The Reality of Everyday Life

From The Social Construction of Reality (1966) by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Part One: “The Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday Life.”

“The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality… While I am capable of engaging in doubt about its reality, I am obliged to suspend such doubt as I routinely exist in everyday life…

“Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience. The paramount reality envelops them on all sides, as it were, and consciousness always returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion. This is evident from… the reality of dreams or that of theoretical thought. Similar “commutations” take place between the world of everyday life and the world of play, both the playing of children and, even more sharply, of adults. The theater provides an excellent illustration of such playing on the part of adults. The transition between realities is marked by the rising and falling of the curtain. As the curtain rises, the spectator is “transported to another world,” with its own meanings and an order that may or may not have much to do with the order of everyday life. As the curtain falls, the spectator “returns to reality,” that is, to the paramount reality of everyday life by which the reality presented on the stage now appears tenuous and ephemeral, however vivid the presentation may have been a few moments previously. Aesthetic and religious experience is rich in producing tensions of this kind, inasmuch as art and religion are endemic producers of finite provinces of meaning.

“All finite provinces of meaning are characterized by a turning away of attention from the reality of everyday life… It is important to stress, however, that the reality of everyday life retains its paramount status even as such “leaps” take place. If nothing else, language makes sure of this. The common language available to me for the objectification of my experiences is grounded in everyday life and keeps pointing back to it even as I employ it to interpret experiences in finite provinces of meaning. Typically, therefore, I “distort” the reality of the latter as soon as I begin to use the common language in interpreting them, that is, I “translate” the non-everyday experiences back into the paramount reality of everyday life. This may be readily seen in terms of dreams, but is also typical of those trying to report about theoretical, aesthetic or religious worlds of meaning. The theoretical physicist tells us that his concept of space cannot be conveyed linguistically, just as the artist does with regard to the meaning of his creations and the mystic with regard to his encounters with the divine. Yet all these — the dreamer, physicist, artist and mystic — also live in the reality of everyday life. Indeed, one of their important problems is to interpret the coexistence of this reality with the reality enclaves into which they have ventured…

“Moreover, language is capable of transcending the reality of everyday life altogether. It can refer to experiences pertaining to finite provinces of meaning, and it can span discrete spheres of reality. For instance, I can interpret “the meaning” of a dream by integrating it linguistically within the order of everyday life. Such integration transposes the discrete reality of the dream into the reality of everyday life by making it an enclave within the latter. The dream is now meaningful in terms of the reality of everyday life rather than of its own discrete reality. Enclaves produced by such transpositions belong, in a sense, to both spheres of reality. They are “located” in one reality, but “refer” to another.

“Any significative theme that thus spans spheres of reality may be defined as a symbol, and the linguistic mode by which such transcendence is achieved may be called symbolic language… Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world.”

Linguistic Portality

Continuing from yesterday’s post…

A reality is an array of phenomena organized according to a particular structure. Any single phenomenon can be assigned a place in an unlimited number of structural schemata. This means that a single phenomenon can participate in an unlimited number of alternate realities. A phenomenon, or the linguistic signifier that points to it, can thus function as a portal between alternate realities.

Probably the most frequently-encountered example of linguistic portality is the metaphor. “It’s not my cup of tea.” The phrase points to a hot drink, but the hot drink occupies a different structural place in two different realities: as a particular variety in an array of beverages, as something that’s high on the list of personal preferences. It turns out that humans are adept at traversing metaphorical portals: linguistic processing time isn’t delayed when shifting between literal and metaphorical understanding.

The question is whether the phrase “cup of tea” points to the same phenomenon in both the literal and the metaphorical situation. I suspect it does not: once the metaphorical structure is invoked by context, the phrase no longer points to the hot drink. So maybe the words are the portal rather than the beverage: the same phrase occupies a place in two different realities. But the phrase doesn’t float free of signifier: the same phrase signifies “hot beverage” in one reality and “something I prefer” in the other reality. The signifier is loosely linked to multiple signifieds, and the appropriate one gets invoked depending on which reality it’s participating in at the moment. The loose linkage makes reality linguistic reality travel a quick and almost unconscious passage. If there were no linkages readily available, or if one particular link was particularly rigid, then shifting between realities would be a lot more difficult, a lot slower, requiring a lot more conscious processing.

In a sense all words are metaphors for the things they point to. Words are portals that transport people back and forth between interpersonal communication and joint imaginary participation in a world of phenomena to which the words point.

Language also functions as a portal between the immediate specific encounter with phenomena and the more abstract realities in which the phenomena participate. The word “flower” transports the language-user from this particular flower to the idea of “flowerness” in realities having to do with plants, gardens and beautiful objects. The opening of this linguistic portal between specific and generic, between phenomena and structures, must have been a significant achievement in human cultural development. Linguistic history shows traces of the struggle. The ancient Greek and Hebrew languages had a definite article but not an indefinite article: “the” but not “a.” The early Indo-European languages — Sanscrit, Persian, Latin — had neither kind of article. The article is absent from some modern languages (e.g., Russian).

What Structure Means to Me

The human environment is populated by real phenomena. Through sensory-perceptual systems we can detect and interpret information generated by phenomena — their color, shape, pattern, sound, velocity, etc. We can then categorize and organize these phenomena in a variety of ways, depending on the particular salient features under consideration. So, this particular thing can be a dog, an animal, a chocolate Lab, the neighbor’s pet, Fido, the cause of the yellow spots on my lawn, the source of all that barking, the dog that likes to be scratched under the chin. Each of these ways of categorizing the real phenomenon is embedded in and derived from a larger structural order. The structural order assigns a particular kind of meaning to the environment. This meaning is conveyed linguistically, so that the structure can be understood by the community of language-speakers in approximately the same way.

It’s possible to imagine phenomena as they really are, disembedded from the various systems of meaning by which we understand them. But we can’t actually encounter the raw thing in itself: even the sensory signals we receive from phenomena are organized by our perceptual systems so that we can make sense of the input. Raw phenomena exist, but from our human perspective they are an abstraction, the result of a thought experiment in which we strip phenomena of all the meaningful structures in which they’re always already embedded. Likewise we can imagine empty structures unpopulated by real phenomena. However, it may be impossible to generate a structure out of thin air without at least imagining the kinds of phenomena that would populate it. More often we abstract the structure beyond the bounds of the specific phenomena available to us.

From memory we are able to call up mental representations of specific phenomena: events, people, objects. We can also call up a variety of cognitive-linguistic schemata whereby we can make sense of phenomena, directing our attention to specific salient features in order to assign them to appropriate categories in various cognitive-linguistic structures. The linkages between phenomena and schemata are multiple and loose, so we can match them up on the fly according to our needs and intentions and whims of the moment.

Because of these loose multiple connections it’s possible for us to embed familiar phenomena in unfamiliar structures, and to extend existing structures to new phenomena. However, this doesn’t mean that structures exist in memory decoupled from representations of real phenomena, that signifiers float free of signifieds. Neither do signifieds float free of signifiers: our memories aren’t occupied by ghosts of raw phenomena decoupled from the various schemata by which we are able to incorporate them into structured systems of meaning. The connections between phenomena and structure, between signifier and signified, are loose and many-to-many. Together, phenomena and schemata constitute an unlimited variety of alternate virtual realities, any one of which can be activated by attention, intention or contagion and assembled in real time.

Immanent Neomarxist Utopia

Empire pretends to be the master of [the] world because it can destroy it. What a horrible illusion! In reality we are masters of the world because our desire and labor regenerate it continuously. The biopolitical world is an inexhaustible weaving together of generative actions, of which the collective (as meeting point of singularities) is the motor. No metaphysics, except a delirious one, can pretend to define humanity as isolated and powerless. No ontology, except a transcendent one, can relegate humanity to individuality. No anthropology, except a pathological one, can define humanity as a negative power. Generation, that first fact of metaphysics, ontology, and anthropology, is a collective mechanism or apparatus of desire…

For generation to take place, the political has to yield to love and desire, and that is to the fundamental forces of biopolitical production. The political is not what we are taught it is today by the cynical Machiavellianism of politicians; it is rather, as the democratic Machiavelli tells us, the power of generation, desire, and love. Political theory has to reorient itself along these lines and assume the language of generation.

– from Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000

Cognitivist Apologetic

During the death of this blog I’ve continued to haunt some of my favorite other blogs. In a recent discussion on American Stranger (see blogroll), Traxus and Parodycenter provoked me into defending empirical psychology from charges of naivete, the valorization of consciousness, complicity with technofascism, hostility to psychoanalysis, and all sorts of other offenses against humanity and the revolution. So I wrote three comments back to back, not so much as a point-by-point response but as a kind of substrate for how empirical cognitivism might be viewed: as a field of inquiry among many others rather than as a “totalizing discourse” about minds. For those of you who weren’t participating or following along with the original discussion but find this sort of thing interesting, here are my three comments.

* * *

Even if empirical psychologists had a strong and reliable model of human cognition, individual human differences override the general regularities. Everybody has different genetically-endowed capabilities and drives, different experiences in the world, different others to interact with. So even on just the input side the material that is available to memory and the relative strengths of neural associations is going to be vastly different from one person to the next. Outputs would be all over the scatterplot.

And that’s just on a purely behavioral level, as if inputs were mechanically processed by the brain into theoretically predictable outputs. The cognitive paradigm acknowledges and demonstrates that individuals also exercise different ways of processing inputs based on things like intentionality, preference, bias, attention. These intermediaries between I and O may be conscious or unconscious, freely chosen by autonomous subjective agents or bent by cultural macroforces like economics and power. Collectively, these intermediaries are regarded as “cognitive,” mostly to distinguish them from environment and physiology.

If anything, then, the cognitive paradigm is less deterministic than the behavioral one. Structuralism in the way Europeans talk about it never had much of an influence on the American-dominated empirical psychology from which cognitivism emerged. Even somebody like Chomsky, who proposed one of the early structural models of psycholinguistics that eventually led to cognitivism, looks like a pragmatic instrumentalist when compared with somebody like Saussure. For Chomsky linguistic structure is an instrumental capability for intentionally manipulating language in order to generate unique sentences. So he talks about “generative grammar” as a very flexible tool for assembling signifiers on the fly to suit the speaker’s purposes. He does propose that human brains are uniquely structured to handle generative grammars, making him kind of Hegelian in that regard. But if anything the advance of cognitivism has led the field to dismiss Chomsky’s unique-brain-structure argument as an unnecessary holdover from idealism. The human brain evolved from other primate brains; human cognitive-linguistic abilities evolved from other primate abilities.

* * *

The working empirical psychologist isn’t typically driven by philosophy or grand theory. Some start out with an inclination to use science as a sort of rhetorical device, to stage demonstrations of favorite theories. This inclination is quickly trained out of you. Empirical investigations are informed by an attempt to understand phenomena that so far have not been investigated or have eluded prior efforts to pull them out of randomness. Sometimes the theory makes the researcher aware of classes of phenomena that it might be able to account for; sometimes the phenomena are compelling in their own right; sometimes they’ve been partially accounted for by competing theories and the question is whether the new theory suggests an alternative, perhaps a more complete, understanding.

A specific study takes place within a narrow band of theory and empiricism. In writing up the findings the researcher might cite one or two broadly-known figures who signify the general field of endeavor, but for the most part the citations are very specific to the empirical question under investigaion, and usually very recent. The field as a whole expands somewhat amorphously from the surface rather than building depth or structure or moving linearly down well-defined trajectories. Rare is the pitched dialectical “throw-down” between competing theories. In experimental design the battle is almost always waged against “the null hypothesis” = phenomenological randomness.

* * *

In the cognitive paradigm, consciousness isn’t a structured assemblage of content; rather, consciousness is a dynamic interface where a specific set of assembly procedures is mapped onto a particular subset of content (perceptions, memories, ideas) in a way that generates structured and meaningful output — thought, speech, behavior, etc. The content, the toolkit of procedures, the array of alternative prefabricated structures that can be imposed on content — all of it remains unconscious until it is called up, either intentionally or not, by the conscious interface. So as the individual moves through the continuous present the vast majority of her cognitive capability is unconscious. The content of the unconscious is loosely interconnected in a distributed and multiply-connected matrix. The structure of the unconscious is more virtual rather than actual: content can be assembled on the fly according to any number of structuration paradigms and procedures.

Some pre-canned structures are easier for consciousness to summon than others, based on habit or demonstrated pragmatic value — so even this dynamic structuring work of consciousness becomes stereotypical, nearly automatic, almost unconscious. Some virtual structures rarely become actual in consciousness: maybe they’ve never been tried before, maybe they’ve failed miserably before, maybe they’ve become associated with unpleasant emotions or memories so they don’t readily pop to the surface, etc.

It might be possible to exercise an individual’s cognitive structuration processes so that the passage between unconscious and conscious becomes freer and more flexible. You might make the person aware of automatic and stereotypic ways of thinking, do “free association” exercises in which material is dynamically structured in unaccustomed ways, identify obstacles in memory and affect that repress certain structures, identify past events that cause habitual structures to be applied transferentially to inappropriate situations, etc.

The Wall

Twenty-five years ago this weekend the Vietnam War Memorial in DC was dedicated. At the time I was in grad school in Charlottesville VA, working part-time at a vet counseling center I had helped get started (I wrote about this HERE and HERE). There was this Canadian vet, I’m pretty sure his name was John, who was walking from Vancouver, down into the States, and on to Washington in a one-man campaign for increased recognition of vets’ issues, including P-TSD and Agent Orange. He reached Charlottesville the day before the dedication, accompanied by a retinue of maybe a couple dozen casual supporters. John was a small scraggly-bearded fellow carrying a walking stick and dressed in fatigues and hiking boots, hauling on his back a heavy pack surmounted by two flagpoles, one flying a Canadian flag and the other an American one. He still had something like a hundred miles to go, so it was clear he wasn’t going to make it to DC in time on foot. Reluctantly he agreed to let me drive him to the ceremony.

At the time the Memorial generated a lot of controversy among the vets I knew. The project had been vet-initiated and vet-organized throughout, financed entirely by private donations. But the architect selected to design the memorial was a woman, and a Chinese-American woman at that. Instead of a white phallic monument to heroism this memorial was to be a black gash in the ground. Not only that, but General Westmoreland and Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Defense Secretary, had finagled invitations to speak. In short, expectations were low.

The afternoon before the big event I got behind the wheel of my VW Dasher, my wife-to-be Anne riding shotgun and our new buddy John sitting in the middle of the back seat, talking compulsively about all manner of things. We got to DC sometime in the late afternoon. Our charge was to deliver John to Tom Daschle, then a second-term Democratic congressman from South Dakota, years later ascending to the post of Senate Majority Leader before being unseated in a concerted Republican effort to label him a radical liberal. Apparently John had been in correspondence with Daschle, also a Vietnam vet, and Daschle had agreed to put him up for the night. So we drove across the Potomac, found a place to park on Capitol Hill, and walked over to the House Office Building. We’re here to see Congressman Daschle, we told the person at the front desk. She told us where to find Daschle’s office, we thanked her, and off we went. The halls of power didn’t make much of an impression, what with the linoleum floors and the bad lighting. We found the right office number and knocked. Daschle himself came to the door, stepping into the corridor to greet us. He helped John with his stuff, stashing it under one of the chairs in his office. We all chatted briefly, and having discharged our duty Anne and I said our good-byes and headed for our cheap hotel a couple blocks away.

Morning broke cold and gray as Anne and I started walking toward the Mall. Men in their thirties and forties, most wearing green army jackets and looking kind of scruffy and wary, alone or with maybe one or two other guys, a few with wife and kids, were converging silently and almost reluctantly on the Memorial. And then, almost without realizing it, we were there. No jubilation or rage, no joking around, no mass communal outpouring: it was a pervasive, private solemnity that had settled over that place. Nobody had really known it before it happened, but now everyone knew: we had come to pay our respects.

No Country

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didn’t have to go but I did. I sure didn’t want to.

– Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men, a Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, starts today in “selected theaters” — which means not in Boulder Colorado. So while I wait for broader release I’ll think about what it might be like.

I was disappointed with the book, which surprised me since I love just about everything the guy has written. I had a sense that it was a McCarthy book with all the distinctive McCarthyesque features edited out. That left the reader with a stripped-down story involving a couple of men confronting a violent depersonalized world. It is McCarthy’s world to be sure. The characters fill slots straight out of genre fiction: bad guy, good guy, ambivalent guy. The story is formulaic: bad guy is chasing ambivalent guy, good guy is chasing bad guy. It’s similar to other McCarthy plots, which usually entail linear movements of a handful of characters, always men and boys. And there’s the usual sense of inevitability in how the events unfold themselves in a McCarthy book. Despite the fatalism, the forward momentum doesn’t take us to the same old place, and there’s satisfaction in that.

So what’s missing? Well, besides the florid style and the nearly obsessive attention to detail, it’s missing the sense of verticality that characterizes most of McCarthy’s work. In his other books the situations, the roles, the motivations, the events aren’t just genre stereotypes; they’re mythic archetypes. Ordinary, stoic, laconic, the McCarthy hero finds himself being moved across a world rendered desolate by the endless repetitions of whatever impersonal or superpersonal forces traverse it. In No Country, though, it’s all been demythologized, rendered mundane in the sheer materiality of a world stripped bare of meaning. Even brutal transcendence seems more habitable somehow than this coarse brutality.

But there is another spirit infusing No Country that replaces the gnostic sublimity. Incredibly enough, it’s old-fashioned humanism. The main character, an old sheriff, still plays out the usual cops-and-robbers choreography. But he senses that there’s something missing in today’s bad guys. The passions — greed, hatred, love — that used to drive them to violence are gone, replaced by — what? By nothing, by an almost mechanical will to commit mayhem. It’s a nostalgic story, a regret at the loss of humanity even in the most inhumane of killers.

Thinking about a movie based on this book, I’m worried. Billy Bob Thornton directed an awful film version of All the Pretty Horses. Now we have No Country, with its stock genre characters and plots, infused with humanistic nostalgia, engaged in acts of extreme violence — it could be the formula for a really ordinary B movie. But then we factor in the Coen brothers, masters of the extraordinary B movie. Even a stripped-down, rather unsatisfying McCarthy book is still something to be reckoned with. Will it be transformed into an exceptional cinematic adaptation? Hopefully soon, in a theater near me, I’ll find out.

Biblical Thought Experiments

For those of you who are interested in such things, I just wrote a post at Open Source Theology called The Biblical Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments. In it I ask the emerging post-evangelicals to consider the implications of regarding the stories about the seven days, the Garden, Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, etc. as mistaken speculations of ancient thinkers, having no privileged claim to transcendent truth. There’s a growing tendency in the post-evangelical world to acknowledge that these stories might not be literally and historically true. However, this acknowledgment gets disguised by invoking the concept of “true myth”: encoded in the details of the story are spiritual meanings that were inspired by God and endorsed by Him as true. So now I’m asking what happens if the “true myth” proposition is set aside. Feel free to comment either here or on the OST post.

And You Can Quote Me

Alone in my room, I wear a piratical black patch over my right eye. The eye may look all right, but the truth is I have scarcely any sight in it. I say scarcely, it isn’t totally blind. Consequently, when I look at this world with both eyes I see two worlds perfectly superimposed, a vague and shadowy world on top of one that’s bright and vivid. I can be walking down a paved street when a sense of peril and unbalance will stop me like a rat just scurried out of a sewer, dead in its tracks. Or I’ll discover a film of unhappiness and fatigue on the face of a cheerful friend and clog the flow of an easy chat with my stutter.

I’ve been reading some of the short works of Kenzabō Ōe, who about ten years ago won the Nobel Prize for literature. At the end of Aghwee the Sky Monster we find out what happened to the narrator’s eye, in a random event that takes place ten years after the story he tells. It’s the story of his first job.

As I had just entered college and wasn’t registered at the employment center, I looked for work by making the rounds of people I knew. Finally my uncle introduced me to a banker who came up with an offer. “Did you happen to see a movie called Harvey?” he asked. I said yes, and tried for a smile of moderate but unmistakable dedication, appropriate for someone about to be employed for the first time. Harvey was that Jimmy Stewart film about a man living with an imaginary rabbit as big as a bear; it had made me laugh so hard I thought I would die. “Recently, my son has been having the same sort of delusions about living with a monster.” The banker didn’t return my smile. “He’s stopped working and stays in his room. I’d like him to get out from time to time but of course he’d need a — companion. Would you be interested?”

I’d seen Harvey myself, long ago on TV; I too had enjoyed it. So when I returned Psycho to the library I picked up the DVD of Harvey. You could have some fun thinking about what these two films have in common. You could also make comparisons with another heartwarming Jimmy Stewart movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, on which I’d previously offered my gloomy Christmastime musings. Somewhat surprisingly, I wasn’t depressed by Harvey; I found myself charmed and amused. But an unmistakable melancholy permeates Stewart’s performance. Genteel, well-heeled, well-educated, eccentric, a bit of a tippler, Elwood P. Dowd is one of those colorful eccentrics usually found in Southern literature, though Mary Chase, who wrote the play, was from Colorado. It could be argued that Elwood can afford to spend his days at the bar chatting with friends real and imaginary, that he practices the milder Protestant virtues accessible only to the gentry. Instead I’ll just quote a few choice bits from Elwood’s discourse.

“I used to know a whole lot of dances. The Flea Hop and – and let’s see – the Black Bottom, the Varsity Drag — I don’t know – I just don’t seem to have any time any more. I have so many things to do.”

“What is it you do, Mr. Dowd?”

“Oh, Harvey and I sit in the bars and – have a drink or two – play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people – they turn toward mine – and they smile. And they’re saying, ‘We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fellow.’ Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers — soon we have friends . And they come over and they sit with us, and they drink with us, and they talk to us. And they tell about the big terrible things they’ve done — and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes and their regrets, their loves and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then – I introduce them to Harvey. And he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back, but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us. That’s too bad. Isn’t it?”

“Think carefully, Dowd. Didn’t you know somebody — sometime — someplace — by the name of Harvey. Didn’t you ever know anybody by that name?”

“No — no, not one, doctor. Maybe that’s why I always had such hopes for it.”

“Years ago, my mother used to say to me — she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you can quote me.”

October 6, 1941

A lot was happening in October 1941. Germany began its all-out offensive against Moscow, prompting the Soviet government to move to another city and Roosevelt to approve $1 billion in aid to Russia. The Nazis executed up to 7,000 Serbs in the Krakujevac Massacre. The Reichsfuehrer SS and Chief of the German Police decreed that the emigration of Jews was to be prevented, taking effect immediately. The destroyer USS Kearny was torpedoed off Iceland, killing eleven sailors – the first American military casualties of the war. Two new Prime Ministers gained power: John Curtin in Australia, General Tojo in Japan. Disney released Dumbo.

And the Brooklyn Dodgers faced the New York Yankees in the World Series. Here’s a musical piece commemorating the fifth and final game, in which the mighty Yanks beat the lowly Dodgers 3 to 1 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. It’s composed by Annie Gosfield and performed by Blair McMillen. If you get bored, skip ahead to about the 2:50 minute mark on the video. Whaddaya say: is this a celebration or a dirge?

Our Madness

He remembered how long it had been since he last heard his mother’s voice. This last time it was through his wife that he had finally managed to learn what she had said about his dead father. When it came to talk of his father in particular, he couldn’t even recall when last he had heard his mother’s voice. When she spoke to his wife, she had apparently referred to his father as “the man.” The Man. The fat man was reminded of a line from a wartime poem by an English poet, actually it resided in him always, as if it were his prayer. Like the Pure Land hymns which had resided in his grandmother until the day she died, it was part of his body and his spirit. And the poem itself happened to be a prayer spoken at the height of the very battle in which his father had lost his Chinese friends one after the other. The voice of Man: “O, teach us to outgrow our madness.” If that voice is the voice of the Man, then “our madness” means the Man’s and mine, the fat man told himself for the first time.

– from Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Ōe

* * *

Night falls on China,
The great arc of travelling shadow,
Moves over land and ocean, altering life…

O teach us to outgrow our madness.
Ruffle the perfect manners of the frozen heart, And once again compel it to be awkward and alive… Clear from the head the masses of impressive rubbish; Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will, Gather them up and let them loose upon the earth…

And now I hear the hum of printing presses; Turning forests into lies…

– “Night Falls on China,” by W.H. Auden

Craning

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Long Neck

In my dream I was milling around in a large room along with a fair number of other people, none of whom did I seem to know. At some point I had occasion to observe myself, although I don’t recall there being a mirror present, and I realized I had an extremely long neck, maybe a foot long. It was most noticeable when I craned my head way forward: then it seemed as if my neck started farther down my back than it was supposed to. I was looking at myself from behind, where I could see that the neck was very bony, like it had several extra vertebrae. It looked grotesque, skeletal, with just a thin layer of skin stretched across it. I straightened my head up, thus tucking the neck against the spine and making it less obtrusive. As I glanced around the room I was surprised to see that many other people — though not all — male and female alike, also carried the extended skeletal neck structure, fully exposed when in the craned-forward position. No one else seemed surprised or revolted by the sight.

Decipher It Till It Disappears

When we were living in Antibes our daughter went to school with an American girl whose parents were missionaries to “post-Christian” France. The girl’s mother — I’ll call her Mary — writes what she calls literary fiction but which to my tastes seems more like adolescent Christian chick lit. Anyhow, as I was reading her first published novel I got to a wedding scene that seemed to call out for psychoanalytic interpretation. So I sent Mary an email, parts of which I excerpt here:

Maranatha loves [her father’s brother] Zane but killed him, or at least took away his potency (= psychic castration?). She hates Georgeanne, who is a competitor for Zane’s affection. On her way to the wedding she ruins her dress. She goes home, finds her mother’s white dress, and wears it to the wedding. She looks like a bride; she looks like her mother. Zane’s getting married; Zane loved Maranatha’s mother. Maranatha is twice doubled as Zane’s bride here: as Geogreanne, and as her own mother who should have been Zane’s bride.

The wedding march plays a few times but still no Georgeanne — maybe this twice-doubled girl will be the one to walk down the aisle after all? Alas, no: Zane has to marry Georgeanne, who is just a substitute for the “real” bride, who is Maranatha’s mother, who is also Maranatha. Georgeanne’s father died too: Georgeanne = Maranatha. From the back Georgeanne looks like a princess (= Maranatha). Maranatha fantasizes about the wedding cake: she becomes Georgeanne, Zane becomes [her black friend] Charlie.

The wedding is over, the cake is cut, Maranatha gets bloody stains on the front of her wedding dress, to the skin, “forever stained.” She straddles the bar, Charlie holds her by the handlebars, they nearly kiss. All very intense, very sexual, very Freudian-Lacanian.

Then there’s this old lady, Mabel. With her good eye Mabel watches the wedding, then turns and sees Maranatha as the double of her mother. Maranatha wanted to die (= her dead mother). Mabel’s spare glass eye rolls onto the floor: it’s staring at Maranatha from under the pew. She picks up the artificial eye with an aritificial flower. And now I recall Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny,” in which he recounts one of the Tales of Hoffman, the one about the Sandman, who throws sand in children’s eyes until they jump out of their heads bleeding. This too is a story of doublings, of a dead father, of a wedding gone awry. There are artificial eyes. The eye, says Freud, is the castrated phallus of the father. (Maranatha’s flower: isn’t it the female genitalia that grasps the phallus?) The Sandman is a story is built around themes of uncanniness. Freud elaborates:

These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of “the double,” which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are considered to be identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another — by what we should call telepathy –, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings, and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.

So I’m having a good time with this. Authorial intent? Who knows? Am I really a Freudian? When I read an event like Zane’s wedding I am. Over the top? You decide.

So what is Mary’s authorial response to my analysis?

Wow. That was a lot to digest. I loved your analysis! I have no idea if I thought through all you highlighted here (perhaps you’re making me smarter than I am), but I found it fascinating. When I write a novel, I feel like I’m translating what I see. The story plays itself out in front of me, which makes for very visual books (and hopefully a screenplay someday).

Yesterday a side conversation at Cultural Parody Center touched briefly on Sam Shepard. Jonquille said this about one of Shepard’s plays:

But ‘True West” is great and I’m sure Arpege Mess [nickname for another blog personality] could decipher it till it disappears. That’s what I loathe about her and traxus’s endless hermaneutics of whatever–the work disappears once it is touched by their corrupt hands…and even then they keep going… Clysmatics [that’s me] lub dat, though.

You may recall from yesterday’s post that Traxus and I engaged in a lengthy “deciphering” of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. Erdman wondered whether after all that interpretation I actually liked the movie (I did, very much). While I was watching I pretty much settled into the cinematic world that Cronenberg had established, not really thinking about the critical-analytic matrix in which it could be embedded. Not until a couple people wrote blog posts about the movie did I begin thinking about it in theoretical terms, and not until I had occasion to think about differences between Lacan and Deleuze did I really feel inclined to delve into serious deciphering. Once I got started, though, and in response to Traxus’s contrasting views, I found it easy to continue — one idea led to another, which brought me back to other scenes in the film, which triggered another theoretical elaboration, and so on. I stuck entirely to psychoanalytic constructs, never even touching on issues of aesthetics or politics or cinematic technique. I see Jonquille’s point: it would be possible to subject the film with so much deciphering that the film itself disappears. It’s like the photographer in the late great Antonioni’s Blow-Up trying to figure out what happened at a crime scene, only to find the scene itself transformed into an abstract matrix of photographic pixels. So if I were to watch Eastern Promises again, would my appreciation be enhanced or stifled by my having subjected it to conscious scrutiny? Would my own fiction writing become grander or more pretentious if I were to psychoanalyze my own text as I was writing it? I already do it to an extent, but certainly there are writers — like Mary — who cultivate an unconscious, non-reflective writing style. I responded to her reply thusly:

Freud presumes that a lot of our imaginings take shape beneath the level of conscious awareness. As a writer of fiction you’d hope to be able to tap into this unconscious source of creativity. Lots of writers go through lots of liquor trying to get to that level. I’m also aware that my own unconscious is shaped in part by images and ideas presented by others. Even Freud’s discussion of the uncanny is based on an analysis of Hoffman’s short story — a crafted text rather than the spontaneous verbalizations of his patients. Hitchcock movies are great examples of Freud’s death-and-doubling theme. I think especially of Vertigo, where the Jimmy Stewart character doesn’t find someone who just happens to remind him of a dead girl — she really is the same girl. So when Hitchcock creates this story is it a work of creativity, a manifestation of his own subconscious self, or the unconscious influence of outside voices like Hoffman’s and Freud’s? Anyhow, I thought the wedding scene was particularly powerful and overflowing with meaning.

And Mary said:

Maybe I’m a dry drunk! I don’t really know how to explain it other than I’m happiest when I’m writing stories. And I can tell when I’m in the zone. It’s a thrill, really.

As if I stand in awe of her creative genius. As if I’ve never written any fiction. Mary asks me to tell my wife that she’s been reading her blog — she never said anything about reading my blog. I read her book; she never asked to read my book. So that was the end of our little email exchange. And now that my blog is dead I can put it up here.