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April 30th, 2023

4/30/2023

Life is a Support System for Art is a Support System for Life
Is a Support System For...: A Recursive Argument with Myself
At Midnight

There’s a great anecdote in Stephen King’s On Writing, which has always stayed with me. It’s been about fifteen years since I read the book, so my recollection will be a bit rusty. That said, a paraphrase should serve the purposes for my musings on this entry of my ill-trafficked blog tonight. Apologies in advance, though, to King and those fans of his more familiar with the book, if I mangle the story in the telling.
Somewhere in the first third of the book King talks about the writing of Carrie. The book is created under suboptimal conditions. King is working as an English teacher at a local high-school while his wife Tabitha is busting ass at a donut shop. They already have one or two kids (Joe and Naomi?) and they are living crowded in a small trailer. King doesn’t even have a functional desk, and so he types out the novel while bracing his typewriter on his lap. One day, King vows, when I’m more successful, I’m going to get a huge desk. He begins to fantasize about this thing, which he calls the T. Rex. I can’t remember exactly how he envisioned it then, but recalling it now I can see my own version of the desk in question. It’s made of solid lacquered walnut, with an ameboid shape, bowing out like an acoustic guitar at the center. It’s edged in rolled brass that gleams like gold, and takes up two-thirds of the room in which it sits.
Eventually King sells Carrie—after something like thirty-five rejections—and gets an advance of roughly sixty-five grand. The years pass and he goes from being a pulp scribe who stays afloat selling stories to men’s magazines to being America’s preeminent popular writer. He’s richer than Croesus, and while not especially ostentatious, he does get the big house, and more importantly, he finally gets the T. Rex.
Something happens, though, when he settles in behind that large wooden behemoth and starts to type. The words still come, but the thrill is somehow gone, or at least attenuated. Even worse, King, in his isolation, begins to drink heavily and even starts using cocaine. Finally, one day, realizing that this desk is some kind of succubus—malevolent despite its inanimate state—he throws it away.
Remembering writing Carrie with a typewriter balanced on his knees and doing no good writing while behind the T. Rex, he has an epiphany. “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
It’s a profound statement, one that, while delivered as a fact, is more an encapsulation of King’s personal aesthetic weltanschauung than anything else. It wouldn’t do any good to argue about whether or not the statement is true in some objective sense. It is true for him, which is enough.
Rereading the money quote, it occurs to me that The Shining is a cautionary tale about how things can go wrong when one creates under ostensibly ideal conditions. Jack Torrance, after all, being a writer, should have celebrated having the Overlook Hotel all to himself and his family. There was plenty of natural beauty to draw on there as inspiration, and few distractions. And yet the perfection of the environment seemed to curdle into something hideous, demented. Torrance, like Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson, had become a prisoner of the pristine world he’d sought out, made mad by his ability to shape his environment to his will. His abuse of Wendy and Danny also seems to serve as metaphor for the selfish artist, viewing everyone around him as either impediment to his creation or just another tool.
His paralysis before the typewriter suddenly takes on new meaning in this context. To create is to take something from the platonic and to make it real, and thus imperfect, or at least different, than what one initially conceived. His constant rewriting of the sentence, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” becomes a kind of protest against trying to engage Hemingway’s “white bull.” Why even risk it when you’re probably only going to get gored, or at least make at least one mistake with the pica spear? Victory’s all but assured when the entire fight takes place in the toreador’s imagination alone.
The Overlook was haunted, of course (at least in the novel version), and Jack is a recovering alcoholic. But the Kubrick film is more open-ended, more amenable to the T. Rex run amok interpretation. Kubrick—more intellectual and a perfectionist—seemed more fascinated by how the search for perfection and creation under ideal conditions could drive one insane. In other words, how making life subordinate to art—to the point of neglecting life—might drive one crazy, and hurt their loved ones.
I wonder, too, if the filmmaker would have agreed with King’s assertion about life not being a support system for art? Something in me tells me he would have objected to it, that perfection through pain was kind of the point. It’s not as easy as saying that one man is an ends justify the means artist, while the other isn’t, though perhaps that’s part of it, too.
There is not the sense in Kubrick’s work that there’s a therapeutic dimension, a way to soothe workaday wounds and cope with life’s travails, as in King’s books. Kubrick’s films feel atemporal even when set in the future, removed from daily concern and steeped in the philosophical and theoretical. Full Metal Jacket, while brilliant, is somehow bloodless, as clinical as dissecting a chloroformed frog. It forgoes the primally mad edge of Platoon or Apocalypse Now, for a cold rationalism that suggests a different, almost scientific madness. Small wonder also, that 2001 and Clockwork Orange never really seem to date; or that Barry Lyndon holds up as perhaps the best period piece ever committed to celluloid aside from Once Upon a Time in America.
It's even less surprising that the film version of The Shining rankled so much against Stephen King’s sensibilities. The conflict between him and Kubrick was not just aesthetic, but deeply philosophical and even spiritual. King believed in an afterlife, and in hell, while Kubrick was more of a materialist-existentialist, who thought any light brought to darkness must be mustered by humanity itself, alone.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Kubrick lived long enough to read On Writing and to offer his opinion on King’s theory of art vs. life. Let’s further suppose that he objected to King’s theory. “Life,” Kubrick might assert, “while painful and full of defeats and ultimately ending in death, requires us to make sacrifices. Those builders who labored to create the monuments which stood the test of time were not doing so to make their lives more livable. Indeed, many slaves who constructed the wonders of the world no doubt suffered injury or even died while laboring. Life is something to be transcended by pouring one’s energy wholeheartedly into the labor of creation, of art, even at the expense of life. Life is temporary. Art, if done right, is much closer to eternal. Why not sacrifice one in the service of the other?”
Again, it’s not a matter of who might be right, but a mere contrasting of philosophies for the sake of a post-midnight Gedankenexperiment on a blog. What, though, might account for the difference in philosophies between King and Kubrick?
There’s the religious aspect, of course. King was raised in New England, with its strong puritanical streak (that shifted from the metaphysical to the political and secular in the 20th century.) Kubrick, on the other hand, was raised in an at least culturally Jewish household, and was still a young man when the details of the Holocaust finally became public knowledge. It might not have taken such an incident, though, to permanently rock his faith in God (assuming he ever had it.) There’s an interview with his sister in the documentary A Life in Pictures, in which she says that FDR was so beloved that his passing spread nihilism among many in NYC.
It could simply be that King’s life was much harder than Kubrick’s. Stanley Kubrick wasn’t quite born into baronial splendor, but he hailed from an upper-middleclass household. His father was a professional and in one of the Kubrick bios I recall his friend saying everyone was awed that Kubrick’s family actually had a house! In Brooklyn! And that Kubrick spent most of his time either playing with his cameras, developing film in his inhouse darkroom, or playing chess in the park.
King meanwhile grew up thoroughly working-class, in a single-parent household, with him and his mother having been abandoned by his father. Because his mom was forced to work (still a little unusual then) he was bounced from aunt to aunt, pawned off, left to fend for himself. Even after he’d made something of a name for himself in the slicks, King was still working a laundry mangle or steam press, or otherwise busting ass at menial jobs. He tells one particularly gross story about cleaning linen tablecloths after a banquet, and getting his hands greasy with drawn butter spilled from the lobster plates.
There’s no doubt that one creates differently when exhausted, when dispirited and at the end of the day, than when they are able to give all their energy to their work. Raymond Carver not just wrote short sentences—his goal being under ten words each. He wrote short stories because his day job at the sawmill didn’t leave him enough time to write novels.
I’m not even sure that Kubrick ever had a conventional job, that as a teenager he did anything besides take photos for Look Magazine. It hardly matters, though. The human condition is universal (unless you accept the cryonics argument or Ben Bova’s theory of telomeric transcendence.) We live, we age, we watch the people we love die, and then we prepare for our own deaths. And that’s if we’re lucky.
No amount of money—no castle, no lobster dinners, no divertissement with dope or women—can ultimately distract a sentient being from this truth. Which makes me think my theory’s specious. One’s own experiences might not inform their aesthetic philosophy, but rather be hardwired in their DNA like so many other things. Whether we respond to the encyclopedic, dense, postmodern work of someone like David Foster Wallace or prefer the staccato rhythms of Mickey Spillane might be inborn, like eye color.
But still the question won’t quite leave me alone: Is art a support system for life or is life a support system for art? If your life is painful enough, you may throw yourself into your work so totally that you neglect everything else: your family, your other obligations, even your hygiene. But even in giving art primacy over life, you are making your life more livable, by providing this distraction, by the attempt at transcendence. Ignoring your life in the pursuit of your art helps distract you from the pain and problems of your life. Thus making life a support system for art ironically means making art a support system for life.
And then there are those for whom it is not just some posture, a bumper sticker for the car or a pose by some manque: art is, in fact, life. Look at David Lynch, not just giving all of his money and time to the creation of Eraserhead, but literally living on the set for some time, sleeping in a warehouse in Philadelphia.
Eraserhead ain’t quite the pyramid of Giza, but it was not an easy film to make. But Lynch has been married four times and cites the selfishness required to create his brand of art as a factor in all of his divorces. King and his missus, meanwhile, have been together more than fifty years.
There’s a lesson in there.
Or maybe not, as Kubrick and his wife, Christiane, remained together until his death, and she continues to remain loyal to his memory.

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April 09th, 2023

4/9/2023

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Fun with Fractals and Fred: Some Slight Aesthetic Musings

The concept of a refractory period is familiar to most people, thanks to its association with sex. People’s prurient interests help ensure that anything associated with sex generates interest. In sexuality, the refractory period refers to the time after lovemaking, more specifically, the time in which the energy to go again is restored. The period is much longer in men than women. As men and women get older, it gets even worse.
The refractory period not only applies to organisms, though. It refers to smaller systems within the larger organism. You could say that the refractory period is fractal, I guess.
What’s the old quote by Goethe? Das Ur-Bild ist das Bild und die Spiegelung. Or, in English, The original image is the image and the reflection.
One area where refractive periods come up a lot is in neuroscience. It’s still nowhere near an exact science, as the brain is a very, very complicated organ. Not only that, but it’s dynamic. Convolutions on brains aren’t exactly like whorls on fingerprints, but they’re closer than you might think. Supposedly “left-brain” functions will sometimes be handled by the right hemisphere (or at least in conjunction with them) and vice versa. The brain also maintains its neuroplasticity (and can even rediscover it) much later than was initially thought. We may find solutions to break up certain tau (plaques) fairly soon, which could alter the effects of everything from Alzheimer’s to dementia pugilistica.
Compounding the problem of complexity is the attempt to locate mind within the realm of the brain. German (and before it Greek) reflects this medical and conceptual imprecision in consanguine linguistic imprecisions. Geist can mean ghost, but pair it with other words and weird things start happening. Geist + krank (which means “sick”) gives you Geisteskrank, which logic would tell you means Soul Sickness. Except it means mental illness.
We’ve made some progress from the days where the Egyptians caked people in crocodile dung to heal their mental traumas, but not much. Or maybe not, as coming up with drugs to bind to MU-receptors in the brain has probably gotten more people killed than crocodile shit. Besides which, seeing someone smeared in crocodile feces is funny. Seeing them dead of an overdose, not so much.
One of the things neuroscientists have learned about nerves is that they also have refractory periods. If someone strokes the back of your hand, you’ll get a slightly pleasurable tingling sensation. Repeat the stroking and the tingling sensation will repeat, albeit in an attenuated version. Keep doing it and the spot will just hurt. Done enough times the slight nuisance can become an unbearable agony. Water torture exists for a reason.
Variation is key to stimulation, while a lack of it leads to excruciation.
Which got me to thinking about Fred.
For those who’ve never read Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction (I can’t recommend it highly enough), he calls the Muse/the unconscious “Fred.”
If all of a sudden you find yourself wanting to read nothing but books on one subject, Knight says, Fred is trying to tell you something. You’re probably getting ready to write a book (or at least a short story) on that subject, only you just don’t know it, yet. Fred does, though.
Fred not only provides help. He can be a sort of a trickster from time to time. I don’t have the exact example here before me, but Knight cites a case in which the same word pops up twice in two sentences. This isn’t a problem with small things like prepositions and pronouns, but with more noticeable words the effect on the reader can sometimes be glaring. It’s the literary equivalent of walking out of a bathroom with a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe.
I’ll give you an example:
“Bob put his gun in his belt and sat down in the driver’s seat. He’d have to gun it if he wanted to make it to the Florida Keys in time.”
See the use of “gun” twice in two sentences, once to refer to the literal object and then a second time in a more figurative sense? There’s nothing wrong with the word “gun” to idiomatically describe driving fast, especially if you’re writing close-third person. But coming so soon after the previous mention of gun, it galls, at least a little. Use the word “gun” again in the next sentence—and perhaps the one after that—and it starts to become absurd.
Let’s try it just for shits and giggles:
“Bob put his gun in his belt and sat down in the driver’s seat. He’d have to gun it if he wanted to make it to the Florida Keys in time. The gun smarted where he’d stuck it down the front of his pants. The discomfort, though, would last for less time if he kept gunning it for the Keys.”
Pretty soon anyone reading this is going to want to blow their brains out, or at least they’re going to find themselves annoyed by it. Sort of like, you know, someone who keeps rubbing one patch of flesh rubbed repeatedly in the same way, over and over again.
Which makes me wonder: is there something fractal here? Not just between the organism as a whole and a system (the brain) and a smaller subsystem (the nerve) but as regards other domains, or at least interacting with the “mind” and not just the brain’s registering of sensory input?
Someone a lot smarter than me and with access to a lab and human guinea pigs would probably be able to figure this out. You’d have to get people to read sentences of varying length—maybe even entire books’ worth of material—and monitor them while they had those wires fixed to their heads. You could monitor brain patterns to see which sentences—and sentences of what length—worked the best on their brains. You could also monitor what kind of effect seeing the same word in multiple sentences had on the brain.
Because each brain is different, though, some would react negatively more quickly than others to the repeated word. The writer Theodore Cheney claimed in his book Getting the Words Right that sentences should not be over thirty words in length. Much more and the mind tunes out, or loses the plot, some anteceding thread or relative pronoun needing to be tracked down again.
Too many especially short, staccato sentences, though, and the effect is a bit like being slapped, or hearing an overconfident child with a bad voice singing. The boldness grates, and smacks of overweening confidence, posturing faux machismo like Hemingway after he lost it and descended into self-parody.
Varying sentence length—not rubbing the same place in the same way twice—is the key. Even as I write that, though, I can remember something else Cheney said, something which contradicts that. The only rule in art, he claims, is the rule of thumb.
Thinking that I’m going to figure out how the mind works by studying the brain (especially when it’s reading fiction, which is art) shows I’m just struggling with the same old conceptual conflations. I’m making Cartesian errors of clockwork, confusing an organism with a mechanism.
And sometimes the deliberate courting of that feeling of sense-deadening creates new and special sensations. The refusal to use ornamentation or artifice—to write several sentences of similar length, and even using the same word in each—can sometimes produce its own kind of cacophony. Greek aestheticians of Attic antiquity were quick to point out that cacophony was just as important to harmony as euphony.
The singer Moby observed as much when talking about torch singer Norah Jones. Too much beauty, perfection in the voice starts to sound robotic. Folk music exists for a reason. Kurt Cobain’s shredding of his laryngeal flesh would’ve gotten him kicked off American Idol in the preliminary rounds, but who cares? The winners of that show make mostly derivative, watered-down versions of standards (usually not even written by the people who originally sang them.) I think Nirvana’s music sounds better with every passing year, but that’s also a matter of opinion. A lot of metal heads who like virtuosity and cocksure front men in their musicians found his primal screaming and performative self-loathing obnoxious and ugly.
There’s an editing program I once used—a program I won’t name here—which would monitor for stylistic flaws and errors in prose. When one made an “error” (and it does necessitate the quotes) the program would produce red squiggly lines beneath the word in question, like in MS-Word.
It did this once when I had written three sentences that had begun with the pronoun “He.”
“Same word used three times in a row to start a sentence. Think of using another word.”
I was thinking more of finding a way to tell the program—non-sentient though it may have been and born ex nihilo of some programmer’s fancy—to fuck its mother.
I’ve seen plenty of instances where three, four, or even more sentences began with the same word, and they not only worked, but sung.
Perhaps, then, there are worse things than having your character gun the motor with a gun stuffed down the front of their shirt.

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Random Ruminations archived on an ill-trafficked blog

April 30th, 2023

Life is a Support System for Art is a Support System for Life Is a Support System For...: A Recursive Argument with Myself At Midnight

April 09th, 2023

Fun with Fractals and Fred: Some Slight Aesthetic Musings

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Life is a Support System for Art is a Support System for Life
Is a Support System For...: A Recursive Argument with Myself
At Midnight