Aporia

Pauline Kael, from her “Notes on 280 Movies” in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, quoted by Falling and Laughing. Do you think that cinema and television have amplified this problem: the occupation of our imaginations by fantasies? James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was written in 1939. Mitty is a tragicomic character inattentive to his weakly-lived and mundane life, preferring the vivid and meaningful heroics of his fantasy world. Don’t we all? A primary struggle: to redirect my mind whenever it starts to enact its hideous, vain little dreams.

It is commonly proposed that the ubiquity of televisual and cinematic media, and now videogames, amplifies the human tendency to reside in self-satisfying fantasy rather than attempt to shape reality, overcome, transcend, find beauty and meaning in the scrum of the real, and so on. I wonder, though, if the media make as much difference as we suppose; it has always been the case that we fly from mediocrity into dreams; it has always been the case that fantasy –self-aggrandizing, self-confirming, self-mythologizing- is our best opiate. Back to books you can go; back to oral storytelling; the kids always pretended not to be turning into their parents.

But I do note, in my own life, that when I watch a certain sort of movies or play video games to excess, it soon occurs that my dreams are taken over, my automatic reveries replaced. This excellent quote from Marshall McLuhan, posted by Carvalhais relates:

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. Political unification of populations by means of vernacular and language groupings was unthinkable before printing turned each vernacular into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men heterogeneously trained to be individuals.

Our trained individualism exists within narrow parameters; we vary, but drawing on the same sources for our consolatory daydreams perhaps not so greatly. Our community is organized around shared, mediated myths and stories. Everyone is a Mitty, and his community is those Mittys whose fantasies are informed by the same sources and have the same shape. We bump into one another walking down the street pretending to be: in a music video, in a videogame combat zone, in a romantic comedy, in a ‘human interest’ piece on the news, in a documentary, in a…

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. I went to look for where Joyce so describes television. The second attributed phrase -“soulskin with sobsconscious inklings”- comes from Finnegans Wake:

And who will wager but he’ll Shonny Bhoy be, the fleshlumpfleeter from Poshtapengha and all he bares sobsconcious inklings shadowed on soulskin. Its segnet yores, the strake of a hin. Nup. Laying the cloth, to fore of them. And thanking the fish, in core of them. To pass the grace for Gard sake!

To say that this seems not to comment on television is easy enough, although since I don’t understand Finnegans Wake I have to admit that it very well may; indeed, a long preceding passage begins with this, possibly setting the subject:

In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade.

Picking through this fascinating language like an uneducated neophyte at an antique shop, I gathered that “teleframe” and “metenergic reglow” and so on refer to television, and I can even sense what it is about Joyce that is so remarkable: this prose illumines especially despite seeming (because seeming) to obscure. It’s rather amazing.

But this reference to the “charge of a light barricade” is the closest he comes to “Charge of the Light Brigade,” at least anywhere I could find. But I don’t know Joyce at all and feel silly impugning McLuhan’s citation.

In any event: I think it’s rather beautiful.

Pope Pius XII, 1950, as quoted by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, recommended to me by Sean. This is a statement notable not only for its continued (and probably timeless) applicability -its resonance in the time of the Internet and mobile communications and invasive advertising is extraordinary- but also because it came from a pope in 1950!  McLuhan notes:

“Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical for mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users… A man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there. [Emphasis mine].”

So that this doesn’t seem pedantically abstract, consider this additional quote McLuhan offers from J.U. Nef’s 1950 work on the subject:

“The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.”

Media are what transform intellectual mistakes into lethal movements and militarism. McLuhan notes elsewhere that

“…[If] we want to get our bearings in our own culture… [we] have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression.”

But he also suggests that this is more or less an impossibility:

“This is like the voice of the literate man, floundering in a milieu of ads, who boasts, “Personally, I pay no attention to ads.” The spiritual and cultural reservations that [people] have toward our technology will avail them not at all. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”

I believe that actually has occurred with me and Tumblr, as it has for anyone who -to take an easy example- now thinks, automatically and with minor embarrassment, of what kind of post a given event in their will make: “Damn, I can’t wait to put this up!”