Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 6

 

Women working as computers for the U.S. Space Program

Tao Yuanming and Su Shi

It was James Bridle in his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future who first hipped me to the fact that computers were once people and that was the name of their job. Often these computers would sit at desks lined up in rows in large rooms crunching numbers in the hopes of accurately predicting the weather for this or that military during wartime. Almost all our major technological breakthroughs begin in research with military applications. Computers will not set you free. More numbers on the abacus means more smoke in your eye, not crystallinity and transcendence, bub. It’s Antonioni’s Blow-Up: the more you zoom in the more it’s just opacity and blur. The 21st century Russians especially are a case in point. Viewers of Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalisation will be familiar: the Russians are less interested in cherry-picking Western leaders or pushing measures like Brexit through than they are in producing mass confusion and animus upon which they can capitalize, and it is in this light that Trump can be seen as a kind of rampaging asset. Our perplexity and incapacity will only grow. Our economics and technology are inherently divisive and they are running hella hot in maximum overdrive. At the end of his chapter on "Conspiracy," James Bridle speaks of living in the "gray zone,” a temporary autonomous zone that "allows us to sample from the myriad of explanations that our limited cognition stretches like a mask over the vibrating half-truths of the world. It is a better approximation of reality than any rigid binary encoding can ever hope to be—an acknowledgment that all our apprehensions are approximations, and all the more powerful for being so. The gray zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present." It is not a matter of finding our way out of darkness but rather of finding a way to live within it…until the solitary pinprick star in the distance fades out anticlimactic once and for bless’d all. Why be interested in class struggle without desire, madmen, and adventure? Do you simply wish to hand over the key to your locks and chains to some new patron? In The Chinese Pleasure Book, her encompassing study of early classical Chinese thought, Michael Nylan apprehends a vital and vibrant living territory that is stridently pragmatic, rejecting immutable moral law, making use of the “delicate constructions” in classical Chinese rhetoric, and committed to sustainable pleasures for as much of the community as possible, modifying “models and commitments as necessary.” What I would call the ontological dimension of pleasure relates to cosmic order, resonance theory, and ‘qi.’ All things have 'qi,' which is spirit or vital energy. Resonance relates to embodied immersion in the macrocosmic domain—manifold frequency connectedness. Translating ‘le’ as “pleasure,” Nylan tells us, will rub certain people the wrong way. She explains why she doesn’t think happiness or joy work. She looks at all kinds of different synonyms for different forms of delight. Rapture, enjoyment, et cetera. I could not help but consider the concept of ‘jouissance’ as elaborated by various thinkers steeped in psychoanalytic theory, especially Julia Kristeva. What distinguishes ‘le’ from ‘jouissance,’ to my mind, is the former’s sober pragmatics and dependence on the natural and the prosaic. A central principle is that the sage lives with an ever-present consciousness of living vitality. From the Zhuangzi: “Great understanding is broad and unhurried, in contrast to petty understanding, which is cramped and busy.” Then we have Yang Xiong, the Western Han philosophical master famous in his time for his ‘fu’ poetry. Yang would seem the apotheosis of early manuscript culture, writing in Exemplary Figures that books “are as alluring as women.” Yang Xiong’s rhetorical question: “Are you for the Way or for profit?” The seventh and final chapter of The Chinese Pleasure Book—probably my personal favourite—addresses the poets Tao Yuanming and Su Shi, separated by almost seven centuries. I was absolutely blown away by the fragments of Tao Yuanming’s poetry included in the Zone edition of the book; his work is at once profound and plainspoken, sometimes ironic, and almost modern as such. “Tao never expected unalloyed happiness at all times; by his lights, he, like all other mortals, took pleasure and felt sorrow by turns, even as he sought to realize the full magnitude of life’s simple gifts.” Su Shi dedicated much of his life—seven centuries later!—to cementing a kind of spiritual bond with Tao, writing matching equivalents of almost all his predecessor’s poems. Both poets dealt with exile, travail, and expendable downtime, attempting the whole while to maintain fidelity to the Way, with varying degrees of success. Tao Yuanming was explicitly an inheritor of Confucian wisdom, Su Shi in dialogue with emerging Buddhist ideas and practices. The final section terminates with a large number of Tao’s poems juxtaposed with Su’s corresponding variations. If Tao excites me considerably more than does Su, largely on account of his commitment to earnestly communicating his own struggles and doubts, the parcel entire is enlightening nevertheless, and I would not given editorial licence have excluded any part. As Warren Oates says in Two-Lane Blacktop: “Those satisfactions are permanent." 

Most people who know me now know about my friend Paul in the low desert of Southern, California, who was my closest friend as an adult even though he was born in 1940 and, when he took sixteen years sober, boasted: “sweet sixteen, never been kissed!” And then said: “sixteen years sober and not one day of personal growth!” He was hilarious. I actually had another friend named Paul back in my university days and he was a real character too. He was a year or two younger than me and his wide black spectacle frames and jet-black hair actually made him look more than a little like the best friend Paul on classic sitcom The Wonder Years, played by Josh Saviano (or like Van Dyke Parks on the cover of the album Song Cycle). I took note of Paul when I happened to catch him presenting a paper to other students and a professor in the film department at Carleton, University on his childhood obsession with Blue Velvet and the way it could not have helped but determine his personal development. His rhythm and language were good, the often self-deprecating humour was genuinely clever and endearing, and he was obviously trying much harder than even my serious academic friends to produce solid and defined pieces of quality writing. It was Paul who changed my life by showing me Andy Kaufman and Freddie Blassie in My Breakfast with Blassie. He loved outsider and degenerate comedy and was also a connoisseur of tape-cassette-era pornography. Together, Paul and I wrote an anarchist remake of the ‘80s teen comedy Revenge of the Nerds where we took every single scene from that film and tried to see how we could make it more subversive and confrontational and yet still fun and inclusive. All Fears of the Forest was the title we gave to our gnarly and unkempt remake of Revenge of the Nerds; we took it from the song “Changes” by Phil Ochs. I still have all or most of the screenplay sitting in a box. Paul and I also made a short film that people did see but which I definitely think would be best conclusively vaporized from the surface of the planet, in which Paul filmed me semi-covertly as I walked around three different Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets with a disturbing grin on my face, acting aphasic and out-of-it, saying nothing more to anyone other than the word “chicken” repeatedly and with increasing hopelessness. I know for a fact that we were largely inspired by Lars von Trier’s The Idiots but I think the influence of Tom Green, too. After all, Mr. Green came up with and perfected his schtick in Ottawa, on our stomping grounds. I even knew a guy who said Tom Green had sex with his girlfriend at a house party back in the Organized Rhyme days. I have a nude scene in this little video movie. Actually, we decided to make it the opening scene. I enter the foyer of a house in the suburbs dressed like a business man in a peacoat, then I hang my coat carefully on a hook, strip off the rest of my clothes, which I leave piled on the floor in the foyer, and finally enter the house off-frame, stark naked. It did not take me long to become embarrassed by this whole thing. Even worse was the Andy Kaufman-inspired open mic performance art we did—and filmed!—with me playing the nastiest barroom piano in history, him telling vaudeville era jokes, and the general volume and misrule rapidly growing unwholesome. When I saw that tape a few days later I asked Paul to please destroy it. One night some of my friends aggressively rustled me to alertness when I was passed out drunk and then recorded me on video as I thrashed about, whined, and pitifully threatened them, my friends lightly chuckling as though I were the entertainment following the courtly feast. I will confess that I did not at all like this footage either, but even then could see perfectly well that I’d brought it on my own no-account goldarn self.       

Anne Carson performs A Brief History of Sky Writing, 2010

Live performance of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, 2019

During COVID lockdown, the Facebook page for the Louisiana Channel brought Canadian poet and classics scholar Anne Carson’s wonderful Lecture on the History of Sky Writing into my life—out, as it were, of the blue. You can find the performance I watched over at Vimeo where it remains to delight and engage uncommonly canny surfers of the web and happeners upon alike. Lecture on the History of Sky Writing was originally performed at the New York Live Ideas Festival in spring 2016 and shortly thereafter at the Whitney Museum. The piece finds Carson standing before podium and microphone delivering the lecture in question, a comprehensive history of everything and more composed by the sky itself, collaborator Robert Currie, got up in nifty western garb, participating in the role of Beckett’s arrival-averse Godot, fanciful banter serving as stimulating counterpoint. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, released by New Directions in early 2020 in an ultra-slim volume, is a delightful patchwork of poems and fragments of prose which compounded altogether serve as a playlet, in a similar vein to the sky lecture, like which it was originally presented live, as the page following the obligatory copyright boilerplate informs us, at the Shed in New York City, premiering on April 9, 2019 (less than a year before the New Directions edition). Norma Jeane Baker who is also Marilyn Monroe is also Helen of Troy. That’s the high concept elevator pitch. Norma Jeane has rather materialized in Troy to occupy the Helenic seat, which leads rapidly to further obfuscation and shroud-shifting. Who actually went to Troy? Norma Jeane Baker? Not exactly. “A cloud in the shape of Norma Jeane Baker.” A cloud that flummoxed the armies. A cloud indicating not only epistemological opacity, obliquity, and obfuscation of the identity of all things and creatures, but also flux and blinding light. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is married to a man named Arthur. We do not get Arthur’s surname, but we would have cause to imagine it to be Miller, and he’s “king of Sparta and New York.” He has gone and led an army to Troy in order to drag his wife home and hopefully earn back her affections. “As Marilyn used to say, ‘Keep the balloon and dare not to worry.’” Systems are being undermined, the order of things not only called into question but tripping on banana peels in a public thoroughfare. Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe traditionally occupy distinctive and very separate timelines, but you fold those timelines over one another en papillote and you get a whole bunch of the more things change the more they stay the same, much of this revolving around the subjection of women and the sacrifice of female idols taken by force. We are told the Greeks prize women below gold “but slightly ahead of oxen, sheep or goats —”; the men of Greece and Los Angeles and New York are driven to distraction by “that WMD in the forked form of woman.” Having once considered dying her pubes blonde to match her iconic simulated Marilyn locks, Norma decided that men prefer the bush the way it is. Is that how they want it? What do men want? “Most men like what slips away. A bit of strange. But I digress.” This is a cloud talking, and she’s expert at slipping away. Slipping away back to the hotel; slipping away from Fritz Lang and MGM; slipping away into any given set of arms. The ground of our groundlessness is entropy itself. What our experts in thermodynamics call entropy is mainly a tendency over time toward the loss of net organization within all systems. The 20th century was rich in entropy literature, especially once things got post-atomic. Much of this literature involved the loss of net organization of history or historicity, a posteriori, sequence and record collapsing into themselves like a tower pancaking. In certain respects, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy has quite a lot in common with a novel like Donald Barthelme’s posthumous The King, in which a manic-maniacal mash-up has the Dark Ages insinuating themselves back into the Second World War, Ezra Pound as nutbar radio personality intermediary. Anne Carson is much more an actual anarchist than the self-destructive and sedentary Barthelme, and though sometimes she may speak on behalf of the sky, sometimes she speaks on behalf of…dirt. “Dirt is something that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confuses categories and mixes up form.” Dirt is “coming to get you.” Rape is one of the book’s themes and one of war’s. Carson returns a couple times to Persephone, a woman made famous in large part on account of her having been raped. May we not perhaps begin to grow convinced that Persephone will have her revenge? She might not even have to lift a finger. Maybe all Persephone needs is a certain number of her ducks in a row and advantageous atmospheric conditions.

Ikue Mori, Labyrinth [Full Album]