In Gravity's Rainbow, we have a contemporary equivalent of medieval folly, the point at which all of our sophistication bends back to annihilate us. It differs from Chaucer, Bocaccio and Rabelais in that the articles of faith have shifted toward technology. Man, the maker, has mastered his ignorance of the planet enough to create abundance, but he cannot master himself. Sam Cohen in later reflection after inventing the neutron bomb and seeing his design altered for maximum destruction, was said to have noted that as a child he suffered extensive diarrhea and one of the effects of his bomb, if released at the proper altitude was to inflict diarrhea via radiation poisoning to the population living within the farthest ring of the zones of impact. We can see in this a simple Freudian stencil placed over Cohen's guilt, but we may also ask if there is truth within a claim that we do not know the full content of our inner drives and what shapes they can take in the things we make.
There is a separate destructiveness of the hand, not immediately connected with prey and killing. It is of a purely mechanical nature and mechanical inventions are extensions of it. Precisely because of its innocence it has become particularly dangerous. It knows itself to be without any intention to kill, and thus feels free to embark on anything. What it does appears to be the concern of hands alone, of their flexibility and skill, their harmless usefulness. It is this mechanical destructiveness of the hands, now grown to a complex system of technology, which, whenever it is linked with a real intention to kill, supplies the automatic element of the resulting process, that empty mindlessness which is so particularly disquieting. No one actually intends anything, it all happens, as it were, of itself.
-Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
I will never touch the sun. With some advanced optics, I can see the surface of the sun and I can feel the warmth of its rays, but I will never touch the sun itself. There's naturally the theory that everything I touch necessarily spun out of the fusion of simple gases into heavy metals and that the sun itself is our local representative of this massive living fusion, the grounding of our orbit and so the source of the mass on earth (unless there is a deeper massiveness I am missing contrived from our solar system's rotation within our galaxy or the larger motion of our galaxy, but these too are extensions of the same counterintuitive principle: though I cannot touch the sun, I can feel its influence through the resistance of every object or body on Earth). It is a statement about the particular fragility of human life- that we can only be sustained en masse at our current distance from the sun - our senses evolved at this distance, so we are necessarily separate from the fundamental source of our life.
You taught me these words. If they don't work anymore, teach me new ones.
The shared nature of language is it's greatest mystery. A population assimilates to varying degrees the rules of speech, adapts and performs its idiosyncrasies. This creates the tension between experiential language, that is private language or the language that reflects back on our subjective place within culture and time, and public language, the language we adapt when are out of our element or when attempting to achieve a sense of timelessness. No doubt there's a spectrum in between that grades that tension, and there are certainly people who speak to themselves in a voice they consider timeless, using what would seem to be a public voice to dictate their inner moods, but in those two modes I generally find the space where we each begin to translate one another, where even within spoken 'Merican, we perform fleeting minor translations of relatability to synthesize what someone is saying. It happens on a nearly unconscious scale, unless you live and work among people who are different than you, then the act of translation can take on semi-consciousness. In resolving semantic differences, exhausting as this can be, the exact points of exchange between private languages, or things understood tacitly within a specific context, become parsed and the associative webs in which our words are wrapped, come a little more unspooled.
I love Ummmmms. In conversation, ummmmms can signify so much: the brain's attempt to catch up to a line of thought, the brain's inability to properly express an idea, a linguistic gap where the word may not exist for a thought that needs to be expressed-- in short it becomes a catch-all expression for the gap between language and thought. I happen to love clichés as well. A good cliché can stave off an ummmmm. It can work as a distancing mechanism. A good comment about the weather in the elevator at work can set off a series of shielding words that transfers the tension built by the otherwise ominous silence that goes with being a group of relative strangers in a steel box suspended 100 feet above the ground. The tension then moves to either extending the cliche, responding in kind or adding some small witticism or personal anecdote about the weather, or in refusing the offer and maintaining your part of the silence. The point being that through clichés, people come the closest to animal calls, to jungle noise-- it's precisely when we have nothing to say to one another that we feel the need to speak.
The worm bird catches the early.
Some work is able to reinvest a cliché with meaning. I looked at John Wayne differently after watching Full Metal Jacket. I thought about MTV spring break specials differently after Spring Breakers. But inevitably, the clichés win out. The counter-image resolves, if for no other reason than it's out-numbered.
Though the source of language may be physiological, or a physiological adaptation to a social need, language itself (outside of Braille) is intangible. As with the sun, words derive their weight in their distance from or proximity to their subject.
With Proust, we can see certain luminous subjects (the Vinteuil Sonata or Vermeer's yellow wall for example). It is in his tendrils, though long passages where a he slowly turns a subject, that a full gradation of the voice achieved. The personal is made public. That silent inner reworking of a moment over time, he coaxes onto the page then stretches it to its fullest form. He gives the type of repetition that grows with each recurrence in his processing of grief or his obsession with Albertine's private life.
Future children our are our.
We normally find ourselves debating gradations by proxy by debating extremes- it's often the case that we push or are pushed towards an extreme form of thought by trying to get to it's logical end, but the illusion of a logical end is doubly impoverishing. In abandoning what may at first appear to be a milder or moderate form of a thought or say political position, we lose the personal understanding of that form and it's associative force. Once moved to the extreme, we have built a lattice of assumption, which may be founded in political reality, but which will always make a convenient fit of something that should be finessed and complicated.
In art we have the chance to share, on a mass scale, the ecstasy of agreement. The form is always there, the icon we can point to, the scales repeatable. The shape we can recognize and fill with our impressions. As long as we remain silent about the impressions, we can evade the personal, elide our differences and assume an equality of consumption, we can conform to the shape and lose everything we placed inside it. We can become the song without singing it.
For a long time, I found after reading a book, its ideas simply melted in, that the book itself stood as a kind of icon I could tap and skim through the highlighted impressions it left, but the details would vanish. I would forget that my having read a book didn't necessarily mean that everyone had read that book. It may be a function of the idea that at best we come to another person's work as a second or third generation reader. In some circles it was definitely true that I read behind the curve. That discussing a book became an act of working up a reading list. That one book lead to another and that it's usefulness could only be described in its relevance to the next work and that in relation to what was yet to be read-- that unread book I always imagined to be more meaningful and more fulfilling than the one I'd just completed. Then in other circles, I'd realize only after slightly painful misunderstandings that everyone had not read the same things as me, that they wanted to talk about Haruki Murakami and I wanted to talk about Bruno Schulz. Or even if they had read Schulz, their memories differed or the scenes that I found meaningful did not match those scenes that stuck with them- ah well. Sometimes shared knowledge can be an illusion.
In public at any given moment we are surrounded by fragments of our own consciousness. The elements we recognize can blind us. One element of growing up plugged into mass culture is access to its proliferation of types, of faces associated with character traits. The people I see on the street, in the supermarket, strangers, only appear less strange in relation to the faces I already know. This problem is double-edged. The familiarity is a shallow one, misleading, but provides a kind of balm-- that persistent sense that people are knowable, if not already known. On the other side, people who are not represented on TV or in movies, those faces which don't have any more than a token form of familiarity may seem even more strange than they would normally. They may carry the full burden of strangeness that I withhold from the people who appear at least partially familiar.This may be an especially suburban concern (i.e. any place where different races and ethnic groups can hide from each other by driving to work or living in different neighborhoods, going to different schools, etc) but the families on sitcoms and their variations (groups of friends, of cast-aways, of house-mates) begin as stand-ins, anodyne extensions of our own families. The faces on TV become masks for the faces we know and in this way they build off of primary familial recognitions, those parental and sibling features we see or do not see within our own faces.
There's truth to Buggin' Out's complaint with Sal in Do the Right Thing. When we rely in part on the media to tell us who we are, to be unrepresented is to be invisible, or to be wrong.
With every picture there is also the opportunity to turn ourselves into strangers, to allow the camera to capture not the light of friendship or family, but the mere facts of appearance. Pictures where I don't look like myself are inevitably deleted. The portion of face I never catch in the mirror, the flank-man with a half-open mouth, double chin and mostly closed eyes, who walks ear first into the light of a flash, or just the closed-mouthed unsmiling thing with the rings under his eyes, moving his facial muscles towards an expression-- these images though repeated often enough on the screen of my camera still don't fit-- and who would want them, but they give the visceral recognition of total vulnerability, the poor timing of the self-image surfacing between shutter clicks, vanishing to leave just the transitory animations toward the thing I recognize as me.
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| Here, young Caravaggio is David and old Caravaggio is Goliath. |
With Proust, we can only trust that the truth of what someone thinks about us is said after we have left the room. Such is the case with Swann. Though Swann's assimilation into Parisian society is aided by his wealth and intelligence, it is his choice in marriage and the concurrence of the Dreyfus Affair which ultimately limits his access to the Guermantes and the fashionable set and acts for those players, M Guermantes especially, as a kind of proof that Swann will always be Jewish first and therefore not a true Parisian, a kind of eternal traitor in their midst. With the case of Baron de Charlus, the homosexual brother of M. Guermantes, there is a conformism, his masquerade as a lady killer, that allows Charlus full access to society but also a discretion that links the Baron through to the secrets of the society set, which gives him power. Proust is careful to show the hypocrisy of a culture both enthralled by and unwilling to openly relate their desires.
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For Socrates...it was an authentic problem whether something that 'appeared' to no one except the agent did no exist at all. The Socratic solution consisted in the extraordinary discovery that the agent and the onlooker... were contained in the self same person. ...that the Socratic agent, because he was capable of thought, carried within himself a witness from whom he could not escape.. that tribunal which later ages have called conscience.
-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
In the pursuit of unification or resolution of a blind spot there is a separate pain of wanting to know something unknowable, the pain of Proust's narrator. The pain of wanting to know may be equally horrible as the fate a blind spot can make for us. For some, the vulnerability that comes with an inaccessible blind spot, say from a tic a person may wear but of which they may have no knowledge, can be the exact expression of that person's humanity. In other cases, it can be the exact expression of their inhumanity. If we think of unconscious or semiconscious racist behaviors, for instance, or of hypocrisy, which is the broader context of Hannah Arendt quote above, some examination of our blind spots is clearly requisite to living in the 21st century.
There is a transfixing silence born from where repulsion and attraction meet, that compelling place where it becomes impossible to turn-away. In fiction, the double or doppelgänger is the physical embodiment of what we cannot admit to ourselves, of the things we find repugnant. Perhaps this is why doubles
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| Adrian Piper's Mythic Being |
There is also the other.
There's a moment in J R where a picture of J R's class has been Xeroxed. The machine reverses the image, so the white children appear black. The picture is being viewed by the executives in a brokerage firm where J R's class visited on a school trip. The executives begin to criticize the children. They seem capable of seeing only at this time the kids' flaws and looking at J R they see the raw expression of his greed. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, of Boston-town, is given a dose of sodium amytal and observed in the hopes of getting a greater understanding of the race problem in North America. While Charlie Parker plays Cherokee, Tyrone drops his favorite harmonica down a toilet. Who should come and help him find it down in there,but a pre-Nation of Islam Malcolm X, known as Red, but only after first finding Tyrone's rear exposed and vulnerable. Tyrone, to escape certain rape (keep in mind this is a psychedelic peek-a-boo into Tyrone that winds up freeing him from a quotient of his inherited racism, which allows him later to buddy up with Oberst Enzian and the Schwartz Kommando, a battalion of Herero from the Sudwest with a collective death wish, against Major Marvy, southern racist leader of a technical intelligence team and buddy of Bloody Chiclitz of Yoyodyne, military industrial mega-weight) climbs down the toilet and is pulled through a sea of shit (batting dingleberries out of his eye). The sense of repulsion is there and maybe for Slothrop an experiment like Adrian Piper's Catalyst or John Water's Pink Flamingos wouldn't seem so extreme an example of what we confront when we approach the notion of otherness.
In her Mythic Being project, Adrian Piper attempted to be herself, a person with her own history and background, while dressing as a man. She considered herself anathema while she performed this, everything you most hate and fear, and noted the ways in which she felt herself adapting towards her appearance. This, as well as her Catalyst exercises, are ways of measuring the weight of different social stigmas and the often unspoken limits and expectations they set, specifically in the context of race in America.
Little is said directly about race in Infinite Jest. Canadians are the ghettoized identity, but with physicality at the core of the novel, it instead takes on handicaps as a kind of ontological limiter or intensifier, where there are Quebecois wheelchair assassins, deformations caused by the toxic environment, mutilations, the list of malcontents in the Madame Psychosis hour, Mario Incandenza and addicts, but everyone is defined in part by their addictions, their maladies, their hypertrophied abilities as tennis players or mothers and their tics in a broad spectrum of behaviors and everyone shares at least in part a type of otherness. This is in part why this book cauterizes the post-modern aesthetic. The other is the norm, to the point that all claims to otherness become flat, but this is also one of this book's biggest weaknesses. Just read about Uncle Nathan in Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia and you'll see the difference.
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