A Fantastically Hideous World
(Warning: This Will Get Graphic.)
As you might be able to glean from the title, this little essay most likely isn’t going to be a paean to the glories of the age. The glass isn’t half full. It’s plastic with the logo of some mindlessly happy product scrawled on it, brightly colored, crushed, lying next to broken beer bottles at a dodgy roadside rest stop on a highway that looks the same wherever you are in 21stCentury America.
Times Square 1945 The End of World War 2 .... (Click on the photo for an enlargement)
Try this: Find a photo of a crowd scene from sometime before the 70′s. How about Times Square, New York City, in 1945 the day the war ended. Make it a good large photo. Look around in it. Investigate these these ancestors of yours. Look at them closely. I don’t know about you, but here’s the first thing that pops out at me: I can’t find anyone who is poorly dressed. Everyone seems to be wearing clothes that look good on them. Now I know if I were on the ground I would find some tawdry elements, guys with grease stains on their ties, ill fitting suits, cheap dresses, etc. But this would just be a poor use of basic ingredients. The next thing I notice is Times Square itself, there are a few large junky billboards but the architecture of the City impresses itself upon me much more than advertisements.
Times Square ca. Now ... (Click to Examine the Chaos)
Now let’s play the game a little longer: Let’s look at the same place in contemporary times. Now the first thing that assaults me is the chaos of the advertising. (And if you actually walk through Times Square you are overwhelmed in Sensurround by multiple and massive television screens.) The architecture has receded from view and the populace has become an extension of the endless logos and contradictory swatches of color. Visually humanity seems to be a silly and sad afterthought. There is no dignity left in jumble of clothing, which seem to have been chosen primarily for their cheap comfortable utility and not their aesthetic qualities. Don’t believe me? Start at the bottom and look for one good pair of footwear? And continue up the bodies looking for some signifier beyond comfort. You might find a couple of articles of fashion worth a moments notice. But the feel of the crowd as whole? Disconnected, lackadaisical, nervous, listless too. The word angst comes to mind. Ironically folks today have much more individual choice in fashions than any generation in history.
Cut and Paste Humanity in Times Square New York City
Let’s make another comparison. Pick a fashion magazine. Let’s say Harper’s Bazaar. Now let’s go back to the 40′s or 50′s again. What do we see? One simple elegant image of a woman wearing a rather attractive dress, one simple caption and the title of the magazine. And that’s basically it.
A clean uncluttered aesthetic - Harper's Bazaar September 1947
Now let’s move to the late 70′s and let’s look at a cover. What do we see? A big face with eyes meant to grab you if sitting behind another title on a rack, and a riot of truly bad graphics that practically cause the publication’s title to disappear. Almost every American fashion magazine had exactly the same aesthetics. This was the disco age; an era of shlock if there ever was one. Eventually this began to seem trashy to the folks in the trade.
A Cluttered Harper's Bazaar Cover Late 70's
And so believe it or not by the early 90′s there was a change. By say November of 1994 one could find classy covers again on Harper’s Bazaar: One classy image with somewhat tasteful blocks of copy on one side. (Although that pesky barcode kind of throws the general image slightly askew.) This coincided with the era of the supermodel and a time when there was more popular recognition of fashion photographers. It was also the Grunge era and other forms of Alternative music that valued honesty more highly than in the late 80′s or again by the late 90′s.
Harper's Bazaar November 1994 - An Attempt at Simplicity
But look at a recent 2011 cover of Harper’s Bazaar, or nearly any contemporary American magazine. It’s obvious that the war has been lost. Buried beneath the graphic hell is a hollow plastic pop singer in pseudo shimmery style. Meanwhile that barcode sits there doing it’s fugly commercial duty.
The Messy Sheen: Harper's Bazaar 2011
More Ugly/Pretty
Barcodes? Gotta have ‘em I suppose. But why are they always on the front of the magazine, squatting there like a cigarette butt ruining any decent attempt at an artistic layout? Why aren’t they on the back of the magazine? It’s a very little thing really. And I suppose you have a right to say why are you even bothered by it? Get a life! And I get your point. These things are small.
Except for one thing: It isn’t just one thing!
No Comment.
We are drowning in a kind of graphic squalor. Everywhere we turn we are sinking in advertisements, propaganda, logos, political signage, photographs, faux textures, demanding collages, edited nightmares.
As recently as the early 90′s alternative artists of various stripes were working to bring a challenges to these hard angular commercial forms that surround us at every turn. But the popularity of the Internet and computer graphics sent the culture straight to graphic damnation. We’ve all been subjected to shoddily designed websites. But it isn’t the weird amateur sites that have warped us as much as it is the big ones where we have to spend a certain amount of time conducting our affairs. It is Facebook, Yahoo!, eBay, MSN, Google, Amazon, etc. It is the tyranny of the angulated blocky assault of words and pixels, photos ands megabytes that threatens to turn our lives into a series of headlines and captions.
Graphic Purgatory
What Seems Normal
And we wear our headlines and captions in an endless stream of T-shirts and corporate logos. We even label our own skins. What is the meaning of getting a commercial logo stenciled onto one’s body? Or of Bible verses about love tattooed directly above the ass crack? And a search for ugly tattoos is beyond my ability to convey for shear odious queasiness. Evidently we are desperate to communicate to others who we are – directly, immediately through any visual means necessary . After all who has time to talk to everybody? Better just to let images speak for us. Yet somehow so much gets cheapened by the hollowness of our insecurity. It is much harder to just be, than it is to “express yourself”.
1st Corinthians 13 as a 'Tramp Stamp'
The Ultimate in Fetishization
Our speech is shortened into simplistic words. I get the feeling sometimes that the caveman is not an image from our past but rather a prophecy of our future. Did humanity ever stand around saying things like “Ugh. Me like.” ? I seriously doubt it. But are we that far from a time when they will say “Dude” “Sucks” “Rules.” “Ka-Boom!”? In other words our language is becoming dangerously close to being a series of slogans and ad copy. (This is one of the scariest aspects of the film ‘Idiocracy‘.) This is nowhere more evident than in what somehow passes for political speech. Even more graphic onslaughts can be found on the cruel bumper stickers produced by both the Left and the Right.
Anti-Bush Pro-Liberal Political Speech (Click to Read)
Anti-Obama Pro-Conservative Political Speech (Click to Read)
The endlessly noxious visual noise we surround ourselves with is not simply a little thing. Why do people in the past, people more prejudiced than we supposedly are, with less psychological insight than we possess and a poorer understanding of nutrition and health, seem more at home in their skins than we do? The answer to the question can be found in the aesthetic environment we have chosen to surround ourselves with. Our debris reveals a people with a very thin sense of reality and personal identity.
Fairly Standard Students
More Unremarkable 21st Century Folks
Our protests will go nowhere if we think the problem is merely, or even primarily, economic. There is a strange cancer the eats at the core of 21st Century reality. It doesn’t really matter what your politics are. It will continue to devour us until we can look it in the eyes and see our own complicity. There are no easy solutions. But it does take courage to see what we, and I include myself here, have become in this cowardly new world.
As Long As Everyone's Having Fun
A Search For Human Dignity
Owen Barfield, a friend of C.S. Lewis, once described how our societies become that which our imaginations create for us. In his 1957 book ‘Saving the Appearances’ he wrote: Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
October 25 2011
The Breaking of Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox Near The End of Her Retrial
I am not really given to writing about tabloid news items. They are generally worthless. And current events require time to be digested. But recently the appeal trial of Amanda Knox caught my attention. I didn’t really get enticed by the speculation of whether she was innocent or guilty. What interested me more was the way that her case was a metonym for a generation. Or rather that her story shows a gaping hole in the understanding of the world for those coming of age in early 21st Century America.
Amanda Knox was extremely typical of her generation prior to the events surrounding the brutal murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia Italy in 2007. Raised in a Roman Catholic Home, with a Catholic education, yet also, in the casual syncretism of the times, a student of Yoga, enough so to demonstrate the namaste gesture on several occasions. ( And like many in her generation I would doubt that the mixture of Christian belief and Hindu practice would even register in any way as inconsistent to her.) (Yeah I realize I’m treading on perilous ground even pointing this out.) Yet also in the same flux of the current American climate she wasn’t exactly setting a spiritual tone with any consistency. Her defense for what she was doing that night was smoking hash and having sex with her then boyfriend. And so she was utterly typical in that regard as well even down to watching television later that night. Likewise she posted silly photos of herself on her social networking sites and wrote things for public consumption that should have been private journal entries. Again standard fare. When she found herself embroiled in what was to come, she acted with pretty much the same naivete and groundless positivity that are also the hallmarks of our times in our land. In other words, how many American souls under thirty would have been caught in a similar way by their misunderstanding of the fact that world is still actually a very large place with contrary rules in different places and that there is enough darkness to go around several times over?
Amanda Knox Appears To Be Having Way Too Much Fun At The First Trial in 2009. 'Appears' Is The Operative Word.
And so in the confusion of the original investigation and trial Amanda Knox acted in wildly inappropriate and culturally naïve ways. In America high school and college age girls just plop down on a floor or rug anywhere. They’ve been doing this since the culture radically loosened up in the Sixties. Then comes the yoga and the cartwheels. Actually according to the most astute observers what Amanda was trying to do was to relax, to get her mind off things, a little stretching, various positions. Unfortunately in her simplistic American mode, where therapy is the number one choice for all problems, she misidentified her problem. Feeling better about herself wasn’t the answer to her dilemma. Relieving her own stress wasn’t going to impress the Italian officials scrutinizing her. And if she ever thought People and Us magazines were tacky, she obviously did not ken to the carnivorous nature of the European tabloid beast. Photos of her during her original trial are filled with smiles, funny faces, funky grimaces. It’s almost as if she imagined she were immune and the American consulate would eventually just rescue her from this absurd situation. And so perhaps she acted like the usual entitled American student. Nothing to get hung about, strawberry fields forever. And the full reality of her situation didn’t start to seep in until around the same time she was declared guilty of murder. (At least that’s the perception.)
I didn’t really pay much attention to the court proceedings the first time round. Pretty American girl gets caught in weird Italian murder scene. So? The world is filled with much crazier and darker things. Then a month or so ago I started to notice a few of the photos being released through the various news agencies. I was arrested by the change in Amanda’s expressions. Suddenly she was no longer the average goofy US college student. It wasn’t just the weight loss or skin broken out with worry. It wasn’t merely the dark eyes with the sleepless blue tinge beneath them. The expression had completely altered in some less definable way. I knew what it was. She had been broken.
The Happy-Go-Lucky Amanda Knox Has Disappeared
In 21st Century America brokenness is a state to be avoided at all costs. It suggests losing one’s identity or even one’s mental stability. We prescribe drugs to avoid anything resembling brokenness. The fellow travelers of brokenness, sorrow, depression, grief, et cetera, are to be shunned like a blackening case of bubonic plague. (We have pills for that sort of thing.) There certainly are circumstances where being broken is a terrible thing. Torture, for instance, breaks and doesn’t heal. However, it does not follow that all instances of brokenness are bad. And in fact I would like to suggest that in our feelgood positive American dreamscape, where the disappointments of life are relegated to political rantings, real brokenness is a much needed antidote to the casual oblivion of our hydra-headed selfishness. We are encouraged endlessly to be empowered to follow our dreams, our desires, our hearts. Yet we never seem to recall that power corrupts, that dreams are unreal, our desires can easily be poisonous and our hearts desperately tortuous and impossible to fully know or trust.
Imagine if Amanda Knox had been entangled in a similar mess in a culture even more distant from us than Italy’s. Let’s just move the peg one notch over to Russia. There, sitting on the ground is positively considered unhealthy, especially for women. There American smiles are seen, as they are in France, as extremely suspicious and evidence of a shallow character. And how does their judicial system work??? Any clue whatsoever? And if someone is sent to jail there will we ever see them again? I often talk with twenty-something friends who go traveling to places as distant culturally as Guatemala, Thailand or Vietnam. They come back with wonderful stories. One gets the feeling that the world is their playground to explore. Yet they rarely know anything about these countries before they go. And not much more when they return.
Young Americans frighten me for their ignorance about the customs of the world beyond their borders. They scare me for the collective assumption that as long as you have a little digital electronic device you can just contact home. But you know what? 6,000 miles away is still six thousand miles away. It costs real money to cross that divide. And although that other culture may have Facebook access, beneath it’s 21st Century gloss, it’s still other and deserves real respect. And really, before you go to China you’d better pick a few books and do some serious reading.
A Very Different Amanda Knox In The Final Days Of Her Retrial
But when I looked into the stark images of Amanda Knox during her retrial as she faced being put away for a long, long time I could see a change. The game was over. Life was no longer about the parties and chilling. It was not about trips to mall or about having fun, whatever that means. Living was no longer an entitlement. Suddenly something much more serious was happening. The brokenness was producing the very thing that Dostoevsky said we humans lacked the most: gratitude. I certainly won’t claim to know what really happened in Italy. But I do know this. No psychopath could’ve given her closing statement. But she was wrong in one major degree. She said she was the same person that she was before the trial started. I’m sure she was trying to tell the court that she was the same innocent girl as when she first started. But in fact she was quite far from ever being that naïve American girl again. When the verdict was read there was a momentary confusion of language. Then it became clear that she had indeed been acquitted. And at that moment she broke completely. But the breaking was filled with gratitude. Amanda Knox had been given the possiblity of a new beginning.
Amanda Knox Shortly Before The Verdict
I wish that kind of breaking upon all of the confused positive folk of our fearful generation.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, after ten years in the gulag and five more in exile, said it best:
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful success I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either–but right through every human heart–and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
…
All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I…have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation:
“Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”
From the Gulag Archipelago
Part IV, Chapter I; Vol. II The Ascent
Byrne Power
Haines Alaska
10/11/11
More Thoughts About the New Samizdat #2
(Submitting Oneself to the Text.)
(This is the second half of Carsten Hyatt’s essay.)
At the conclusion of the first installment, I said I wanted to look at different “powers” or rather, different ways a reader may exercise power over the text. First, I think I need to clarify that I’m not primarily interested in doing justice to Umberto Eco’s understanding of Thomas Aquinas, not that it isn’t worth understanding, but that it falls well out of the bounds of this essay. I took Eco’s line about the Summa as a starting point because it was a pithy statement from an incisive reader of the particular attitude in which I was interested.
Saint Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica - Unabridged
What might be the advantage of dismantling the structure of a work, such as the Summa? A common reply would be that perhaps there is much to the potential meanings, discoveries that St. Thomas, had he been less of his age, might have encouraged us to seek out by denying his constructive intelligence. The popular (not Eco’s, perhaps,) argument against imposed structure is that it frees the reader to build or uncover (not, necessarily, in the sense of Leviticus 18) a legion of meanings for themselves, which they could not have done if they had restricted themselves to the confines of authorial structure. I do not want to provide a caricature of “reader response” or other hermeneutical theories. The way of reading I am describing need not be explicitly theoretical in motivation nor interested in a simple dismantling of all available frameworks. To oversimplify, I mean any way of reading that desires to retrieve from a work more than they desire to submit to it (‘submit’ not to be taken in the sense of Thom Gunn’s “Continual temptation waits on each/ To renounce his empire of thought and speech/Till he submit his passive faculties to evening…” but in the sense that the Authorized uses the word “subject” in the translation of Romans 13:1 “Subject yourselves to the higher powers.”). My first response to this is that there may be meanings to be had by way of retrieval, but that these would be had at the cost of the meaning available to the reader who is ordered even as the work is ordered and at the cost of meeting the mind of St. Thomas, or any other author, himself.
Perhaps it is best to say that if St. Thomas had wanted “a concluding system” we should let him have it, and those who do not want to prevail upon their readers in such away need not do so. That all works need to be of in the form of the Summa is obviously false. But it is the impetus, more than any specific form, to retreat from ordering the reader in a specific way that is what I am essentially concerned with. First, I think the type of reading I have described as one of retrieval rather than submission is at least implicitly opposed to an authorial ordering of any kind, as it is the very thing that inhibits their retrieval from, or construction of, the text. Secondly, and more importantly for my argument, a way of reading that prefers to take what it likes and is chary of submission is, in the end, in conflict with the nature of writing and reading.
Take another look at Eco’s line about the Summa. His metaphor of “a piece of architecture” for the text is apt, but misleading. By contrasting a building with the loose-leaf version, there is the suggestion that the one is an imposing object, the other is a lighter, approachable, would literally and figuratively be easy to carry. But I find the loose-leaf notion, and what it represents, to objectify the text far more than the alternative. To take from a text what one can or what one will is precisely to treat the text as an object unto itself, as a “piece of architecture” to be dismantled and restructured at will. I do not want to take up the cause of the author against the reader, but I do think how one reads, how one responds to a text reveals what one thinks of the author, the person on the other side of the text. Given this, I would defend a kind of reading that takes the person into full consideration.
One of the Library Rooms in the Strahov Monestary in Prague
Therefore, I take writing to be a form of address and reading its receptive corollary. In that, I would argue that to submit oneself to a work is necessary if there is a person, or persons, to be met within the text. To read a text would therefore require of the reader the same that is required of a hearer: a refusal to interrupt. Instead of objectifying the text, the text is an avenue to the author and to do otherwise is to set oneself in a world of textual objects and few persons. An approach to texts in this way is to submit, actively, to the terms set by speaker. Submission may not be for many a happy term, but I do not want to pretend it is otherwise than to deny oneself, among other things, the right to manipulate the text on ones own terms. One cannot submit naively; no doubt writers, like speakers, perjure themselves. Perjury, however, exists only together with an oath, a binding claim on the speaker’s verity. It has not been shown that the realm of reading and writing, speaking and hearing, is a realm wherein such binding claims to truth exist. I acknowledge that for my view of the submissive reader to be defensible, there must be such a realm.
I cannot defend such a claim here, and so cannot definitively answer that yes, such a realm of truth telling, and so true submission, exists. But let me suggest that the answer to this question of reading and writing, or hearing and speaking, depends in the end on the existence of divine speech and human hearing. A conclusive answer to that question would establish the necessary grounds for assuming that there was at least some speech that, in the words of R.P. Blackmur, “adds to the stock of available reality.” Such a speech would be worthy to be heard, and so to be submitted to in hearing. Such a speech would take place in a realm of binding and loosing. Without such a speech, it is unclear what, if anything, undergirds any faith in speaking and hearing. Perhaps, to do something for the rehabilitation of writing and reading, the question would have to be asked: What is meant by the prophet Jeremiah when he says “every man’s word shall be his burden”?
Carsten Hyatt
Los Angeles
10/4/11
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