What can a lover say to that? When you don’t value yourself much, it’s easy to say yes. I said yes. She didn’t believe me. Her husband would die for her, and seemed to have proved this to her in ways beyond question. It didn’t matter that she claimed that she didn’t love him anymore. The question was, if I was to replace his role in her life, “Would I die?”
I’ve got a problem with dying. Lots of my friends have done it, and they made it seem simple. A bit too many drugs, and the job is done. A short step off a tall building, and it’s done. No more pain, no more worries. But I have a problem. As fucked-up as it seems most of the time, I still love life. I really don’t want to miss anything. And if you’re not here, there’s nothing more to see. I like seeing new stuff all the time.
That doesn’t mean that I’m afraid of death; if I could trade my life for someone else’s happiness, I suppose I’d do it. But if I died, I suspect it wouldn’t make anyone happy at this point. It might even make a precious few sad. Why are love and death so often equated?
This isn’t new. Love is often written as a tragic thing, but I think that’s a bad story to accept. I think it should be a creative thing, not a destructive thing. Maybe I’m just weird that way. But the issues it always clouds are truth and morality. I didn’t see the lies until it was too late. I might as well have been dead when it was over, but I wasn’t. I was still looking at the world through sad eyes, waiting for what happens next.
Your case is not so extraordinary, beyond thought or reason. The Goddess in her anger has smitten you, and you are in love.
What wonder is this? There are many thousands that suffer with you.
So, you will die for love! And all the others, who love, and who will love, must they die too?
How will that profit them? The tide of love, at its full surge, is not withstandable.
Upon the yielding spirit she comes gently, but to the proud and the fanatic heart she is a torturer with the brand of shame.
She wings her way through the air; she is in the sea, in its foaming billows; from her everything, that is, is born.
For she engenders in us and sows the seed of desire whereof we're born, all our children, living on the earth.Euripides, Hippolytus.
I briefly mentioned an advance copy of an article I was going to read from my professor, Dr. Michael Klein, regarding the problem of creating a kinder, gentler modern rhetoric. I’ve been digesting it for a few days, it’s called “The Heuristic Potential of Rhetoric Reclaimed: Toward Imagining a Techne of Dialogical Arrangement.” The article is actually easy to state in plain language: Dr. Klein has suggested that what we know about conversational discourse analysis (he is a linguist) can be applied to the problem of rhetorical invention to provide a new mode of rhetoric.
He’s actually promoting a schizophrenic sort of writing, a writing that emulates the model of conversational “turns” where points of view are interrogated and defended in two voices. Not in the agonistic sense of classical rhetoric, where a stronger position is defended against a weaker one, but in a space which emulates the conversational “floor” where positions are treated on an equal basis. At first, it seemed like it was delusional: how can one speaker be both advocate and challenger? Then, I discovered an example in Prodicus.
In “Heracles on the Crossroad” Prodicus (in a secondhand account) describes how Heracles meets Virtue and Vice. The oration began with a sensual description of these two women, but narration ceases as the conversation between the two possibilities begins. The core of the “pitch” on both sides is pleasure— pleasure now from Vice, or pleasure in the future, from the Gods, by Virtue. At no point does the orator seem to favor one over the other, and the actual decision made by Heracles is only implied. The rhetor doesn’t judge, or point, or direct the argument at all. The argument is purely supplied through conversation.
I remember how much I hated Plato when I first read him. Aristotle too. The reason why was that their motives and steering of the “dialogues” was just so blatant. This is not the case with Prodicus, his approach seems nearly identical to the techne suggested by Dr. Klein. Trying to figure out the 5th century B.C. is pretty tough, and the perspectives of the Sophists or Plato and Aristotle are not the only ones available. The dramatists, like Aristophanes and Euripides put in their two cents too.
I decided to read Hippolytus again. I first found this play, oddly enough, through a Thin White Rope song, “Some Velvet Morning.” It’s a cover of a Lee Hazlewood song, and it’s just haunting.
Some velvet morning when I’m straightThere’s a video, with Lee and Nancy Sinatra riding horses on a beach, which makes little sense until you figure out who Phaedra is.
I’m gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you about Phaedra
And how she gave me life
And how she made it end
Some velvet morning when I’m straight
Short synopsis: Hippolytus, a chaste young man and bastard son of Phaedra, is hopelessly in love with Artemus (the goddess). Aphrodite gets pissed off, because he isn’t paying her tribute since he won’t fall in love with a human. She forces Phaedra to fall in love with him (in the non-socially acceptable way). Phaedra goes mad, holding back those forbidden feelings. She eventually breaks down and confesses to her nurse, and the nurse professes an oddly familiar point of view:
The life of man entire is misery:How postmodern is that? Not bad for 428 BC. The nurse will have little to do with words as a solution: “Your words are wounds. Where will your tale conclude?” Euripides’ argument, conveyed by the nurse, is much the same as Shelley’s. Love is the ruling force of all:
he finds no resting place, no haven from calamity.
But something other dearer still than life
the darkness hides and mist encompasses;
we are proved luckless lovers of this thing
that glitters in the underworld: no man
can tell us of the stuff of it, expounding
what is, and what is not: we know nothing of it.
Idly, we drift, on idle stories carried.
The chaste, they love not vice of their own will,And through Phaedra, Euripides indicts those who would practice rhetoric:
but yet they love it. Cypris [Aphrodite], you are no god.
You are something stronger than a God if that can be,
You have ruined her and me and all this house.
This is the deadly thing which devastatesOddly enough, Hippolytus has a teacher (perhaps a Sophist?). Since words won’t do the job, the nurse decides to tell Hippolytus the problem thinking he might be able to physically, ahem, take care of the craving. Big mistake. When the nurse begs him to be silent and not tell anyone, he responds: “Why not? A pleasant tale makes pleasanter telling when there are many listeners.”
well-ordered cities and the homes of men—
that’s it, the art of oversubtle words.
It’s not the words ringing delight in the ear
that one should speak, but those that have the power
to save their hearer’s honorable name.
These words doom everything. Phaedra hangs herself, and leaves a note claiming that Hippolytus raped her. Theseus, Phaedra’s husband, banishes him. Theseus’s father was Poseidon, and he utters a curse on Hippolytus which daddy takes care of. As Hippolytus rides away on the beach, a huge bull comes out of the ocean and wrecks his chariot, mortally wounding him (this explains the video!). Artemus appears in the end to tell Theseus the truth, and the last discussion is on the futility of teaching as Hippolytus is dying:
Theseus:
What fools men are! You work and work for nothing,
you teach ten thousand tasks to one another,
invent, discover everything. One thing only
you do not know: one thing you never hunt for—
a way to teach fools wisdom.
Hippolytus:
Clever indeed
would be the teacher able to compel
the stupid to be wise! This is no time
for such fine logic chopping. I am afraid
your tongue runs wild through sorrow
Theseus:
If there were some token now, some mark to make the division
clear between friend and friend, the true and false!
All men should have two voices, one the just voice,
and one as chance would have it. In this way
the treacherous scheming voice would be confuted
by the just, and we should never be deceived.
While still implied to be agonistic, this contains Dr. Klein’s argument in a nutshell. I wasn’t expecting to find it offered in 428 BC. But, then, you never know. Some good ideas just don’t want to quit. I wonder if he knows about this? I suppose I’ll have to mention it to him next Tuesday.
Following one of Luke's links, I found some happy news underneath a woeful tale. It seems that Blake's original watercolors for Blair's Grave have surfaced!
I really hope a facsimile is published. These drawings were important to a point I was making in a paper, and I used several prototype drawings to illustrate the way the image which forms the frontispiece to Jerusalem was well wrought. A brief history of these drawings casts an interesting light on the nature of genius— it is the nature of genius to get screwed.
Illustrating Blair's poem "The Grave" was to be a big turning point in Blake's career. He spent over a year producing illustrations for Edward Young's Night Thoughts early in his career, which was a dismal commercial failure. Only 42 of 300 illustrations were used, and in desperation he accepted the patronage of William Haley and moved from London to Felpham, on the coast. Though hopes were high, he didn't find much relief there. In the end, he was accused of sedition and moved back to London worse off than when he began.
The contract with Cromek to illustrate "The Grave" should have been a good start at getting back on his feet. Though he produced incredible work for it, Cromek was unsure of the salability of Blake's engravings. So he had the drawings engraved by Schavronetti instead, cheating Blake out of the bulk of his money. The engravings by Schavronetti are competent, but they don't have the real spirit of Blake. Now, for the first time, we can see what those illustrations were supposed to look like. I'm jazzed.
For those with a more fiscally interested bent, like Cromek, think of the return on the investment these days: the drawings were lost after their last sale in 1836 for one pound five shillings. They are now expected to sell for over a million. Nice profit, if you can enjoy it. Blake's currently residing in a potters field, and it won't do him any good.
Oh, and I agree with you about Wil Wheaton, Luke. My first impression was: So? What's next, a blog by Gary Coleman?
Language is a lava lamp? There’s just something really nice about this image. After all, I do often sit and stare at it for hours. Yes, I am easily amused.
Camile Paglia argues eloquently for the classics. I’ve been reading more Greek philosophy than ever in the last few years, and it’s amazing how little the questions have really changed. There will be a lot more posts coming in that direction, right now I’m trying to digest Prodicus.
The universe is dark, unforgiving, and random. But I never saw much to this argument. Everywhere I look I see patterns.
I took randomness to heart when I was young. My photography teacher in high school took a sabbatical, after I graduated, and I used to go visit him. He was always so light and free when it came to matters of art and literature, and his constant advice to me was that I should lighten up and have some fun. He helped me with Milton and Blake, and he helped me relax in my worries about finding a “voice.” I think that's one of the reasons why I've always felt drawn to teaching. This man, and a few more, really changed my life. I was particularly inspired by one project he did while completing his MFA.
He took a map of the city and drew a grid of 52 squares. He developed a procedure where he would use a deck of cards to pick a location, a time, and a direction to point a camera. Then he’d make a photograph there. He took a proof sheet of 36 images made in this fashion and blew it up to 30”x 40” and then displayed it next to a description of the process. At the time the University of California at Bakersfield was filled with many of the movers and shakers in the conceptual art field, and this project was well received.
The point of the process was to show that art is everywhere. Even taken totally at random, these photographs had a singular beauty. The same teacher introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, who asserts through one of his characters that “life would be little changed if I had done nothing more than carry a rubber dog bone from room to room for sixty years.” I suspect this is true as well. But it doesn’t make the patterns stop.
So I believe in randomness as a way of life, not as a way of death. The inevitable conclusion of reading a lot of Sartre is “What’s the point?” The question, restated by my teacher would be “Does there need to be a point?”
She didn’t seem to understand my resistance to proofs of pointlessness. There’s a subtle distinction there. In her world view, the universe was an evil machine bent on her destruction. A tornado ripped her home apart when she was growing up. Medical mistakes screwed up her body. She seemed to be quite relieved with by the thought that there was no point behind it. On the other hand, I want to believe that there is something behind the patterns of beauty in this world. Though I suspect that they are indeed random, I don’t see them as dark and unforgiving. I think forgiveness is the glue that holds it together. No, there doesn’t have to be a point. But there are indeed patterns, even if sometimes we fudge and forgive to make things fit.
The pattern between us followed her belief system, not mine. I couldn’t overcome it. When you want the universe to be dark, cold, and unforgiving— things do have a tendency to turn out that way.
I don’t believe they are equivocal. Equating them begins a carefully reasoned path into religion. Starting from the fundamental questions, St. Augustine gets right to the core in his Confessions:
What, then, am I my God? What is my nature? A life that is ever varying, full of change, and of immense power. The wide plains of my memory and its innumerable caverns and hollows are full beyond compute of countless things of all kinds. Material things are there by means of their images; knowledge is there of itself; emotions are there in the form of ideas or impressions of some kind, for memory retains them even while the mind does not experience them, although whatever is in the memory must also be in the mind. My mind has the freedom of them all. I can glide from one to the other. I can probe deep into them and never find the end of them. This is the power of memory! This is the great force of life in living man, mortal though he is!
Augustine goes on to propose that we do not recognize things unless we remember them. Therefore, qualities like joy and happiness can only exist in the mind because we experienced them somewhere before. There must be an origin, a God to explain why these qualities seem so familiar to us. If you buy that thinking and remembering are the same thing, then human experience is a closed thing dependent on an original experience, an experience of God— because if the mind is infinite but based on memory, then the memory must be of the infinite.
I’ll bet you didn’t think I could get here from there. The line of argument can also be tied into the debate of nomos vs. physis between Plato and the Sophists. If all thinking is memory, then how do things get named? The Sophists, like the postmodernists, believed that language was arbitrary. They asserted that there is no one “correct” name for anything. It was depends on the ethics of the situation, nomos, a sort of little t truth. Nomos is is truth only when it works; humans are free to rename things when the renaming works to clarify the situation, because the only truth that exists is the truth inside each of us. Plato and Aristotle championed physis a physical capitol T truth that lies outside, that can be discovered, that can be correct at all times for all people. There is a metaphysical hierarchy, perhaps only vaguely remembered by humans, which assigns all things one and only one proper name.
To name things is to reclaim them. Protagoras, the oldest of the Sophists, was also perhaps the worlds first agnostic. He felt that “God” couldn’t be proved or disproved, but more than that, that it really didn’t make any difference in our day to day lives. We define and name our world each day as we travel through it, without the need for outside guidance. This comes from a distinct difference in the view of language. To embrace memory as a guiding force, and reasoned correctness in naming, is to accept that spirituality is not only possible but essential.
But it can be a maddening concept, especially for an artist. It sounds like so much new age hokum to say “you must find your own voice.” Maybe lemon and honey will help? I don’t think so. The term is used to denote a form of self, a self that we express. The trouble with the concept is that it implies that each artist has just one proper “voice.” Writers use the term in the same way, but they don’t really take it so seriously as visual artists. Writers work with multiple voices that can be generated once you find a “center” to work from.
When I think about it, this makes the model of self that Dr. Anderson proposed on Monday really fit well. While postmodernist theory tends to suggest that there is no self, only interaction with others, Dr. Anderson suggested that there may not be a self, but rather multiple selves. It seems interesting to lay these out in terms of a molecular model. There is a core of genetic predisposition, perhaps, which accounts for a particle in the nucleus. Somehow, experientially, we develop other particles that do not change much over time. However, revolving around this mass there are hundreds of other selves that rotate and interact dependant on situation that modify and develop over time.
Dr. Anderson’s proposal was tied to a model of what happens after trauma. He suggested that traumatic experience causes a collapse of all these multiple selves into one self— a self that bases all its concepts in relation to trauma. The healing process then is a return to multiple selves, an expansion back to the larger discursive space that non-traumatized individuals inhabit.
In an oddly related tangent, I was thinking about how photography works. I was a chemistry and biology kind of guy before I became an artist type. I knew, going into my first photography class, that a photon entering certain silver halide compounds would cause a disruption in the orbital path and form a latent image. Then, subsequent chemical reactions could be used to isolate and reveal these disruptions. That’s one perspective that a chemistry teacher (who also taught photography) shared with me.
But when I took the class, it was taught by a former English teacher. The first day, when he slid the paper in the tray and an image would start to appear, students all around squealed in delight and asked “how does it do that?” The teacher just smiled and said:
“It’s magic!”I liked his explanation better.
Being a more pragmatic person these days, I was thinking about the difference between these two explanations. Let’s see, in the first explanation, a hypothetical particle (I’ve never seen a photon, have you?) impacts with other hypothetical particles and they change orbit. The tricky thing is, it isn’t necessarily a particle. Sometimes it acts like a wave. Sometimes it seems more like a packet of energy. There exists reasoned proof that we cannot really know what it is— because the act of constructing an experiment to figure it out dictates the result. Uh, photons sound like magic to me. Something outside our understanding, or the possibility of our understanding if you listen to some. I still like the English teacher’s explanation better. It’s shorter and cuts to the heart of things without the complexity. It is a valid explanation. However, to make better films and papers, delving deeply towards the limit of what we can know is the best strategy. Magic doesn’t seem to make better films or papers. But magic makes better pictures.
I was watching White Man’s Burden this afternoon, and though it’s an appallingly shallow film, it reminded me of some issues that have come up in teaching. My classes are about 50% black, and it hasn’t been a problem for me. As the final core course in writing, all the writers I’m dealing with are of a fairly high level, and if I had to make a value judgment about it, I’d say that the black writers are all on the high side of normal when it comes to skills. The university is probably about 25% black on the average, so it was odd to hear from some of the other new teachers that their classes were nearly 70% black. Writing is writing, as far as I’m concerned, though I must confess that the percentages made it clear to me that when selecting essays I needed to make sure that there was a healthy assortment of black writers present. It’s not a matter of setting quotas, but more a matter of making sure that something “connects” with the students in my classes.
I have a fairly broad background in literature so it’s not a difficult task to think of good pieces to use, though I must admit that I fight the temptation to include 18th and 19th century stuff because I’m afraid they just won’t get it. I did use Phyllis Wheatley (the first published African-American poet) in class last week though, because she is just too good to be missed. Another teacher chose Maya Angelou. After reading one of her pieces, she said that a burly white student announced:
“That SUCKED!”She actually felt fear for his safety in the predominantly black classroom. The teacher in question is a very small young white girl, but outspoken. She immediately interrogated his appraisal:
“Could it be that you think that because you’re a rich white boy from Sylvan Hills?”Sylvan Hills is a privileged white neighborhood filled with private schools, and luckily the guy had a sense of humor, and just said “I guess so.” Many of my black students come from private schools, and it’s just weird to see the dynamics of a large urban University at work. The spread of experiences that comes across in the essays I’ve heard so far is just staggering. A person needs a shotgun approach to reach them all.
There’s just a shock of immersion that all these first year students are dealing with. It’s a different universe, where there is no real power or privilege dynamic other than the usual teacher/student one.
The swap of power dynamics in White Man’s Burden reminded me of the oddity of having more upper class black and lower class whites in my classes, and there is just no such thing as “typical” as far as I can see in the makeup of our classes. I’ve always been a bit of a generalist, and so far that has been a big advantage in trying to hold things together and connect with people. But this also has made me notice a rather scary thing when searching for web resources.
Women writers are well represented on the web. Lots of stuff to choose from, much of it arcane but still, lots of useful stuff. But in looking for some favorite African-American writers, I can’t find anything by Eldridge Cleaver, little from James Baldwin, and most of Martin Luther King’s catalogue is also noticeably absent. I’m sure that when I dig a little deeper I will be able to find some Henry Louis Gates, but even the sites that focus on African-American lit are just shallow puddles compared to the wealth available in other areas. Maybe it’s copyright issues, but this just doesn’t seem right. There is just too much good stuff out there to keep it under lock and key. It bugs me.
A kitten was wandering around the parking lot of the bar. One of the bouncers, a big soft-hearted fellow decided to rescue it. The promoter, a cat hater, decided he wanted to play pool and knock the cat into the corner pocket. But the bouncer was larger beast, and didn't let that happen— the kitten chose the corner pocket on its own. He wasn’t put there by a person with hatred for shy and retiring beasts, because that promoter respected the larger beast. Bouncers are assertive beasts who usually get their way.
So are presidents. I made the mistake of watching part of his state of the union address. It was like seeing Joe McCarthy’s ghost. “And in her prayers, she said ‘Semper Fi’” Uh oh, I smell a master narrative. And the poor little boy sent his football to heaven . . . I got angry and then I got nauseous. Missiles will save us, yes, that’s it. We’ve got to spend more money on high tech weapons, to fight those who might go down to the corners store and buy some fertilizer and force their opinions on us explosively. Yes, we must root out the filthy communists, er, I mean terrorists, from every corner of the globe. They’re everywhere. Maybe there’s one sitting next to you right now . . .
The question is always there as to which story to believe. Who believes the triumphant Johnny comes marching home bit? But it’s always a persuasive story. It isn’t that we believe it, really, I think, it’s just that we want to believe it so badly. The promoter really didn’t offer to knock the kitten in the side pocket. If I remember correctly, he wanted to take it skeet shooting and use it for a target. But that was a joke, and everyone knew it. Too bad we can’t figure out that the “war is good” narrative is bullshit too.
Woke up this morning to read a great article, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument” by Walter Fisher. It opens with a quote from Kenneth Burke:
The corrective of the scientific rationalization would seem necessarily to be a rationale of art— not, however, a performer’s art, not a specialist’s art for some to produce and many to observe, but an art in its widest aspects, an art of living.
I don’t care for Burke much, but in looking at this fragment I see a fundamental premise at work. The corrective for one rationale is another rationale? This is a side-step, an evasion of more fundamental oppositions, which are dealt with by Fisher. It made me think of the 18th century method of dealing with the emotions— to rationalize and apply logic to them— which was totally overthrown in the revolt of Romanticism. The comparison of reason vs. the emotions, or rationality vs. magic, or any other convenient lumping strategy may be just a diversion from other core issues. In order to make Burke’s stratagem effective, a redefinition of what constitutes reason is in order, which is exactly what Fisher suggests.
The core assumptions of the article are easy for me to accept. Fisher asserts:
“Humans as rhetorical beings are as much valuing as they are reasoning animals.”A quick check of web behaviors confirms this pretty clearly. Hot or not? We question value more often than we apply logic, it seems to me. Reason is a factor, but not the central issue in most of our decision making behaviors. But still we call them reasoned choices, or as Fisher labels it, we employ “good reasons” for making decisions. Fisher defines good reasons as “those elements that provide warrants for accepting or adhering to the advice fostered by any form of communication that can be considered rhetorical.” He groups this with a fairly common definition of rhetoric: rhetoric is practical reasoning. Note that in dealing with practical reason, Kant also admitted the potential influence of transcendent concepts, magic if you will, on this practical reason— because, as I have often observed, there is just no accounting for taste.
Fisher’s usage of paradigm must be clarified. While I think it works well in the linguistic sense (a set of available elements), he defines it more broadly as “a representation designed to formalize the structure of a component of experience and to direct understanding and inquiry into the nature and functions of that experience.” The structure of the classical world is represented as the Rational World Paradigm:
Rather than adopting Burke’s construct of man as a symbol making creature, Fisher proposes the metaphor of homo narrans, man the storyteller. The narrative paradigm alternative proposed by Fisher makes a lot of sense:
I do believe that this is a paradigm I can work with. It’s a wider view of humanity, and in my opinion a more truthful view. It also dovetails nicely with some theories of self that Dr. Anderson was working with last night. More to come on all this, I am sure.
Monday is my 7am to 9pm day. But it was a good day. I love working with writers. I heard several essays with potential today, and I can’t wait to read the final drafts. I tried to convince everyone to take responsibility for their writing, to ask questions, and not accept “I like it” for an answer. They just don’t know how lucky they are, to have people who have to listen to what they have to say. Real life isn’t like that. That’s the great thing about school.
I really need to get going on my templates for Movable Type, that will cure the comments problem I suspect, but is bound to create others. Technology is a good thing, but so many of the people in my class are scared of it. I tried to convince them that using blogger is no more difficult than using a telephone or a microwave oven, and that’s the way they should think of it. So far, about half of both classes have started blogs. I think it’s a good thing.
But the real treat of the day was the long night class. Three hours of textual analysis for the most part, trying to draw distinctions between “healing narratives.” A bunch of good stuff, dealing with the levels of language and levels of displacement when people tell stories about traumatic events. I can’t discuss most of it here, because I have taken the “vow of secrecy” but I certainly will elaborate on the theoretical aspect of it as I dig in. Language is really a magical thing.
One of the oddities was the usage of the naming function of language, which had me constantly flashing back to Wordsworth’s poems on the naming of places. Another thing was a rather unique slant on the complex nature of the postmodern self. I really liked the introduction to a collection of essays called Healing Narratives edited by my teacher. He deals rather well with the problem posed by taking the “self” out of writing in the postmodern classroom. I’ve often remarked here that I don’t think we can be expected to be purely cogs in the Marxist discourse machine. I’m glad Dr. Anderson feels that way too.
I love taking apart writing to see what makes it tick. Especially when it isn’t my own.
I could weave a tragic narrative around the photograph I posted yesterday, but I won’t. For those who might wonder, yes, unless otherwise credited all the photographs on this site are mine. But it’s kind of the “other me,” the me that I’m still having problems dealing with. Once upon a time, I was a photographer instead of a writer. I’m hoping that one day in the future I will be both.
Sometimes I think too much.
Sometimes I feel too much
I can’t honestly think of a time that I stopped thinking or feeling.
I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t thinking about love or loneliness.Sometimes, I’d like to get out of the memory business.
I’ve never been asked to write an essay about why I took a particular class before, but I just did— 2,000 words worth. Still fighting the depression. Writing workshops tomorrow, in the classes I’m teaching that I need to produce handouts for. More material to read for other classes. Got up early and did laundry, oh joy.
I hesitate to tell people what I’m feeling when things get this dark. Synthesis has his fingers on the pulse of many threads regarding self-reflective blogging. There is an aspect of “writing oneself into existence” but there is also an element of “exorcising the demons.” Both elements are a part of the writing process itself, not just blogging. So the web has the potential to make people more scattered and chaotic than ever before— if this is the case, why did it take the addition of a temporal element (blogs) to make it come together as a mass communication medium? Writing is usually an attempt to force cohesion where it didn't exist before. It summons the angel in us all, in the desire to reach out and touch our fellow humans. But what if you don’t want to summon your demons?
“If I exorcise my devils, my angels may leave too”
Tom Waits has his finger on that. Most of my essay dealt with issues of displacement in writing. We displace ourselves from reality when we use metaphors to describe it. We displace ourselves from reality when we make up stories or allegories based in real experiences to give them closure, to force them to make sense. We displace ourselves from telling people what we think when we do little more than link, either by quoting or hyperlink, to the ideas of others. In an odd fashion, we bring ourselves closer to becoming by separating the knower from the known. But there are different levels of displacement. Teasing out the levels of displacement may be part of my project for the class. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but there’s got to be a way to codify it, to compare types of displacement on a more abstract level.
But maybe not. After all, consciousness is a sort of magic. That’s why I often make comparisons to poetry. A great poem, for me at least, is a poem that is barely held together by the relationships which it attempts to contain. At any moment, it can fly apart into incoherence, if only the slightest link is broken. Nobody likes things that are too easy. The obvious isn’t much fun.
Time for a drive. Over six hours of writing in a row is just too much. The magic idea, however, is neither freaky nor too much. Sometimes, there just isn’t any other explanation.
I had forgotten the Homer Simpson axiom that “beer was the cause and solution of all life’s problems.” The odd thing is, I usually only drink beer when I feel good. When I feel bad, it’s hard liquor. The resulting hangover usually forces the epiphany: “I’m too old for this shit...”
I finished my synopsis/reaction to Opening Up by James Pennebaker. If you’re interested in the subjects of trauma, confession, and inhibition be sure to check out the links provided by Michael Rubin. I know I will. Thanks Michael!
And I must give a major hug to Shauny, for her constant reassurance that I am not writing in a vacuum. I urge everyone, even those who (like me) don’t believe in awards, to vote for her in the Bloggies. She is indeed, one of the best kept secrets out there. Reading her musings keeps me well entertained, though I’ll say, as I often do— I am easily amused.
I woke up to what seemed like an Indian chant: “Hih-a-tee-yah” but it turned out to be just the neighbor's kids upstairs. It was freezing, and I forgot to turn on the heat. But I’m warmer now, now that I’m getting some things done. There's so much I want to write about these days. Maybe I should cut back on the sleep thing?
Thanks for reading. I do appreciate you all.
I was talking about suicide notes and such last May, brought about by viewing Girl, Interrupted, and noticed that the mental hospital involved in the story, McLane, seemed to have a major literary pedigree.
Now, I find out that John Nash also did time there. The Atlantic now has a nice interview with Alex Beam, author of Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premiere Mental Hospital. One of the primary driving forces behind treating mental illness at the time this hospital was founded was the removal of troubled people from crowded urban surroundings. There has been a big shift in my thinking since I left California, and sometimes I wonder if this is really a good thing. Its been theraputic though, even if it wasn't what I expected.
There is a shift in perspective, far from the madding crowd. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s thoughts on being a “Middle Westerner,” I think it has more to do with world-view than just the removal of distraction. Sometimes Arkansas seems like my asylum, though with “territorial vanity” I am always quick to declare myself a Californian. California is a country all its own. California is the end of everything. Go west young man? There isn’t any further west to go. It’s a closed space, shut off by oceans and mountains and deserts. So it’s self contained. Californians feel that there isn’t much need to look outside its borders for much of anything. California has it all. Or does it?
California is nearly rootless, because it’s roots wither in the ocean, the deserts, and the mountains. There is no sense of America. Vonnegut describes this succinctly:
Anglo-Americans and African-Americans whose ancestors came to the Middle West from the South commonly have a much more compelling awareness of a homeland elsewhere in the past than do I— in Dixie, of course, not the British Isles or Africa.
What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for a fertile continent stretching forever in all directions.
Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.
Arkansas is not Middle Western. The land is green, and filled with hills and variegated territory. It isn’t the South, either. Shortly after I got here, I drove to Memphis, Tennessee. Home of Elvis and all that. A friend here told me, there’s just something about Memphis— “It’s the smell,” he said. I ventured into Mississippi, down the infamous Highway 61. Now that’s the South.
I drove to Missouri a couple of years ago. It scared the crap out of me, a land of pick-ups with gun racks and CB radios. I’ve never heard a CB radio in Arkansas. People use cell-phones (and even have indoor plumbing!) around here. Missouri is the Midwest, or what I’ve seen of it, but I must admit a desire to check out Lawrence, Kansas, which is not that far and the home of William S. Burroughs. Recently, I went tripping through East Texas. Each of these trips took less time than a trip from Southern California to San Francisco, and the change in terrain and attitude was just breathless.
I don’t suppose I really felt like an American, until I came here. There’s more to it than I ever dreamed. I’ve been thinking about continuing this pilgrimage east, though Dr. Klein keeps urging me to consider the Midwest, or the North, where I’ve never been. It’s been my therapy. Going back to California isn’t on my list, though I talk about it all the time. It’s just my point of reference, my territorial vanity. There are places that form us, and I am glad that my make-up is now more complex. For all his time in London, Luke is still Australian. Perhaps if Australia goes on a bender, I might even end up there.
For now, I’m enjoying my time in this asylum. A few white-russians, and some cheesy movies, and I could be anywhere. We're all allowed our territorial pissings, now aren't we?
