If it’s not on facebook it didn’t really happen: or, reality through technology

I watched the first episode of The Wire today.  So far it comes across as one more (exceptionally complicated) cop show.  I was struck, however, by the repeatedly interspersed shots of the action as seen through surveillance technology.  An illustrative example is when two of the cop/detective types (can’t quite keep up with the names yet) step into the elevator together.  As they enter and exit the elevator, the shot is a fairly standard medium-distance color shot–what the tv/film viewer is used to accepting as an unmediated look into the storyworld.  As the elevator ascends, however, the shot shifts to grainy black and white taken from above, as from a security camera.  Nothing whatsoever happens in the elevator–no activity, no conversation, nothing.  The only point of the shot is to remind the viewer that everyone is always being watched, that technology is constantly absorbing and fixing reality for later review and analysis.  What actually happens is ephemera; it’s what the camera captures that is reality.

This sinister reminder of the ubiquitous eye of technology is made (to me) even more disturbing in Paul Murry’s Skippy Dies. This novel seems to suggest that the mediation of reality through technology is not just an unnerving reality, but in fact the contemporary individual’s preferred method of dealing with life.  One scene that sticks in my mind is when history teacher Howard Fallon is having a strained conversation with his girlfriend, a technology writer.  He is playing with an image-enhancing digital camera about which she is writing a piece, and as he looks at her through its gold-toned screen all the tensions of their relationship fall away and he finds it easier to talk to her.  Of course, it doesn’t last–their conversation devolves into argument–but for a few moments, through the screen of the camera, he is able to see the beauty and good in the woman with whom he’s been sharing his life.

In all honesty and hopefully without sounding like an old fogey or a Luddite, I have to admit that this deeply worries me.  It worries me because I see it in myself.  I am much fonder of my online presence–aka the facebook me–than my actual self.  The allure of the online presence is control; facebook Kate is both wittier and prettier than the real thing, due to my ability to carefully think out her words and censor her images.  The thoughtless stupidisms and double chins are largely filtered out in advance, and my “about me” suggests that I spend all my time reading and painting and frolicking outdoors, passing completely over the stretches of time I spend lying on my bed staring at the ceiling or engaged in other unflattering occupations.  It’s uncomfortable to realize that one’s better half is a construct, an electronic projection of the rosier bits of oneself.  It seems wrong to prefer the image of sterilized reality filtered through the camera/internet/phone to raw, messy, uncontrolled, real reality–wrong, but uncomfortably like the truth.

Yes, I’m worried.  Of course, I could talk out the worries with an actual human being, but…I think I’ll just blog about it.

Im/Ex-plosion

“I’m under a lot of pressure” seems to be synonymous with “I’m stressed out.”  But, since I think that the “I”–one’s experiencing self–is located at the intersection of the external/public world and the internal/private mind, it seems that the term “under” might be unnecessarily one-sided.  In other words, pressure pushes up as well as down.  Thinking about stress in terms of pressure–where it’s coming from and what it’s pushing on and what’s pushing back against it–seems appropriate.

Under normal conditions, people seem to live in a state of (relative) equilibrium between their internal and external worlds.  In other words, the activity of one’s mind and the activity of one’s body are essentially balanced.  Stress, however, (at least for me) seems to manifest in an imbalance between internal and external forces.  Either 1) there is extreme pressure exerted by outside forces that threatens to shut down or crush the productive functioning of the internal, or 2) there is a buildup of internal activity that finds no counterpart or release in the external world.

Situation 1 is what happens when one is overwhelmed by responsibility, work, etc, and the result is implosion.  This mode of stress is the sort we most commonly refer to–the world’s expectations are too great to be comfortably born.  Situation 2 is what happens when there’s an incredible, disproportionate amount of something–thoughts or emotions, say–going on inside the mind, and the result is explosion.  This second mode of stress has characterized my last four summers; I was reading loads and was full of ideas, but working full time at a job where no one cared, I had no place to exercise my intellectual restlessness. (Embarrassingly, it also characterizes the entirety of my stint as a teenager…sorry for all the angst, Mom and Dad).  In both cases, I became irritably touchy–explosive, in the most unpleasant way. 

Implosion is, however, markedly worse.  Explosion, at least, can be productive.  You can have an explosion of creative activity, but no one’s ever heard of creative implosion (and for good reason).  The result of implosion is apathy, paralysis, an utter inability to cope.  Implosion, therefore, is the enemy.

Thinking about stress this way–in terms of a balance of internal and external pressures–it seems to me that the way to counter intense pressure from outside forces (over which you have no direct control) is to work up an equally intense frenzy of internal activity.  The possibility of destructive implosion is then neutralized by an equal pressure from within.  By this account, external forces cannot on their own create stress, liberating the individual from the victim’s role. 

This seems potentially useful.  Although, at this point, a large mocha, neck massage, and speed-reading superpowers might be more useful.  It’s hard to say.

Helpful Words

Because I occasionally still fall prey to the “parents are parents and not actually real people” fallacy, I was surprised when my dad mentioned how sometimes, because of the particulars of your life at a given moment, a book or film can suddenly and profoundly touch you.  I guess I thought this was something that happened only to me, or only to people who frequently read fiction (my dad’s a nonfiction man, primarily).  On further reflection, though, I suspect that this may be a fundamental and universal human experience.

A lot of novels have grabbed me over the years, and for various reasons.  When I read the The Chronicles of Narnia in second grade, for instance, I was just old enough that (having experienced the relentless routine of the school day for a few years) I was incredibly aware of and disgusted with the usual.  Formal education was boring for me pretty much all the way on up through high school, and I think fantasy series–Narnia, Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce’s work, etc.–rushed in to sooth the sting of constrained dulness that was a major feature of my teens and pre-teens. 

 College wasn’t boring anymore, but actually caring (about more than my GPA) made life stressful in new ways.  An accidental reading of Byatt’s Possession while applying to grad school felt, at the time, like the only thing between me and nervous breakdown.  At any other time the book would have been merely interesting and well-written, but at that time it was precisely the passionate case for the pleasure and worthiness of an academic career that I so urgently needed to remind myself that all this worry would be worth it in the end. 

In recent weeks, it hasn’t been books or movies so much as graffiti.  Someone wrote “Try Harder” in black sharpie on the rise of a stair approaching the third floor of Denney Hall.  Every time I see it I feel like it’s speaking directly to me, and I do try harder, at least for awhile.  Another anonymous friend scribbled “you are smart and beautiful” in a toilet stall somewhere on campus; I didn’t feel either of those things the day I found it.  And, one day when the sidewalk along Neil Avenue was freshly poured, someone grabbed a stick and wrote “forget regret” in the wet concrete. 

That person didn’t know that I would run past their defacement of public property on a November morning when I needed to hear what they had to say.  A.S. Byatt didn’t know that my emotional stamina in the fall and winter of 2009-2010 depended on her publishing a literary love story.  That’s what makes the phenomenon so powerful, I think–it reminds us that we’re all human, and more the same than we are different.  People put their words out there without knowing for whom, and because we’re all so similar at the bottom of it all, their words are the perfect shape for the holes in someone’s heart that so desperately need filling.          

Thinking about Winnie the Pooh thinking

Even when reading through Winnie the Pooh and House at Pooh Corner with an eye for narrative levels and metalepsis, one can’t help Noticing Things (things like Milne’s proclivity for nonstandard capitalizations, for instance).  It’s been awhile since I spent significant time with Pooh, so a lot of these discoveries are hitting me for the first time.  I wish I had time to focus academic work on everything; however, here are a couple of interesting things about Pooh that I won’t be covering in my narrative theory paper:

1. There’s a major emphasis on literacy and intellectual prestige.  None of the characters is fully literate, but those who have even a shred of reading and writing ability flaunt it extravagantly.  Pooh–who frequently misspeaks–refers to “messages” as “missages,” a particularly apt malapropism given that his ability to interpret language ends with recognizing the letter “P” and equating it with “Pooh,” leading him to miss the point of many written communications completely.  Despite the fact that all the animals are in more or less the same boat when it comes to lack of literacy skills, there also seems to be a serious shame attending illiteracy.  Lying and evasion is preferable to frank admission that one can’t read.  This focus on literacy is closely aligned with the repeated attention to who has a brain and who has just fluff between his ears.  Having a brain is considered a prerequisite for intelligence and authority, and Pooh is repeatedly referred to as a “bear of very little brain” or “bear of no brain at all.”  Yet, (and this brings me to point 2), Pooh is responsible for the vast majority of artistic creation that takes place over the course of the books.
2. There’s also quite a bit of commentary about the artistic process.  After eating and spending time with his friends, composing poetry seems to be Pooh’s primary pastime.  Few chapters go by without a “hum” or two of the bear’s own creation.  And, while his poetry uses nonsense words and is often somewhat simplistic, Pooh is not a naïve artist.  He is self-conscious and seems to have a philosophy of composition.  One telling example is when he promises to write a poem about Piglet’s bravery when Owl’s house is blown over and Pooh and Owl require a rescue.  Several days have passed since the event, and Piglet is growing impatient, so Pooh returns to the site of the disaster to wait for inspiration.  “But it isn’t easy…because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you.  And all you can do is go where they can find you,” he reflects.  “I shall begin with ‘Here lies a tree’ because it does, and then I’ll see what happens.”  After composing a seven-stanza poem with a fairly complex rhyme scheme, Pooh reflects again: “It’s come different from what I thought it would, but it’s come.”  Later, when Piglet questions his own heroism, Pooh says, “in poetry–in a piece of poetry–well, you did it, Piglet, because the poetry says you did.  And that’s how people know.”  This statement is almost an echo of Hayden White on history–the historiographer’s composed account of history validates and constructs the past as we know it, just as Pooh’s poem validates and constructs Piglet’s bravery.  This sense of Pooh as philosopher and poet is almost nonexistent in film versions of the stories, retained only in  the characteristic pose of a head-scratching Pooh muttering “think, think, think.” 

It is largely (for me) this image of such an intense, physical, earnest attempt to think deep thoughts that makes Pooh so endearing.  That and his unabashed desire for food.  I like to think that if I had to pick a literary character who’s most like me it would be someone badass, beautiful, and brilliant (a la Elizabeth Bennet), but, honestly speaking, it’s probably that good-natured, bewildered, rotund, fluff-filled philosopher-poet-of-very-little-brain, Pooh.

Cultural Relativism and Stuff

Point 1: Hey, I’m back!  In the four months since I’ve posted, my life and conception of self have been turned completely inside out, but as things are beginning to fall back into place in this new, wonky, and wonderful world of grad school, and as I’m more full of thoughts than ever, and as I think best in writing, and as I need a creative outlet at least somewhat separate from school, I’ve decided to make blogging a priority again. 

Point 2: I’m very fond of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.  I also maintain a very firm (one might say granite-esque) belief in the value of free literary engagement with serious topics like religion.  This is a point that seems obvious to me–if we don’t allow for creative dissent, we are never going to get any closer to the truth (or the understanding that there’s no such thing as truth, as the case may be).  So when the matter of the fatwa came up in class, I took a confident, flying leap and defended the book on the basis of freedom of speech, the press, open debate, creativity, whatever–and smashed headlong into the shiny glass windowpane of cultural relativism.  As my brain lay gasping and fluttering, metaphorical feathers swirling down around it, I struggled with two apparently mutually exclusive beliefs, both of which I hold.  (1) That (thoughtful, considered, non-hateful) free discourse is good, not just for some people in some times or places, but for all people everywhere, and (2) that just because a belief happens to be mine and my culture’s doesn’t mean that it is somehow more valid than an opposing belief belonging to a different culture or individual.  It’s perplexing.  I’m not just entertaining two sides of an idea here, I’m strongly embracing two beliefs that seem inherently incompatible.  I’m saying that I support a certain statement as universally true, and at the same time that I don’t believe in the concept of universal truth. 

So, my question is, does the fact that I support mutually exclusive ideas mean that I haven’t thought out my beliefs well enough?  Does one require an internally consistent set of convictions in order to be a clear-thinking, educated, intelligent person?  If, for instance, I met an individual who claimed to be both a strict Biblical literalist and a believer in Darwinian evolution, I would at the very least want an explanation of how she made those two belief systems work together.  If she couldn’t provide a rational account, I would probably assume (whether fairly or not) that she was not particularly thoughtful and hadn’t given her own beliefs much critical attention.  Not wanting to be an uncritical thinker, and not being able to explain how to make my espousal and disavowal of universal truths compatible with one another, and still adhering to both original propositions, I find the whole thing kind of upsetting.

Capering Word Puppets

I was reading A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower this afternoon, when my eyes got tangled in a description of a class studying Howards End and Women in Love:

These grown up human beings speak wisely and foolishly of other human beings: Margaret and Ursula, Forster and Lawrence, Birkin and Mr. Wilcox, as though they were (as they are) people they know (and don’t know).  They know perfectly well, if reminded, that four of these six beings are actually made of words, are capering word puppets, not flesh and blood.

This passage made me realize, abruptly, that to the individual there is no difference between a character in a work of literature and a real human being whom he has never met.  There are numerous people–friends of friends, great-grandparents dead before my birth, authors and artists and intellectuals whose works are their only public presence, famous historical figures, etc.–whom I know only by description.  In my understanding they, too, are nothing but linguistic constructions, “capering word puppets” less developed, probably, than the meticulously woven characters of my favorite authors.

Our willingness and effortless ability to treat these language-sketches as real people whether we may someday encounter them as such (a friend’s boyfriend or J.K. Rowling) or not (George Eliot or Julius Caesar) suggests that literature is as valid a forum for the study of human nature as history or current events.  This is, of course, a position that I tend not to dispute, although there are certainly people who set up fiction in opposition to “real life.”  They may scorn the study of “nonsense,” but fiction, I think, is often as real to the individual as “real life” itself, sometimes more-so.

I need to think more about this–the fusion or distinction of the real and the fictional–and whether it is at all important, where the boundaries lie, and what lies inside those boundaries (King Arthur, Robin Hood, Jesus–man? myth? inseparable fusion of the two? (manth?)).  Anyway, it interests me, and it is a pleasure to think once in awhile.