What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too: Part 03
“Blue’s the colour of the sky”
Some thoughts on communication informed—in part—by life in the pandemic though not necessarily about life in the pandemic and, if I’m being honest, the writing kinda started beforehand anyways. The essay equivalent of a streaming mini-series in four parts. If you missed it, read Part 01 & Part 02 here.
Poor Cow
In scrolling through Twitter, peeking into the more confessional Peach, or just chatting with friends, it’s clear I’m not the only one who has been affected by the high contrast of isolation and overexposure that comes as part of life in quarantine with another person. I was at an outdoor, and properly distanced, July 4th gathering with a few couples who, when I told them how my quarantine breakup rendered me homeless, they burst out laughing. These were friends who had been with their partners for much longer than my recent ex and me, had kids, homes, a foundation; they immediately started telling me how especially in the beginning things almost ended for them.
Simple miscommunications fester. We went from lockdown to life as normal to lockdown again. There’s no opportunity to go to work or out with friends. When we sense danger, real or psychic, the unruly, reactive amygdala takes over as hormones flush through our system, which in quarantine can become an inescapable loop. In behavior therapy, they say the simple act of having to perform as another version of yourself will change your body chemistry and bring you out of a reactive state. We then come back to the conflict with a new perspective. Instead, without these in built moments to be alone or around other people, no feelings or arguments ever left the house. Conversations are networked through what the psychiatrist R.D. Laing referred to as “knots.” Laing’s book Knots lives somewhere in a liminal space between psychological text and poetry. The premise is that pure communication is essentially impossible, as it is always mediated through the other’s psyche before the signal is sent back.
Diagram from Langs’s Knots
In people with a relatively reliable sense of the world and so-called healthy interpersonal relationships the signal to noise ratio is low but never quite gone. But studies show that depressed people actually have a more accurate picture of reality, a syndrome called “depressive realism” according to a Vice article Facebook seemed to think I’d enjoy that cited a study from 1979. The piece went on to say “some psychologists concede that an element of self-deception may be necessary for well-being,” so perhaps what would be called a healthy dialogue contains more noise.
It makes sense that Knots is written in this undefinable format. This deliberate blur allows the book to function as an example of its subject matter. A key facet of poetry is that the audience is left to interpret the words. A good poet is knowing and confident and specific with language while keeping its variable meaning open and manages to guide the reader to a moment of private understanding. With invisible and fungible guardrails left in place, the reader has room to connect disparate, conjoined, asynchronous ideas, a rare space between thoughts, a space beyond what Buddhists call the observer self, a space where ideas form and dissipate and leave you simultaneously confused and enlightened, hungry and satisfied.
Specificity is something other forms of writing do more efficiently, though never perfectly. Knots is a book about the problems that arise when a signal is tragically and inevitably degraded as it pings back and forth between two individuals. Because with each relay, the signal’s content gains traces of the person’s psychological profile, insecurities, history with other people in other, similar, circumstances, any atypical neural or cognitive conditions: as it comes in, gets interpreted by the host and relayed back to its origin as it degrades with each pass. Relationships fail. Perhaps this is why an abstraction like poetry might be a useful form to arrive at a shared truth. If we are destined for inconsistent and unreliable conclusions in communication, why not shape the message in such a way that it contains multitudes?
Contour Tutorial
In college I was particularly enamored by Alvin Lucier’s “I’m Sitting in A Room.” The piece starts with spoken text that explicates the composition, both in process and purpose, and then repeats again and again for forty-five minutes. “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”
It’s hard to sit all the way through, something like a durational Shinto meditation. To experience the long hike from spoken language to abstraction— to be wholly immersed in a reality that is slowly and imperceptibly changing— has a surreal, almost psychedelic effect. The first thing you hear is the clear recorded monologue. About a third of the way through it starts to sound something like a vocoder. Towards the middle, it’s a synth without recognizable phonemes, and by the end his words have flattened into a bell-like sound—one with a delayed attack that smooths out the initial strike sounds—with very long sustain. In another room, this sound would be different because every room has a different resonant frequency and timber. We are reminded that all of our senses are subjective, relational, a variable, not a control.
When I listen now, I tend to skip around. I liken this to the way we have sequential, mostly uneventful lives but also have the ability to manipulate time, to align one moment with another contextually, spatially or temporally unrelated. We can highlight facets of human experience with greater depth simply in the act of comparison. It’s hard enough work to feel the sublime in our own internal, lived, daily existence with all its mundane pain and dull repetition—and to what end? Maybe non-sequential story-telling makes more sense to how we think anyway. It challenges the myth of both the stable subject and a stable timeline.
Like how in “Annie Hall,” Wood Allen tells his story completely out of order but in doing so, he captures the way we really remember important relationships. The first thing that comes to mind is not always the beginning and the last intrusive or wistful thought won’t necessarily be from your very last moments together. Allen fractures time further when the characters—in the throws of their rearranged build and decay as a couple— talk about their pasts and transport to that moment. In these scenes he allows the contextually present-day characters to look on like the ghost of insecurities present. Here Allen makes a key distinction between storytelling and memory. Memory is the chaotic sequence of the main narrative, a present the characters remain inside even as they temporally slide. In storytelling, when a character consciously relays a memory, they retain a meta-analytical distance. Lucier’s experiment is not meant to dictate exactly how to manipulate the process for a single desired effect but rather to display the entire range of possible outcomes. He illustrates how to use the given obstacle—the resonant frequency of the room and the gradient of tones those physical parameters provide—to arrive at something more precise in its abstraction.
Every Man Dies
Joseph Campbell talks about shared mythology across time and space, stories that would have no intersection other than their relationship to primal Jungian archetypes. While America’s lineage is one of endless cons and constant reinvention, I think really, early Hollywood is the true American mythology.
The notion of the star, however, wasn't itself exactly new. In “Swann’s Way” Proust writes about little Marcel’s crush on an actress. “If the sight of Maubant, coming out one afternoon from the Théâtre-Français, had plunged me in the throes and sufferings of hopeless love, how much more did the name of a ‘star,’ blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more, seen through the window of a brougham which passed me in the street, the hair over her forehead abloom with roses, did the face of a woman who, I would think, was perhaps an actress, leave with me a lasting disturbance, a futile and painful effort to form a picture of her private life.”
It is not enough for Marcel to engage with the theatre—his obsession is with the individual women who play in it. Proust gestures at the idea that the audience, here represented by the confused lust of a young boy, sees not only the stories but also the charismatic magic these women possess as they mix the fantasy of the fiction they perform with the corporeal person onstage. And suddenly beneath the character lies yet another layer of desire. But it’s a delusion to think it any more attainable. Because although the actress exists in reality she remains teasingly unknowable to the viewer.
Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, Cannes, 1956.
Hollywood definitely refined the happenstance into a repeatable craft, a Ford assembly line for identity. The Studio system which ran from the 1920’s through the early 1960’s not only understood the parameters of this exchange, the persona and off-screen lifestyle of the stars became integral to the production of the films. Actors were given new names that had the capacity to define their archetype. The stars and studios managed their off-set wardrobe, dyed their hair. They went on fake dates and covered up scandals. The studios created public characters out of their actors as an extension of the entertainment. Gossip columns documented the intimate interiors of their supposed lives as the public consumed the twin narratives of the films and their stars simultaneously. In 1948 Ingrid Bergman had a widely publicized affair with director Roberto Rossellini, the mere suggestion of which allowed anyone who watched her in Casablanca to also imagine Bergman in decidedly more lewd and potentially more real acts as she chastely kisses Humphrey Bogart.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Flip, 2016
I’m pretty sure the word touchpoint would not enter the lexicon till years of ad meetings later, but the Hollywood star machine maintained the desire in the consumer by reinforcing the allure in every interaction. They controlled every parameter of the network through which they delivered their story.
While the prewar Hollywood system remained relatively opaque, by the 1960’s the notion that a person could build his or her own public image trickled into the avant garde. In 1964 Andy Warhol specifically mimicked the Hollywood studio system and built his own superstars out of whole cloth. Years later, of course, this concept has become banal; we all present and watch others live through variants of edited selves on social media. Celebrities, friends, exes, former colleagues all exist as equal squares waiting for the flick of our thumb.
Parts 01–03 will be archived on hgtv420.substack.com, and the final installment, Part 04, of What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too will be sent out next week. Feel free to pass around :)