Marginalia, no.19

This roving humor…I have ever had, & like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird it sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly (for who is everywhere is nowhere)…, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.

~ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

[Wasn’t it Pascal who named Distraction mankind’s universal foe, the catholic goad of our nature, preventing us at every turn from attending to life’s proper tasks? Though periodically re-lamented (as if just discovered), the habit of distraction must confer certain benefits.  A too constant focus on life’s mortal intentions toward us can be a downer, after all, and there are just so damn many books to read – most of which, like Burton’s, are themselves the happy products of distraction.]

Trashing Cinema

It was fun watching the applecart being upset… but now where do we go for apples?

That’s Paul Schrader, screenwriter for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.  The quote is lifted from Robert Fulford’s National Post article surveying the long wreckage left in the wake of Pauline Kael’s reign at The New Yorker.  Ever since 1967, the idea goes, when Kael came out swinging for Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde, American film has been steadily vulgarizing.

The trouble with the democratization of taste is that you too often end with something unpalatable.  It’s a popular sentiment among the mandarins of culture, as well as the creatively frustrated and underappreciated, and perhaps there’s some truth in it.  But it’s not enough to fault the critics for the trend, and Fulford admits Kael can hardly shoulder all the blame.  Her career was simply emblematic of her era.  Rather than summoning and driving it, Kael too was a victim of that fleeting specter -the zeitgeist- that so single-mindedly set about dismantling bourgeois sensibility and prejudice in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

We all get a little spooked by the zeitgeist.  But I wonder if the critic, like the artist, isn’t a little more susceptible to a good spooking than most.  Perhaps, like a 19th century medium channeling spirits, a critic who manages to levitate his way to prominence does so by an especially effective channeling of the zeitgeist’s own critical genius.  In which case, Kael may have given herself and her colleagues too much credit when she complained:

When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.

Is it really so bad?  Have we fallen so far?  Are the Love Gurus, Terminators, Armageddons and Independence Days that have plagued American box offices these past twenty years the truest, best representatives of the age?  Was cinema and artistic sensibility prior to the Kaelian Revolution such an unadulterated paradise?  Surely, no one who has seen American Pie or Superbad can deny there’s been movement toward greater vulgarity, even compared to the teen movies of my own generation like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Breakfast Club. 

But I think there’s something more fundamental at work here, something that trips up all would-be romanticizers of the heretofore.   We fall victim to that ruse of perspective by which the far horizon seems full of towering achievements only because its lesser works are rendered invisible by distance.   If we’re unable to see any legitimate cinematic achievements in our own age (I nominate There Will Be Blood), it’s because we’re so thickly surrounded by the present undergrowth of lesser works which will, with time enough and distance, find a merciful oblivion.

Marginalia, no.18

The plants, said Aristotle, live in a perpetual sleep; because they have only a vegetative soul, all their aim is in the flower. They have their mouth in the earth, and it is their hermaphroditic corolla that they expose to the birds of heaven, without the least repression. Literature, today, would be that plant…

~ Jacques Maritain, Art and Poetry (1943)

[“Repression” being a bad word nowadays and people being overfond of exposing their corollas in public, a reader might imagine Maritain intended a compliment here; but no, it’s a critique of mindless sensualism (one needs to explain so much anymore).  As one half of a Josephite marriage, Maritain knew a thing or two about repression, I suppose.  Of course, it’s ungenerous to discount a man’s philosophy based on the incomprehensibility of his personal life, so we’ll thank him for the botanically suggestive reminder that -moving heaven downward- the head and heart take anatomical precedence over other symbolic organs.]

Marginalia, no.17

O who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?
O no!  The apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

~ Shakespeare, Richard II

[In 1971’s Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the incomparable Gene Wilder, as Wonka, sings in praise of pure imagination: “If you want to view paradise / Simply look around and view it / Anything you want to, do it / Want to change the world / There’s nothing to it…”  Imagine you’re there, in other words, and there you are.  Pace Mr Wonka, his elder namesake begs to differ.  But Shakespeare is always insufferably realistic about the limits of self-deception.]

Art and Imperfection

We were so eager for happiness, we forgot we weren’t free.

That’s one of the more poignant lines from Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful film, Persepolis - adapted from her graphic novel of the same name.  It tells the story of Satrapi’s own life: her childhood in Tehran, the overthrow of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the turmoil of the eight-year war with Iraq.  Especially powerful are her portraits of her grandmother and an executed uncle, and the frank, mesmerizing sequences that lead us through her student years in Vienna and subsequent (temporary) return to life under the ayatollahs. 

After Persepolis itself, my wife and I watched the “making-of” documentary also included on the DVD, which delves into the rather old-fashioned techniques used to such rewarding effect in the film.  Entirely drawn and inked by hand, the months of detailed labor behind Persepolis was once par for the course for animated features, but in the era of CGI requires a special devotion to craft that is vanishingly rare.  The robust, magical, shadow-theater quality of the final product is worth every hour poured into it.

Satrapi herself comments on the decision not to use computer-generated imagery.  The trouble with CGI, she suggests, is its absolute precision, and hence its inhumanity.  That sounds about right.  By their very nature, computer-generated images are the product of mathematical perfections alien to the human eye and hand.  I recently heard a Pixar director describe how in order to create a CGI image which will be received as true-to-life one has to engineer the illusion of dirt and flaws.  With traditional animation, on the other hand, one may strive for perfection in line and form as ardently as one wants without fear of actually achieving it, and the results are immediately received as true and familiarly human. 

A CGI movie may tell an inspiring story, then, and it may be a technical feat, but it can never be art in the same sense that a film like Persepolis can.  The greatest achievements of art are necessarily imperfect.  In fact, their imperfection is inseparable from their greatness.  The American poet Robert Lowell arrived at the same basic idea when he declared that “imperfection is the language of art” – by which he meant true and truly human art. 

Whether bequeathed us by swooning Greeks or as a side-effect of progress in science and technology, there is a mathematical idea of perfection at work in culture today which we’re frequently tempted to admire for the wrong reasons or apply in the wrong cases.  We are so eager for perfection, you might say, we forget that we ourselves are imperfectible.  This misunderstanding is one of the more irksome and self-defeating pathologies of modern man.  Geometry, after all, may deliver us the distance of a star and chart out the recesses of space, but will never map the abyss of the heart.

Marginalia, no.16

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.

~ Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

[Gnwqi sauton.  I appreciate the encouragement, not feeling like such a “bold and adventurous piece of nature” today.  But even this sort of listlessness is catalogued in the encyclopedic self.  Africa, by the map, is no stranger to the jungles of vexation or the numbing dune sea of ennui.]

Infernal Summer

Everyone loves a fire, at least for a while.  Writing about the war years in Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge says we all harbor a secret desire to see civilization crumble around us, to witness the Great Downfall, to watch the world go up in flames before our eyes.

During a heat-wave this past weekend a clutch of electrical storms pushed through the state, which is rather unusual and frankly unwelcome in a drought year.  The lightning that scattered through the tinderbox canyons and Sierra sparked over eight hundred separate wildfires in a single day. 

The northern half of the state is lit up like a birthday cake, and it’s only the beginning of the season.  Few of us are in any immediate danger since the fires are mostly confined to wilderness areas.  But the smoke smothers and deadens everything.  The horizon disappears in an unwholesome twilight.  The mountains look like belching volcanoes.  There’s a fine ash on the morning streets.

When you finally do see the world burn up before your eyes any appeal the idea might have had quickly evaporates.  The campfire odor sheds all sentimental associations when it persists for days and weeks.  You grow sick over lost landscapes: redwoods and chaparral, oak-lined riverbanks, coastal ridges, alpine meadows - the grandeur passing daily into flame.  You’re left to scratch, as best you can, some stoic comfort from the melancholy truth so nicely captured in Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos or The Architect:

What is most beautiful finds no place in the eternal… Nothing beautiful is separable from life, and life is that which dies. 

Or “burns,” as the case may be.

Marginalia, no.15

It wasn’t courage the Americans lacked, but only the hope of success.

~ Montesquieu

[In other words, the optimist always wins.  Lest anyone accuse me of editorializing on current events, I’ll quickly note that by “Americans” Montesquieu was referring to the Aztecs and Incas in their face-off with the Conquistadors.  As a generalization it crumbles under its own ambition but anyway reminds us that in the end even the most valiant and refined fatalism proves, well, fatal.]

Marginalia, no.14

…for what is a squirrel but an airy pig, or a filbert but a sort of archangelical acorn?

~ John Keats, from a letter to J.H. Reynolds, 1818

[It’s comforting to see that those whose early genius will outstrip your most mature accomplishments were nonetheless capable of spouting the same kinds of absurdities you did at age twenty-two.]

Electric Babylon

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries…

Anyone familiar with the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges will instantly recognize these as the opening lines to his 1941 short story The Library of Babel.  Borges’ alternate universe, a library-cosmos, is made up of nothing but interconnecting chambers full of randomly shelved books, extending in every direction, and through which librarians (that is, people) are fated to wander their whole lives long.

Most of the books in Borges’ library are perfect gibberish.  Letters and symbols are arranged on the page at seeming random or according to patterns which provide no foothold for interpretation.  Denizens of the library, even after a lifetime of searching, consider it a great triumph to find a book containing a single intelligible sentence.  However, since the Library is infinite, it can only be conjectured that somewhere in the numberless galleries there exists every possible book, every work of literature, every poem, every instruction manual, every biography of all past and future persons, every history and every prophecy –as well as a mind-numbing multiplicity of textual variants and forgeries.

I ask: what is the Library of Babel today if not the Internet?  Certainly I’m not the first to see the obvious parallels.  Hasn’t Borges’ fictional library achieved a sort of flickering actuality in this so-called “worldwide” Web that extends indefinitely in every direction, page upon page, link upon link, and gallery upon gallery?  The Web encompasses every imaginable variety of human expression.  Full of rot and nonsense, for sure, it nonetheless holds in its digital recesses virtual encyclopedias of accumulated knowledge, experience, observation, trivia and arcana.

This Digital Age, if you want to call it that, is little more than twelve years old.  It only began to come into its own about the time I finished college. Graduating in ‘95, mine was the last generation of university students to receive an entirely “offline” education: no assignments or syllabi posted on the Web; no online discussion forums; no laptops in the classroom; no Power Point presentations and no class email lists.  Everything was done on paper.  (In fact, one summer I took a job with the university’s Records department where every grade for every class for every student for over a hundred years was stored on typed or hand-written paper transcripts – which sounds downright medieval now.)  It was only in my senior year, that we were given email addresses – but we didn’t really know what to do with them, and neither did our professors.

However, I do recall wasting a lot of time that year in a place I’d hardly set foot in before: the computer lab.  Some friends and I were using a now-archaic telnet protocol to log into a multi-user dimension (MUD) founded by Pavel Curtis, called LambdaMOO. This was a sort of precursor to today’s online communities like Second Life (which I’ve never visited, but I get the idea).  LambdaMOO was a text-based virtual-reality environment that mimicked a vibrant, rather chaotic city.  At its height, it claimed over ten thousand members.  After gleaning some basic knowledge of how things worked and a few special commands, users could shape their character’s identity, construct their own additions to the metropolis, and interact with -even manipulate- those around them.

I once dated a girl in LambdaMOO.  We went for “walks” together.  We met for “drinks” at bars in the hip central district of the city.  We went “dancing” too (which is difficult to do in text).  We even crossed the line and spoke over the phone, which was a mistake.  She was from the South and I was charmed by her accent, but her real life was too complicated and distant and I didn’t want to get involved.  It wasn’t long before I got sick of my new life in the far corners of the computer lab and returned to my old life in the far corners of the library.

When the World Wide Web arrived, everything changed.  I remember the first time I ever saw image content online through a browser (Mosaic?).  I was impressed.  We all were.  I began to understand that possibly something revolutionary was happening. Was it a good revolution, or a bad one?  I wasn’t sure.  But along with everyone else I watched in mute fascination as the edifice of the Web was built up before us like a new Tower of Babel, soaring upward towards some vague appointment in the digital heavens.

If you are my age or older, you will recall that at its birth the Web was not a consumer space, nor was it a governmental space.  Its prophets announced it as the universal solvent, an equalizer, a democratizer, a peacemaker.  It was supposed to be the harbinger of a new era in human consciousness.  It was immaculate.  It could never, they said, be tampered with by men of ill intent.  It could never be commercialized.  It could never be politicized.  By its very nature it would call forth all that was right in the human spirit, uniting and pacifying strangers and enemies across the thousands of miles, ideological or actual, that separated them.  In all sincerity the question was posed: How could there be hatred, conflict, war, when the mothers and children of Tehran, Moscow, Pyongyang and New York could reach across the frontiers of governmental belligerence and hold virtual hands in peace?

It sounds perfectly ridiculous now.  It was only slightly less ridiculous sounding then.  The Web has become like any other organ of human cultural expression.  No one today seriously considers the Web in itself a promoter of peace and universal harmony.  In many ways it has become the consummate field for conflict and partisanships of all kinds: political, religious, sporting, consumerist, sexual, ethnic, academic, you name it.  For some it may still be a forum for the promotion of peace, knowledge and community.  For others, it’s a forum for inanity, indulgence, or cost-effective and unfettered propagandizing.  The Internet has simply, inevitably, become an extension of our best and worst selves.

Which is not to say there isn’t any philosophical or spiritual content in our life online, just that the Web is not properly conceived as a filter designed to admit only the better angels of our nature – our demons get access too.  Even so, there is a sort of limited transcendence available through the Web that can’t help but exert an influence on our perception of ourselves and our image of the world.  We live in a different way when we live online.  As Nicholas Carr puts it:

For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. On the Internet, we’re all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols.

In this respect, the Web is the Platonist’s vision of paradise, the consummation of millennia of platonic longing in western culture.  Freed from the limitations and disappointments of materiality, we gain online the godlike powers to extend our interests infinitely and to recreate ourselves according to our own desired ideal image.

And so it’s hardly surprising that, like Platonism, the Web births its own mysticisms.  I need hardly mention, for example, The Matrix or its film and video game offshoots.  More people than you might imagine are eagerly awaiting the day when, in Gibsonesque-fashion, they can cheat death by downloading their consciousness directly onto the Web.  And some of today’s New Age leftovers still speak of the Web as a means for achieving a state of universal collective consciousness.  Others see spiritual significance in the Web’s very architecture and describe visions of data packets ascending and descending through the Net’s immaterial courses like the angels on Jacob’s ladder.

In The Library of Babel there’s room for mysticism too.  Even under the weight of universal incoherence and apparent meaninglessness, the residents of the library whisper of a mythical gallery, a Crimson Hexagon in which is shelved the One Book, an Index of Indexes, containing the key to deciphering the entire cosmic library.  To find the Crimson Hexagon and read the One Book is to transcend the library itself and become “analogous to God.”

But what is this place, this Internet, after all?  A cosmic library, an unreal city, a distillation of the human spirit into bits of light, electricity, data – can we even call it a place?  I caught my first shimmering glimpse of Electric Babylon in the imaginary metropolis of LambdaMOO more than twelve years ago.  Now we are within its walls.  Electric Babylon is a city, a symbol, an idol, a mystery, a place of strange worship and strange encounters, of strong men and beggars, of priests and prostitutes, of hanging gardens and cloud-locked towers. It is a home for some and a place of exile and captivity for others.

How long, I wonder, before some curious sect of netizens begin a hushed pilgrimage to search out the Web’s own Crimson Hexagon?