Le Paradoxe du comédien

Here's a little morsel for you to nibble on.

I'm in the middle of preparing an honors thesis proposal on Loïe Fuller, a dancer at the turn of the last century, as a transatlantic figure.

The author of one of the books I'm pulling from quotes Diderot's writings on art and literature to describe the "undecidable doubleness implied in any theatrical mimesis" (put simply, the complex process actors go through when they go in character):

"One is oneself by nature; one is another by imitation; the heart you imagine for yourself is not the heart you have."

What's most intriguing to me is the third bit about hearts. What heart do I think I have? Diderot's telling me it's not the one I actually do. Can we know ourselves? I'd like to follow the Delphic Oracle's advice to γνῶθι σεαυτόν, or "KNOW THYSELF." Sounds great! I'd love to say that I know whats going on in my heart and my brain (and my left shin, for that matter), but how possible is that? Will my self-perception always be somewhat aberrant? I know that I am blind to lots of my faults - I think part of growing up is seeing faults, as well as strengths, within yourself.

I don't love to be overtly religious, but I think in this vein, LDS theology points to an important idea. Mormons talk about "eternal progression," or the idea that individuals can perpetually gain more knowledge, become more godlike, have more love, etc. I think a big part of that idea is actually understanding oneself. If I have a clear(er) view of myself, I'm going to be more forgiving of the people and the world around me, I am going to have reasonable expectations of myself and others, I'll be better able to master my own thoughts, emotions, and body, and I'm sure that list goes on.

Michel de Montaigne, for whom this blog is actually titled, based his entire Essais project around the idea that if you know yourself, you know the world around you because he believed that within each individual is contained the whole of human experience. Now, I think that's a bit of a stretch. Having grown up in Suburbia, USA, isolated from the harsh reality that is the existence of so many of my fellow humans on this planet, I'm probably ill equipped to 'understand' the experience of an expecting mother in Namibia with HIV who can't get proper neonatal and early childhood care. However, I would argue that as I try to understand her situation better, I will better understand my own humanity, and vice versa. In the LDS scriptures, there is a line that talks about what individuals will be like that have progressed to a "perfected" (a term that in Mormon theology means something more like "having done everything necessary to be with God" rather than "a terminal point") state: "they see as they are seen, and know as they are known" (D&C 76:94). To me, this means that we ultimately can - and should try now - to see and know clearly ourselves, the state of the world, and especially the individuals that populate our planet.

So maybe what I'm trying to say is that even if total self-understanding isn't possible now, it is something we should work towards because it will help us to be better equipped to deal with the world, both the one within ourselves and the dizzyingly complex one around us. I talk a lot about trying to be open and authentic in my relationships to other people, but that has to start in my being more open and authentic with myself - trying to make the "heart I imagine for myself" the same as the "heart I have."

Another poem

I'm on a poetry kick the last couple weeks - maybe it's my psyche crying out for sanity in the midst of skull-crushing stress.And Billy Collins has been here for moral support.

This was read by the poet himself on Saturday's A Prairie Home Companion. It's a reaction to a book about fiction writing, creatively called Writing Fiction, which is full of advice like, "Never use the word suddenly just to create tension."

Tension
By Billy Collins

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on the shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

the economy of december

Right now it's 7:18am. I'm sitting in my office trying to get started studying for my critical theory exam today. Before me are several empty bottles of Vitamin Water, a tupperware of the Thai leftovers I ate for breakfast Friday (wow, I am disgusting), a large Dr. Pepper, and a box of orange sticks.

It's been what I affectionately call "Hell Week" since the day I got back from Thanksgiving, a colorful description of which only the adjective, and not the noun it modifies, is true. This semester's Hell Week will actual span nearly a month. I thought I might illustrate the economy of the month of December for the average student, by which I mean me (I'm pretty average, right?).

INPUT: lots of caffeinated beverages, about 5.4 hours of sleep per night, obscene quantities of Asian take-out, chocolate-covered gummies, and hot showers to shock myself into the world of the waking

OUTPUT: graded written and oral exams, compositions, and homework for French 101; a 10 page paper on how Edgar Poe was an Orientalist; an 8 page postmodernist reading of BYU's Christmas Around the World; a really great bike ride with some of my favorite people; a study of the folklaw governing Mormon profanity and vulgarity; graduate school applications; a couple harp performances; lots of conversations on women, gender roles, sexuality, and relationships especially in LDS culture; moving out and driving the 16 hours back to Kansas; and about 23 other things I could bore you by enumerating.

Mom, please don't be offended if I go into hibernation the second I land on the front porch.

Sometimes you get to the point...

It's 11:33pm. I only have 5.5 solid pages of the 10 page paper I'm reworking to submit at 8am tomorrow. I promise I haven't been procrastinating - it's just been one of those absolutely crazy weeks where you're trying to figure out which way is up.

I've had a couple random thoughts I thought I'd like to get out right now, which includes a nice picture and a poem. Multisensory envolvement, Ka-POW!

(1) Sometimes when I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, say, when I'm working on applications to graduate school, I actually briefly forget what day/month/year it is. I forget the present and live in the future. No good.

(2) Some of classiest chocolate in the world is made in Orem. Thank, Amano, for getting me through finals (not to mention the last three semesters). I think Ocumare is my current favorite.

(3) Frank O'Hara is great. These are some photographs of him and his friend Grace Hartigan. Frank O'Hara was a poet, art critic, and museum curator in the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote this poem called "Having a Coke with You," and it makes my heart sing. Here it is. Please find a quiet place and read it aloud to yourself (or listen to Frank O'Hara read it himself).

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it


Great, right? I'm not going to pretend to get it, but I love the bit about a tree breathing through its spectacles and how silly statuary and painting is when you're looking at someone you love and how someone saying an experience is so much a part of having it...

The Internet, Part Deux

So Christmas came early this year.

I was talking with my dad this evening about wanting to buy a MacBook Air and he got the brilliant idea to head over to the Apple store to get some hands-on playtime and expert opinions. After 20 minutes in the store, Dad and I decided that it wasn't a bad idea to go ahead and buy today. The Air was $101 off for Black Friday - a "promotional price reduction" (but never a "sale." Apple doesn't do "sales."). They threw in a printer for good measure. All the signs said, "Buy today!"

I'm in seventh heaven, even though the I won't actually switch to the new Air until Christmastime. The poor thing will have to sit in the basement unloved and unused until I've got the time to transfer all my files, but I can certainly wait for such a good thing.

So here I sit, spending a few moments with my new favorite 2.9 pounds of plastic, aluminum, and lithium polymer before it's goodbye for another three weeks. I'll survive.

As I was setting up Google Chrome on my computer, though, I stumbled across this highly entertaining and educational ebook called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. One line really struck me, especially after my musings in my last post on the Internet:

"The movement of many of our daily tasks online enables us to live more fully in the real world."

The idea is intriguing: because we can pay bills online, make dinner reservations online, submit homework online, and check the score of the Mets game online, we have less to worry about offline. Cooking from AllRecipes.com is simpler, in theory, than looking up a Betty Crocker recipe in a book that cost you $17.98. Shopping online is, again in theory, less complicated than dragging your screaming toddler around Macy's.

Okay, sure. In some ways, the Internet really simplifies the daily processes. I am Wikipedia's #1 fan. I love reading the Times online. All this information is at our fingertips, just waiting for the right Google Search.

But while the Internet is really liberating in lots of ways, I actually feel like I lose a lot of autonomy to it. By no means do I consider myself a slave to the Internet, but having so much information so readily accessible means I'm less active about going out and looking for it.

For example, the Internet has radically changed the way college students write papers. While my parents were in college, writing a term paper involved trekking to the library, pulling dusty back issues of scholarly journals of the shelf, pouring over page after page looking for just the right word. Today, I can access a sizable portion of the materials for my own research from my laptop from the comfort of my own bed and use the handy dandy command+f function to search for keywords and phrases. From this angle, I'm apparently more "free" than my parents were; there is more information that is way more accessible to me.

But at the same time, how much do I let convenience restrict how adventurous I am, how much liberty I take in the real world? If all the information and services I could need are a click away, why would I ever even leave my house?

So the Internet provides a place where we're increasingly more free to say what we want however we want to and gives us a certain freedom in the real world, but the convenience of it all can limit and alter our interaction with that world.

The Internet is ultimately a tool we can use to expand our "freedom" (wow, what a loaded word) or limit it, but it's not inherently anything, right?

The Internet.

A year ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave this address on internet freedom. The gist of her speech is this: open up access to the Internet and you open people's minds and eyes. She cited events like the "birth of citizen journalism" during the 2009 elections in Iran to point out that social media websites - like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube - can be used to open channels of communication when a government is trying to restrict what information gets passed around.

With these kinds of websites, you're putting the "means of production" and distribution of information into the hands of the masses. Anyone with a video-capable camera or cellphone - quite a sizable number of people - can create videos, upload them to a site like YouTube, and share them with an effectively global audience. Anyone with access to the Internet can create a "tweet" on Twitter and share information as banal as what they ate for breakfast or as shocking as the fact that police opened fire on demonstrators. There is an unimaginably large quantity of information getting thrown around out there on the Internet, and I'd argue that the majority of it comes through unofficial channels; while official institutions like the New York Times or the government make lots of information available, the sum total of unofficial sources of information on the Internet - like Facebook status updates, YouTube videos like this one, and my own blog - is immeasurable. We're all putting lots and lots of information out there, and consuming lots and lots of information, and we're using sites where we control the content. Even official institutions like Foreign Policy magazine's site now create forums where we average folk leave comments on their articles.

Put simply, we are an essential part of the information flow happening on the Internet. We're not just passive consumers, but rather we are active producers. As Marshall McLuhan put it way back in 1975, "At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors." Interestingly enough, this is actually the title of the article in which he elaborates this idea, but the idea is just as true today if we replace "Sputnik" with "the Internet." As users of online social media, we're all interconnected and we're all creating, be it a new profile picture or a Prezi. In spite of the fact that using the Internet doesn't require you to get up off your couch except to pee and grab a coke from the fridge, participating in Internet culture (which you, dear reader, are actively doing while reading my blog) is an active experience.

I know, dear reader, that this is nothing new to you. "Duh, Grace," you're thinking. "That's pretty obvious. Tell me something I don't know."

What I want to point out is that even though the Internet is making us more and more connected all the time, I think for the average user, online social media is used to reinforce concrete human relationships rather than to forge new ones. For example, my friend Adam shared this video with me this morning in a face-to-face interaction, and then ten hours later, I turned around and shared it with another friend, Jourdan, again in a face-to-face interaction. My relationships with these two people began in the real world, and the social media was used to reinforce those relationships. Further, I think that for the average user, more often than not, social networking sites don't really expand her actual social sphere. The people I interact with through the Internet are people I already know in concrete contexts. I don't think most of us go out looking for new friends on the web. I'm not online looking for new Facebook friends in Vietnam so I can keep up with the political scene there. Rather, I think most of us use social media to solidify and expand on relationships that exist offline.

Of course, we all hear the "horror stories" of sketchy liaisons between people who meet through social networking sites. Just think of this Fall's film Catfish or for my Mormon readers the story Elder Bednar shared in his May 2009 CES Fireside about the couple who met and married on Second Life.

But that's not what the vast majority of us are using the Internet for. We might keep up with the news online, we might stream Jónsi concerts from NPR, and we might even publish blogs to which we want to attract a large readership of people we don't know, like my friend Tristan does. However, for most of us, we want to establish and maintain human relationships in "unmediated" contexts - in face-to-face interactions with real human beings - rather than in "mediated" ones in which we can only get our hands on 13" plastic boxes and stare into LED screens rather than human eyes.

Online social media helps us reinforce human relationships but doesn't replace them. There's something about breathing the same air as the person you're communicating with - gauging their reactions to you by their body language and tone of voice, making eye contact, sharing a meal. All that is largely lost online. Maybe this comes back to my recent preoccupation with sensuality and my fear of feeling increasingly alienated from my own physical body. I want sensation: sight, smell, sounds, touch, taste. And I'm not going to find that online. Even as I write this blog post - which I hope will generate some conversation within my own preexisting social circle in real face-to-face contexts - I find myself forgetting about my body and wiggle my toes to remind myself that they're still there.

Real face-to-face relationships in my tangible body - I guess that's what I'm after.

Final note: please don't think I'm a Luddite. I'm all about online social media. I think Clinton has a point - online social media is a great way to circumvent government censorship and promote understanding between people who wouldn't otherwise be able to connect. I just want to remind myself - and you all, while I'm at it - about how important our relationships are with the physical world and the other people who inhabit it.

On fundamentalism

That's a pretty formidable post title for a silly little blog like mine, but I've been having some (albeit loosely connected) thoughts bouncing around lately that seem to point back to fundamentalism.

Another controversial "F-word" among many (fetus, feminism).

The other day, my critical theory professor suggested that fundamentalism follows postmodernism.

Rewind. Let's define postmodernism - or at least attempt to. The word's a slippery one, but basically describes the tendency of contemporary culture to reject absolutes. It's all relative, says postmodernism. A good postmodernist "deconstructs" - breaks down and analyzes - the strict dichotomies that apparently define us: black/white, male/female, gay/straight. Postmodernism is all about recognizing the pluralities that exist in the world and turning a skeptical eye on anything that claims to be universal, conclusive, or infallible. It's all about exploring nuance and meaning and category. Postmodern works are always quoting from or referencing other works and movements and themes - a postmodern work doesn't claim to be "original," but rather amuses itself by playing with the preexisting world.

Ideologically speaking, that's a pretty difficult world to navigate. We humans are funny creatures. We like to feel that our existence has meaning. We like to believe that we have a solid, core identity. We like to think there are things that are absolutely true, like that democracy means freedom or that someday, justice will be served.

All that is exactly what postmodernism is trying to debunk.

Postmodernism a reaction to this secure, confident, positivistic worldview - a swing of the pendulum that's been a long time coming. Because denying objective, ultimate truth makes us humans feel so puny and insignificant and insecure, I don't think Marc Olivier (yep, that's my critical theory teacher. Props!) is wrong to suggest that a reaction to postmodernism might be a pendular swing back towards a mentality that asserts that the world around us is ultimately knowable, rational - one that makes sense, one where there are ultimate truths. We humans like to institutionalize those knowable truths: religion, government, political parties. Cling a little more tightly to such supposedly literal, ultimately knowable truths and you get fundamentalism.

But hold up. If defining postmodernism gets a whole paragraph, shouldn't we explore the semantics of "fundamentalism" a bit more closely? After all, the term has a wide range of applications. It was first coined to describe a movement in Protestant theology, but over the last few decades has been reappropriated to describe groups of Muslims, Jews, and Mormons. Strictly speaking, "fundamentalism" should describe the groups' adherence to the most fundamental - that is, the most basic and essential - doctrines.

And here's a whole new can of worms.

What the heck is doctrine? What doctrine is "essential" or "fundamental" to a religious group obviously varies between members of that group. Members of the LDS Church don't believe polygamy to be an essential core doctrine, because we don't practice it anymore. Fundamentalist Mormons, however, have adopted the "fundamentalist" modifier, though, to assert their belief that it is. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on the Muslim faith, but it seems what jihad means is up for debate, and we've assigned the modifier "fundamentalist" to the Muslims who interpret jihad as literal war on unbelievers.

[Brief side note: for some interesting ideas on what essential, or for sake of argument "fundamental" Mormon doctrine is, see this 2007 official statement and Valerie Hudson's close reading of it]

However "fundamentalism" gets applied, it does mean uncompromising adherence to a set of beliefs. Quite the opposite of the postmodern refusal to decide anything for certain. That refusal is unsettling. It's a lot more comfortable to unquestioningly believe in the existence of God than it is to have to explore how and why you believe that - to thrust faith under a microscope.

That said, I'd like to close with this quote from Hugh B. Brown:

"One of the most important things in the world is freedom of the mind; from this all other freedoms spring. Such freedom is necessarily dangerous, for one cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong, but generally more thinking is the antidote for the evils that spring from wrong thinking."


That's no resolution at all of the conflict, but I think it's the start of one. More to come in the future, I hope.