Dreams Of The Marionettes

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Medusa, c. 1597

"Mythology is an expression of the collective unconscious."

"The human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths."

"The elementary ideas: what could be called the ground ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. "Archetype" is a better term because "elementary idea" suggests head work. Archetypes of the unconscious means it comes from below. The archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded: the biographical is secondary to that. All over the world and at different times in human history, these archetypes have appeared in different costumes. The differences in costume are the result of environment and historical conditions."

"It's surprising how much memory there is down in the unconscious. There's a whole system . . . which, when we see it in animals, we call instinct. That is the biological ground. But then certain things happen that make it repulsive or difficult or frightening or sinful to do some of the things one is impelled to do, and that is when we begin to have our most troublesome psychological problems. Myths are primarily for fundamental instruction in these matters."

"A metaphor points to two ends: one is psychological, the other metaphysical. The dream is metaphoric of the structures of the psyche, and your dreams will correspond to the level of psychological realisation you are operating on. The metaphysical, on the other hand, points past all conceptualisations, all things, to the ultimate depth. And when the two come together, when the psyche and metaphysics meet, then you have a real myth."

"Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with the great human problems."

"Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realisations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form."

"Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods. All the worlds are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body on conflict with each other."

"Dreamtime is the time you get into when you do to sleep and have a dream that talks about the permanent conditions within your own psyche as they relate to the temporal conditions of your life right now."

"Everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. This is an archetypal thing. So there is a basic mythological theme there even though it is a personal dream. These two levels . . . are found in all cultures. For example, everyone has the problem of facing death. This is a standard mystery."

"A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of society, you are in accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you."

"Dreams come up from the imagination which is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body, and these are all the same in human beings. Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, it is bound to produce certain themes . . . There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be enumerated, no matter who is dreaming."

"On some levels a private dream runs into runs into truly mythic themes that can't be interpreted except by an analogy with myth. Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream, or the dream of the mythic dimension. You can interpret a personal dream by association, figuring out what it is talking about in your own life, or in relation to your personal problem. But every now and then a dream comes up that is pure myth, and carries a mythic theme, or that is said to come from the archetypal person within us. "

"I think the psychology of Freud tends more to relate to what Jung calls the personal unconscious. When you break past that into the realms that cannot be interpreted in terms of personal experience, you're in the field of mythic forms. And if you're acquainted with the mythic forms, you understand where you are in a way that's impossible if you have no previous acquaintanceship."

Joseph Campbell

Wide Blue Wonder

Joan Miró (1893-1983) - Blue I, 1962


'The blue of the sky, if we were to examine its many image values, would require a long study in which we would see all the types of material imagination being determined according to the basic elements of water, fire, earth, and air. In other words, we could divide poets into four classifications by their response to the single theme of celestial blue:

Those who see in an immobile sky a flowing liquid that comes to life with the smallest cloud.

Those who experience the blue sky as though it were and enormous flame - "searing" blue, as the Comtesse de Noailles describes it.

Those who contemplate the sky as if it were a solidified blue, a painted vault - "compact and hard azure", as the Comtesse de Noailles again says.

Finally those who can truly participate in the aerial nature of celestial blue.

Of course, besides the great poets who instinctively follow these basic inspirations, it would be easy to discover, with such a common image, all the rhymers for whom "blue sky" is always a concept, never a primary image. Poetry about the blue sky suffers an enormous loss on this account. We can almost appreciate Musset's scorn when he called "blue" the stupid colour. In the works of artificial poets, at least, it is the colour of pretentious innocence from which come sapphires or flax blossoms. Such images are not, of course, banned: poetry is just as much the participation of the large in the small as it is the small in the large. But no one experiences this participation by juxtaposing a terrestrial and an aerial name. Only a great poet can discover naturally, without copying a literary example, blue sky in a wildflower.

But, leaving aside the facile polemics against false or worn-out images, I would like to reflect on a fact that has often struck me. As I have read many different kinds of poets, what has surprised me was how rare were the images in which the blue sky was truly aerial. This rarity is due, first of all, to the fact that aerial imagination is much rarer than the imagination of fire, earth, or water. But even more important is the fact that, even when the immense, distant blue infinity is felt by an aerial soul, it needs to be materialised in order to be incorporated into a literary image. The word blue designates, but it does not render. The problem of the image of the blue sky is completely different for the painter than for the poet. For a writer, if the blue sky is not merely a background, if it is a poetic object, only a metaphor can bring it to life. The poet's task is not to translate a colour, but to make us dream the colour. The blue sky is so simple that no one thinks he can oneirise it without materialising it. But this process of materialisation goes too far. The blue sky is made too hard, too glaring, too searing, too compact, too burning, and too brilliant. Often the sky looks at us too fixedly. We attribute too much substance and constancy to it because the soul does not become a part of the life of primary substance. We tonalise the sky's blue by making it "vibrate" like a sonorous crystal, whereas, for truly aerial souls, there is only the sound of a breath. Thus, with excessive intensity, the Comtesse de Noailles writes: "Today the blue is so strong that it blinds you if you look at it too long; it crackles, it whirls, it becomes filled with golden tendrils, with hot frost, with sharp and radiant diamonds, with arrows, with silver flies . . . "

The hallmark of what is truly aerial is to be found, in my opinion, in another direction. It is, in fact, based on the dynamics of dematerialisation. the substantial imagination of air is truly active only on a dynamics of dematerialisation. The blue of the sky is aerial when it is dreamed as a colour that pales a bit, like a pallor that seeks finesse, a finesse that we imagine as yielding beneath our fingers like a delicate fabric as we caress, in Paul Valéry's words:

The mysterious texture of the utmost height.

That is when the blue sky counsels us to be as calm and as light as it is itself:

The sky above the roof, is
So blue, so calm!

sighs Verlaine from the depths of his prison where he is still under the weight of unforgiven memories. This calm can be filled with melancholy. The dreamer feels that the blue sky will never be a possessed good. "What good are the symbols of a basic and comforting mountaineering since I shall not, this evening, reach the blue, that blue which is so aptly called sky blue?"

But it is by following the scale of dematerialisation of celestial blue that we can see aerial reverie at work. Then we will understand that it is an aerial Einfühlung: the fusion of a dreamer with as undifferentiated a universe as possible, on that is blue and gentle, infinite and formless, with a minimum of substance.'

From The Blue Sky by Gaston Bachelard

Death By Philosophy: Part Three

The Burning Question

Thich Quang Duc (June 11th, 1963)


'What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of his own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with themselves.

Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve answers that are no less simple and that the evidence implies evidence. A priori and and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer "no" act as if they thought "yes". As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think "yes" in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have never been as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behaviour of those who profess them . . . Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic seriously is not grievous, but it helps to judge a man.

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world the body's judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body retains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope for another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it . . . '

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Death By Philosophy: Part Two

The Fatal Game

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Suicide, 1877


'Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here . . . with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from the light . . .

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in a melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble". Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Death By Philosophy: Part One

A Deadly Thirst

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - The Death of Socrates (1787)


'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because the judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition II

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (1844-1910): The Armchair Jungle

Surpris!, 1891




La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907




Combat de tigre et de buffle, 1908




Nègre attaqué par un jaguar, c. 1910




Forêt tropicale avec singes, 1910




Cheval attaqué par un jaguar, 1910

The Week in Review

Films:

Éloge d'lamour (In Praise of Love), 2001 - d. Jean-Luc Godard
Notre musique, 2004 - d. Jean-Luc Godard

La Jetée (The Pier), 1962 - d. Chris Marker
Sans soleil (Sunless), 1983 - d. Chris Marker

Double Indemnity, 1944 - d. Billy Wilder
The Lost Weekend, 1945 - d. Billy Wilder
Sunset Boulevard, 1950 - d. Billy Wilder
Some Like it Hot, 1959 - d. Billy Wilder

Television:

Smallville: Fourth Season

Books:

Meetings with Remarkable Trees - Thomas Pakenham
Mythic Woods: The World's Most Remarkable Forests - Thomas Pakenham
Remarkable Baobab - Thomas Pakenham
Remarkable Trees of the World - Thomas Pakenham

Music:

String Quartets - Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartets - Belá Bartók
String Quartets - Elliot Carter
String Quartets - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quartets - Arnold Schoenberg
String Quartets - Dmitri Shostakovich

Power Without Story

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) - The End, c. 1990s


'I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.'

Joseph Campbell

Two Backs (February Special)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Bather of Valpiçon, 1808 (left) and Lucian Freud (b. 1922) - Naked Man, Back View, 1991-92 (right)

With talent, you do what you like. With genius, you do what you can.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

With me it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

Lucian Freud

Unmapping The Heavens

Plates from Harmonica Macrocosmica, 1660 - Andreas Cellarius (c. 1595-1665)

"Ah what Bull, what Dog, what Bear,
What trophies of victory immense,
Once embarked on resourceless time
The soul imposes on formless space!

Charms, "Secret Ode", Paul Valery

Mathematical reverie has drawn diagrams of this immense tableau of a Cerulean night. These constellations are all false! They have grouped totally foreign stars in a dingle figure. Between real points, that is between stars that are isolated like diamond solitaires, the dream of constellations has drawn imaginary lines. Dream, that great master of abstract painting, sees all the animals of the zodiac done in a pointillism reduced to the minimum. Homo faber - a lazy maker of wheels - puts a chariot without wheels in the sky; the ploughman, dreaming of his harvests, erects a simple golden sheaf. Seeing such luxuriance produced by the powers of projective imagination, how odd this logical dictionary definition seems!

Constellations: the assembly of a certain number of fixed stars on which has been superimposed a figure, either man or animal or plant, in order to remember them better and to which has been given a name to distinguish them from other groupings of the same kind.

Naming stars to "help remember them", what a lack of appreciation for the speaking powers of dream! What ignorance of the principles of reverie's imaginary project! The zodiac is the Rorschach test for the child Humanity. Why have learned grimoires been written; why has the sky of night been replaced by the sky of books?

There are so many dreams in the sky which poetry, encumbered by old words, has not been able to name. To how many writers of the night would we like to say: "Come back to the principle of reverie; the starry sky has been given to us, not to think about, but to dream"? It is an invitation to constellating dreams, to dream about the easy and ephemeral construction of the thousand forms that our desires take. The mission of "fixed" stars is to fix some dreams, to communicate some, and to rediscover some. They prove to a dreamer the universality of oneirism. This ram, young shepherd, that your hand caresses as you dream - there he is up there, turning gently in the immense night! Then there will be two of you to sketch him, to recognise him, and to talk to him as a friend. You will find that the two of you have the same vision, the same desire, and that even in the night, in the nocturnal solitude, you will see the same ghosts pass by. How much greater life becomes when dreams are bound together!

We will understand to what an extent the imagination of the sky is falsified and impeded by book knowledge if we reread some passages in which writers have blithely lost track of dreams in exchange for "knowledge" that is as poor as it is lifeless. At that stage we will perhaps be justified in suggesting a kind of counter-psychoanalysis that might destroy the conscious mind in favour of an established oneirism, which would be the only way to restore a refreshing continuity to reverie. "Knowing" the constellations, naming them as in books, projecting a classroom map of the sky on the sky itself, is brutalising our imaginary powers and depriving us of the benefits of the stars' oneirism. If we were not burdened with the words that "help our memory"- the memory of words, the great sloth that refuses to dream - every new night would be a new reverie for us, a renewed cosmogony. An ill-formed consciousness or one that is too formal is as harmful for the dreaming soul as an amorphous or warped unconscious. The psyche must find a balance between the imagined and the known. This equilibrium cannot be satisfied by vain substitutions in which, suddenly, the imagining powers find themselves bound up with arbitrary schemata. The imagination is a primary power. It must be born in the solitude of the imagining being. As always, to understand contemplation, we must begin with the Schopenhauerean formula: the starry night is my constellation. It makes me aware of my power to form constellations. It puts in my hands, as the poet says, these weightless chalices and these flowers that grow in space."

From The Constellations by Gaston Bachelard

The Bleeding

André Kertész (1894-1965) - Distortions, c. 1933


'Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment - not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? I am not suggesting that this is how women are, that this is their ontological status. Instead, my hypothesis is that women's corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage. My claim is not that women have been somehow desolidified but the more limited one which sees that women, insofar as they are human, have the same degree of solidity, occupy the same genus, as men, yet insofar as they are women, they are represented and live themselves as seepage, liquidity. The metaphorics of uncontrollability, the ambivalence between desperate, fatal attraction and strong revulsion, deep-seated fear of absorption, the association of femininity with contagion and disorder, and the undecidability of the limits of the female body (particularly, but not only, with the onset of puberty and in the case of pregnancy), its powers of cynical seduction and allure are all common themes in literary and cultural representations of women. But these may well be a function of the projection outward of their corporealities, the liquidities that men seem to want to cast out of their own representations.'

From Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz.

Illuminating Manuscripts

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) - Carnet de notes (Notebooks), 1908-18



"Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals."

Marcel Proust

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

Elmore Leonard

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Mark Twain

"True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

Alexander Pope

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to be able to make new things familiar and familiar things new."

Samuel Johnson

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."

André Gide

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

Jules Renard

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

C. S. Lewis

Render Unto Ceasar

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) - I shop therefore I am, 1990

"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."

Mark Twain

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."

Robert Graves

"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."

Pablo Picasso

"There are people who have money and people who are rich."

Coco Chanel

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."

Woody Allen

"It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."

Albert Camus

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion."

Voltaire

"When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life: now that I'm old I know it is."

Oscar Wilde

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may be said to be living apart."

e. e. cummings

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

Dorothy Parker

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition I

Paul Klee (1879-1940): The Miraculous World




The Golden Fish, 1925




Around the Fish, 1926




Cosmic Flora, 1923




Ad Parnassu, 1932




Temple Gardens, 1920




Carnival in the Mountains, 1924

The Week In Review

Films:

Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), 1959 - d. François Truffaut
Antoine et Colette (Antoine and Colette), 1962 - d. François Truffaut
Baisérs voles (Stolen Kisses), 1968 - d. François Truffaut
Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board), 1970 - d. François Truffaut
L'Amour en fuite (Love on the Run), 1979 - d. François Truffaut

Television:

Smallville: Third Season

Books:

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan
Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud

Music:

More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) - Talking Heads
Music for Films (1978) - Brian Eno
Fear of Music (1979) - Talking Heads
Remain in Light (1980) - Talking Heads
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) - David Byrne and Brian Eno
The Catherine Wheel (1981) - David Byrne
Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks (1983) - Brian Eno
Stop Making Sense (1984) - Talking Heads
True Stories (1986) - Talking Heads
Naked (1988) - Talking Heads
Rei Momo (1989) - David Byrne
The Forest (1991) - David Byrne

Inaubible As A Melody Cut In A Disc Of Flesh

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) - Mandolin and Guitar, 1924



"A painter paints their pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence."

Leopold Stokowski

"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."

Ludwig van Beethoven

"You are the music while it lasts."

T. S. Eliot

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."

Victor Hugo

"When words leave off, music begins."

Heinrich Heine

"Music is the shorthand of emotion."

Leo Tolstoy

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

Aldous Huxley

"Music is the poetry of the air."

Jean Paul Richter

"Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me."

Jean Genet

"Too many pieces of music finish long after the end."

Igor Stravinsky

What The Vivian Girls Saw

Henry Darger (1892-1973) - from The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion


"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"

Leonardo da Vinci

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination."

Emily Dickinson

"I shut my eyes in order to see."

Paul Gauguin

"Imagination is intelligence with an erection."

Victor Hugo

The Pinocchio Syndrome

Data (Brent Spiner) - Star Trek: The New Generation


'There is a certain kind of fiction that I unfailingly experience, in Rilke's terms, as either a cat story or a dog story. This is the category of fiction marked by an unusual choice of protagonist - sometimes literally an animal, but more often some inhuman, semihuman or hybrid figure: robot, alien, swamp creature, ape man, mutant. Or one of those strange, half-formed humans we call a child. In a cat-like story, this figure remains inscrutable, and the point of the tale is to teach us a chastening lesson about that inscrutability.

...

Dog-like stories are completely different. They are sentimental tales, full of pathos, aiming above all to wring tears from the reader or viewer. Their heroes are half-humans who strive desperately, yearn terribly, for the humanity which has been denied them through the circumstances of their creation. Some of the classic figures of this sort include Pinocchio, the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Frankenstein's monster, No. 5 in the Short Circuit films and Edward Scissorhands.

Besides Mitsou, nothing brings tears to my eyes faster than the episodes of Star Trek: The New Generation centred on the android Data (played so well by Brent Spiner). One of the central questions driving Star Trek in all its incarnations (all the generations, in both film and TV) is: what does it mean to be fully, truly human? As in so much science fiction, the otherness of the aliens encountered by the members of the Enterprise is not often seriously explored as an issue. These very uncat-like creatures are usually deployed as symbolic mirrors to humanity, as they exemplify some ingenious, evolutionary imbalance of the basic drives, exhibiting too much libido, or placidity, or aggression, or rationality. For a long time, and as an essential ingredient of Star Trek's premise, Spock teased the limits of his comrade's comprehension with his enigmatic, unearthly mind-set - but his inexorable trajectory (whatever his gnomic protestations) was set towards becoming more and more human. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Kirk even gets to tell Spock that 'We're all human'.

As an android, Data reraises the tricky question involved in dramatically or comically defining the borders of humanity. Like Spock, he is an inscrutable figure: his face conveys little, except when he tries too hard to mimic the facial contortions involved in a human laugh or frown. Incidental details play constantly on Data's inability to understand the most sublime levels of human achievement - art, religion, philosophy - he doggedly works on his painting, his violin playing, and the reading of the pillars of wisdom which Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) solemnly entrusts to him. He obviously also admires the human qualities of playfulness and cleverness, since he sometimes dons the garb of Sherlock Holmes for a spin in the imaginary worlds created by the ship's Holodeck.

The show cleverly incites our desire to read into Data's sleuth-like curiosity the stirring of a more profound sentiment: yearning. And if Data yearns, isn't that the surest sign that he is already, somehow, becoming human? Yet, while certain actions that Data performs seem to indicate the magic alchemy of such a transformation, others pull us suddenly back to ground zero. He is, after all, a machine, one that we occasionally see switched off, and (as he often reminds us himself) he has no emotions of any sort. That is a condition of his being, like his autonomy, which gives him a passionless, twilight aura of existential solitude: as the only one of his kind, Data can have no sense of community or belonging.

Yet the ultimate nature of Data as a sentient being is kept alive as an open question in Star Trek: The New Generation, and many of the best episodes dramatise the ambiguity that compellingly surrounds him. In one story, a coldhearted, hyperrational scientist arrives on the Enterprise with the mission of disassembling Data, so that he can be reproduced and improved (due to a handy trick of intergalactic history, his exact technological make-up remains a mystery). When Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) is able to prove the presence - inexplicable as it is - of attributes in Data that at least resemble conventional emotions, Picard formally rules that henceforth, Data is to be considered neither android nor human, but a hybrid that inaugurates a new evolutionary species.

In another, extremely moving episode, Data takes the question of his reproduction into his own hands. He builds a daughter who, like her father, shows through her inability to adapt to human manners the gulf between these two species. But then she develops powerful surges of emotion that deranges her circuitry. Like man classically transgressive heroines of melodrama, she is far too much trouble for the show to keep alive; but as she dies, she assures Data that, although he cannot honestly express proper parental love, she has enough love for the both of them.

An explicit line of reference in the show compares Data to both Pinocchio and the Tin Man - casting him as that perfectly sentimental figure who lacks a heart or soul, and whose only wish is to obtain them. 'The Tin Man', however, casts a somewhat more sympathetic and accepting light on Data's hybrid nature. The plot concerns Data's relation to two unusual creatures, both of them singular beings fitted uneasily into the cosmic scheme of things. The first is a brilliant but difficult man with supreme powers of empathy and intuition. He is so open to feelings and thoughts that any interaction is a torment to him. The second is the Tin Man - a pile of discarded machinery out in space that has evolved into a sentient being with completely unknowable values and drives. Data, silently, identifies with both of them. When it comes to pass that the destiny of these two beings is to merge into one - thereby extinguishing each other's yearning - Data returns to the Enterprise and reflects that he too, at last, feels some sense of belonging.

The most intensely ambiguous of all the Data stories to date has been 'The Most Toys'. In this episode, Data is kidnapped by a sadistic, selfish collector for his museum of unique objects. Counterpointed to Data's typically cool and methodical exploration of means to escape captivity are the varied reactions of grief from his comrades back on the Enterprise, who believe he is dead. Data has explained to his captor early on that, as an android with a built-in check, he cannot murder; this is later used to taunt him, as others around him under the collector's rule are cruelly exterminated. Finally, Data faces the villain with an especially lethal gun in hand, and is told: 'If only you could feel rage . . . if only you could feel a need for revenge, then you could fire. But you're just an android. You can't feel anything, can you?'

The collector interprets Data's dilemma here - the question of whether to kill or not - as 'just another interesting intellectual puzzle for you, another of life's curiosities'; meanwhile the familiar flickerings in that passive android face seem to bear out the truth of that description. 'I cannot permit this to continue', says Data - ever the rationalist - and raises his gun to fire. At this precise moment, a transporter beam envelops Data and returns him to the Enterprise. The ship's controls indicate an energy discharge has occurred. Data - in an unreadable moment that may indicate canniness - denies that any such thing happened. Finally, he faces his captor, now in turn captured. 'It must give you great pleasure', whines the fallen megalomaniac. Data replies, 'No, sir, it does not. I do not feel pleasure.' And as the camera tracks in for dramatic underlining, he blankly parrots back the words, 'I am only an android'.'

From Dear Data by Adrian Martin.

The Revolting Body

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - Self-Portrait Masturbating, 1911


'The restrictions on masturbation hardly start in Europe until the eighteenth century. Suddenly, a panic-theme appears: an appalling sickness develops in the Western world. Children masturbate. Via the medium of families, though not at their initiative, a system of control of sexuality, an objectivisation of sexuality allied to corporal persecution, is established over the bodies of children. But sexuality, through thus becoming an object of analysis and concern, surveillance and control, engenders at the same time and intensification of each individual's desire, for, in and over his body.

The body thus became the issue of a conflict between parents and children, the child and the instances of control. The revolt of the sexual body is the reverse effect of this encroachment. What is the response on the side of power? An economic (and perhaps also ideological) exploitation of eroticisation, from sun-tan products to pornographic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation. 'Get undressed - be slim, good-looking, tanned!' For each move by the adversary, there is an answering one by the other.'

From Body/Power, an interview with Michel Foucault.

'Have adults forgotten how they themselves were incited and aroused by sex impulses as children? Have they forgotten how the frightful passion burned and tortured them while they were still children? I have not forgotten, for I suffered excruciatingly from it.'

Egon Schiele

The Corpse of Everything But Existence Itself

György Eszter (Peter Fitz) - Werckmeister Harmonies (d. Bela Tarr, 2000)


"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

From The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot (1922).

Bill's Bounty

Willem van Aelst (1627-1683) - Still Life with Fruit, c. 1660


"The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

Galileo Galilei

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

Francis Bacon (Novum Organum)

"I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."

Bertrand Russell

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous that we sweat."

Seneca (Letters to Lucilius)

Turner's Tempest

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) - Shade and Darkness: The Evening of the Deluge, 1843


"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."

Blaise Pascal

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

Henry David Thoreau

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."

Frank Lloyd Wright

"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe."

John Berger

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."

e. e. cummings

The Week in Review


Films:

Damnation - d. Bela Tarr (2000)
Werckmeister Harmonies - d. Bela Tarr (1987)

Books:

Genet: A Biography by Edmund White
Saint-Genet by Jean-Paul Sartre
A Thief's Journal by Jean Genet

Music:

I Will Not Be Sad In This World (1990) - Djivan Gasparyan
Ask Me No Questions (1994) - Djivan Gasparyan
Apricots from Eden (1996) - Djivan Gasparyan
Black Rock (1998) - Djivan Gasparyan
Armenian Fantasies (2000) - Djivan Gasparyan
Moon Shines At Night (2001) - Djivan Gasparyan

Maid For Murder

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598


"And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe."

Bible (Exodus 21:23-25)

"If you prick us do we not bleed? . . . If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not want revenge?"

William Shakespeare

"Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged."

Samuel Johnson

"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

Mahatma Gandhi

"Revenge is sweet and not fattening."

Alfred Hitchcock

Commedia Dell'Agonia

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) - Gilles, c. 1718-19


"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."

Italo Calvino

"Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad."

Victor Hugo

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another."

Anatole France

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad and indifferent: e.g. music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."

Baruch Spinoza

"Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits."

Susan Sontag

Baise-Moi, Baby

Anca Daucikova (b. 1950) - Kissing Hour (video), c. 2000


Love's Infiniteness

If yet I have not all thy love,
Dear, I shall never have it all;
I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move,
Nor can intreat one other tear to fall;
And all my treasure, which should purchase thee,
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent;
Yet no more can be due to me,
Than at the bargain made was meant.
If then thy gift of love were partial,
That some to me, some should to others fall,
Dear, I shall never have thee all.

Or if then thou gavest me all,
All was but all, which thou hadst then;
But if in thy heart since there be or shall
New love created be by other men,
Which have their stocks entire, and can in tears,
In sighs, in oaths, and letters, outbid me,
This new love may beget new fears,
For this love was not vow'd by thee.
And yet it was, thy gift being general;
The ground, thy heart, is mine; what ever shall
Grow there, dear, I should have it all.

Yet I would not have all yet.
He that hath all can have no more;
And since my love doth every day admit
New growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store;
Thou canst not every day give me thy heart,
If thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it;
Love's riddles are, that though thy heart depart,
It stays at home, and thou with losing savest it;
But we will have a way more liberal,
Than changing hearts, to join them; so we shall
Be one, and one another's all.

John Donne (1572-1631)

The Oscar For Best Quote

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


"Biography lends to death a new terror."

"Wisdom comes with winters."

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."

"Only the shallow know themselves."

"I love acting. It so much more real than life."

Oscar Wilde