Category Archives: Reflections

Facade and Reflection

Posted on by
Reply

Facade and Reflection

The façade pictured in the image at right belongs to the second and third floor of a building on Grant Avenue in San Francisco which I photographed in February 2003. That façade is NOT an element of the lovely Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, at which I had the pleasure of helping to staging a conference in the 1980s.

A fun attraction of the Peabody continues to be the twice-daily march of the Peabody Ducks to and from a fountain in the center of the hotel’s main lobby. Another fun but lesser-known uniqueness of the hotel is the “Lead Duck” pin. If you are wondering what a pin made of lead and shaped like a duck could be about you are already leaning in the direction I hope this post will take you.

The pin is given to key folks who are participating in the staging of an event at the hotel. It lets the hotel staff know that the wearer is to be accorded special assistance if requested because they are an event lead…er. Pleasantly aware that “lead” has at least two meanings, and potential humor can arise from a meaning switch, when the hotel’s delightful convention manager presented me with my pin she declared me a “Lead Duck” – pronounced “led” as in the heavy, bluish-gray, soft, ductile metal. I remain very amused.

I love words that can mean more than one thing. From words soulful like tear, to words colorful (another word that also has a couple of meanings) like booty. Which brings me to façade and reflection and the image above.

I think of my own experience of my own experience as a layer-like zone vacillating in a conical space between unconsciousness and consciousness. Imagine on the left side of the screen an immense globe of swirling unconscious material, each mote of which is related to every other mote by a gazillion associative connections. On the right side of that globe imagine a conical space…a transition area the base of which projects from and interacts with the swirling unconscious stuff. And emerging to the right from the apex of the cone is a line of thoughts, formed when the unconscious stuff moves and is processed through the cone into a linguistic-like conscious thread that allows me to purchase a jar of pickles, open it, and tell you about it.

Regarding that conical space, I think of myself as sort of a band or layer that moves back and forth between the unconscious base and the conscious apex. Often hovering nearer the base than the apex. Especially lately since I’ve been willfully courting a state that, with increasing frequency, allows what I see there to linger as images that can be recalled. Images from a depth within the cone that precedes the point where one or another related meaning gets designated as the next bead in the linier conscious thread – from a depth at which differentiation between things has not yet occurred.

Continue reading →

Brittle Husks / Hollywood 1973

Posted on by
4

Brittle Husks

Imagine you and I are having a conversation and it occurs to you that what I’m saying does not seem entirely genuine. Perhaps you find yourself wondering, “What does he really think?” And if you asked, I’d probably try to come clean, but I think that even if I threw myself into the task with abandon and total sincerity whatever I said would be as vapor rising from a vast ocean swarming with life below the surface of consciousness. Strictly speaking, I think I’d only be able to say what I think I think. In other words, I think that much of what I’m thinking at any given time is a feeble work in progress emerging in response to immediate conscious circumstances profoundly influenced by a tumultuous underlying universe of unconscious material.

In the movies we often see a whiteboard to which photos of bad folks have been taped, and lines drawn on the board between the photos indicate who is related to who. And sometimes in the movies we also see a basement or attic or garage where a loner has covered the walls, and perhaps even the floor and ceiling, with photos, news clippings and scribbled notes, connected by a dense web of threads that tie together pieces of an improbable conspiracy. I think both the detective’s careful plotting and the loner’s largely incomprehensible web are different flavors of metaphor for the way the human mind connects mental material, only the web of interconnecting threads within any individual’s mind is millions of times denser, with literally every scrap of mental material connected through millions of hops to every other scrap.

I think a detective’s whiteboard is especially metaphoric of the mental activity of someone who has developed the ability to willfully ignore connections that don’t seem pertinent to whatever conscious task is at hand…especially tasks that involve teamwork and require agreement among the participants regarding the basic details of their shared perceived world and what’s to be accomplished and how.

And then there is the poor devil, often characterized as “a conspiracy nut”, whose ability to ignore mental connections is somewhat limited. For such folks, I think, no matter what is being considered, connections are included to various clusters of mental material that have acquired a sort of gravitational pull. And that pull grows stronger each time it is indulged, which is often. In extreme cases I think even when “a conspiracy nut” is discussing the price of tomatoes their words and actions are leavened with ideas about pyramidal structures on the surface of Mars or the suppression of reports of Big Foot sightings.

I will cop to a certain amount of conspiracy nuttiness since it seems to me my understanding of myself and my relations with everything I’m consciously aware of drifts on a sea of unconscious material, every iota of which is connected to every other iota. Most of the time, like a detective earnestly working a case with like-minded colleagues, I willfully ignore all but a relatively few connections. And those most frequently favored connections find expression in habits of behavior that others perceive as my personality. But at other times, like while working on the image above, I think webs of connections usually ignored find overt expression, in this case through arrangements of pixels that I was moved to set in place to a significant degree under the influence of lots of unconscious stuff.

Continue reading →

Very Bad Judgement

Posted on by
Reply

Coverplate

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s tempting to speculate about the motives of the justices who pushed that ruling through. But I focus here upon what I believe to be an overt circumvention of the fundamental function of law in America.

As reported by NPR:

Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”

For Justice Alito to speak of “an abuse of judicial authority” is ironic at best because his participation in the overturning of Roe v. Wade places him radically at odds with the core function of the Constitution, which is, I believe, to guard against tyranny.

I think the American Revolution was necessary to bring to an end the lording of one group over another. And I think the Constitution is a remarkably lucid attempt to establish a foundation upon which a society can evolve that’s primary virtue is that it guards against one group bullying and otherwise tormenting another. (Racial injustice in America remains a monumental societal failing in this regard.)

Above all other considerations, I think the initial gating factor when determining whether something is constitutional must be does it open the door for one group to impose their will upon another, which overturning Roe v. Wade absolutely does. The license to commit acts of aggression against women which that overturning has set in motion is, to my way of thinking, a horrifying example of the general drift in all aspects of human interaction toward self-indulgent sadism.

Post a Comment

Self-Indulgence and Sadism

Posted on by
Reply

Coverplate

WARNING: This post contains toxic material not suitable for parents of young children or others who may wish to remain optimistic about the future.

In the last chapter of his marvelous and frightening book “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy”, Tom Nichols observes:

But if we have learned anything in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, it is that people will think hard – or they will convince themselves that they have tried to do so – and still come up with incomprehensible and reckless anti-democratic conclusions … if the citizens of modern democracies were the kind of people willing to engage in the kind of honest reflection that leads to a commitment to political maturity, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

My reading of Professor Nichols’s book suggests to me that he holds out hope that Americans and citizens in other democracies can still decide not to destroy themselves…that we can think our way off the road to ruin.  I’m less optimistic.

The primary reason for my pessimism is that I think human consciousness, like the biological machine that carries it, continues to evolve.  And that an ever-increasing number of human beings are now possessed of a form of consciousness that manifests itself in selfish and fundamentally sadistic behavior.  In what follows I’ll refer to such folks as “self-indulgent sadists”. 

I hypothesize that way back in time the fundamental human experience of itself was as a group, but since long before recorded history the trend in the evolution of human consciousness has been toward increased self-awareness, with the result that now LOTS of human beings experience themselves as entirely individual.  These are the folks I think of as self-indulgent sadists because it is inevitable that someone who experiences everything only through the lens of their own feelings and ideas must live in a state of constant, crazy-making frustration.  They can’t have everything they want.  They are constantly confronted with ideas they don’t agree with.  And a great many of their own ideas form around the day in, day out frustration of their desires.

People who are constantly frustrated, and self-indulgent sadists almost always are, seem to live in a state of perpetual anger.   Since their exclusively individual experience is the only experience they know, they are unable to imagine that others’ self-experience is different.  Consequently, they are certain that whether others admit it or not, everyone else is also deeply, perpetually frustrated and consumed with resentment.  This assumption…this projection on others that they are all also perpetually frustrated and consumed with resentment…makes anyone who challenges them in any way “a lying, weaselly jerk who thinks he’s smarter than me, conspiring with other lying, weaselly jerks who think they are smarter than me, to try to keep me from having what I want. What I should have!” 

Continue reading →

Dickens and Talos

Posted on by
Reply

The Shape of Water

When I was a child I couldn’t read. When I tried my eyes resisted. They wouldn’t focus upon the next word in a sentence without extraordinary effort. Being called upon to read aloud in class was a recurring humiliation. Knowing my turn was coming, I would try to guess where the teacher would have the person in front of me stop reading, and before it was my turn I would try to work through the words I would have to read. Even when I guessed right about which sentence I would have to attempt I was always so anxious that I could not remember the two or three words I had figured out.

I would stand, book in hand, staring at the page, trying to get my eyes to stay on the first word of the sentence long enough for me to recognize it, at the same time filled with distress about the lengthening silence I was authoring. Finally, I would see the word and offer a tentatively suggestion. “The.” Then the struggle shifted to the second word in the sentence.

Lots of anxious ideas swirled in my head while I tried to get my eyes to hold still. Maybe the first word was a hint to the second. Everyone else can do this! There must be some trick that I just haven’t figured out. But what was that first word again? “The.” No help there. Could the second word be “cat.” Usually, about this time, the teacher would call upon the next student and I’d sit down, exhausted, wanting nothing so much as to curl up in a corner and sleep.

This went on until sixth grade (1962) at which point my parents and the administration of the Catholic school I attended agreed that I could not be given another pass. At a parent-teacher conference that took place at the front of an otherwise empty classroom while I sat within earshot at the back, it was decided that my willful refusal to study could not be tolerated further. It was time for me to flunk. I would have to take sixth grade again.

Continue reading →

Antimony

Posted on by
Reply

Coverplate

Before social media, isolation was the heavy tax levied on the luxury of minority views. The daring might attempt to reach out to others of like mind, but it was often risky and the cost was sometimes dear.

Nonetheless, as now, advances in information technology offered options. Starting about 560 years ago enterprising and determined Europeans employed movable type and published under assumed names to hide in plain sight, where only those looking for their own reflection might find each other.

In 1685 a book called Currus Triumphalis Antimonii (The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony), ostensibly the work of a 15th-century Benedictine monk, was published in Amsterdam. A colorful excerpt from the book’s “Dedicatory Epistle” follows here.

Illuminated M


ercury appeared to me in a dream, and brought me back from my devious courses to the one way. “Behold me clad not in the garb of the vulgar, but in the philosopher’s mantle!” so he said, and straightway began to leap along the road in headlong bounds. Then, when he was tired, he sat down, and, turning to me, who had followed him in the spirit, bade me mark that he no longer possessed that youthful vigour with which he would at the first have overcome every obstacle, if he had not been allowed a free course.

Continue reading →

But there’s one thing…

Posted on by
Reply

Just One Thing

And that one thing is perhaps a memory. Something seen or heard that all thought inevitably circles back to.

Sanctuary

In 1969, my last year in high school, I worked on the school newspaper. I had heard that the previous year’s class president – his name was Curtis as I recall – had sought sanctuary from the draft in a local Unitarian Church. I visited him and we talked for a while, then I wrote about him and the ideas he had shared with me in the following week’s edition of the paper. About a week later I heard that soldiers in uniform had gone into the church one night, beaten Curtis, and dragged him out onto the lawn where police were waiting and took him into custody. That was in Whittier, California. A sleepy college town where Nixon had spent much of his youth.

Late one Sunday night shortly after Curtis’s arrest I was working alone at school cranking out the Monday edition of the newspaper on the mimeograph machine. The paper’s staff moderator had given me keys so I could come and go at odd hours, and it was after 10. I was not expecting to bump into anyone, so I was startled to discover a guy named Don who I had known since first grade standing in the doorway in army dress uniform. Continue reading →

Salvage by Moonlight

Posted on by
Reply

Salvage by Moonlight

There is a 2,000-year-old wonder called the “Antikythera mechanism.” I plan to talk about it, but I’ll start in 1993 when I got some nifty drawing software and took it into my head to try to compose an image resembling a coin with a two-faced Janus head on one side. Since the program allowed me to position visual elements precisely I decided to put small circles like a string of beads around the edge of the coin. This proved surprisingly challenging. The diameter of the coin was 7 inches, so its circumference was roughly 22 inches (2 x pi x (7/2)), but the string of circles needed to be just slightly inside the circumference of the circle. And the circumference of each little circle was a line that had thickness, and I wanted those little circles to overlap at their points of contact.

Something I realized pretty quickly was that I would make myself crazy if I tried to draw every single little circle and hope that they would all meet up nicely when the two ends came together over a 22 inch circular span. So instead I divided the 7 inch circle into eight 45-degree slices, fitted the small circles along the curved edge of one of the slices, then made seven copies and arranged them around the circumference of the coin. The result was not perfect uniformity, but it did not offend the eye. And since I was only drawing, and not trying to manipulate solids, or needing to have my work mesh with something else, what I came up with was sufficient.

Continue reading →

Tobacco, Flying Saucers and Hypnosis

Posted on by
7

Saucers Over Hollywood

Is every creative act a form of biography? Does everything we elect to do with purpose and care paint a portrait of us in miniature? And what about those things we do spontaneously with little care? Perhaps even carelessly? Might they actually be the most accurate indicators of who we are – even when we can’t see it ourselves?

And then there’s the stuff that comes to us uninvited? Dreams, imaginings, visions. Is that biography as well?

One of my earliest memories is of a dream. A merchant steamship is moving slowly through thick, silvery fog at dawn or evening twilight. A time that could be any time. The captain steps out of the wheelhouse and leans against a railing looking out into the mist, listening. A lit cigar is pinched between the first and second fingers of his left hand. Smoke drifts from a cylindrical ash at the tip. With the unconscious ease of a maneuver performed a thousand times, the captain brings the cigar to his lips, takes a puff, then grasps it between his thumb and index finger. He flicks briskly with his middle finger and I fall away from the glowing ember. At first I drift on a misty breeze. Then I’m bobbing on the sea, but only for an instant as I feel myself dissolve into the vastness of the ocean, becoming one with it.

I love the memory of that dream, and it may have predisposed me from a very early age to associate tobacco with transformation because I love tobacco too. I don’t smoke often. Perhaps one pipe full or a cigar every six weeks or so. This is intentional so that each experience is intense and approached with sweet anticipation. Colors are more vivid. The edges of objects more distinct, as if outlined – an especially exciting effect when looking at something detailed and dynamic like the swaying bough of a tree. My visual depth of field expands so that items both near and far appear in the same plane and in focus. And I’m filled with contentment and a sense of optimism. As the last puff swirls away and is gone a nostalgia embraces me, like a vacationer saying goodbye to Venice or some other extraordinary place.

Continue reading →

Earth, Air, Water

Posted on by
Reply

Desser House Chips

People have been acting for a very long time, and the profession is rich with allure. Nearly 2,500 years ago, in his tragedy The Bacchae, the Greek playwright Euripides observed:

Headlong he runs to death.
For death the gods exact, curbing by that bit
the mouths of men. They humble us with death
that we remember what we are who are not god,
but men.

What joy to speak such lines before an audience! To call to the assembled crowd, enjoining them to consider such themes! What ham bone could resist such glorious occupation.

But actors also engage fundamental notions by which people understand the world in a way that transforms them. There is no higher praise than when a performance elicits remarks like, “I really believed what she did!” Or “He made me forget I was watching a play – I was there with him in some other place and time!”

The desire to work such magic can tempt the actor to dabble in risky psychic business. Participation mystique, for example, regarding which C.G. Jung explained, “It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.”

If everything works out all right things are cool, sometimes even impressive. But, as my shrink Tom once remarked, “It’s like walking around with your unconscious hanging out…no wonder strange things happen.”

FADE IN

Imagine the interior of a 1966 BMW sedan. We had been on the road since 2 am, talking movies and screen plays and actors and directors. Ahead Highway 86 glided through the halo of our headlights, sliding endlessly away under the car. Out the back and side windows the star crowded sky glistened above the empty black silhouettes of the hills.

Continue reading →