The War? Whatever

The last two antiwar marches I attended were in Nice. The first one, a couple months before the war began, totaled maybe ten thousand people; the second, shortly after the war started, was a little smaller, significantly less optimistic, and more politically radical. Today, more than four years later and for the first time since Vietnam, I went to a peace rally in America.

The march began with maybe fifty people; when it ended an hour and a half later the crowd had swelled to maybe eighty. Quite a few people carried signs; one guy played a snare drum. At the head of the parade was a college-aged girl with a bullhorn leading the chants: “What do we want?” “Peace!” — that sort of thing. “One two three four, we don’t want your bloody war!” What happened to ‘we don’t want your fucking war,’ I asked the woman in front of me. I told her not to say it, she replied. Why not? She’s my daughter. Well I’ll say it then. The mom smiled. Mostly I stuck with ‘bloody.’

The parade route started at the public library and wound its way through downtown Boulder, the pedestrian mall, the outdoor market, then back to the library. Quite a few people applauded as we passed by; only two or three expressed prowar sentiments. No heckling, no police, no tear gas. Mostly I noticed the expressions on people’s faces: a half-smile that avoided eye contact, expressing not so much cynicism as embarrassment.

Back in front of the library a few participants made brief speeches and a couple of musicians sang antiwar folk songs. When the last chorus had been sung there were maybe twenty people still hanging around.

Meanwhile, last week the American administration declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. The Guard is an official branch of the Iranian military numbering some 125,00o strong. By categorizing them as a terrorist organization, Bush can presumably authorize the invasion of Iran in accord with existing anti-terrorist powers already authorized by the Congress. The majority of the American public believes that we are losing the war but that we can still win it. The Democrats are expecting the war to fail so that, when the next elections roll around, the Democratic Party can solidify its hold on the Congress and take the Presidency. But if Bush invades Iran, this passive-aggressive move by the Democrats will fail. Next month the vote for continued funding of the war goes before Congress. With the threat of an invasion of Iran in front of them, will the Democrats actually do what they were elected to do and pull the plug on the war? I’m betting no.

Adorno and Bildung

To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of the spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other… Thus what constitutes the essence of Bildung is clearly not alienation as such, but the return to oneslf — which presupposes alienation, to be sure.

– Gadamer, Truth and Method

In the humanistic tradition of Bildung as it extends from Hegel through Gadamer (see prior post), the dialectic between self and other is transcended through identity. The self comes to recognize in its encounter with the other an aspect of itself that had previously remained hidden. By overcoming its alienation from the other, the self simultaneously overcomes self-alienation. The difference between identity and non-identity is resolved through identity.

As traditionally understood Bildung is a self-discipline by which individuals converge on a set of ideas, tastes, judgments that constitute the current approximation to universal standards. In a society dominated by economic considerations, Bildung ensures that buyers and sellers are on the same page regarding what sorts of commodities ought to be circulating. And universality never arrives; it’s always on the horizon, setting the direction of movement, of progress. The always-not-yet of the universal horizon assures a continuous influx of new and better products and a well-informed (i.e., well-disciplined) consumer base that’s ready to demand them. Bildung’s continual extension of provincial awareness toward the universal horizon assures the progressive globalization of the economy. Nietzsche recognized what was happening: As much knowledge and Bildung as possible — therefore, as much need and production as possible — therefore, as much happiness as possible. Instead of creating the universally conscious enlightened individual, this pseudo-Bildung produces a herd of Bildungphilisters — cultivated philistines, consuming popular culture spoon-fed to them by the marketplace while remaining unmoved by art and literature and other manifestations of high culture.

For Theodore Adorno, the humanistic project of Modernity has been thoroughly co-opted by the capitalistic production apparatus. In the marketplace the only difference that makes a difference is one that can be measured in excess profits: lowered cost of production, increased use value, and especially increased fetish value. All other differences are reduced to identity. Originally a means of nurturing humanistic individualism, Bildung becomes a means of minimizing individual differences. Higher culture is not immune:

No theory escapes the market anymore: each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions, all are made available, all snapped up. Thought need no more put blinders on itself, in the self-justifying conviction that one’s own theory is exempt from this fate, which degenerates into narcissistic self-promotion.

– Adorno, Negative Dialectics

As a corrective Adorno calls for a “negative dialectic” that upholds the irreducible integrity of non-identity in spite of the homogenizing machinations of capitalism. Adorno isn’t merely asserting the negative in response to the affirming collapse of all difference into the false optimism of the marketplace. It isn’t even the “negative of the negative,” by which the synthesizing co-optation is forestalled. Instead the intent is to draw attention to the unsynthesized remainder, the excess that identity cannot contain. Whatever resists identity will appear as contradiction, as the irrepressible negative.

Contemplating an unfamiliar idea or work of art, the observer encounters realms of familiarity interspersed with enigma. If you allow yourself to resist the lure of the familiar and to be drawn into the enigmatic, you find yourself withdrawing from comfortable identification and immersing yourself in the alien. You engage in a process of alienation from pseudo-Bildung — which is also a self-alienation, since the self has been so thoroughly shaped by pseudo-Bildung’s collective awareness. The progressive transcendence promised by authentic Bildung is pursued, says Adorno, not through self-effacement in the collective mind but through self-withdrawal into irreducible non-identity.

Adorno characterizes his praxis of Bildung as a “negative dialectic.” From the standpoint of the marketplace, differences that cannot be exploited economically have no meaning, no reality. To delve into these invisible differences is to seek presence in absence, forcing the mass culture of pseudo-Bildung to recognize its existence, which it can experience only as a negative, a disruption, a potential subversion. From within Critical Theory, of which Adorno was a central figure, Bildung becomes a form of counter-education, a way of building revolutionary resistance and counter-pressure to the hegemony of the “Culture Industry” that dominates the contemporary scene.

The practitioner of Adorno’s reconstructed Bildung is an alienated figure, a neurotic who will not be cured, who resists the social pressure exerted by the happy, healthy, normal people produced by mainstream pseudo-Bildung. Adorno’s pessimism was profound: Probably every citizen of the wrong world would find the right one intolerable, they would be too damaged for it. But there is no abandonment of humanistic idealism here. Instead its movement toward transcendence is inverted as a temporary corrective to the socio-historical situation “on the ground.” Instead of a unifying societal force, Bildung becomes a prophetic calling, a lonely trail into the wilderness, a utopian vision that only the pessimistic and the alienated can see.

Critical Imbalance

Our daughter likes to draw. She says that, when she shows her drawings to adults, they usually come up with a theoretical or technical observation: “You have a good eye for balance,” that sort of thing. To her these comments seem forced and pretentious. Her interest is in the drawings themselves, what they depict, her pleasure in creating them, others’ pleasure in looking at them.

Why do the critics feel like they need to know more about the artist’s work than the artist herself does?

Gadamer and Bildung

Gadamer wasn’t interested in studying humanity as it is, through empirical methods adapted from the physical sciences; he wanted to discover what humanity could be. Toward that end he drew on the concept of Bildung, defined by Herder as the rising up of humanity through culture. Bildung entails the proper cultivation of one’s innate capabilities in order to move progressively toward universal consciousness. Says Humboldt: when in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character. And then Gadamer again: the rise of the word Bildung evokes the ancient mystical tradition according to which man carries in his soul the image of God, after whom he is fashioned, and which man must cultivate in himself.

Bildung isn’t a technique to be mastered, nor does it strive toward some predefined goal; it is a continual way of being in the world that has no end other than itself. Bildung demands restraint in the pursuit of immediate pleasures, but it’s only through cultivating universal awareness that one gains freedom from the object of desire. Only by reaching beyond the particular to the universal, by trying to understand the wholly other, does one come to understand oneself. But Bildung isn’t reserved exclusively for the cultural elite: in acquiring the language and customs of our own culture we are continually extending ourselves beyond ourselves.

An individual praxis for moving beyond raw animality and egocentrism and cultural bias toward universal consciousness: the idea is appealing. The question is whether it “works.” Though it aspires to self-transcendence, Bildung is essentially a refinement and cultivation of the self. Taste, judgment, insight, self-consciousness — these are the distinguishing features not of universal culture but of the cultured individual. Since at least Greek times the cultivation of disinterested reason has distinguished the character of the true aristocrat, the man on whom wealth and power by rights ought to fall. Rather than constituting the imago Dei, might not Bildung be regarded as a kind of “secret handshake” by which the ruling class identifies one another?

Besides, how do those who practice Bildung know that they’re moving toward the universal, rather than immersing themselves ever more deeply inside their own culture? Empirical science presents itself as a method for moving progressively toward universal understanding, yet Gadamer and others regard it as a cultural byproduct of modernity, motivated by the desire to control nature, artificially separating the scientific observer from the field of study, alienating subject from object. Instead of method, Bildung relies on a kind of inner resonance between the cultivated mind and the appearance of Truth in the world. But by buffering this resonance from methodological scrutiny, Bildung can be confirmed only through intersubjective agreement among others of acknowledged good taste and good judgment — which again seems like just another way of reinforcing the biases of the elite.

It would seem that the only way to move beyond cultural bias toward universalism is for the individual practitioner of Bildung to disregard intersubjective validation altogether, moving progressively out of the orbit of the collective into the rarified atmosphere of individual transcendence. This is the direction that Nietzsche took Bildung: only the genius can claim to be a true practitioner, and genius by definition transcends all recognized standards of the community. No longer a universal capability open to all who would pursue it, Bildung becomes the exclusive province of the Supermen. And since the cultivation of individual genius means leaving existing standards of excellence and good taste behind, there can be no assurance that the practitioner of Bildung will arrive at anything like universal awareness. He or she is just as likely to arrive at a position of total otherness and uniqueness. But this sense of the idiosyncratic genius pursuing the unparalleled and lonely course into the ether: isn’t this too a cultural bias, the valorization of extreme individualism characteristic of Western modernity?

Is it necessary to abandon Bildung as a praxis hopelessly enmeshed in individualism and cultural bias? If so, what’s left to us as an authentic way of being in the world?

Crisis of Trust

Yesterday’s sell-off started in France, after BNP Paribas, the largest publicly traded bank there, suspended investors’ ability to remove money from three funds that had invested in American mortgage securities. The bank said it had become temporarily unable to place a value on the funds, which have turned sour as increasing numbers of homeowners have defaulted on their loans. “Trust was shaken today,” said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. “Credit depends on trust. If trust disappears, then credit disappears, and you have a systemic issue.” (from a 10 August article in the NY Times)

Yesterday we bought several pieces of used furniture from a small local company that specializes in “staging” homes. Homeowners can’t always get their homes sold before they have to relocate. So they move, taking all their furniture with them. But an empty house is hard to sell. Apparently buyers lack imagination: confronted with the raw physicality of the house as a container, it’s hard for most people to picture it as a home. And I suppose the empty house also implies to potential buyers that the absentee owner is eager to sell, that maybe the house can be had at a bargain price. So, for a fee, the seller can hire a staging company to decorate the empty house with tasteful and elegant furniture, reinforcing the message to house-hunters that this is indeed a high-end buy.

The staging business isn’t really needed in a red-hot market, when houses sell so fast they never get empty. In a cold market owners become reluctant to put their houses up for sale, afraid that they’ll have to settle for far less than they believe the house is worth. Our town, and apparently most of the world, constitutes a cold housing market. So, with a decline in demand for their services, the little home staging company has decided to reduce its inventory of furniture and move into a smaller warehouse. That means bargains for us: some nice used furniture that’s never actually been lived in.

For the second consecutive day, President Bush sought to soothe investors by pointing out that the American job market and the global economy were healthy. He added that deep pools of capital were available. “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he said at a news conference. “Another factor one has got to look at is the amount of liquidity in the system. And I am told there is enough liquidity in the system to enable markets to correct.” But his remarks appeared to have only a brief and limited impact on the stock market. Later in the day, several Democrats criticized the administration’s response to the mortgage problems as weak and shortsighted.

In response to this “crisis of trust,” the European Central Bank (ECB) lent $130 trillion at low interest rates to European mortgage banks, while the Fed pumped $24 billion into American lending institutions. The purpose behind these moves was to keep mortgage rates from jumping, which would depress the housing market even more. The immediate effect, though, is to keep the mortgage lenders from going belly-up from too many home mortgages that have gone into default. And why so many defaults? Because people were buying houses at inflated prices. And why? Because they could qualify for very big mortgages at very low interest rates. And the banks would extend these big loans why? Because housing prices kept going up up up, so banks were eager to compete for a small share of big profits. Now that the market has cooled, these heavily-morgaged houses aren’t even worth the amount of the outstanding loans. So the buyers default, and the banks can’t recoup their losses by selling the houses. Short on cash, the banks try to sell off non-liquid assets. But what do they have to sell? Bundles of home mortgage loans. But the loan consolidators are taking a hit too, for the same reason the banks are — they’re selling, not buying. Which brings the central banks into play. With their loans financed by tax dollars, and with the ability to print more money, the central banks are there to bail out the banks and their investors during this “crisis of trust.”

But the European bank’s extraordinary response — its first since Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington — deepened investors’ anxiety. “The E.C.B. ignited a fear that there is something really bad going on that the markets don’t yet know about,” said Jacob de Tusch-Lec, a fund manager at Artemis Investment Management in London. “It will take time until investors are sure that this is not the case.” …“It’s like popcorn in a kettle,” said James Melcher, president of Balestra Capital, a hedge fund in New York. “First you have one or two pops, then it turns into a cacophony. I think we are about halfway through.”

Macroeconomics shape our environment, and our responses to the environment, in ways that are beyond our control and for the most part outside of our conscious awareness. Economic trends emerge from collective unconscious factors like trust, anxiety and greed, which spread across the society like a virus. Economics is like a language: we are immersed in it at the macro level and it’s inside of us at the microlevel. It shapes our thoughts, attitudes and behaviors from both the outside in and the inside out. I try not to think about these things very often — a psychological defense mechanism known as dissociation. But just because I don’t make the effort to make conscious sense of the economy doesn’t mean it’s not affecting me. And these effects aren’t only psychological; they’re also tangible. After all, if it wasn’t for this crisis of trust we wouldn’t have gotten such a good deal on those three tables we bought from the home stagers.

Between the Abyss and the Wall

Here’s another crack at describing my therapy practice. I imported the first paragraph from a prior post, and I’m worried it sounds too hopeful. It’s possible I should skip everything but paragraph 8 (I’ve numbered them for ease of reference). Or maybe just paragraphs 2, 3, 7, and 8. Or maybe toss the whole thing and try again. Whaddaya think?

—————–

1. Do you ever get the feeling that you’d be fine if only the world was different? That if you could just transport yourself to another reality, your weaknesses would turn into strengths, your failures into successes, your indifference into enthusiasm, your frustration into fulfillment? A reality where value isn’t just market value, where you make something besides money, where spending time isn’t just wasting time? A reality where people engage each other instead of undermining or ignoring one another?

2. Is it genius or virtue, the hand of God or Fortuna’s wheel, an iron will or a lack of imagination that guides the steps of those who find their way without confusion and who persevere without struggle? We may envy and resent them, and not without cause. But isn’t it possible that when we lose our way we’re on the verge of discovering a different way, and what seems like a stumbling block might also be a threshold?

3. There’s a channel that winds its way between the Abyss and the Wall, between chaos and overdetermination. The channel is a labyrinth branching in countless different directions, nearly all of which remain invisible to us. Passing through the channel we might learn something about the contours of the world. We might encounter fellow explorers along the way: some pass in silence; others extend a hand in fellowship; only a few travel with us. We might even meet ourselves.

4. Reality isn’t a given, nor is it obvious: we have to discover it. At times it’s hard to tell the difference between discovery and creation, between what we see of reality and what we make of it. Reality isn’t a universal constant: many realities interpenetrate the world, emerging, morphing, dissolving. Sometimes without realizing it we pass from one reality to another. Less often we recognize the presence of a portal and its pull on us. Only rarely do we understand that we can resist this pull or accede to it.

5. A reality isn’t a raw physical thing; it’s more like a web of meaning that links us to the world and to other people. We assume there’s only a single reality, but we participate in multiple realities every day, depending on what’s motivating us and what signals we’re attuned to. Most of the time we’re unaware of the realities in which we’re embedded. But we can pay attention; we can become aware of alternate realities and the strands of meaning that comprise them. We can learn what attracts us to certain realities, what repels us from others, what keeps us unaware of still others. We can understand the ways in which realities shape us, and the ways we shape realities. We can become reality travelers, linking ourselves to the world and to to other people in ways that we might never have imagined possible.

6. What can be said of realities can also be said of selves. Selves and realities create each other, like the Escher print of a hand drawing itself. A self is like a reality – a way of making sense of who you are and what you experience. Some realities don’t come fully into being until we start living in them. Some versions of ourselves don’t reveal themselves until we enter into a reality where that self makes sense.

7. You can get stuck in a reality that has become toxic or claustrophobic. You try to make yourself succeed, but instead you find yourself alternately crashing into the Wall or teetering on the brink of the Abyss. Everything you do, say, think or feel bounces right back at you like an echo – or else it disappears altogether. You try to make yourself bigger, hoping that by sheer presence you can decide, plan, act, push your way through – only to find yourself frustrated by your own lopsided clumsiness. All the while other realities, other selves, remain undiscovered, unexplored, uncreated. Instead of trying so hard to get bigger, stronger, more focused, you might want to look around a little, experiment, get more flexible. Maybe instead of bulling your way through this reality you can slip into a different version of yourself and set out for a different reality.

8. In my practice I don’t profess to be a problem solver, a healer, a coach. I’m more like a tour guide, an outfitter for those who would explore uncharted realities, examine unformulated experiences, identify the hidden regions of the self. Curiosity is the main prerequisite, a willingness to probe the contours of the Wall, to sound the depths of the Abyss, to distinguish the map from the territory, to unravel the web and open things up a little.

John Doyle
M. Div., Ph.D. (Psychology)
Boulder, Colorado
by appointment
Email: portalic@gmail.com

Ktismatics Overhaul

Looking over the archives, I see that I wrote my first blog post a year ago today. So today seems like a good day to make a ktismatics overhaul.

I thought about quitting. I want to write another novel, as well as a some more extended pieces on psychology that extend beyond the length of a typical blog post. I tend to write posts in clusters, devoting days or even weeks to the same topic. That style can make it hard for a reader to jump in on any random day without having to back up and read the prior days’ posts. So I thought about changing my blog style, making each post a self-contained item like most other blogs. But I’m wanting to get more focused rather than less so.

I’m also starting my therapy practice here in Boulder. I find it difficult to describe my orientation in a few words, so I’m thinking maybe the blog might help establish a context. I don’t want to turn ktismatics into a self-help service or an advertisement, nor do I want to depersonalize my posts and comments to keep from revealing too much about my own pathologies. But what the heck: I don’t claim to be the paragon of mental health.

Then I thought about stopping this blog and starting up a new one. I could change the look, the focus, maybe even the name. Maybe I’d find it invigorating. I could put in a link to the old blog for those who want to troll the archives, but I could more or less leave the old obsessions behind and work on some new ones. Again, though, why not just tweak ktismatics a little? My old obsessions aren’t likely to go away, and besides, hardly anybody reads the archives anyway.

So I’ve decided to carry on: same blog, same name, same general approach, but with a few changes:

• I’ve taken down the pages referencing my book on Genesis 1. Ktismatics began as a means of calling attention to the book and elaborating on the ideas it contains: generally I deem the blog a failure in achieving that end. Now it’s the practice’s turn…
• I’m going to add a page describing the practice, for those locals who might want to give it a try. I posted one version of such a description previously; I’ll put up a new one tomorrow. Of course if my experience in drawing attention to the Genesis 1 book is anything to go on, then the blog page about the practice is likely not to draw much attention either.
• I’ve added a blogroll, mostly because it makes it easier for me to consolidate in one place the links to blogs I read regularly. This use of a blogroll is probably obvious to everyone else, but it took me awhile to get it.
• I might use the upper left sector of the blog for announcements. E.g., if there’s a movie I intend to watch and write a post about, I can let people know ahead of time in case they too want to watch it and engage in discussion.
• I might start categorizing the posts a little more informatively. If I can be bothered, I might even recategorize the archives.
• I might start printing off copies of the day’s post and distributing them around town. If I do this I might add to the post a very brief description of the practice, thereby creating a weird sort of sales brochure. If I get ready to do this I’ll post an example of what the “ad” part might look like.

For those of you who read ktismatics on a regular or occasional basis, thanks for following along. If you have any observations or suggestions about the blog please let me know.

Hud and Dr. Strangelove

We watched two sixties movies back-to-back, and though they were made only two years apart their sensibilities seemed separated by at least a generation.

Hud (1962) is an actors’ movie, earning Oscars for best supporting actor (Melvyn Douglas in deeply moving performance) and supporting actress (Patricia Neal, uncomfortably over-the-top at times but solidly representative of a style of acting that has gone out of favor). Though Paul Newman was nominated for best actor, his stereotypic portrayal of the smug and self-centered title character kept the film as a whole from being much more than just another horse opera, an obsolete genre of which Brokeback Mountain is the postmodern country cousin.

This story, like so many others I’ve watched recently, calls for a Lacanian interpretation where desire is indistinguishable from rebellion against the Law imposed by the Big Other. The tough old rancher (Douglas) is thoroughly disgusted with his ne’er-do-well younger son (Newman). “You’re an unprincipled man,” the father tells the son. “That’s alright Old Man,” the son shoots back, “you’ve got enough principles for the both of us.” The heated interpersonal drama unfolds against a stark black-and-white cinematic world of dusty roads, a sleepy Western town, and the big empty Texas that reduces everything to insignificance.

A single series of images will dominate my memory of this movie. One of the rancher’s cattle dies of undetermined causes. The vet comes to examine the remains; he suspects hoof-and-mouth. Tense days go by as diagnostic tests are conducted. At last the vet returns with the worst news a rancher can hear. The scene begins: two big bulldozers, side by side, drive toward the camera, scraping away the top layer of dirt. Next, from the air, we see the result of their work: a big rectangular pit maybe eight feet deep, steep edges cut out on three sides, sloped evenly down from grade on the fourth side. Then we watch men on horseback herding the cattle, maybe two hundred head, down the slope and into the pit. The underground enclosure is barely big enough to hold them all: the cattle shove and climb over one another. At last there they stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, a single shuffling mass of horns and hide and eyes, quiet, waiting. All along the rim of this dugout corral silent men stand stare down at the herd. A couple of them wear cowboy gear, the rest are covered head to toe in rubberized raingear, looking like aliens in the midday glare of the Southwestern sun. Each man holds a shotgun under his arm, and if we didn’t realize it before we do now: this big wide trench is a mass grave.

* * * *

The premiere of Dr. Strangelove was scheduled for November 22, 1963, a date that, like September 11, 2001, stands sentinel at the transition from one era to the next. Still, I have far more vivid memories of my only Little League home run and the Beatles hitting the American charts than of John Kennedy’s assassination, even though all three events took place within a year of each other. I suppose it’s possible that, when the movie was released in early 1964, the audience already regarded Dr. Strangelove as a holdover from a doomed presidency that had witnessed the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs debacle, and the onset of America’s military engagement in Vietnam. But the Cold War dragged on and so did Vietnam; Lyndon Johnson, elected for a full term, decided not to run again and was succeeded by Richard Nixon. By then I’d suffered through an angst-ridden high school, been teargassed in antiwar rallies, quit college, passed my pre-draft physical, and begun backpacking through Europe and North Africa with no idea when or whether I’d go back to the States. As the years passed Dr. Strangelove came more and more to symbolize the nihilistic counterpoint of the sixties and early seventies. Even now, with the Cold War over, the film still seems timely – or timeless.

This is an English movie about the American will to military annihilation, not just of its enemies but also of itself. Shot in black and white at a British studio, Dr. Strangelove features memorable performances, brilliant lines, and iconic images that have stayed in my memory through the years. There’s the cramped B-52 cockpit, an artifact of cinematic imagination so realistic that the FBI interrogated director Stanley Kubrick to determine if he’d been privy to an intelligence leak. Then there’s the White House War Room, with its gigantic circular table and the wall map showing the bombers gradually approaching their targets in the Soviet Union. The “Making Of” feature on the DVD says that, when Ronald Reagan first took office, he wanted White House aides to show him the War Room. When told there was no such room, he said there must be – he’d seen it in Dr. Strangelove. The bomber pilot (Slim Pickens), waving his cowboy hat in jubilation, rides the massively phallic nuclear warhead down to its target. The final scene is what has stayed most vivid over the years: a series of images of nuclear mushroom clouds is projected behind the closing credits while a woman’s voice sings the old song without a hint of irony: “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but we’ll meet again one sunny day.”

This time I was especially tickled by a scene I’d forgotten. General Jack D. Ripper, who ordered the nuclear strike on Russia, has suicided in his bathroom. Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) has just figured out the secret code for recalling the bombers: O.P.E., a permutation of P.O.E., the initials for Purity Of Essence and Peace On Earth, recurrent motifs in the General’s insane anticommunistic paronoia (I did remember the code). One of the American soldiers storming the General’s headquarters confronts Mandrake and orders him to put his hands up. After reasoning, pleading, and blusteringu Mandrake persuades the soldier to let him call the White House in order to give the President (Peter Sellers again) the code. The General’s hotline has been blasted by incoming fire, so Mandrake resorts to using the pay phone in the corridor. He doesn’t have enough change to pay the toll, so he orders the soldier to shoot the lock off the soft drink machine’s coin box. The soldier is reluctant: it’s private property. Mandrake shames him into it: are you willing to permit the loss of millions of lives just to protect this stupid machine. Reluctantly the soldier agrees; he shoots, and the coins come tumbling onto the floor. But he’s still skeptical: if this whole thing is a hoax and you don’t get the President on the phone, he tells Mandrake, “you’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company.”

The Lost Eden of the Creators

We watched movies on consecutive nights: The Secret of Roan Inish by John Sayles (1993) and Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog (1985). Despite differences in cinematic and narrative style the two films are quite similar: a young child loses her/his mother, moves to a rural part of Ireland/Sweden, and is restored to fullness of being by the simple pleasures of pastoral living. Industrialization is alienating: the fathers either abandon their families for jobs in distant ports or spend their spare time slumped over too many pints at the corner pub. Worse, there is no comfort to be found, no one to hold you next to her bosom. For Sayles it’s the rugged isolation of the sea that brings the downtrodden city-dweller back to life; for Hallstrom it’s the idiosyncratic communalism of the remote village. Upward mobility offers no allure: in these two films we see no middle-class suburbanites, no bosses or financiers living the good life on the backs of the workers. Only two options are placed on the table: proletarian dehumanization or a return to preindustrial peasantry.

This was an old story even in our grandparents’ time. So why bother making this romantic kitsch yet again, other than to make the ironic observation that nostalgia is always a remake? And it’s clear that the bucolic past really is past, even for those few who return to it. Both stories are set forty years in the past, but the worlds they depict seem older than that. The Irish island of Roan Inish can house only a handful of families; the colorful Swedish communal home is really a boarding house owned by the company that employs all the villagers. The children who return to these places don’t find new mothers to nurture them. What they find isn’t comfort but freedom: to play without adult supervision, to take risks without being subjected to constant warnings, to imagine outside the constraints of ordinary reality.

I think it’s this last part, the work of the imagination, that comes through the strongest. The women are happier in these towns, but it’s the men who really come to life. In town the men are tense, silent, mechanical, but in these isolated villages they blossom into artists. The Irishman who with his bare hands plucks fish from the sea is the one who tells the dark legend of his people, a tale so fabulous it must be true. All the Swedish townsmen are glassblowers, acrobats, crackpot inventors, sculptors. Released from the tedium and brutality of the industrial age, men find the freedom to enjoy creating for its own sake. And these are hopeful stories, stories pointing toward the future: even as village life recedes into the past, it’s not too late for a child of the modern age to make passage into the freedom of the creative life. These places are gone now, but maybe through a kind of retreat and rebirth it might be possible to find these ancient sources of freedom and inspiration.

Why is it, then, that these two movies feel false? In Roan Inish the acting feels stilted, the storytelling a kind of artificial device. In the Swedish village we’re shown glimpses of darkness, but they’re whitewashed in quirkiness, quaintness and humor. It’s as if these two filmmakers are afraid to move beyond craft and archetype and into art and truth. Maybe that’s the intrinsic limit built into the archaic sources of free expression, a limit that can be superseded only by grinding it up in the machinery of the contemporary world.

The Talented Mr. Minghella

Jonathan Erdman of Theos Project, a frequent commenter on Ktismatics from nearly the beginning, recently went on a backpacking trip in the Black Hills, sparing some room in his pack to carry the Tom Ripley novels with him for entertainment. When Jonathan returned to Indiana and civilization(?) he sent me an email asking if I’d read these books. Only the first one, I told him — The Talented Mr. Ripley. I read it in Nice, having checked it out from the English-American Library there, which I found apropos since so much of the action takes place near where we were living at the time. I liked the book; Jonathan said he thought it was the best of the three. Then the next question: book or movie? There’s an old French version of the book, made in 1960, but it’s the more recent version that comes to mind, the one starring Matt Damon as Tom Ripley and featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Cate Blanchett in supporting roles.

Patricia Highsmith, a Texas-born emigree, brought out the first installment in the Ripley series in 1955. Not generally regarded as a great author, Highsmith wrote what might be termed high-end pulp fiction. Alfred Hitchcock made a great movie from Highsmith’s first novel: Strangers on a Train. Maybe filmmakers can see in Highsmith’s books the potential for making a very good movie out of a pretty good book. Usually novels cover too much ground and dig too deeply to make a really successful transition to film. If it’s a really good novel then a movie that remains true to the book tends to fail. The successful film adaptation has to leave big chunks of the book behind, then build a movie out of the pieces he keeps. The Lord of the Rings movies did that: left out long slogging treks across Middle Earth in order to focus on the colorful characters, the festive scenes and the dramatic climaxes. Though I love the world Tolkien created, though I liked wandering through it with the characters, though I’ve read the books three times now (twice aloud to our daughter at bedtime), the books really are kind of weak dramatically and literarily. What the books do with slow immersion, the movies accomplish with spectacle and plot. A movie version closer to the books would feel more like Lawrence of Arabia — a slow march through bleak terrain. Still, the Rings movies were great spectacles.

Patricia Highsmith wrote Tom Ripley as a sociopath, which makes him nearly impossible for the reader to relate to. He has no personality of his own; his motivations are nearly inhuman; he’s on the outside of normal humanity looking in. All he can do is imitate, to turn himself into a simulacrum of a real human being. When you look for depth of character you find none at all. In the book you might infer that Dickie is a live wire and either a nice guy or a snob, but Highsmith shows him to us through Tom’s eyes as someone whose surface accomplishments and possessions are plenty good enough for Tom to destroy, to steal and to mimic. And then Ripley has this pathological inability to believe that he’ll get caught, repeatedly compounding his ruthless disregard for the human condition assuming that nobody else is really going to care much what happens to their dead friends and family members. That Highsmith could actually make the reader sort of root for Ripley I found kind of remarkable. It’s either a tribute to us “real” humans, who can project humanity onto a rock, or an acknowledgment that we aren’t as deep as we think we are. Or maybe it’s Highsmith’s unique talent.

You’d think this sort of flat character going through a series of harrowing adventures would be ideal for the movies. Because a movie is so short it can’t offer a whole lot of character development. And because modern Hollywood movies have become so non-literary and so auditory-visual, character development has to rely on pretty flimsy clues — and on the personae of the actors who occupy the roles. But Hollywood also wants the viewer to identify with the characters — something Highsmith slowly, almost unconsciously coaxes out of the reader. The filmmakers equip Ripley with a homosexual attraction to Dickie, which humanizes his motives and makes him easier to relate to. And though Matt Damon is sort of chameleon-like as an actor, he does carry his intrinsic regular-guy persona into the role. It’s a good movie, but it’s not a particularly strange movie.

The book relies on the protagonist’s flat otherness for its unique attraction. The movie performed usual Hollywood trick of imbuing a flat screen persona with the simulacrum of humanity. It’s as if the filmmaker, Anthony Minghella, is Tom Ripley, doing to the book version of Tom what Tom did to Dickie.

No Recruit Left Behind

Tomorrow we enroll our daughter at the local high school. In preparation we’re filling out the paperwork: address and phone, prior schools, information about parents, and so on. “Who may pick your child up from school?” Mother and father. “May we include this student’s address in the Student Directory?” Yes. “Do you grant permission to release video and/or still photographs of this student to media groups?” Hmm, I guess, sure. “Do you grant permission to release information about this student to military recruiting officers.” What? No, of course not.

We turn to the next form: Parents’ and Students’ Opt-Out Form for Disclosure of Personal Information to Military. Again? Here’s what it says:

According to the Federal No Child Left Behind act of 2001: “(1) …each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students’ names, addresses, and telephone listings.” …The No Child Left Behind Act REQUIRES that the school district provide student names, addresses, phone numbers to recruiters from the U.S. military and institutions of higher education UNLESS a parent or the student request in writing that this information be withheld.

No Child Left Behind is the Bush program for improving educational quality and accountability in primary and secondary schools. How does providing information about our daughter to the military enhance the quality of her education? At least this school makes it explicit that we can opt out of this requirement — I suspect that a lot of schools don’t even bother.

So we check the box: “I request that you DO NOT release the name etc. to any Armed Forces recruiter or the US Department of Defense.” But then the next box throws us: “I request that you DO NOT release etc. to any institution of higher education.” Our first reaction: sure, release the information; it might help when the time comes for university. But wait a minute… why is this question on the same form as the military recruitment form? Maybe it’s a trick question; maybe if we check the first box but not the second the high school sends the information to West Point or the Air Force Academy, who then hand over the information to the military recruiters and the Pentagon. No; let’s check that box too.

I wonder if the school is obligated to inform the Pentagon that our daughter just spent four years attending school in France?

Invisibility Cloak

The night before last I had another isolation dream. This time I was in high school trying to do some sort of geometry proofs, and having a difficult time of it. I wanted to call somebody up to ask how it’s done, but I didn’t know anyone to call. I was feeling panicky, not knowing how I was going to complete the assignment. But my performance anxieties were overwhelmed by the impotent rage I felt at being so isolated. I had a sense that I could probably do the proofs if I just stopped looking for help and figured it out. But I was determined to find someone to telephone with whom I could discuss the work, all the while convinced that there was no one. An old friend was there with me; he said he’d call someone he knew and have that person talk to me. But as he’s dialing the phone I’m raving in frustration, to the point where my friend refused to call his friend because he was afraid of how I’d sound in the background.

I’m reading the seventh and final Harry Potter book, my daughter and wife having already whizzed through it. Just past halfway through the book Harry has decided to shift his focus from destroying the archfiend Voldemort to equipping himself with the means of defeating death itself. Legend has it that a wizard can accomplish this impossible feat if he possesses three specific magical objects: one, the Unbeatable Wand; two, the Resurrection Stone that can bring dead people back to the land of the living; three, the Invisibility Cloak, by means of which one can hide from any enemy, including death himself. Harry’s chums, Ron and Hermione, are skeptical: surely this is just a legend, a story to tell the kiddies. But, Harry reminds them, I already own one of the three objects, and you both know it. And they have to agree: Harry’s Invisibility Cloak is the real deal. It always works; its power never fades; it is immune to all counter-charms and spells and hexes.

Let’s say you have an Invisibility Cloak. It hides you from your enemies, from those who would destroy you if they could. It buffers you from interference, allowing you to pursue your private schemes without interference and to hone your skills before putting them to the test. It lets you explore dangerous and forbidden realms without compromising your safety or your reputation. All in secret you’ve amassed a storehouse of arcane knowledge, mastered strange spells, delved into the hidden realms and stolen their secrets. You’re ready to face death himself if need be.

But now, ready to unveil yourself, you discover that your Invisibility Cloak has wrapped itself around you so tightly that you can’t take it off. No one can detect your presence. What you know, what you can do, who you’ve become — hidden. You demonstrate your powers but no one is watching, or maybe they convince themselves it was an accident, or act as if it hadn’t happened at all. It’s as though you’ve become a ghost haunting the world of the living. But even more you’re haunted by it, by its separateness. It’s as if you’re already dead.

Of course you can continue to take advantage of your invisibility, cultivating the kind of uniqueness that only isolation affords, but if no one can ever see you what’s the point? You stop watching, learning, creating, caring — as if you’re already dead. Would you even care if you found the Unbeatable Wand if nobody knew who was wielding it? And instead of bringing people back from the dead, wouldn’t you rather find the magical Stone that can transport the living across the barrier of invisibility so they can see the ghosts of the lonely dead?

600 and Counting

I thought about baking a virtual cake, but it might not meet everyone’s tastes or dietary restrictions. Instead, tonight I shall raise a glass of my favorite libation in honor of the Ivan, Are You Okay? post and its 600th comment. As best I can tell Ivan holds fast to atheism while Sam remains Christian. Others are always welcome to join the discussion, which has been going on since last December.

The Terrorism of Desire

Luis Bunuel was born in 1900; Jacques Lacan, in 1901. Both grew up in Catholic countries and attended Jesuit schools. Both associated with the important surrealistic artists and writers of their time. Both lived in Paris. For both the object of desire became a kind of obsession. But whereas Lacan grew up in Paris, Bunuel was born and raised in a medieval Spanish town. Maybe that’s why for Bunuel desire remains more primal, more obsessive, more religious, more sadomasochistic than it does for Lacan. No, that’s not quite it. Lacan analyzes perverse desire; Bunuel shows it.

In Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, an aristocratic older gentleman becomes obsessed with a much younger working-class woman who appears in his life as a new maid on the serving staff in his elegant home. Matthieu follows Conchita around slavishly, lavishing attention and expensive gifts on her. She seems cooperative enough, to the point of sharing his bed. But she will not give him what he wants: her virginity. She tells him that he doesn’t really love her, that once he gets what he wants he’ll abandon her. He protests, he pleads, he threatens, to no avail. Conchita is capricious, alternately confessing her affection and devotion, only to taunt Matthieu cruelly when he abases himself before her. He tries to free himself of his obsession, going so far as to have her deported from France. But he’s drawn to her, following her to Seville, where his humiliation reaches its nadir. Finally he’s had enough, and he beats her. When Conchita follows him to the train station, pleading for reconciliation, Matthieu pours a bucket of water on her (this is where the movie begins; most of the story is told retrospectively).

It’s a straightforward tale, but there are strange features in the telling. The turmoil of this perverse love story is punctuated periodically by violent and seemingly random acts of terrorism, the motives of which are unexplained but which are attributed in media accounts to the enigmatic left-wing Revolutionary Society of the Baby Jesus. Conchita repeatedly walks away but, through the most unlikely coincidences, she keeps showing up in Matthieu’s life: in the aftermath of an armed robbery perpetrated on him in a Swiss park, as a coat-check girl in a restaurant where he’s eating lunch, in an apartment window he happens to be passing by. Perhaps most disconcertingly, the role of Conchita is played by two different actresses: one a thin and chic Parisienne, the other a darkly voluptuous Spaniard. The two women alternate in the part without apparent rhyme or reason. Sometimes a scene will begin with one Conchita, switch to the other, then back again. Granted, the girl is two-faced, but both actresses show us both faces of Conchita.

Bunuel never explained why he used two lead actresses to play the same part, but here’s my theory. It’s not the specific woman that’s important. The “obscure object of desire” can move from one receptacle to another, as if it has a life of its own. The actresses aren’t the same; maybe the character they play isn’t the same either. Maybe the French maid isn’t the same girl as the robbers’ accomplice, or the hat-check girl, or the flamenco dancer in Seville. Maybe it doesn’t matter who she is; it’s the object of desire that remains constant.

So is woman the object, the unfulfilled sexual attraction without which a man feels incomplete? It would seem so, but then there’s the title telling us that the object is “obscure.” And though Matthieu is the narrator of the story, though he portrays himself as the pathetically masochistic captive of desire, he too seems to possess an allure for Conchita. She also desires him, or something he has. Matthieu’s desire for her bestows value on Conchita; she desires his desire; it’s what gives her that haughty self-assurance. But she despises him for it; she recognizes her dependence on him at the very moment she feels the most full of herself. And so she pushes him away. But as soon as he threatens to leave, as soon as he begins to reject her, she reels him back in.

The object moves back and forth between the two of them, his attentions alternately attracting and repelling her; her refusals alternately attracting and repelling him. And the inescapably obsessive part of it is that her repulsions attract him, while his repulsions attract her. There is no escaping this mutual terrorism of desire, short of blowing the whole thing up.

(Certainly this film by Bunuel — his last, made when he was in his mid-seventies — manifests the Lacanian idea of desire stimulated by prohibition, discussed at length in a series of recent posts about Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, especially in this one and this one. One can also regard the movie as a precursor to Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, discussed even more recently, where Luisa brings the old Spanish obsessional desire to the younger generation of Mexico. Other relevant posts include this one, about Hegel’s master-servant dialectic, and this one, about another Bunuel film, made more than twenty years prior to That Obscure Object of Desire.)