October 19, 2006
A Miscellany
Dark Times. 2006. Collage. © Catherine King.
by Jerome du Bois
[This post is like a bunch of scribbled notes I've been carrying around, jammed into my pocket.]
Properly speaking, The Tears of Things is not a blog anymore. We no longer reach out into the wider world. It's just a record for us, and a time-capsule witness for the future. Since nobody ever responds to anything we post, why should we care if we have readers?
We started out as an art and local culture blog, but we got weary of standing up for high standards against the vicious attacks by local trolls. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, we love the city, but we just can't stand the scene. The misogynists and whores (and we mean that literally) can have it. Maybe it will be reclaimed by better people in the future.
These days we're devoting ourselves to beauty, fashion, our own art, and the study of important things: the meaning of life, the meaning of the afterlife, physics, consciousness, and the nature of time. And we'll post about them if and when we feel like it.
As to beauty and fashion: people often talk in this town about the city having no culture, no definitive profile, but these are the same people who appear in public in t-shirts, khaki shorts, and flip-flops. When we went to Macbeth for the Arizona Opera season opener, I was astounded to see a guy in a blue work shirt, tail out, blue jeans, scuffed brown athletic shoes, and a backwards baseball cap sitting across the aisle. He belonged in a sports bar. We, of course, dressed formally, as we always do, and Catherine faded all the women into the woodwork, as she always does.
The ball cap guy was an extreme case, but nearly everybody else was on the same no-style continuum. We encountered a similar situation last night at the Herberger, for Twelfth Night. We were by far the best-dressed couple there. Style begins within, and takes effort. Catherine spent three solid days of sewing to tailor her ensemble just right. Everyone else dressed as if they were about to do the laundry. Phoenix will continue to have no distinctive, vibrant style until its citizens develop it within themselves, then display it to others.
Both the opera and the play were excellent, by the way, overflowing with talent and energy and professionalism. (Though, again, we must say that the costume designers need to exercise a lot more imagination.)
Whyn Weirds Kaleide, reproduced below, reflects my feelings about beautiful reason's hard work in its present atomizing battle against both totalitarian ideology and liberal antihumanism. I got the idea for the unusual spelling from reading about scholar John Andrews and his explanation of "unanchored language" in Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars.
The piece I'm working on now is based on Julian Jaynes's classic maverick book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The book's premise is that until about 3,000 years ago people had no subjective consciousness, but instead a hallucinatory mentality which obeyed the voices of gods. This will be the first time I've used figuration in an artwork in several years. Its central feature is the altar of the Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurta I. It will also feature a throne adapted from the Ark of the Covenant, a human brain, and a pair of huge Assyrian eyes with faceted gemstones for irises.
From Jaynes:
About 1230 BC, Tukulti-Ninurta I, tyrant of Assyria, had a stone altar made that is dramatically different from anything that preceded it in the history of the world. In the carving on its face, Tukulti is shown twice, first as he approaches the throne of his god, and then as he kneels before it. The very double image fairly shouts aloud about this beggarly posture unheard of in a king before in history. As our eyes descend from the standing king to the kneeling king just in front of him, it is as emphatic as a moving picture, in itself a quite remarkable artistic discovery. But far more remarkable is the fact that the throne before which this first of the cruel Assyrian conquerors grovels is empty.
No king before in history is ever shown kneeling. No scene before in history ever indicates an absent god. The bicameral mind has broken down.
The piece will be called Bicameral Breakdown / No Voice Your God.
Let's see, what other notes have I got in my pocket. Oh, yes . . .
I like maverick books, which are dissents by experts from the mainstream of their fields. Such as Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos, Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, E.R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational, and Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. Smolin's new book, The Trouble With Physics, mentions a couple more maverick books, one of which I'm reading now.
It's by Julian Barbour, and it's called The End of Time. Barbour is trying to reconcile Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics, and his argument requires the elimination of time. All that exists are static real objects, he says, and "time is inferred from things." It's tough going for a layman like me, and he may even be wrong, but the important thing is that it makes me think hard. It knocks me off the rails of conventionality and forces me to look at the world differently. And I get to witness a great thinker thinking in a new way, and telling me what other great thinkers before him were thinking about. To me it is pure inspiration, and a heartening antidote to the dismal political fools surrounding us, and the shrunken-head artists we've left behind.
Barbour appears as one of the "seers" in the latter pages of Smolin's new book. Smolin argues that physics, tied down like Gulliver in Lilliput by the hegemony of string theory, needs people who question basic assumptions, not just about string theory, but about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum theory. They're out there, he says, but they're shunned by the academic establishment.
I had no idea that physics departments were just as hidebound as liberal arts, fine arts, and political science. It's worse than I thought. For anyone interested, Burton Richter recently wrote what I consider the best précis on string theory's current status. He says they're doing metaphysics, not physics.
Speaking of metaphysics, what about the dead and their spirits? They're out there, too, and Catherine is still taking pictures of them. I don't see any inconsistency between my devotion to reason, science, and natural selection, and my conviction that the dead impinge on our reality. They bring our contingency into focus, and sharpen the knowledge of life's precious, fragile arc.
Between metaphysics and physics we find biologist Rupert Sheldrake, another maverick expert. In The Sense of Being Stared At and other books, he postulates the existence of morphic (or morphogenetic) fields, which are like invisible extensions of individual persons (and animals). There's plenty about these fields on his website. I mark here only the following: In the section of Stared At on "Animal Sensitivity," he recounts case after case about pets who sense when their owners are in trouble. On August 5th of this year I got into an auto accident. Right about the time the two cars collided, Catherine told me later that our laid-back cat, three miles away at home with her, began moaning, caterwauling, and running restlessly throughout the house. It took her about a half-hour to calm down.
The world is still full of fascinating mysteries. I'm glad I don't feel stunted and stifled anymore. I'm glad I chose to step back and away from the current skanky culture and the preoccupation with Islamic life-haters. These are dark times, but they're not the end times.
A final note about fascination and beauty, via Paglia, in the form of an epigrammatic poem I wrote years ago: