More Real Than They Realize

… on one level, [it] is less real than they thought; but on another level, it’s more real than they realize …

This is from A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers by Scott MacDonald (2005). This is from his interview with Jim McBride:

[ ... ]

McBride: … I made this film [David Holzman's Diary] twice. Are you aware of that?

MacDonald: No.

McBride: Well, before I knew Kit … , I was working at a company that produced films used to sell land in Florida. It was an interesting learning experience about how to make movies for a particular purpose. There were only three people in the whole company, so I got to do a lot of different things. I got to shoot, to cut. This was my real training, more than school was. I had a good relationship with the guy who ran the place, and he would let me borrow equipment on weekends, and I started making this film with the actor Alan Rachins, who later went on to do the TV series L.A. Law.

MacDonald: When was this?

McBride: Nineteen sixty-five, I would guess. So I’m producing this film and had all my friends involved. Every weekend we’d go out and shoot something. Then I got fired from the job — it had nothing to do with the film I was doing — but I packed up all the film I’d shot, stuffed it into a cardboard box, and put it in the trunk of my beat-up old VW and left it there for a couple of weeks while I was looking for a cutting room I could use to edit the film. When I finally found a place, I went to the car, opened the trunk, and the film was gone.

I think in those days when people saw raw film on reels, they thought immediately of porno. At least that’s my guess: someone took it thinking it was porn. But I never did find it. It was a totally demoralizing experience, and I went for more than a year not even thinking about making a film.

Meanwhile, I had started working with Michael Wadleigh, a very accomplished vérité cameraman. I began to work with him as a sound man and sometimes as an editor. At some point, I told him about my film, and he got all excited and said, “Let’s make it!” He had a whole setup: access to equipment and a little editing space with a Moviola. So we shot the film, using leftover film stock. We were constantly working on other projects where we’d end up with a lot of short ends, and you could send pieces of your film to be developed along with whatever job you were doing. So it really didn’t cost much.

But it was Michael’s involvement that allowed us to remake the film, and it was at that point that I got Kit involved in the project.

MacDonald: How fully was the story fleshed out when you began? The film is about the character David Holzman, but interspersed with what happens to him are many other kinds of material that create a general context for  his story. I’d imagine that you went into the film with a fairly sketchy sense of what was going to happen.

McBride: Well, you’re exactly right. It was part planned and part totally unplanned. We were impassioned by this vérité idea at the same time that we were picking it apart and making fun of it, but we also wanted to be open to whatever might happen in the course of things. There was a rough plan, but never a written script.

We did things in blocks, and most of the stuff of David in his apartment talking to the camera was done over one long weekend. I had spent the previous week sitting in the room with Kit and a tape recorder saying, “Now in this scene, you’re going to say this,” and he’d sort of put it into his own words; and then I’d say, “Well, this part is good and that part wasn’t so good.” We were writing it out, without putting it down on paper. By the time we had done it a few times with the tape recorder, we knew exactly what it was going to be.

[ ... ]

MacDonald: There was this vogue at the end of the sixties, in the wake of the Warhol films, of extremely long, continuous takes. Noren’s Say Nothing is a continuous, thirty-minute shot.

McBride: Which is what was so compelling about it. The idea of real time was a big issue in those days, at least to me and to other filmmakers I knew.

I had the idea for the shot, but it was actually Mike who executed it, and he did it in a way that I wouldn’t have thought of: he had the camera cradled in his arms and shot in slightly slow motion.

But a lot of the other stuff was just, “Well, let’s go out and see what we find.” We’d go out in the street with the idea of just picking up flavor.

[ ... ]

MacDonald: My students are so disappointed at the end that the film has been a ruse, but what’s interesting is that only about half of the film is a narrative fabrication. Everything else is actually more real than what we’re used to seeing. There’s a paradox: on one level, David Holzman is less real than they thought; but on another level, it’s more real than they realize, at least during their initial disappointment. And that other level of reality is what gives the story its power.

McBride: Yes. I think that’s what’s exciting. It is real in spite of the fact that it’s a made-up story. It’s a real place and a real time and, in fact, most of the events — even though they might have been fabricated — did come out of my own experience.

[ ... ]

McBride: … When I made David Holzman in those early days, there was a tremendous amount of excitement about independent films and this terrific economic boom. Independent filmmaking existed on the fringe, where people with a little extra money who wanted to get into the world of the arts could, for a small investment, be part of something. But that all fell apart in the early to middle seventies. Suddenly people couldn’t throw money away anymore, which was what investing in independent movies generally was. The whole scene just dried up.

My most recent previous post from MacDonald’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Those Who Sleep in Average Rooms

… the miraculous exhilaration of achieving better understanding expands the dwelling of those who sleep in average rooms and suddenly creates for them a palace …

This is from The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies by Michel Serres (2008, 1985):

… A clumsy person plays ball by moving it around himself, an aberrant planet receiving its law from the subject sun; discordant, rigid, willful, controlling, he will never learn anything. He does not know how to bring things into being. He refers things to himself. A statue, a robot. The ball, on the other hand, plays with the clever players as they pass by, wandering planets around the small new sun, harmonious, flexible objects around the ball-subject. These players will be able to learn everything because they have abandoned their own law and given up controlling things in order to adapt, becoming submissive, and therefore subjects in this new sense to the law of what is fleeting, and already far away.

… If you ever played team sports in your youth you will be familiar with the personal state in which your body suddenly becomes angelic and succeeds in everything it undertakes: without fatigue, without experiencing any obvious effort, you can jump higher, go everywhere, run tirelessly and reach every goal. … [Y]ou will remember having been given an angel’s body for a few seasons, having passed without knowing how into another world, into a space without error or weakness, where the craziest plans were effortlessly successful, precise gestures, subtle movements, delicate and always accurate decisions — life lived a meter off the ground, in a state of levitation. The ball itself pulls the arm to the goal. Music composes for the author without his doing anything.

Individual ecstasy leaves an imperishable memory — of sport and one’s body, of the intellect or emotions — it is the best thing that happens in your life.

… we have no language, we are monads — we know, anticipate, love each other; we anticipate each other at lightning speed, we cannot go wrong, the whole team cannot go wrong, it is playing: not me or my partners but the team itself. I move to the right, I know that another player knows that I have done so, that the ball will await me. The ball is traveling so fast that it weaves between us bonds of unassailable certainty; as this certainty is seamless, the ball can travel around even more rapidly, and as it travels more rapidly, it weaves … No-one who has not experienced such ecstasy can know what being together means. I have the impression of knowing from the inside, as if by intuition, how a part or element of an organism must live. But in the case of the latter, where does the ball go, and where do balls come from? And again, what is a ball in a collective that does not play, and where does it go?

… the miraculous exhilaration of achieving better understanding expands the dwelling of those who sleep in average rooms and suddenly creates for them a palace the size of the world; there is nothing to equal an elegant proof, that combines subtlety with reason; an intuition that makes the body fly at the speed of thought which seems to us swifter than light; deep meditation, altitude, slowness, the serene plain of wisdom; there is nothing to equal trying or waiting, and if I am mistaken I will at least not have hurt anyone, and if I am not, we will exult joyfully; nothing as good as a piquant, incisive, off-centre idea, attaching its movement to the long, crooked chain of ideal grains winding their paradoxical path through the air around us …

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Something Different Is Coming Down

… Christopher Small calls it “that ideal society, those relations between human beings, that can enable each one to feel, in a literal sense, in tune with all the others and with the world.”

This is from the essay ‘A Sense of the Possible: Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance’ by Chris Smith in the collection In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation edited by Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell (1998):

… Miles intentionally supplied, withheld, and distorted performance information because of a quality of attention that such an environment evoked from his players, some of whom nevertheless recognized his motives and the dynamic perspective from which they derived: “Miles is a boxer, and he thinks like a boxer when he talks. If the other person is someone who might pick up on what he’s doing, it’ll be like parrying” (Keith Jarrett, quoted in Keepnews 1987).

… Miles himself acknowledged: “What we did on Bitches Brew you couldn’t ever write down for an orchestra to play. That’s why I didn’t write it all out, not because I didn’t know what I wanted; [but because] I knew that what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged stuff.” [emphasis added by Smith]

… Miles wanted a quality of attentive flexibility that would lift his players to the level of co-composing interpreters; that would encourage them to respond to the improvisational moment with his own alert flexibility. Communicating in an intentionally ambiguous and nonverbal fashion meant that Miles’s players were forced to engage with him by interpreting what they thought such communication demanded. As Miles explained: “See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that — but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he’s got to take more risks. … So then he’ll be freer, will expect things differently, will anticipate and know something different is coming down. … Because then anything can happen, and that’s when great art and music happens.”

Of course there is a paradox here: the semiotic technique Miles used to create the improvisational environment (ambiguity, visual and sonic cues, etc.) often had the secondary effect of centering the players’ attention upon him. So there is an implicit tension between Miles’s decentering actions and the players’ learned and habitual attention, which was itself heightened by these actions. Thus Miles was obliged to manipulate the ambiguity still further; as his players became familiar with certain cueing techniques, he constantly replaced those techniques. As a result, subtle sonic and visual gestures took on layers of associational meanings, in turn demanding further responses. But, as Schieffelin acknowledges, this is a profoundly involving and fertile space in which to create performances: “[Such an] experience of inclusiveness and imbalance gives people little choice but to make their own moves of creative imagination if they are to make sense of the performance and arrive at a meaningful account of what is happening. In so doing … they complete the construction of its reality.”

So the deliberate incompleteness of Miles’s directions was itself the element which, through the attention and response it elicited, enacted the completion of the creative process.

[image from Wikipedia]

[ ... ]

Miles developed a basic musical building block out of a heightened sensitivity to the interaction of all signifying elements: players, tunes, performance parameters, and cues. The interactive process was allowed to take place because Miles recognized its centrality and understood the means of its creation, and he was willing to tailor standard jazz practices sufficiently to permit, indeed to demand that it occur.

… It was this “sense of the possible” which profoundly influenced generations of jazz musicians who played with Miles. It is no coincidence that, in paying tribute to Miles’s influence, these players uniformly allude not to issues of technical or compositional approach but, more profoundly, to a way of hearing and responding, and encouraging others to do the same; to the cultivation of a unique capacity for attention.

… Miles Davis came from an African-American performance tradition which focused on individual expression of communal feeling, empathic interaction among participants, and creative response to shifting contexts. The ritual music space that he constructed offered a literal, experiential manifestation of this model. Music educator Christopher Small calls it “that ideal society, those relations between human beings, that can enable each one to feel, in a literal sense, in tune with all the others and with the world.” This potent legacy is manifested again and again, in the music he initiated, performed, and recorded, in anecdotes and reminiscences about him by his players, and in musical endeavors inspired and influenced by him. Miles emphasized and constructed a specific ritual performance context. And the behavior he demanded within that space evoked a centered, focused sensitivity to the enormous creative possibilities of the ever precious, ever fleeting, present moment.

My previous post from this collection is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The “Strike” or “Cut” of Its Existence

… What is generous abandons itself to generosity [ ... ] it is having been delivered or abandoned not only without calculation and without having been able to calculate, but even without an idea of generosity.

This is from The Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy (1993; 1988):

… Freedom is not exactly out of comprehension’s reach; for example, it is not located higher up on a ladder of intelligibility, on a rung accessible, for instance only to an intelligence other than our own. Even less is freedom opposed to comprehending: it makes itself understood, at the limit of comprehension, as what does not originate in comprehension. The “realization of being” (or praxis?) has no object, or theme, except itself, in its independence with respect to objectality and thematicity. Thus, incomprehensible freedom makes itself understood at the limit [à la limite], in a very precise sense of this expression, as a self-comprehension independent of the comprehension of understanding [entendement]. What we comprehend, at the limit, is that there is this autonomous comprehension, which is the realizing [accomplissante] comprehension of realization.

… Must anything be reserved for freedom? Must its space be kept free? We should ask instead if this is even possible. Is not freedom the only thing that can “reserve” its own space?

Would not what is at stake in freedom be the fact that, according to a logic resolutely separate from every dialectic of (in)comprehensibility, freedom in any case precedes the thinking that can or cannot comprehend it? Freedom precedes thinking, because thinking proceeds from freedom and because it is freedom that gives thinking.

… To be sure, here there is no longer even “freedom,” as a defined substance. There is, so to speak, only the “freely” or the “generously” with which things in general are given and give themselves to be thought about. No doubt “freedom itself” unleashes “itself” both in the sense that it would be the subject of this act and in the sense that it would expend its own substance. Yet what unleashes “itself” was not previously attached to a substantial unity: on the contrary, the subject follows only from freedom, or is born in her. What is expended was not previously reserved in a pregnant enclosure, nor even contained in itself like an abyss. Generosity precedes the possibility of any kind of possession. The secret of this generosity is that it does not have to do with giving what one has (one has nothing, freedom has nothing of its own), but with giving oneself — and that the self of this reflected form is nothing other than generosity, or the generousness of generosity. The generousness of generosity is neither its subject nor its essence. Rather, it remains its singularity, which is at the same time its event: generosity happens, it gives and is given in giving, always singular and never held back in the generality of its own quality — and its unique manner of not “taking place” in the sense of a simple positing, but of always preceding itself by always succeeding itself. It unleashes itself, without “being unleashed,” before being, but also well after it — already hurled, sent, expended, without having had the time to know that it is “generous.”

… What is generous abandons itself to generosity [ ... ] it is having been delivered or abandoned not only without calculation and without having been able to calculate, but even without an idea of generosity. This is not an unconscious, but on the contrary — if these terms can be used — the most pure and simple consciousness: that of expended existence. Thought that is given in this way is the most simple thought: the thought of the freedom  of being, the thought of the possibility of the “there is,” that is, thought itself, or the thought of thought. It does not have to “comprehend” or “comprehend itself” — or uncomprehend.

… “Freedom” cannot avoid combining, in a unity that has only its own generosity as an index, the values of impulse, chance, luck, the unforeseen, the decided, the game, the discovery, conclusion, dazzlement, syncope, courage, reflection, rupture, terror, suture, abandonment, hope, caprice, rigor, the arbitrary. Also: laughter, tears, scream, word, rapture, chill, shock, energy, sweetness. … Freedom is also wild freedom, the freedom of indifference, the freedom of choice, availability, the free game, freedom of comportment, of air, of love, or of a free time where time begins again. It frees each of these possibilities, each of these notions of freedom, like so many freedoms of freedom — and it is freed from these.

… Each of them, or the figures that can be composed from them, would no doubt call its own elaboration phenomenological, but above all, their long list — unfinished and unfinishable – signifies its own proliferation (and we do not want to be misunderstood as seeing an anthropological bricolage here), which itself definitively means that freedom essentially bursts.

… What is in this way is never at first on the order of action, nor is it on the order of volition or representation. It is a bursting or a singularity of existence, which means existence as deprived of essence and delivered to this inessentiality, to its own surprise as well as to its own decision, to its own indecision as well as to its own generosity.

… freedom [of the existent], with which it is more intimate than any property of essence, is in this very intimacy only the “strike” or “cut” of its existence: the archi-originary bursting of pure being.

My most recent previous post from Nancy’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Role-Performance Maximization

… Each ‘move’ (if we may call it that) either is for the purpose of evoking a dramatic response, or is such a response, or is both.

Continuing through The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits (2005; 1978). In this installment he introduces two new characters, starting with the secret agent, Porphyryo Sneak, who loves his sneaky work and is bored between assignments:

… Then one day Sneak made an astonishing discovery. He realized that he had no interest in the military, or even, he had to admit, in the patriotic value of his assignments, but only in the opportunities they afforded him for performing dramatic roles. With this new information about himself he adopted a quite new attitude towards the conduct of his life. For he saw that he need not simply sit around waiting for an assignment to be handed out to him. He could, instead, seek out such assignments. And so Sneak became a double agent; not, of course, to double his income, but to double his roles. And during good times — the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam — Sneak became a triple, quadruple, and quintuple agent, and so also became perforce not only the world’s most versatile character actor, but also the world’s quickest quick-change artist.

… [Eventually, it occurred to him that] there was no reason why Sneak should not take a continuing, rather than a merely remedial, hand in world history. Accordingly, his impostures began to be governed as much by decision-making as by intelligence-gathering considerations, a fact which was to have far-reaching consequences for his future. For he next discovered, to the delight of his dissembling soul, that these purposes could both be accomplished in the course of performing one and the same role.

To these ends, he escalates his skills until he finds himself not only perfectly impersonating heads of state, but impersonating both heads of state in an important diplomatic dialogue between the two:

… he realized that he could play any role in any dramatic situation he chose to contrive, quite independently of the demands, direct or indirect, of the spy business. He was his own playwright, and a kind of God, for the whole world had become his stage.

The brief period of modern history which resulted from Sneak’s great discovery became known as the Mad Months. And it seemed, during May, June, and July of 19__, that the entire fabric of international relations was simply shredding to bits. Alliances between nations were formed and dissolved with dizzying speed, cabinets were reshuffled daily, and the world suffered continuous vertigo as it peered in terror over one brink of disaster after another.

At which point Sneak has a nervous breakdown (actually, we find out later that he was role-playing his breakdown, but that turns out to be irrelevant for my purposes). Next, we find him in a sanitorium, at his first therapeutic session with Dr. Heuschrecke, who is not a psychiatrist (he informs Sneak) but a doctor of philosophy (“I try to cure  the philosophical maladies of my patients”):

[ ... ]

Sneak: Do you mean to say there is nothing seriously wrong with me?

Dr. Heuschrecke: I mean to say there is nothing clinically wrong with you at all.

S: Then there is something wrong with me?

H: There is.

S: Tell me what it is, Dr. Heuschrecke, for God’s sake!

H: You are suffering from a logical fallacy.

[ ... ]

H: Your error is the same as that of the fabled inventor of roast pig. And just as his error was correctable, so is yours. You remember the story. One day this chap’s barn burned down, killing a pig he kept there. Finding the flesh of the burnt pig palatable, indeed delicious — having, that is, invented the pork roast — he sensibly decided to avail himself of more roast pork on future occasions. So he rebuilt his barn, put a pig in it, and set fire to the barn, thus committing arson and a logical fallacy.

S: The fallacy of mistaking a sufficient for a necessary condition.

H: Precisely. What you wanted were opportunities for playing make-believe games, and you found — by accident, just as the pork fancier had — that impersonating monarchs, prime ministers, and presidents provided such opportunities. [ ... ] And if we add to the pig fable the embellishment that each time the primitive gourmet burnt his barn the whole community was threatened with incendiary destruction, we have a complete parallel to your own case. And we also have an indication of where the solution lies, do we not?

S: Well, I suppose the pig chap corrected his logical error by inventing the cook stove.

[ ... ]

H: … All your moves were playing a part and nothing but playing a part. You were not engaged in any kind of imposture, although you thought you were.

S: What was I doing, then?

H: You were playing Heads of State. And you hadn’t had so much fun since those nearly forgotten days of Actresses and Bishops.

[ ... ]

S: Are you really suggesting that I spend the rest of my life playing childish games?

H: I’m certainly suggesting that you spend the rest of your life playing games. Whether they are childish or not depends on the games you choose to play, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t expect you to play Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, or even Actresses and Bishops. But then I wouldn’t expect Bobby Fischer to spend the rest of his life playing checkers either, although I am quite sure that he will spend the rest of his life playing games. But what do you find so repugnant about the idea of playing games for the rest of your life? That is all you have been doing with your life so far.

S: Yes, yes, I do see that, Heuschrecke, but you have to admit that there is no small difference between impersonating the Queen at Buckingham Palace and playing Heads of State in my living room.

H: Of course there is a difference, there is a tremendous difference. But the question is whether that difference makes any difference to you.

[ ... ]

H: [The psychiatrists who examined Sneak before Heuschrecke's session] established conclusively that your sole motive in playing what we ought now to call the games of Espionage, World Crisis, and Heads of State was entirely a game motive. If they had established the fact that playing these games was a device to serve other (probably neurotic) purposes, then I would not be at all confident of your rehabilitation along the lines I have suggested.

[ ... ]

H: … notice that ‘make-believe’ is not the same as playing a part in a stage play. If it were, your rehabilitation would of course be accomplished by your becoming, in all likelihood, the greatest theatrical actor in the world. How would that strike you?

S: Not at all well. Acting out a part in a play is simply being enslaved to some script writer. It is like miming the moves in a game which has already been played by someone else.

H: That is what I thought you would say. And it points to a basic feature of make-believe games. Each ‘move’ (if we may call it that) either is for the purpose of evoking a dramatic response, or is such a response, or is both. But these evocations and responses really are evocations and responses; they are not merely representations of such interplay, as is the case in staged performances. The players are, in a way, writing a script at the same time that they are enacting it.

S: Quite right.

H: Now, looked at from the viewpoint of one of the players in a two-role game, what he wants the person performing the other role to do is to keep providing him with opportunities for dramatic responses (e.g. feeding him ‘good’ lines). [ ... ] But the best way to get good lines is for your partner to be a player, because then he has a motive which is better than that of either of the others. The dupe is worst, of course, because he is least dependable, and most of the time he isn’t giving you lines at all but going about his own affairs. And the person who feeds you lines for some reward (or out of friendship or fear, it might be added), although we would expect him to be more constantly employed at his task than the dupe, is only indirectly motivated to provide the desired motive. Only another player (or yourself as the other player) has a direct motive. For he must give you good lines in order to get good lines in return, and since you are motivated to do the same for him, the game is itself a reciprocating system of role-performance maximization.

S: And you are telling me that that, in principle, is the kind of game that I have spent my life playing?

H: I am.

[ ... ]

S: [But your] description makes no reference at all to the fact that in make-believe one assumes a role which is not the player’s real-life role. That strikes me as a rather startling omission.

H: On the contrary, I don’t think it’s an omission at all.

S: But surely playing a part is the very essence of make-believe.

H: Playing a part is, yes. But playing what might be called a foreign or assumed part is not. One can also play, so to speak, native or proprietary parts.

S: What on earth is a proprietary part?

H: One way to define it is as follows: a part of such a kind that when one plays it, one is not conveying misinformation about one’s identity. If, for example, I have the job of lookout for a band of bank robbers, and if I want to give myself a plausible reason for loitering in the vicinity of a bank, I might (taking advantage of my short stature and youthful appearance) put on a Boy Scout uniform and help old ladies across the street. I take it that you would accept this as an example of someone playing a part which is not his own part.

S: Obviously.

H: Very well, now suppose that a Boy Scout does the same thing. He dons his uniform and helps old ladies across the street. He is also playing a part, but it is his own part; that is, its performance conveys information rather than misinformation about the performer. But — and this is the point — the part itself is just the same in the two cases.

S: You are talking about role-playing in everyday life.

H: Precisely.

S: You sound like a sociologist.

H: That can’t be helped. The point is that there are roles which enjoy a kind of objective or public status, so that they can be performed by different people for different purposes. They are in this respect like clothing. All kinds of apparel are for public sale, and I can purchase and put on something which correctly conveys my position in life, or I can purchase and put on something which misrepresents my position in life. For example, I can put on a business suit or I can put on the uniform of a full admiral. The only difference is that suits and uniforms are patterns of cloth and roles are patterns of behavior.

S: Yes, well, I’ll concede that what you say is highly plausible, but I don’t see what that has to do with the problem before us. Even if I grant the distinction between proprietary and assumed roles it still seems clear to me that make-believe must necessarily consist in the performance of assumed roles.

H: I agree that what you say seems intuitively obvious. It is, nevertheless, untrue. But I see that our time is up for today.

To be continued next week.

My most recent previous post from Suits’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Interpretive Horizons

… But there is still another “other” …

This is from Painting Borges: Philosophy Interpreting Art Interpreting Literature by Jorge J.E. Gracia (2012):

“The Other” is one of those stories in which Borges challenges the reader to solve a puzzle for which there seems to be no solution. The central difficulty posed by the story concerns personal identity and memory, appearance and reality. Are we the same persons throughout our lives? Is an old Borges the same person he was when he was young? Are they both real, is just one or them real, or are both of them unreal? The older and younger Borges are very different, but we would like to say they are one and the same. And how does memory play into this?

John Locke and David Hume claimed that memory is the key to personal identity. Borges’s memories make him the person he is and provide continuity throughout his life. But memories are in a constant Heraclitean process of change and are notoriously unreliable, more so in old age, which is the situation with the narrator of the story. Memory selects and fails. Our memories today are different from our memories a year ago, let alone when long periods of time are involved. We can never be sure that we remember accurately. Sometimes what we remember vividly was not as we remember it  and what we remember vaguely turns out to be right. Certainty is elusive because we lack an internal criterion to measure the legitimacy of our memories, particularly since remembering and forgetting are inextricably tied. How can an older Borges be the same as a younger one? And, given memory’s unreliability, can we tell what is fact and what is fiction? Perhaps our memories are mere dreams.

“The Other” is a memory within a memory, a story within a story, as so many of Borges’s fictions are. The action takes place in February 1969, in Cambridge, north of Boston. Borges is sitting on a bench by the Charles River when suddenly, under the impression that he had lived the experience before, he hears — for he is nearly blind — that someone has sat at the other end of the bench. The person in question turns out to be a much younger version of himself and Borges engages him in conversation. His former self thinks they are sitting in Geneva, on a bench by the Rhone, and not by the Charles River in Cambridge. Both cannot be right. Either Borges is right or his former self is right, in which case either Borges is dreaming his other self or his other self is dreaming Borges; one of the two is  dream of the other.

Neither thesis is easy to prove, although the older Borges tries hard to prove that he is the real one to the younger.

… The puzzle is never satisfactorily resolved, since its solution depends on the emphasis placed by readers on the many and conflicting elements of the story. This brings us to another aspect of the tale that I have not mentioned. So far I have spoken of two persons, but actually there are three others. One is the writer of the story, who is not the same as the older Borges sitting on the bench in Cambridge, for the account of the meeting was not written at that time but rather months after the event that may, or may not, have taken place. Another is Borges, the reader of the story, who read it later still. And the third is the reader who is not Borges, you and/or I, who has read the story at various times after it was written. What do we make of these additional three persons? Do they play a role in the tale? Are they relevant for an understanding of it? Or do they merely add an unnecessary distraction? It is impossible to be sure, and that is part of the tale’s charm and the reader’s challenge. For the reader, as Borges says elsewhere, is part of a story, a character of it, and even perhaps an invention of its other characters.

Laura Delgado has painted three interpretations of “The Other,” of which I use only La otra here. It carries as subtitle a line from Borges. The entire title reads: La otra – éramos demasiado distintos y demasiado parecidos (The Female Other — We Were Too Different and Too Alike).

Laura Delgado, La otra

… We see a young girl sitting at a table, with pencil in hand, concentrating on the task of finishing a drawing on a sheet of paper. We cannot see her face, because she covers it with the hand she is not using to draw. The figure she has created on the paper is in many ways typical of what children draw. [ ... ] The drawing dominates the canvas, occupying two-thirds of it. It looks as if it were meant to be a portrait of the girl as she sees herself and is capable of drawing. Although the bow she wears is reproduced in the drawing, everything else is very different between the image and the artist. In reality there is no flower, sun, grass, elaborate summer dress or even a face we can see. The girl is in a rather dark room, painted against a dark background only lightly illuminated on one side, which explains the light shed on the picture under construction. And she is dressed in what appears to be a winter blouse.

Both the composition and the use of the glossed line from the story as a subtitle indicate that Delgado has focused her interpretation on the way we think of ourselves as both like and unlike what we are. Perhaps Borges’s story is not so much about identity over time, as it appears at first glance, but rather about self-image. Can we see ourselves as we are? How is the image we have of ourselves similar and different from the way we are?

… Mauricio Nizzero’s pictorial interpretation of Borges’s story in El otro presents a very different perspective from the one Delgado’s work displays. He has drawn two figures. One is sitting on a bench.

Mauricio Nizzero, El otro

The other figure in the picture, by contrast, is all motion, energy, and vigor. He is in the act of running, apparently from the older Borges, although his location and position would make this physically impossible. In reality he could not be in a position to begin running, for there is not sufficient space between him and the sitting figure to achieve the motion he displays. This suggests that his motion is possible only because he is not part of the physical reality depicted in the work; he is a product of the sitting Borges, and as agile and faithful as his thoughts.

… But perhaps there is still another way of looking at this piece of art. In another work that Nizzero had done on this same story, he raised the question of a still third person who observes the other two. This could be another Borges, older and closer to the time of his death. He is observing the two Borgeses of the story, recounting a memory of a memory, going back to an earlier part of his life. This Borges completes the story, and is indeed the author of the written story. Indeed, he makes us realize that there are still two other persons involved in the event. One is Nizzero who has painted the story and the other is the audience of the story and the painting — that is, we. For the sitting Borges “the other” is the younger Borges, for the younger Borges it is the sitting Borges who is “the other.” For Borges the narrator, both of these Borgeses are “the other.” In all these cases “the other” is part of Borges. But there is still another “other” that comes in as what Borges is for Nizzero and for the audience of both his painting, and the story. Perhaps this is an important aspect of “The Other,” namely, the appearance of the other as interpreter. If so, the significance of the story then changes from one concerned with time and identity, to one dealing with interpretation, insofar as the work leads to speculation as to the merging of five, or even perhaps as Borges would put it, “infinite” interpretive horizons.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Flat Light Rising

…..

All of these are by W.S. Merwin, starting with the first and last two verses (of six) from:

…..

Low Fields and Light

I think it is in Virginia, that place
That lies across the eye of my mind now
Like a gray blade set to the moon’s roundness,
Like a plain of glass touching all there is.

[ ... ]

My father never plowed there, nor my mother
Waited, and never knowingly I stood there
Hearing the seepage slow as growth, nor knew
When the taste of salt took over the ground.

But you would think the fields were something
To me, so long I stare out, looking
For their shapes or shadows through the matted gleam, seeing
Neither what is nor what was, but the flat light rising.

…..

---

…..

One line from the very long Lemuel’s Blessing:

…..

My head is a nest for tame ants,

…..

---

……

One verse from the middle of the very long:

…..

The Crossroads of the World Etc.

[ ... ]

You’ve swallowed night I swallow night
I will swallow night
And lie among the games of papers
And the gills of nibbling
Fires

[ ... ]

…..

---

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Good Art Critic

…  when I read Greenberg (and this is the greatest compliment I can make to an art critic) I am constantly wracked by the temptation to run to the museum and verify his judgment by consulting my own, and then to return to the text and confront his qualifiers with the ones that came to my mind before the work. If something conceptual (something substantive, some substance) emerges from reading (and so it does), it can only come from this double movement which never crushes the visual into the conceptual, the aesthetic into interpretation, designation into signification, Bedeutung into Sinn.

This is from Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines by Thierry de Duve (1996):

First, the question: is artistic emotion textually transmissible? Can an art critic cause his readers to love the work of which he speaks, and if so, by what means? By his argumentation, his rhetoric, his writing? Second, the question of the question: which critic are we talking about, and which work, which transmission? Third, an attempt at a first-person response concerning one specific case: did Greenberg make me love Pollock?

… I have a particular affection for Clement Greenberg the art critic, even if I am far from sharing all his judgments, even if I may have learned more from Greenberg the historian, who very early on formed quasi-dogmatic convictions about the role of the avant-garde and the raison d’être of modernism, and even if my debates have primarily been with Greenberg the theorist, who stepped out onto the terrain of aesthetics in the sixties under the pressure of the art stemming from Duchamp, whom he detested. All this means that even when I stick to Greenberg the art critic, my feelings are mixed.* I also have a particular and long-standing affection for Jackson Pollock, the painter and the artist. However, being a child of my times, I must admit that what I now call my affection for Pollock — which twenty years ago I would have called my interest in Pollock — has gone through successive phases in which I am occasionally unsure whether I recognize the same artist. As an adolescent, my first contacts with the painting of Pollock, by way of Skira press, led me to view him — in the doxa of the epoch — as an American Mathieu.

… I don’t disavow all that [de Duve's youthful ideas about Pollock], there’s still some truth in it, but nonetheless … It was then, and all at once, in a well-wrapped package, thanks to the good graces of Yve-Alain Bois and the journal Macula, that Greenberg’s texts on Jackson Pollock fell out of the sky in a French translation. Only ten years later did they become easily available in the original, without long hunts through the library. Meanwhile, I had seen some Pollocks. And then I saw them again, and again. And I read and listened to other critics, for example T.J. Clark in Vancouver, who made me realize, suddenly, without saying anything of the sort, that Pollock was in the same family as Cézanne, and on the same level. But that was in 1986, and the Macula articles are 1977. And it was then, I say it for truth’s sake, without shame, and in gratitude, that my interest in Pollock finally molted into affection. Yes, Greenberg made me love Pollock. The question is, how?

… Does Greenberg write well? Yes, he writes well. Does it matter? Yes, it matters. But what does it mean to write well? It’s to write “true.” And “true,” what does that mean? That means … but take a look for yourself, read a passage:

It is possible to accuse the painter Jackson Pollock, too, of bad taste; but it would be wrong, for what is thought to be Pollock’s bad taste is in reality simply his willingness to be ugly in terms of contemporary taste. In the course of time this ugliness will become a new standard of beauty. Besides, Pollock submits to a habit of discipline derived from cubism; and even as he goes away from cubism he carries with him the unity of style with which it endowed him when in the beginning he put himself under its influence. Thus Pollock’s superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create a genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control. His emotion starts out pictorially; it does not have to be castrated and translated in order to be put into a picture.

Pollock’s third show in as many years … contains nothing to equal the two large canvases, Totem Lesson I and Totem Lesson II, that he exhibited last year. But it is still sufficient — for all its divagations and weaknesses, especially in the gouaches — to show him as the most original contemporary easel-painter under forty. What may at first sight seem crowded and repetitious reveals on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety. One has to learn Pollock’s idiom to realize its flexibility. And it is precisely because I am, in general, still learning from Pollock that I hesitate to attempt a more thorough analysis of his art.

… Shunning all braggartism, an art critic announces to his readers that his function is to learn from artists, and that because this artist has not finished teaching him he can say no more for the moment. Admirable. But I am not here to praise Greenberg, I’m here to find out  how he made me love Pollock. So I’ll ask once and for all, because I’ve got it under my skin: who writes like that today? Where can you read art criticism that discusses a contemporary work, and at the very moment of its blossoming (because one must remember that outside a small circle, Pollock was a nobody in 1946), with the terms customarily reserved for the great masters of the past, and yet without sparing specific reproaches: “divagations and weaknesses, especially in the gouaches”? No jargon, no abstruse theorization, no professorial condescendence, no need to excuse oneself for promoting the artist — or for not promoting him. The reader is assumed to take contemporary art as seriously as the critic. Greenberg only addresses himself to real art lovers, but in a style and in a mode of address that excludes no one. It’s a long time since I’ve read anything similar (or wrote anything similar, I admit) in contemporary art criticism.

[ ... ]

… The good art critic doesn’t deprive himself of theorizing, but he always proceeds intuitively. Like the empiricist described by Deleuze, he is a great fabricator of concepts. And the fabrication of concepts by a good art critic almost always begins with the choice of an appropriate word to express a judgment. I would add that it also ends there. All the “conceptual” work of interpretation — and I put the word between quotation marks, so convinced am I that almost nothing in art is a matter of concepts or theory in the strict sense of the words — is left hanging between  two judgments: a first judgment, aesthetic and perfectly intuitive, from which the desire to understand the work is born, and the same judgment, but in a form nourished by reflection, where the comprehension of the work attains its conclusion. (The fact that judgments change over the course of time and that they come to rest on wider or deeper experience and on a broader general culture changes nothing about the nature of this cycle.) Reflection, for its part, needs a framework, and this framework is often a question or a dilemma.

[ ... ]

… The fact that I myself do not practice art criticism on a daily basis (essentially because I’m slow to judge, and one must be quick to be a discoverer) does not take away my right to wish that others might dust off the laurels of art criticism — and also an attitude before art, and an ethics — in which Greenberg for a time was exemplary. I don’t see why this attitude should be the exclusive property of those who share Greenberg’s taste. The fact that contemporary art does indeed appeal to an intense intellectualization, very specialized and at times even esoteric, does not to my mind prohibit it from being appreciated aesthetically, on the strength of feeling. The sophisticated art lover should possess that level of culture and have incorporated the necessary intellectual references; once he has done so, it is also by feeling that he judges. As to the others, the best way to give them the desire to acquire that level of culture and the urge to hurry out to the galleries is certainly not to talk to them like school children. Finally, I don’t see why it should be beneath a critic’s dignity to hand out stars like travel guides [do]. When I look to the cinema ratings in the entertainment section of the local paper, I don’t feel obligated to judge like the local critic, and once I have gotten to know his taste I finally realize that an unfavorable critique is a good sign that I should go see the film. This type of criticism exists for theater, cinema, and music; it is sorely lacking for the plastic arts. Yet it would be of tremendous help in pulling contemporary art out of its ghetto.

Greenberg often expresses his opinions on the function of the art critic, and always says: point, point, point. There’s just one essential thing to be done, which is to voice one’s own judgment: this is good, that isn’t. Greenberg made use and perhaps abuse of his. Had he done no more, would he be read? Personally, I can’t tire of reading him, because in fact he did nothing more. Let’s be clear: as far as I know, the four volumes of his complete writings published so far do not rack up page after page of little index fingers pointed to works and accompanied by stars. But each of his conceptual elaborations, each of the reflections he shares with the reader, not without touches of the ingénu or the ingenious, each of the expressions that he coins in the proximity of his experience, each of the tropes of his rhetoric are pointers which all designate one aspect or another of a work which might have gone unnoticed without him. All of them ask me: are we the appropriate concept, reflection, expression, or turn of phrase to express that to which we draw your attention? Thus when I read Greenberg (and this is the greatest compliment I can make to an art critic) I am constantly wracked by the temptation to run to the museum and verify his judgment by consulting my own, and then to return to the text and confront his qualifiers with the ones that came to my mind before the work. If something conceptual (something substantive, some substance) emerges from reading (and so it does), it can only come from this double movement which never crushes the visual into the conceptual, the aesthetic into interpretation, designation into signification, Bedeutung into Sinn. So the question I’ve been obstinately asking since the beginning of this chapter, Did Greenberg make me love Pollock, and if so, how? has only this response: a hundred times, he brought me back before Pollock. Greenberg has made me appreciate Greenberg, but it is Pollock who made me love Pollock.

*[this is footnoted in the original text] And thus in answering the questions I’ve set for myself above, I will always keep in mind the two that Jean-Pierre Criqui has asked with respect to Greenberg: “what advantages does he offer to his reader, and at what cost?”

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Critiquing

… It is so fatally easy to have opinions …

This if from an essay ‘James Dickey’ by Howard Nemerov first published in 1972. He’s reviewing Dickey’s book, Drowning with Others. I am quoting from Nemerov’s description of the process of reviewing and leaving out the specific examples that he uses from Dickey’s book:

Coming to know an unfamiliar poetry is an odd and not so simple experience. Reviewing it — conducting one’s education in public, as usual — helps by concentrating the attention; perhaps though it is a gloomy thought, we understand nothing, respond to nothing, until we are forced to return it actively in teaching or writing. It is so fatally easy to have opinions, and if we stop there we never reach the more problematic, hence more interesting, point of examining our sensations in the presence of the new object.

The following notes have to do with coming to know, with the parallel development of sympathy and knowledge. Undoubtedly they raise more questions than they can answer; and they may strike the reader not only as tentative but as fumbling and disorganized also, for the intention is to record not only what happened but something as well of how such things happen.

The situation of reviewing is a special case, narrower than merely reading, and nastier, certainly at first, where one’s response is automatically that of a jealous cruelty. Hmm, one says, and again, Hmm. The meaning of this is: How dare anyone else have a vision! One picks out odds and ends, with the object of making remarks that will guarantee one is A Critic. Little hairs rise on the back of the neck. One is nothing if not critical. For instance:

I spooned out light
Upon a candle thread …

Triumphant sneer. Surely this is too ingenious by far? Has he no self-control?

But already I have suspicions of my behavior.

With that preface, Nemerov sets about doing close criticism of particular examples from Dickey’s book. But again, he pauses … :

… The objections of this stage have a perfectly reasonable air of being right: you describe a characteristic, and present evidence to show that this characteristic is in the poetry. Surely this is How To Do Literary Criticism? All the same, I am still suspicious, and even beginning to get annoyed, because by this time, in order to say what I have said, I have had to read many of the poems a number of times, and have realized that I care for some of them a good deal.

[ ... ]

There does come a further stage, where one begins to understand something of the poet’s individuality and what it decrees for him in the way of necessities,  his own way of putting together the bones and oceans of this world.

After further consideration of specific parts of Dickey’s work, Nemerov concludes thus:

… Possible to continue for a long time describing these complex articulations of simple things. Very little use, though, to a reader who has not the poems to hand. Besides, it may be about time for someone to ask, “Well, is it great poetry or isn’t it?” and someone else to ask, “What about objective, universal standards for judging poetry?”

About all that I shall say to the reader: If you believe you care for poetry you should read these poems with a deep attention. They may not work for you, probably they cannot work for you in just the way that they do for me, but I quite fail to see how you are going to find out by listening to me.

Probably the reviewer’s job goes no further than that. Not to be thought of as malingering, though, I shall make a couple of other remarks.

I have attended to Mr. Dickey’s poems, and they have brought me round from the normal resentment of any new experience, through a stage of high-literary snippishness with all its fiddle about “technique,” to a condition of sympathetic interest and, largely, assent. [ ... ] Where his poems fail for me, it is most often because he rises, reconciles, transcends, a touch too easily, so that his conclusions fail of being altogether decisive; that near irresistibly beautiful gesture, “I believe everything, I am here,” may represent a species of resolution that comes to his aid more often than it should. Perhaps he is so much at home among the figures I sort out with such difficulty that he now and then assumes the effect is made when it isn’t, quite.

There is this major virtue in Mr. Dickey’s poetry, that it responds to attention; the trying to understand does actually produce harmonious resonances from the poems; it seems as though his voyage of exploration is actually going somewhere not yet filled with tourists: may he prosper on the way.

My most recent previous post from Nemerov’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

World Without End

… Such an [imperfect procedural] epistemological stance recognizes neither a beginning nor an end of inquiry.

This is from Considered Judgment by Catherine Z. Elgin (1996):

… Metaphysically, perfect procedural epistemology is committed to the view that the facts are independent of anything we know or believe about them. Just what those facts are is, of course, hotly disputed. They may concern what is the case or what ought to be the case; they may consist of matter in motion, each of many monads reflecting the world from its own point of view, ideas in the mind of God. The crucial point is that because the identity and character of the facts is independent of what we think, we can be right or wrong about them; we can have true or false beliefs about the way the world is. The aim of perfect procedural epistemology is to learn those facts — not by chance, as Columbus happened on America, but in such a way that we are entitled to and secure in our beliefs about them. Otherwise, like Columbus, we might never realize what we have found, and so never stand to profit from it.

Perfect procedural epistemology demands cognitive security. To count as knowledge, a belief must be highly credible, and certifiable as such. Preferring ignorance to error, it excludes from knowledge anything that cannot pass its stringent tests. A variety of cognitive states, functions, and abilities fail to measure up. Being nonsentential, a painter’s sense of color, a farmer’s feel for the land, a poet’s sensitivity to nuance can neither be evaluated in terms of truth nor justified by inference. Such sensibility is thus not knowledge. Nor is every truth bearer a candidate for knowledge. Those that are neither intrinsically credible nor susceptible of inferential justification are out of the running. Neither the insight an apt metaphor affords nor the understanding a great fiction engenders count as knowledge; for they are not backed by appropriate guarantees.

… A perfect epistemology guarantees that if a sentence satisfies its standards, that sentence is permanently credible. But it cannot guarantee that any sentence satisfies its standards. If none does, inquiry is abortive. Compromise being impermissible, the perfect proceduralist is then forced to skepticism.

[ ... ]

… Forced to admit fallibility, the imperfect procedural epistemologist demands corrigibility. Knowing that some well-founded conclusions are erroneous, she incorporates into her epistemology mechanisms for reviewing and revising or rejecting previously accepted claims.

Methods, too, are revisable. The best we could do yesterday need not be the best we can do today. So imperfect procedural epistemology is prepared to criticize, modify, reinterpret, and — if need be — renounce constituent ends and means. If, for example, we discern a bias or limitation in inductive reasoning, we attempt to correct for it. There is, of course, no assurance of success. We might find no modification that does the trick. Or we might find one that does so only by creating more serious problems than it solves. Still, if we succeed, inductive reasoning improves. Although the procedure remains imperfect, it is less defective than it used to be. Imperfect procedural epistemology thus construes justification as inherently provisional. Reasons emerge from a self-monitoring, self-critical, self-correcting activity. Rather than deriving from as static system of uncompromising rules and rigid restrictions, they belong to and are vindicated by a fairly loose and flexible network of epistemic commitments, all accepted for the nonce as the best we can do, each subject to revision or revocation should defects emerge or improvement be found.

Perfect procedures confer permanent credibility. Nothing less than permanently credible claims can support their results, lest ineliminable error creep in. But imperfect procedures yield only provisional credibility. They are free to adduce a wider range of considerations to support their contentions, for both conclusions and arguments are subject to review. Being our best guesses as to how things stand, our considered judgments are initially credible. Should they prove inadequate, we round them out with hypotheses and hunches that we have less faith in. Clearly the method is risky, for considered judgments can be the repository of ancient error; unsupported hypotheses may be insupportable; hunches, wild. Still, the risk is bearable, since initial credibility is revocable. If our considered judgments lead to an untenable conclusion — if, for instance, it generates false predictions or conflicts with more highly warranted claims — we retrench, retool, and try again.

Since its results are revisable, imperfect procedural epistemology is free to use arguments, sources of evidence, and linguistic forms that perfect procedures cannot. An appreciation of the ways useful analogies, sensitive emotional responses, and apt metaphors enlighten might lead it to countenance some types of analogical, metaphorical, and emotive reasoning. Their acceptance is, of course, subject to revocation should they do more harm than good. But in this they do not differ from other modes of argument. Nor is there an order of absolute epistemic priority. Claims pertaining to physical objects may warrant or be warranted by sensation reports. Rules may be validated by yielding credible results, and results vindicated by being products of reasonable rules. Still, justification is not circular, since some elements possess a degree of initial credibility that does not derive from the rest. Justification is holistic. Support for a conclusion comes not from a single line of argument but from a host of considerations of varying degrees of strength and relevance. Indirect evidence and weak arguments, which alone would bear little weight, may be interwoven into a fabric that strongly supports a conclusion. Each element derives warrant from its place in the whole.

… Imperfect procedural epistemology prefers error to ignorance. It risks error to achieve understanding. But it hedges its bets. Because accepted beliefs are corrigible, methods revisable, values subject to reappraisal, error is eliminable. Aware of its own inadequacies, imperfect procedural philosophy looks back as well as forward, reviewing, revoking, altering, and amending its previous conclusions, methods, and standards in light of later results. It considers nothing incontrovertible. What vindicates an individual statement, rule, method, or value is its incorporation into a network of cognitive commitments in wide reflective equilibrium. What vindicates such a network is its mesh with our prior understanding of the subject matter and the methods, rules, and values appropriate to it. Exact correspondence is neither needed nor wanted. Realizing that our previous position is incomplete, and suspecting that it is flawed, we would be unwise to take it as gospel. But we would be equally unwise to ignore it. We treat it as a touchstone, being the best independent source of information about its subject we have.

… The considered judgments that tether today’s theory are the fruits of yesterday’s theorizing. They are not held true come what may but accorded a degree of initial credibility because previous inquiry sanctioned them. We may subsequently revise or reject them, but they give us a place to start. Such an epistemological stance recognizes neither a beginning nor an end of inquiry. As epistemic agents, we are always in media res.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/