I Want the World to Shimmer and Gleam

There may be infinite readings of this or that text but there are still good and bad readings. A good reading is surprising, delightful, and generous. Things once familiar become refreshingly unfamiliar; habit gives way to the now and a thing experienced hundreds of times suddenly comes into focus as if for the very first time.

Few things exhilarate the way a good reading does. A fine and fresh distinction or well-placed reversal infuses the banal with vitality, the quotidian with wonder, the dead with life. A good reading is uncanny, taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar so you at once know and don’t know the thing.      

A reading can’t really be wrong — there is no code to be deciphered, no truth awaiting behind or within the words. Neither the author nor the critic nor the professor will deliver the answer from on high. All there are are different readings.

And yet we can still pass judgment, say this reading is good or bad. For instance, a reading may be out of bounds. To say that Moby Dick is a tale of Soviet oppression is just plain silly. And, I suppose, we can say it’s wrong. Such a reading exercises a certain  violence on a text, making it bend in the most uncomfortable ways. So perhaps rather than saying a reading is wrong, we can say a reading is…distasteful? Unethical? Foul — as in baseball? Yes, I like “foul” because it is at once ethical and aesthetic.

There may be no proof that a reading is right but there is evidence — a foul pole of a sort. To read something demands attention, an accounting for what’s there, for what’s happening. There is something thorough about a good reading (although not exhaustive — it can never exhaust a text as a text is infinite).

And then there are plain old bad readings of things, readings that may very well be in bounds but that are bad for any number of reasons. A bad reading makes the thing less interesting, quashing its multivalences (think: writing on museum walls or much of ideology critique). A bad reading may just be obvious, the reader not really doing anything at all but echoing that which has already declared itself.

It’s a matter of posture and health, of the terms with which you come to the world. Do you seek to recognize the world? Or (re)create it? Of course, we often seek to confirm what we know. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it is necessary. But when I come to a book or art or politics or sometimes just a glass of tequila, I want to see it anew, fresh, I want to spin it into new shapes and new modes of living. I want to be lead astray of myself, taken somewhere new and exciting. I want the world to shimmer and gleam.

Nothing is More Normal than the Weirdness of the World

So one day you wake up and for no apparent reason you're thinking about your friend Jamie. You haven't talked to Jamie in, I don't know, 2 years. But there she is, her virtual self staring you in the face. Never mind, whatever, you go on with your day.  And then there's that distinctive pluck of harp strings announcing a new text message: it's from Jamie!

"That's weird," you say to someone. "I was just thinking about her and, bang, there she is! I'm telling you, man, it's fucking weird!"

But, of course, nothing is less weird. It's only weird because, for some reason, the basic forces of the universe elude our science and everyday assumptions about the world.

Because, as it turns out, the world teems with forces that exceed us. Egad! The world is not just an object of our will! No, no it's not.  The world has a lot of bodies in it the least of which, in many ways, are human bodies. There are rocks and bugs, clouds and winds, not to mention all the shit we've made from Pokemon to airplanes to nuclear bombs to Borges to the bible and this here interwebs. There are planets and asteroids and black holes and suns — so many, many suns, so many more suns than there will ever be people. 

Now picture the life of all of these things. What is the life of a sun like? My god, it's intense!  Makes your latest break up look a tad, well, paltry. Not that the break up isn't important, too. But just consider life, for one moment, on a cosmic level.  This shit is complex. And to say there are forces at work — more than gravity and centrifugal — is putting it mildly.

Pay attention to all the information, all the flows of mood and energy, that run through any given day beginning with your dreams and the state they leave you in when you awake. And your day hasn't even begun! You wake with a mood, with a sense of the day that comes from all sorts of places — the weather, what you ate the day before, what you think will happen that day, and then...all the solar storms, all the moods and thoughts of all the people you'll interact with today, all the people who may be thinking about you in one form or another, all the debris that's kicking around this cosmos.

And then there's you, a node amidst this vast network. And you think it's "weird" that you were thinking about Jamie and then — and then! — she texted you.

Now carry on with your day. What's the temperament of traffic? You jump in to a coffee shop to grab an espresso. What's the vibe? You know there's a vibe. So what is it? And how are you feeling? Ask yourself why. Try to see all the forces that might have lead to this mood at this moment on this day. It's only 8:42 a.m. and you've experienced so many forces, so many moods and flows, that exceed you. Keep up this interrogation all day and then tomorrow and the next day and the next. What patterns emerge? What have you learned about the cosmos and how you go in, and with, it?

The universe is overrun with energetic forces, the human amongst them. We are not actors on a stage. The stage is alive and complex and various — it's playing us. There are so many forces at work at any given moment, driving your moods and experiences, from the solar to the digestive.

So wouldn't it be even weirder if you were thinking about Jamie and she didn't text you?

Attraction

I've always loved magnets: to feel their pull is to experience the palpability of a profound truth.  Things are drawn to each other for no other reason than they just are; it's not a matter of will — they don't choose it — but a matter of constitution. But not everything is drawn to anything. No, there have to be very particular conditions, the make up of the bodies needs to be just right. But then, oh then, there is an inescapable attraction.

This kind of attraction and its counterpoint, repulsion, run through all kinds of encounters. We are attracted to certain foods, certain booze, certain drugs, certain colors, certain weather, certain speed, certain emotional intensity and, yes, certain people.

It's a great way to read the world and your place in it: which things draw your body in? At times, we call this taste. I know people — usually men and usually men with unruly beards — who really, really like beer.  They make and drink all kinds of beers. Not me. I find the yeastiness repulsive. I may enjoy a cold pilsner or, from time to time, a bitter porter or stout. But, for the most part, beer doesn't agree with me and I, in turn, am not drawn to it.  It's as if beer and I repel each other.

I love when I'm attracted to something, when there is that spark that exceeds my desire and seeks to draw me closer, to bring me into its orbit. I especially love when this happens with another person. It's a moment in which the universe speaks loudly and clearly.

It's rare — at least it is for me.  I find plenty of people attractive; that is to say, I find them capable of attracting others. I see and understand the appeal of their allure. But that doesn't mean I'm attracted to them. No, attraction is something other than being attractive. It is a force that exists between two bodies.

Now, this force may not be in equal proportion. I may be more drawn to you than you to me. I mean, when I have a little magnet near my fridge, it lurches out of my hands towards that plastic clad metal frame. But the fridge doesn't budge at all.

And yet the fridge is not indifferent.  On the contrary, it calls that little magnet to it, beckons it, seduces it with its iron siren song.  Attraction is always mutual but not necessarily in equal proportion.

And attraction need not be sexual. I am attracted to my good male friends; I want to be around them, to move in their orbit, to enjoy their sense in its many forms. No doubt, much of attraction is sensual even if not sexual. I like looking at my male friends; I think, usually, they smell nice. And sometimes I meet men who are pleasant and smart and funny and yet, for whatever reason, I am not attracted to them.

But attraction is never just physical because, well, nothing is just physical. All bodies are run through with ideas and concepts, with affect and memories, with invisible traces of images and experiences and knowledge. And all bodies enjoy a style, a mode of moving through the world, a rhythm and speed and intensity.

Attraction, of course, happens in ever differing intensity.  Sometimes, you are kinda drawn to another. And other times, it's as if the sun itself were pulling you into its fiery embrace.

Those are rare and beautiful events — you meet someone at a party or behind a counter or wherever and there is this incredible, palpable, clear energy reverberating between you. Your body and everything else quivers, even if just a bit. I believe this power deserves to be honored. After all, it's the literal pull of cosmos so it seems silly to turn away from it, even if you can.

This doesn't mean the attraction will yield only goodness. There is no assurance of that whatsoever. In fact, I might say that most intense attractions will end badly, like being proverbially pulled into the sun. It seems people often maintain miserable relationships because the power of attraction is so strong. Then again, the power of the attraction may just fizzle of its own accord.

But so it goes. The will of the universe is the very way different bodies interact with each other, attract and repel each other. To me, that pull is such a beautiful thing, is erotic in and of itself — even if the nature of the attraction is not erotic. Just sitting there feeling the magnets pull and repel makes my heart throb. 

It's All Right There

"We know, we can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by crossing. Or it appears as declining development. The anthropologists among the criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo." — Nietzsche

"Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly." — Georges Perec

We like to believe, perhaps, that there is a surface of things that is transitory and, in the end, meaningless. Under this surface is what really matters: there lies the the truth of things.

But the world reveals itself, always and necessarily. Scratch away the surface and you scratch away life itself.  The trick is to learn to see the world.

Usually, we don't see.  Our vision is blinded by familiarity and fear — familiarity of what we know and expect; and fear of engagement with the overwhelming vitality of the now. And, of course, out of fear we rely on the familiar — we prefer to see the controlled dead rather than the sublime living.

Look around.  Everything is right there.  Not only all the information you need but all the information there is.  You might have to poke about a bit. You might have to squint. You may even need to close your eyes.  But you'll never have to sift it out because life happens in this world and nowhere else.

Now look at someone's face.  Really look at it.  See the overwhelming amount of information in the skin, the posture, the eyes, the rhythm of movements and twitches.  It's unbearable. We leak ourselves  continuously, relentlessly, necessarily. There are of course thoughts and fears and images in your head I can't see but if I look long enough and hard enough at you, I'll sense those thoughts and fears and images.

This is what psychics do: they read the wealth of information available, the information we tend to ignore out of fear. But just look and you, too, can see. It's obvious when we desire and are desired — you don't need the girl to say, "I want you," to know that she wants you and, at the same time, that she's a tad ambivalent, curious, cautious. You know all that. But still you ignore it, play dumb: "How am I supposed to know?" Because you do.  You see it on others. You can tell when that girl likes that boy. But when it comes to yourself, your engagement with the world, you turn blind.

We wear our experiences. We wear our lives on our faces and in our flesh. We wear our fears and thoughts and desires and images and histories. We are a cinema screen (and a camera at the same time).

The trick is knowing how to read it. The trick is not just listening to what people say but to how they say it. We know this most of the time — so and so protests too much, we thinks.  Which is to say, we read people's behaviors not just what they say. But we stop short of reading all the information they are giving us.

Look again at your lover's face while he or she is speaking, thinking, cooking, writing, sleeping.  Really look.  The complexity and plethora of pathos is sublime: it overwhelms.

And yet if we overcome this fear of sublimity, we'll be so much smarter. We'll understand why and how we feel the way we do, why and how we ended up here rather than there.  We'll know that our lovers speak of nonchalance but are in fact profoundly afraid of loneliness, of stillness; we'll know that even though they say they love you, they in fact love love; we'll know all the ambivalence that goes into every kiss.

Sometimes, to see means not staring at your lover's face but standing back to take in the lay of the land. You need to see the map of the territory and the trajectories that landed you here and where they'll most likely take you next. Like all things, seeing demands both touring and mapping your life. 

We live at the surface, always. This is not superficial, at least not in the sense of being false or "mere" surface. This is being empirical rather than blind. 

Complex Terms of Engagement: On Mike White and "Enlightenment"

So I began watching HBO's series, Enlightenment, and found it difficult. The main character, played by Laura Dern, is annoying. But so is everyone else in the show. But then, after a few weeks, because I found it so difficult that I returned to it thinking there must be something there. And I realized that it's, in fact, astoundingly brilliant.

Why? Because it refuses all the familiar terms of engagement and gives us, in their stead, sophisticated, respectful new ones. There is no character with whom we sympathize; there is no character who is downright bad. Rather, we get relationships and situations in which our sympathies and empathies shift, sometimes moment to moment.

Take the relationship between Laura Dern and her mother (who is also her real life mother). When she first moves in without asking, you're torn. On the one hand, Laura Dern is so assuming — doesn't her mother have a life of her own? On the other hand, isn't Ms. Dern her daughter? Shouldn't she be welcomed?  This play, this ambivalence, this shifting takes place relentlessly between all characters in all situations — in every freakin' scene.

In some sense — in a different sense than we usually use the terms — this is a situation comedy: the situation dictates the terms of our engagement, not the character or some meta-situation.  Take the main character, the character whose voice over we here: at times, we not only hate her, we fear her, we feel for those she assaults and annoys — even though we don't like them, either.  And that leaves us, as viewers, in a rather strange situation as our own emotional responses spin.

And what makes it all more difficult is the naked human emotionality — it's so realistic, so poignant,  all that passive aggression, all those micro-politics between people, between family members, loves, co-workers.  It's all so familiar.

What's unfamiliar is how the show engages us, what it asks from us, how it speaks to us.  It is not there to make us comfortable — on the contrary, it seeks to unsettle us from what it means to watch a drama, to watch television, from what it means to identify with a character or a story. This is not a show you just kick back and enjoy, gently chuckling at Ross' antics. 



This, alas, is what defines so much of Mike White's work — Chuck & Buck and the excellent Year of the Dog. These are understated, difficult movies in that they give us a familiar emotional terrain —loneliness, desire — but deliver them in unfamiliar terms.  They ask strange things of us as our sympathies and identification shift over and over again. And through it all, there is this incredible emotional poignancy that is, at time, unbearable.



All art — all people, all things —  presents us with terms of engagement. They come to us, they come at us, with a certain posture, asking for certain things — our attention, our reactions. Most pop music, most pop movies and TV, ask very little of us.  They confirm the same old hetero-bourgeois nonsense; they confirm what we know and who we are as they conform to the standard terms of engagement. Characters stay the same; we know what to expect of them.  We root for so and so and against that other so and so as we hope Ross and Rachel get together in the end.

But Mike White will have none of that.  He presents us with very different terms of engagement. He understands that life is complex and that art, too, can be complex; that identification and sympathy and empathy may shift, that who we are and what we care about may change as circumstances change.  In Mike White's world, we may like a certain character even while we cringe at his or her behavior. 

And, while perhaps unsettling, these terms of engagement are more respectful — more respectful of life and more respectful of us as viewers. These terms ask us to be grown ups, to embrace the complexity of life and the complexity of viewing. 

Bergson on Philosophic Images

Here, for the edification of all, is Bergson on the philosopher's image and how we might approach it — through imitating its style, embodying it. We don't seek understanding; we seek a certain sight. I love this passage:

"What is this intuition? If the philosopher has not been able to give the formula for it, we are certainly not able to do so. But what we shall manage to recapture and hold is a certain intermediary image between the simplicity of the concrete intuition and the complexity of the abstractions which translate it, a receding and vanishing image, which haunts, unperceived perhaps, the mind of the philosopher, which follows him like his shadow through the ins and outs of his thought and which, if it is not the intuition itself, approaches it much more closely than the conceptual expression, of necessity symbolical, to which the intuition must have recourse in order to furnish ʻexplanation.' Let us look closely at this shadow: by doing so we shall divine the attitude of the body which projects it. And if we try to imitate this attitude, or better still to assume it ourselves, we shall see as far as it is possible what the philosopher saw."  — Henri Bergson,  "Philosophical Intuition," in The Creative Mind, p, 109.

Learning to Be Seen

 This is a fun exercise. Go through actors you know — like, dislike, don't care — and ask how they stand towards the camera, whether they let themselves be seen. Consider the ever dreamy George Clooney, who will never been seen; Mike White, who is somehow always seen; and Harvey Keitel who invites the gaze and then lets himself be seen.

So, yes, we live in the age of the always on camera. We lead public lives. And, yes, this makes for some anxiety amongst young and old alike. We elders cringe as we fear the camera; the kids cringe as they read comments and likes.

But there is nothing inherently good or bad about this inside out world. As with everything, there are some good things, there are some bad things, there are a lot of neutral things.  It all depends on the individual, on how he or she goes, what he or she wants.

What's most important is not how we slow down or speed up this involution. It's how we stand towards it, how we invent new postures of living, new ways of being in the world.

As Marshall McLuhan says, problems arise when we use old technologies to make sense of new environments — we use the horse and buggy to understand the railroad, the book to understand the video game.  Of course to a 65 year old literature professor, video games look like the devil, tempting kids not to read. But to the gamers, video games are a new kind of text that have non-linear narratives and move more than eyeballs. 

It seems to me, then, that in a world of an always on camera, rather than turn away, we need to learn how to be seen.  And, perhaps, know when — and how — to hide.

Here is something I wrote a while back about Marc Lafia's great film, The Revolution of Everyday Life: 

"The distinction the film draws is not between public and private but between demanding to be seen and allowing oneself to be seen. On the one hand, there’s Tjasa who imagines herself a radical fomenting change through situationist performances. Tjasa demands to be seen, screeching into the camera just as she screeches at others, to no one and everyone. Meanwhile, Lizzie, her lover, avoids the spotlight but finds a much more intimate relationship with the camera and with being seen. In a gesture of infinite generosity, she allows herself to be seen.

...In these two modes we get postures of standing towards perception, postures of being seen. We get an ethics (mercifully bereft of judgment)."


Revolution of Everyday Life from marc lafia on Vimeo.


How does one learn to be seen? What kinds of demands does this make on our personhood? What, precisely, is it asking of us?

I, for one, go cold in front of a camera.  I am a narcissist and feel my best when holding forth in front of a large group. But stick me in front of a camera and I get nervous, awkward, tongue tied.  How do I change this?  Practice, sure, but I'm talking about more than that. I'm talking about how I would have to change my self-perception, my literal and metaphoric posture. 

My instinct says it demands greater self-confidence and that age-old mode of wisdom: resignation.  That is, just giving in, letting go, surrendering all of body and mind and whatever else we are to circumstance, to the gaze. I think in resignation there is a kind of indifference — by succumbing all the way, we move past caring, past posing. 

But I know of resignation through Kierkegaard — and what the fuck does he know about life in the Spectacle? (If I were one of the kids, I put some sort of emoticon denoting I'm half serious, half not.)

Part of me thinks we have to move past the true/false dichotomy, past what we consider our true selves and our false selves, into a perpetually grey area where dissimulation is the norm (and hence, perhaps, simulation?).

Or is it the opposite and we need to affirm a line between that me and this me? 

I think of the famous story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man (I've heard other attributions but this one works well). Hoffman shows up on the set looking a wreck— he'd been doing god knows what for days in preparation for a scene in which he's tortured and then runs away. Olivier looks at him and says, "Dustin, chap, you look absolutely terrible." And Hoffman replies, "I've been preparing for the scene, getting into character." To which Olivier replies, "Well, why don't you just try acting?"

Which posture, I ask you, is the posture the always on camera demands? What new postures do we need to invent? How do we learn to be seen?  And what is exposed in that gaze? What do we reveal and what do we hold back? When do we act and when do we "be"? Or is that the wrong question?