The nature of my particular fanaticism is such that I prefer to enjoy. So long as it should prove to remain possible, viable. It pleases me to enjoy. I prefer it to the gloomy alternative. That pleasure is pleasing and fun is fun: small children not only grasp these tautologies, they are known to be quite declarative about it. What happens to us? Along the way? There are people out there who only like Scandinavian black metal, K-pop boy bands, or Italian opera. It would not surprise me in the least if out there somewhere exists some fellow who of all the things in this bountiful world only likes Stan Getz live in Stockholm. The onetime Playboy associate editor, Discordian prankster, and psychonaut Robert Anton Wilson liked to perorate on the subject of individual “reality-tunnels,” and we might simply conclude—perhaps too simply—that the issue is one relating to narrowing with respect to these tunnels. We might think of it as a myopia of progressive concretion. It is commonly believed that old people don’t like anything new. Here is one of my favourite passages from any book ever, which one can find in Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati: “Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality-tunnels, and try to show them how to break that bad habit, but I don’t feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.” The funny thing about this quotation is that you can share it with, like, one thousands people—as I am sure I have done in my work with my fellow alcoholics and addicts in and outside of a treatment context—and nine-hundred-ninety-nine of them will nod vigorously, maybe even say something approximating “far out man”...then proceed to do absolutely nothing with what they have just pretended to learn. Behaviourists have been telling us for a good while that people don’t want to change their thinking because they believe it is close to the whole of who they are. Challenged on core beliefs and values, people see red, detect an existential threat—the midbrain kicks in. This is the hopelessness of the human being, equivalent to a trout flopping in a motor boat with a hook in its gums. Your programming has tribalized you, you are caught, the platitudes you trumpet not properly your speech. What are the things you like? What is to your taste? Okay, stop talking, you bore me. If I do generally tend to find individual human beings monumentally tiresome, my particular fanaticism habitually directs itself toward an effort to try and enjoy the things human individuals make, alone or in groups. We are talking about specific varieties of things. We are most especially talking about writing, cinema, and music. I want to enjoy these things and appear to have better success than most people, especially professional (ahem) critics. That being said, sometimes, yes, it is all but impossible to enjoy. If I go and see a very bad movie—one I believe to be woefully inept, gratingly tedious, or totally objectionable—my last resort is to revert to sociologist or anthropologist mode, simply trying to figure out what garbled claptrap the bad movie might be expressing about the world in which I live. It is now bad, maybe very bad, so it becomes a patient, and I try to be as patient as I can with the patient, and may earn for my trouble a better command of aliments, which is something I might actually sort of enjoy. When attending two film festivals this past September (and early October), both from my couch (COVID-19 brought Toronto to me) and in theatres (masked and distanced), I did a very good job of enjoying everything, even the things I had to enjoy as a slightly exasperated clinician. The least satisfactory film I streamed from Toronto was a pretty good film that I would probably be willing to recommend: True Mothers by Naomi Kawase. Now, I do not at all think that Naomi Kawase is a bad filmmaker or that her story is bullshit or unworthy (even if it is not terribly original). What becomes a bit depressing for me watching True Mothers mostly pertains to the ways Kawase diverts from her strengths in order to enter territory outside her wheelhouse. This is going to be a problem for somebody who is basically enjoying the film and wants to keep enjoying it. Kawase is not a sophisticated or a manipulative director, at least not when she plays on her strengths. I think of her doing her work directly with the actors, the camera a little off to the side, unobtrusive, the work a work with the possibilities of intimacy and uniquely capable of seducing singular interactions and expressive affects into being. Problems start to accrue in True Mothers’ second third because the power source of the poiesis is cut off by the too-fancy insinuation of structural convolutions and an excess of scenes/sequences that seem to be purely illustrative within the schematic. A work is most likely to lose me if it starts to lose credibility within the parameters of the terms which would appear to be those set by the work itself, rather than its not conforming to a model I have of how all or most works ought to conduct themselves. If you have seen Charlie Kaufman’s most recent film I'm Thinking of Ending Things, a sort of psychogenic rockslide largely framed by the failure of framing, you will be aware of the already notorious scene in which the unstable plurality (mostly) embodied by Jessie Buckley begins reciting as though extemporaneously the famous New Yorker of yesteryear Pauline Kael’s demoralizing pan of John Cassavettes’s 1974 masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence, this being a review that happens to be contained in a Kael collection conspicuously placed earlier in the childhood bedroom of the boyfriend on the receiving end of the embezzled tirade. The review is so hideous as to represent something close to dereliction of duty. A key piece of prosody here involves the sardonic assertion that Gena Rowlands’s performance is something like the “most transient big performance” ever, this a capstone to Kael more or less telling us that what she really objects to is flux itself, as though there were or ought to be no such thing. Well, Cassavettes and Rowlands (and me and Félix Guattari) could not disagree more. The odious David Denby, current New Yorker hack, writes about this scene from I'm Thinking of Ending Things in his review of Kaufman’s film, likewise resorting to the sardonic Kael-lite modality. The narrowness of Denby’s reality-tunnel asserts itself as it always does. Sorry, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not Stan Getz live in Stockholm. For shame, Charlie Kaufman. Why do I read? Or go to the movies or listen to music? Susan Sontag, abjuring interpretation, rhapsodizes on the erotics of our encounters with art and the products of culture. I want to keep expanding through absorptive self-relation, pulling everything inward, blowing up like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka, Jack H. Harris’s Blob, or the increasingly giant gluttonous woman who tramples over the narrow and narrow-minded small town set and setting of Robert Coover’s John's Wife, that greatest of American novels. My position as to why this is my fancy: I am a special kind of idiot, if not to say a holy fool. Not quite like the Dostoevskian idiot archetypes the great Jean-Luc Godard shows us in his films Soigne ta droite (1987) and King Lear (the same year), if only because a great deal more pleased to be pleased. I think I am more like Dostoevsky’s actual Myschkin, who exists in something close to a state of permanent hyper-stimulated ecstasy. I would caution you to not get too fanciful a notion in your head about what the life or origin story of such an idiot might look like. Communicating online with the filmmaker Jon Jost in the wee hours of the morning, I wrote both of how “my life (in my twenties and a little beyond) was for a considerable period a harrowing nightmare for those tasked by providence with having to love or try to love me,” and of how still now, nearly seven years clean and sober, a special kind of idiot, “People very frequently look at me as though they believe I must be walking around with a pant leg full of my own shit.” Jost responded thusly: “We special kinds of idiots are a tiny minority. And we tend to know it, for better or worse. Many cannot handle it and destroy themselves with booze or drugs or suicide. Some can handle it and make the most of it with whatever they can do. Often in the arts. Sometimes in sciences.” Jost knows. My idiocy is instrumental irony. It is a medicine taken primarily in the form of what I tell myself with nobody else around and how I set out to engineer my pleasure. Jost’s “special kinds of idiots” who constitute “a tiny minority” are the minor persons Curtis White calls “transcendentally stupid” in his recent book Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today. The world excludes you as too stupid to embrace the platitudes, too intransigent to narrow, and you are blessed. You can have your own expansive scene. You can metaprogram yourself as moulder of your own neuroplasticity. Transcendental stupidity? Consider how French literary theorist Fernand Hallyn assesses metatropological irony in The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler: “The subject is placed in a transcendent position with respect to his discourse, but only to deny the possibility of making himself the guarantor of transcendence.” Instrumental irony can play inventively with the seat of the absent guarantor. In the novel I am reading right now, Alfred Hayes’s The End of Me, a fallen man in his late fifties, formerly successful, who happens to be the narrator, reeling in the aftermath of a marital cuckolding, beholds in his young cousin (once removed) intimations of an ultimate reckoning. Asher, the narrator, momentarily projects young cousin Michael outside of the domain of immediately accessible sense-data. “He is playing an ironic game with himself as he comes down the corridor. He is in enemy country.” The ironic game that is imagined, if only faintly: what might be its aim? Michael enters Asher’s hotel room and refuses to remove his overcoat. “Did he remove it only under direct orders from a superior? Superior what? Superior who?” What if the ironist’s “Superior who” is just some idiot? Anything could be in the offing. This is the divining index of young Michael’s diabolic potency. Do I myself carry an idiot with me in order to commit crimes and misdemeanours? If so…only incidentally, really. I first had to be an idiot because I must have intuited that it was a viable alternative to addiction, misery, and suicide. I continue because it is simply a fucking gas.
No comments:
Post a Comment