for violence is perhaps our defining feature as a species, so it’s hard to know what is being served by avoiding its representation in art. If executed effectively and with integrity, depictions of violence offer glimpses of mysteries that return us to our lives in a more vital and urgent way. In scenes throughout A Prophet, the camera hovers close to Malik as he ponders such mysteries, as do we, rooted to our seats in the movie theater.
This unnerving dimension of human violence, has been explored in depth by the French cultural anthropologist Rene Girard. The author of the seminal Violence and the Sacred, Girard does not flinch from large ideas. His central thesis is that at a certain stage in their development all human communities faced an impending apocalypse of inter-clan violence, and that this blood feud is the terrifying monster vanquished symbolically in every myth (see the Beowulf quote above). Salvation arrived in the scapegoat mechanism, the sacrifice of the Pharmakos in Athens, for example, who would then be worshiped for his very real contribution to the survival of the community. So violent are we as a species, Girard believes, that those cultures which failed to stumble upon the scapegoat mechanism were wiped out in a storm of contagious tit-for-tat killings – the depravity of Rwanda or Bosnia played out to the bitter end.
It would take a very long post to unpack all the evidence Girard marshals and all the implications of his thesis. To Girard our violence is “mimetic,” by which he means it springs from competition for social roles, which are inherently plastic and adoptable. For me, given my engagement with Buddhist thinking, what’s interesting is how mimetic violence relates to the concept of “emptiness.” It is precisely because we lack any intrinsic, enduring form that, in the grip of dualism, we resort to imitation – mimesis. In contrast to our nagging sense of groundlessness, the Other appears fixed and solid. Secretly craving these qualities we seek to become “original” copies of the Other…which can only happen if the Other is eliminated in the process. We find the Oedipal relationship, in which the son seeks to copy and replace the father, so revealing, not because it is special, but because the tangled dynamic of mimesis becomes clearer when lit up by the primal energies of close family bonds.
Paradoxically, aggressive acts temporarily seem to deliver the solidity longed for by the egoic self, and this makes violence as contagious as small pox. Imagine me striking someone you love and feel how definite you become, how liberated from free-floating anxiety. The anger that runs through you is an entirely negative experience perhaps, but you are certainly free from feelings of “lack” or self-doubt. In the grip of anger we truly do become mirror images, replicas, of each other, and our public world becomes a nightmarish echo chamber of reciprocal violence. The mechanism of sacrifice ends the Hobbesian “war of all against all” as the violence is directed at the scapegoat. By common agreement the blood feud is buried with the victim, who is then worshiped as a god, becoming the lynch pin of all culture and myth. But the peace that descends is only temporary, and the seeds of mimetic violence will sprout again.
Certainly, anyone who has spent time working in the dramatic arts recognizes the significance of mimesis and the plasticity of the self, and all tragic dramas are rooted in sacrificial rites. But in Girard’s view social hierarchy in general arises out of the initial, hidden sacrifice. Even the competitive mimesis of the market economy – in which every new product is instantly cloned – is a distant, sublimated echo of the mimetic violence percolating underneath. And whenever we come to resemble each other too closely – when income inequality levels out, for example – the old atavistic anxieties begin to stir. Opponents of the death penalty, for example, miss how the leveling of incomes during the 1970s caused alarm among the defenders of social hierarchy. As recent governors of Texas seem to understand, erroneous executions are to be secretly celebrated; the more innocent the victim the more the execution will function like an actual sacrifice, buttressing the forces of social hierarchy.
There’s much more. The essential narrative of the Old Testament, according to Girard, is the story of the scapegoat mechanism held in abeyance. Abraham comes close to sacrificing Isaac…but then holds back. Joseph’s brothers’ turn him into a scapegoat…but he survives. With Jesus, however, we arrive at the return of the scapegoat mechanism in classic form. In Girard’s view the final lament of Jesus was that with his own sacrifice our bond with violence would only be buried, not broken. The aggression remained, sublimated in the various forms of culture, ready to continue its destructive magic out of view. Seen in this way, the idea that a second reckoning would surely arrive was more the product of clear thinking than prophecy. To survive, Girard suggests, the species must finally and completely shed its bond with violence – both greed and aggression – in its direct and in its sublimated forms.
While Girard may be extravagant in the claims he makes for his ideas, it’s hard to see where he really goes wrong. One reason the issue of mimetic violence is so hard to illuminate is that those who come to understand it directly, like Malik in A Prophet, are rendered mute by what they have experienced. The murderer exists apart, on the other side of language. Whether you define their difference as a form of spiritual insight or as a moral disfigurement, they speak in riddles or remain silent. From Macbeth on the battlements to Raskolnikov on the crowded streets of St. Petersburg, the killer is drawn into the heart of things to his ultimate peril. The genius of A Prophet is how it shows this dynamic operating in a vehicle as unlikely as Malik, an everyman who seems empowered solely by his bond with the would-be lover he murders.
Depictions of violence in art beg the question: what cherished self images are we willing to forgo in order to lessen the actual suffering we are causing? No doubt we would prefer to forget our own shadow material, which today gets played out, not in primal blood feuds, but in gushers of black oil flooding the waters of the Gulf. From a Buddhist perspective, our ultimate opponent is not aggression or greed but ignorance. Artists examine human violence in order to illuminate the Darwinian habits that also explain our current success as a species. But the violence cultivated by the imperatives of natural selection is now a limiting factor when it comes to our continued survival. Evolution itself now calls on us to break our hidden bonds with violence. A first step, perhaps, is to draw them into the light and look at them with an unflinching eye.
Each day my wife visits the Kali machine at UCLA. The techs lay her down on a metal pallet and bolt to her head a hard white plastic mesh that’s been molded to fit her face. The linear accelerators of the IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) device, big as a small car, start up. Seven beams of X-ray radiation target the zone beneath her right ear where the parotid gland used to be. This gland, the largest of the salivary glands, was surgically removed in January, along with the malignancy that had grown within it. Any cancer cells that lingered in the wound would eventually sprout into new tumors, so they need to be destroyed. Each day the X-rays of the Kali machine tear into the exposed DNA of cells in the process of replicating. Since cancer cells do almost nothing but replicate the X-rays kill them off with great efficiency, leaving the delicate surrounding tissues damaged but capable of regeneration. The Kali machine hums and hovers around Jenny’s head for about fifteen minutes and then the techs unbolt her and we drive back East toward Silver Lake.
Merciless and potent, tongue protruding, Kali dances with a belt of skulls dangling from her waist below her many blue arms. The destructive aspect of the divine feminine, Kali takes away what currently exists in order to open a space for what will come. She dissolves form to reveal an underlying “emptiness” full of potential. Cancer cells, meanwhile, with their blind, obsessive self-copying, strike me as the ultimate triumph of “form.” A single note tapped over and over, cancer replicates with endless uniformity, confronting us with the monomania of the death instinct in its purest manifestation. By ending death’s sovereignty Kali, paradoxically, is a bringer of life.
When I first heard about the seven beams of IMRT my mind immediately turned to the Seven Points of Mind Training, the Tibetan meditation sequence that has been a part of my sitting practice for half a decade now (a good translation is important). First brought to Tibet in the 11th Century by Lord Atisha and written down in the 12th century by the Kadampa master Chekawa, Mind Training turns the engine of the self into reverse, amplifying the experience of compassion and presence. The idea is that we cut ourselves off from fully experiencing our lives by pushing away the things we don’t like and by clutching the things we do like too tightly. This pattern of aversion and attachment becomes a fixed and rooted structure of separation, a false self progressively alienated from authenticity. With Mind Training you practice the opposite: giving away what you’re attached to and taking in what you don’t want. Counter-intuitively the result is an energized presence that reminds us of our innate freedom, a rising up out of the meaningless struggles of samsara. Deceptively pithy, the adages of the Seven Points interconnect with a subtle logic, like a complex and beautiful score one can only begin to appreciate after long exposure.
In the waiting room I sometimes unpack the parallels between the seven beams and the Seven Points. Implied in the comparison is the notion that the emotional patterns and self-images composing the reactive ego echo the replicating monomania of cancer cells. In left-brain thinking mode we impose a single interpretive straightjacket over all our experience – must be this! Can’t be that! We view ourselves as separate and apart and continuous in time, blinding ourselves to the imbalances and dysfunction we create in the world around us. The path of practice involves a steady engagement with the retreating forces of the ego, which sprout everywhere, cancer-like, distorting the energy of the awakened aspects of mind. In this view the purpose of practices like the Seven Points is to search out every hiding place of the reactive self – paging Sidhattha Gotama, head oncologist.
Opinion is divided on the extent to which the current prevalence of carcinoma is the result of environmental degradation, but everyone knows toxicity plays a role. On my iPhone as we make the trip across the LA basin I tap into satellite imagery of the globe as it appears from outer space. The healthy greens and blues are shot through now with the necrotic tissue of asphalt and concrete, the socio-economic carcinoma of 21st century human development. On a geological time frame this burst of growth is abrupt, beginning back only three hundred spins around our small star. The black spot would have started in the mill towns of Southern England and spread quickly East and South before jumping the blue Atlantic (on trade ships loaded with textiles and slaves) to metastasize in the fertile tissue of the resource-rich Americas.
And yet tonglen, the Seven Points, and all the other Asian imports (Zen, Theravada, Tantric practices of all kinds) come to us via the era of unprecedented wealth and plenty created by that same fire. The oil fat post-War American consumer paradise generated enough light to crack open the fortress of the Western mind. In its pragmatic materialism liberal democracy produced a sustained experience of what the Buddhists mean by the “Human Realm.” One of the six “realms” of samsaric existence, the Human Realm is defined by the pursuit of mundane material satisfactions. The satisfactions may be real enough…but so is the disappointment as time continues on, sweeping us along. As sure a recipe for suffering as the other five realms, the Human Realm is different in one regard – in classical depictions it’s where the stem of the lotus of Nirvana – non-dual awareness – finds its roots. The Human Realm is where we enter “the way,” in other words.
It’s important to understand this today because the stem of the lotus is delicate and under attack. The neocons and other proto-fascists, whose moment was the presidency of George W. Bush, are devoted to shifting our political realities in the direction of the lower realms. Descendents of Thomas Hobbes, who viewed humans as inherently evil and life as a war of all against all, the neocons embrace the solid feeling that comes when the self is under attack. They are denizens of the Hell Realm, in other words. What makes them particularly dangerous is that they recognize the utility of scarcity. Scarcity propels us into our brain stems toward reptile mode where we are easily controlled. The neocons have an advantage in that scarcity is easier to generate than abundance, and the coming short fall in oil reserves, to choose just one example, will provide them with a wealth of opportunity.
Hobbes counterweight on the left would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau’s ideas took a hard hit in the mid 20th century as the idealistic revolutions in Eastern Europe and China gave rise to totalitarian forms of state socialism. As a result, the emotional reserves of the left are in much worse shape than the last time Capitalism faced a crisis like ours – the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. But Rousseau’s ideas seem less foolish when viewed from the perspective of non-dual thinking. The concept of private property, to choose one example, stops making so much sense when we abandon our determination to separate from the underlying contingency of our lives. If you give a man a way of relating to this aspect of experience, that man will stop wasting precious time amassing a huge fund of private property and then rigging the game to protect it. Great private wealth is famously useless in the end, a false promise that has seduced many lives into a compromised existence.
To me it seems clear that Western political thought, aided now by advances in brain science, is knocking on the door of the non-dual. Empirically speaking there really is no world separate from what we experience in the here and now. There is great mystery in that – how could this vast world exist non-separately from my experience, and also from your experience? Not to mention non-separately from the experiences of the multitude of other souls breathing right now? How can we begin to make sense of a paradox like that? I certainly can’t…but maybe it’s possible to live with that mystery instead of needing to resolve it. Mystery and paradox, after all, define the material world down to its quantized roots.
My hope is that a new mode of thought will emerge to help us ride out the assorted crises confronting us. A series of questions announce themselves: how could the bedrock of laws be modified to retain all the creativity and energy of a capitalist economy but in a more balanced way? What socio-political practices would allow us to mitigate the trashing of the planet? My sense is that the shadows created by the harshly analytical Western mind may yet conceal solutions to the complex of interlocking crises on the horizon. The empirical traditions of Western science remain a potent tool for correcting the imbalances we have created. I write this as a man who feels as grateful right now for the medical technology of the Seven Beams of IMRT as I have felt for the transformative power of the Seven Points.
Reading Stephen Batchelor’sConfession of a Buddhist Atheist is likely to have an irreversible impact on your image of the historical Buddha. Far from a demi-god who woke up one day beneath the Bodhi tree and lived out his life in an alternate universe defined by bliss and ease, Batchelor’s earthy and forceful Siddhattha Gotama exists within a Shakespearean landscape defined by passionate treachery and high political intrigue. While Batchelor takes pains to present this figure as one of many legitimate pictures of the Buddha, the picture he paints couldn’t be more bracing.
Toward the end of Confession, for example, Batchelor tells of an old king who, when visiting Gotama, hands his sword and turban to his military commander and enters the sage’s hut alone. Inside, Gotama listens as the king laments his dwindling capacity to generate fear, let alone respect, in his subjects. Out loud the king wonders how Gotama has managed to preserve his own authority so successfully. At the end of the meeting the old king steps out of the hut and is dismayed to discover that his general has absconded with the insignia of royalty. Instantly, he sees that the visit was a diversion set up by his son, whom the general is now en route to coronate. As the defeated old monarch rides away, Gotama knows the new king will now attack his homeland, taking revenge on the population for a deep and long-simmering humiliation. He travels out and sits beneath a tree on the border of the country. When the new king approaches at the head of his army, Gotama persuades him to turn back. Before long, however, the troops return – the king has ordered them to invade the land and slaughter every man, woman and child.
The old monarch in the story is King Pasenadi, who ruled the kingdom of Kosala in the Ganges Plain of Central India some twenty-five hundred years ago. His son, the new king, is Vidhudaba, and the land he will invade with murder in his heart is Sakiya, home of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha Sakyamuni. For forty years, Pasenadi has been Gotama’s main patron and protector, and because of his demise the remaining few years of Gotama’s life were marked by an elevated state of uncertainty. This is just one of many remarkable narratives Batchelor has patiently brought to light out of the vast archive of early Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon*(See Note), narratives that force a grounding reassessment of what it means to practice the dharma.
An iconoclast and polemicist, Batchelor has earned his authority on contemporary practice the hard way. A monk first in the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and then in the tradition of Korean Zen (where he met his wife Martine, herself an accomplished practitioner), Batchelor’s understanding of the dharma stacks up against anyone’s. He also writes extremely well. His first book, Alone with Others, was rooted equally in Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way and Martin Heidegger’sBeing and Time. The Awakening of the West came next, followed by the hugely influential Buddhism Without Belief.. Batchelor’s 1998 translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center presented the 5th century Mayahana teacher as a poet, while his Living with the Devil traced the parallels between the figure of Mara in Buddhism and that of Satan in the West. In addition to his work as an author, Batchelor is an accomplished photographer. He is, in short, a very impressive gentleman.
I heard Batchelor read from Confession recently. We were at Against the Stream, the dharma center on Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood founded by Dharma Punx author Noah Levine. Levine presents the dharma as a rebellion against the forces of greed, hatred and delusion, so Against the Stream felt like an appropriate setting for Batchelor. Seated on a small dais at the front of the room, he read a few passages from Confession and then took questions from the crowd. Batchelor almost visibly winced as these questions centered on issues of reincarnation and karma that he views as completely unfruitful avenues of inquiry. Batchelor is unflinching in his advocacy of an empirical approach to practice, stripped of belief. And the Confession is in part an effort to separate out those teachings that were unique to Gotama, such as “this-conditionality,” from the common cultural traditions of his day.
Reading Batchelor brought home how my own subtle idealizations of Shakyamuni Buddha have been driven by secret longings to become invulnerable to harm. It is through the space opened by admiration, I sense, that certain “gaining” ideas can infiltrate one’s practice. Instead of a total critique of normative modes of living, the dharma then begins to devolve into a smile button pinned to the lapel of a spurious identity, the vain self-image of being someone on the path to “enlightenment.” Reading Confession helps re-energize the practice of dharma as an effort to radically transform the ground of experience. Seeing Gotama so deeply engaged with the radical contingency of his time and place underscores how dogma will not help us – we must engage with experience breath by breath.
Confession also contains an extended meditation on the blessings and pitfalls of religious institutions. Without institutions, religions disappear…but institutions inevitably distort the insights and practices they exist to convey. On this level Confession does for Buddhism what Elaine Pagel’sThe Gnostic Gospels did for Christianity. Exploring recently unearthed gospels by renegade apostles such as Thomas and Phillip (and even Mary Magdalene herself), Pagels radically altered our sense of the actual teachings of Jesus. In a similar way Batchelor ponders the effects on Gotama’s teachings of the struggle after his death between the authoritarian Kassapa and the dreamy Ananda. While Kassapa may have compromised the subtleties of the teaching, he also helped to ensure we can experience the dharma today.
The tension between the dogma and practice is always challenging because language itself is part of the problem. The experience of presence is immediate and ephemeral; any attempt to depict it becomes distorted by the crudeness of words. The linguistic “forms” we deploy to describe the experience of dharma begin to do what all forms do, which is to persist and draw energy, replicate and spread taking, finally, institutional form. Seen in this way the issue of enduring institutions on the one hand versus the immediacy of practice on the other falls under the rubric of “the middle way.” The challenge is to hold both ends of this spectrum balanced in the mind at one time. Our problem can be viewed as a root imbalance or bias in the direction of the “form” end of the spectrum. Using the language of modern science, we tilt toward the left-brain, with its strong ego-based linearity, over the connective right brain. Gotama then becomes a pioneer in a necessary rebalancing, a forerunner of the kind of human being we must all become if the species is to continue to thrive.
If Batchelor at times seems overly harsh in his assessment of the traditions that formed his sensibility, it is perhaps to provoke an important question: where do the impulses of orthodoxy and hierarchy lurk within the emergent culture of Western dharma? Already, no doubt, such retrograde forces are exerting their distorting effects. And yet one of Batchelor’s themes is how elastic the dharma is, able to adapt to radically diverse cultural settings, and resistant over the long haul to all efforts to co-opt its transformative power. This elasticity is rooted, perhaps, in the dharma’s capacity to activate the remarkable gifts of practitioners like Mr. Batchelor himself.
*Note on Batchelor’s translation
For the confirmed dharma-geek, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist includes an account of how Batchelor managed to track small threads of biographical narrative hidden in the vast Pali Canon. Crucial to his ability to do this is A Dictionary of Pali Proper Names, first published in 1938. Running itself to 1,370 pages, this massive index allowed Batchelor to follow accounts, for example, of King Pasenadi, cross-referencing for accuracy and detail. Batchelor is translating this primary source material himself, giving even more weight to his portrait of the man Siddhattha Gotama.
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The shiver of political anxiety that winds through Eric Santner’s book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald arises from the work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose theory of the “state of exception” figured prominently in the juridical foundations of the Third Reich. Santner’s anxiety is shared by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his important work Homo Sacer, and by Jacques Derrida in his lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, and it concerns the way Schmitt’s thesis is once again expressing itself in the world, particularly in America’s “war on terror.” Santner contextualizes Schmitt’s thinking by examining an impressive slate of German writers that includes Holderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Kafka, and also the more recent work of the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald. The Jewish “psychotheologist” Franz Rosensweig also figures prominently in the discussion. It’s a heady brew, in other words, and one of the most impressive aspects of the book is how deftly Santner manages to illuminate the nuances that differentiate these big glaciers of thought while also mapping their continuities.
The continuities between the “spectral materialism” described by Santner and the “intelligent materialism” of Deleuze and Guattari underscore the tectonic cultural shift we are currently undergoing in this age of global bio-politics. The test of this new materialism is its capacity to illuminate the intricate subjectivities of art, and particularly the new(ish) structures of feeling that imbue certain works of art with a sense that they exist beyond us, in a future we are destined for. Though as a psychoanalytical work, On Creaturely Life orients itself quite differently than anything in Delueze and Guattari, I believe this only makes Santner’s work an ideal vehicle for illuminating these continuities. To even mention Deleuze and Guattari in the context of a psychoanalytic text is to suggest that there’s a baby in with the psychoanalytical bathwater we are in the process of discarding.
