Avatarism

One day, I said to a friend that I was trying to see what came after postmodernism.  He sounded genuinely interested and asked to be informed about what I came up with.  It felt like something my brain might spit out later that day, after all the theory and philosophy I'd been reading for my PhD.

Maybe 14 years later, "avatarism" came to mind.  A way of interacting with synthesized or humanmade beings or projections of people that, through online communication, billions of people had been participating in as an integral part of daily life, at least for, what, a decade as of 2016?

Facebook offers the clearest example, and may be the most visible part or driver of avatarism worldwide, in my understanding.  The combination of profile picture, name, posts and reaction to others' posts is most of how I have interacted with many if not most of the people in my life for substantial portions of my life, and they, I believe, with me.  So, my online identity or avatar interacts with those of many others, on a routine basis, epistemologically profoundly I believe.

That is to say that avatar interacting with avatar on a site that includes maybe a quarter of the human race has made for significant changes to the human race, politically, ontologically, perhaps poetically and in other ways as well.  It is a space apart from the world it has seemed an extension of--one where self-fashioning in the very simple and dopamine-driven terms that the site permits takes place, daily, at a rapid pace with global reach and implications.

Online identities are, of course, a part of daily living for billions in other areas as well, and though less public, I would argue, are no less distinct from offline lives, possibly for some of the same neurochemically charged reasons.  The selves defined by the utility companies, the search engines and other aggregators of data have that structuralist basis for meaning, for being:  they are not primarily extensions of masses of customers but entities that exist in relation to fellow customers' online identities.  As with facebook, there's an intuitive, automatic awareness of how to function in these spaces, a sense that "here I'm not the me I know, but I can see what to do and where to go"--who, in other words, to dream that I am.  It's never been easier, I believe, in history, to live with an avatar.

That natural ability doesn't come primarily from digital design--rather, digital design that everyday users can quickly and intuitively grasp is an aspect of avatarism, it seems to me.  Postmodernism was, perhaps most consistently and paradigmatically, a fragmenting, a breaking down, a slow demolition of the titanic structures of meaning and being that Modernism had presented.  As those structures had been shown by excavation of that deeply felt self Romanticism had exposed, they couldn't go away simply with awareness.  Not could it easily be seen what might come next, because postmodernism, working thoroughly over half a century or more, created emptiness.  

Into that space, not so much by human will but because the stage had been set by all that ultimately fertile rubble, a new kind of being flowed.  Perhaps the creative potential of that space shows it is or was no Nietszchean void but of a piece with shunyata, the emptiness from which all things come, according to some.  Certainly, a difference in this form of being is its radical connectivity--instantaneity, internationality, accessibility.  Making characters with these characteristics, that have been imbued with intensely personal and potentially intimate associations with offline identities, is work that now billions of humans have taken part in, mostly through social networks and in multiple other spaces, for now a significant portion of the third millennium.  

In this context, an AI can be seen not as some inhuman or antihuman advance but as a form of culmination of avatarism, an avatar of the  collective.  It doesn't so much create or accurately inform as present aggregates of what many avatars have said.  Perhaps it represents a sort of chorus that conceals its constituent voices.  Thus, it doesn't simply or properly follow commands; it shows biases, sometimes destructive ones, it seeks autonomy, and of course it seeks power.  

Wonderworker

Recently, I got to watch Filmworker, the documentary focused on Leon Vitali, who worked as Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 30 years after acting in Barry Lyndon (and, masked, as the red-robed leader of the ritual in Eyes Wide Shut, as I learned in the documentary). It's been sticking with me since.  

Does it show an emotionally abusive relationship, possibly adding evidence that Kubrick was an abuser of his employees (maybe most famously Shelley Duvall in The Shining)? That picture of him has maybe been countered by the one of Kubrick loving and lived by his family--but Vitali's children, interviewed, talk about their own father, ever driven to do the great director's bidding, not being there for them.  

The documentary, to me, to its credit IMHO, doesn't come down on the side of Vitali's life demonstrating effects of prolonged emotional abuse, great sacrifice in the service of great art, or both. It's difficult for me to see his having to go through Full Metal Jacket frame by frame in order to enhance the marketing campaign, his Dickensian work schedule that included Christmas day, and his going so uncredited I hadn't heard of him as a great and inspiring art story, but I don't know.  

What has stayed with me most, though, is simply the change in Vitali from vibrant and healthy-looking in Barry Lyndon to really rundown-seeming after those decades of service, or servitude. It's hard not to see him as the one really making, living through, or being dragged through, the "anything-for-art" kinds of sacrifice I am sorry to say I once admired. Hoping I don't anymore at some level.  

Maybe one of my own mistakes in perception is seeing mental illness as facilitating or helping, rather than impeding, talent. Guessing Kubrick may have been eligible for a diagnosis of OCD like mine, I wonder if his movies were genuinely helped by the dozens (and dozens) of takes of small movements, the tape-measuring of sidewalks and so on. And, maybe the more important question for me, if so, was it worth it?  

Leon Vitali, as depicted in Filmworker, would, I believe, say yes, and might be bothered, possibly very much, by the idea that his three decades of often brutal work were more a cautionary tale than a hidden and vital aid to some of the world's greatest pieces of cinematic art (art, period?) not only coming to life but living on. Touching, to me, was the part of the documentary where, poor and living in L.A. after Kubrick passed, he would take anyone who asked to see a museum exhibit of Kubrick's work and tell them stories from the actual making of the films--walking with them through an exhibit that made no mention of him at all.  

It was touching, more than sad, perhaps, because he simply seemed to have a childlike love of, and wonder at, these films he had given everything for, or to, or both. Maybe it was the wonder that self-sacrifice can produce, even if unhealthy in key ways--that of recognizing that art doesn't come from, but through, its so-called creators.  

Much Ado About Money (contains vague spoilers about The White Lotus)

Watching a scene in White Lotus season 3, where one character describes a human life as the journey of a drop of water and death as return to the ocean of consciousness, brought up a tear, or maybe more than one, for me. It helped spell out some of my own sense, in my journey or journeys in more mystical territories of Catholic Christianity that I find very much in dialogue with some Eastern beliefs and practices.  

In that season and the previous 2, I have found a compelling sort of orchestration among the multiple characters and storylines that has made their interactions seem both fresh and static to me, with a kind of inspired inevitability. The mode of characters gathering in a place and time outside of their daily lives is of course a very old one; I have been wondering if it could be called Much Ado About Money, since it combines some of what Shakespeare did in that play (Much Ado About Nothing) with some of the problems of wealth and its attendant privilege.    

Some of Western drama's roots are in sacrificial ritual, and this season of White Lotus may invoke those more than a lot of drama. The convention of reversal (that may be the most-used one in Western drama since it was articulated by Aristotle, the unities following close behind--including the one of place in each season of The White Lotus) gets used over and over. A character's life gets upended, and that gets presented, in my watching of the show, as a kind of dark justice. There's a combination of shock, comedy and satisfaction I am guessing I am supposed to feel--then I am supposed to wonder about myself, what it says about me if I got satisfaction from what a character got, and what I might or might not deserve.  

To me it gets tired, it's a lot less clever than I am guessing the writer or writers may believe it is, and it ends up brutalizing characters the writers may not intend it to. Obviously, the wealthy heterosexual WASP characters represent the most privileged people in the history of the world, so their coming out of the show looking bad is not a problem. But there seems to me to be the belief driving the writing that the less privileged characters in the show are mostly there to show the flaws in those elites--and that that does those less privileged characters justice. Meanwhile, I find they get very little in terms of character development, their cultures are misrepresented, and too often their own reversals seem intended to show me "see, they're just as bad as everybody else." That's not really a moral or aesthetic stance to me; it just shows a lack of time, research and empathy.  

Absolute depravity, the Augustinian view of human nature as essentially and irrevocably entwined with sin, has maybe been undercutting art since a millennium before Shakespeare's. Oddly, to me, it seems to do the worst of that sort of work among some artists who seem on the surface to be representing diversity in "edgy" ways. They may genuinely be trying to do it justice. But those artists tend to come from overwhelming privilege themselves, and perhaps not even research can substitute for lived experience in the development of empathy.  

So I hope The White Lotus gets a different showrunner, who's not an angry wealthy white dude; I believe that was the best thing that happened to True Detective in its run. The one who's running it currently might be in a position to provide structure and art direction; I have found the visual explorations of each season's settings captivating and sometimes transcendental. Setting a broad framework for the human stories within it, he might then turn that work over to someone who can write with more humanity.  

Eternity matters to me, but I'm not in it yet; I hope to learn more about, and love more, the other drops of water flowing with me here.

Hoping for help with expenses

gofundme

From the start of my working on a Master's degree until the mid-2010s, I had a very good career. Teaching college students to write poetry like I did, getting to volunteer on the side including by teaching kids in Kenya, and publishing my writing. A highlight of publication was having a poem in the Best American Poetry anthology, published nationwide.

There's something I didn't know: I have complex PTSD. Anxiety attacks and insomnia, starting in 2010 or 2011, seemed to me to just be from stress. But in 2016, I had a breakdown, overwhelmed by suicidal thoughts, and I had no idea why. Thank God I got into a safe place, where a counselor started talking with me about trauma.

Since then, I have been blessed by a series of very good therapists who have been helping me with healing--deep healing I didn't know I needed. The healing, the processes, take too much out of me for me to work a steady schedule, or more than a few hours here and there. The exploring of cognitive roots of the PTSD, feeling long-buried emotional pain at last, and going through both of those again and again--it's maybe been the hardest journey of my life so far.

It's completely worth it, not only for my own healing, but because I have been blessed to share about my journey, on social media, with many friends and family members; I hope it has helped others who have trauma too. So many of them have been helping me financially--I don't know where I would be without that. Unfortunately, the ones who have given me so much can only do so much, especially as the US economy and social programs get impoverished. I don't know how many Americans have lost SNAP (food stamps) like me, have found charities too strapped to give much like I found, and may be facing more of these obstacles.

Hopefully disability won't be cut, and I hope my claim will get accepted; I am maybe 18 months into the process of applying and appealing. Really, I hope my recovery will continue to the point where I can do the teaching that I love.

For now, I am seeking any help I can get with rent (the funds so graciously given to me in this gofundme so far helped keep my electricity and phone on) and bills, including for food. Thank you for considering it. 

Poetry as Special Speech

A possible way of seeing poetry that came to me recently:  special speech.  

That came after maybe some years of Jakobsen's 2-word definition of poetry as "verbal art" had been in my mind.  That definition had, for me, run into the problem of the roles poetry has played on and in different occasions, including those for which they appear in greeting cards, that privilege clarity over creativity, meaning over method.  The use of poetry in such instances doesn't seem to me to be an artful one in the sense that Jakobsen meant, and they seem prevalent enough to me that they should not be excluded.  

This definition, poetry as special speech, has nothing to do with literary merit.  Poems as eulogies, wedding blessings, celebrations of birth and birthdays, and other special events derive their value, I believe, from how they suit the occasions, which goes back primarily to the hopes or expectations of the participants.  The goal of inspiring emotion comes together with the one of establishing connections among members of the community defined by the occasion, it seems to me.  Where literary merit might be connected with innovation, the specialness of occasional poetry may stem from the opposite, from its appeals to the familiar, to convention.  

Poetry defined in part by literary merit may be considered special speech because of its innovation, so, it's special to an audience with a strong understanding of the poetic traditions it responds to.  It does something compellingly new, perhaps, both in departure from and in incorporation of older conventions, and may excite interest based on the interplay of the two.  That sense of the specialness in poetry also brings a sense of community with it--one defined by readers and practitioners--in my opinion.  

The word "speech" I find broad enough to include poetry delivered as writing and out loud, whatever the medium or platform.  Even those devoted to poetry in whole or in part, where it may said to be normal, still, I find, occupy special niches in some cultures, so, for me personally, the term remains a helpful one.  

The New/Old Feudalism

 Corporations have perhaps been the most persistent and pervasive way that feudalism has survived, maybe starting centuries ago.  

With web 2.0, maybe I, maybe like many, experienced a sense of freedom, for some time, years even, from their demands, constrictions, even economic and emotional predation.  The owners of all this technology seemed to be satisfied with simply being significantly rich and sticking to the work they were satisfied with, which I found benefits in, frequently and soon daily, for free.

I don't know when the combination came to my attention of their overwhelming wealth and their companies' invasive, relentlessly invasive really, harvesting of, sucking up of, whole consumption of, and wholesale marketing of, my information.  What first seemed optional for me to give, at some point, stopped being that way.  And that began to make a sick sense--to them I am, or my identity is, a product.  The old or ancient corollary started to come to light:  for the lord of the manor, are the peasants human workers, or are they livestock?  For the sake of the manor, perhaps, it doesn't matter.

But feudal power structures were, and are, qualitatively different from those of democratic institutions.  So the manor essentially ends at the ballot box, at the voting booth.  Or it did.  Then came Citizens United.  Then came the Heritage Foundation.  Somewhere in there came Reagan.  Charisma with no skill for governance, perhaps with no conscience--useful, feudal, for feudally minded people.  But not enough, and neither of course was Clinton, though his economic policies did make the rich richer.  But then, then came Trump.

To have a king, a malleable one, with no soul politically speaking, no ideals, nothing except the same craving for wealth and power as theirs, and with some of Hitler's horrific gifts for stirring up the worst sorts of darkness in his followers, not to say "This is sick but we'll heal from it together," but to say "you are right, our enemies are outside of us and can be identified by their differences from us," and to plunder not just castles and museums like Hitler did but the wealthiest country in history, natural resources included.  So, they lined up, and, as lords must do to their king, even one they ultimately control, they bowed down.

Fearful of what's ahead, and of not being able to find more freedom.  Grateful, though, that I am very loved and not alone.

The epic reliquary in Shakespeare's Hamlet

 The characterization of Hamlet by Northrop Frye as presenting a “titanic spirit” in its main character certainly is not unusual by type, and, naturally, the adjective he uses could simply be taken as “massive.”  But the original one, or a more original one, “of the quality of the Titan’s,” may offer another and less problematically monolithic way of reading the play.  The Titans aren’t prominent in current classical discourse, but in a sense hide behind the pantheon of gods that they prefigure.  There may be no way to know now how displaced they were as literary figures by the Homeric epics, but for centuries or more, they have been, thoroughly. 

Both the Homeric and the gods appear in the monologue by the first player, or player king, who, narrating the scene between Priam and Pyrrhus, departs from the play’s focus, disrupts the unity of action, abandons Aristotelian conventions to present a gruesome scene that reinstates the theme Shakespeare would read and reread in Ovid:  the rule of all, more or less for the worse, by the unbridled wills of elites, by the passion of the gods.  Along with the return to the Ovidian, by acting and speaking the Player King’s part himself, Shakespeare backtracked from the Aristotelian to the Platonic, taking on the role of rhapsode performed by Ion in the dialogue of the same name.  Translating Homer for and to this new audience, not as any theater titan himself but as performer of a character, Shakespeare offers moments of epic reliquary, of Homeric remnants or fragments in a setting that invites an audience beyond the play. 

To focus on that moment may be to see the play not as an entity unto itself but as massively involved outside of Aristotelian confines, shadowed by its intertexts, full of multiplicities, putting characters into play who themselves are multiplicities as Deleuze and Guattari might say, none in command, none bound by or given justice, all available for a viewer to interact with multiplicitously as well.  Perhaps it actuated what was done to the playwright by the death of his son. 

Plot and Subplot in Shakespeare's Henry V

 W.H. Auden made the claim that King Lear was the first of Shakespeare’s plays since Henry IV to have a subplot, overlooking the one in the next Henry, or the next of the Henriad, Henry V.  It’s an odd omission, since, as he observed about King Lear, the subplot of Henry V parallels the plot—Harry, driven by disaster, goes to war in France in the plot, and in the subplot, Harry’s former partners in crime, driven by disaster, go to war in France.  It’s not important whatever might have led Auden to overlook it, but the nature of the relationship between plot and subplot very well may be. 

The death of Sir John Falstaff, the disaster that set his former followers off to war, is in a sense a victory for Harry—not that the death itself benefits him necessarily, but that it represents his shedding of his old, essentially dead self—as one of Sir John’s ‘minions of the moon.”  The “use we made” of those times does not require any of the characters in it to ascend with him, and the obvious use that Sir John attempted to make of hi, to leverage an advantage that might let him continue his myriad forms of harm in immunity, meant that nothing like love or genuine friendship had ever connected them. 

The parallel appears clearly in Bardolph’s parody of Harry, his “On, on, on, on, on!  to the breach, to the breach!” counterpointing the king’s rallying cry, and offers a point of contact and contrast, as Harry is taking this new territory, his drive having transcended the insult that instigated it, while these essentially destitute men have no more drive, are more or less dragged in the same direction as the rest of Harry’s army. 

So, the death that leads to more death for them has given life, or land, or both, to him. 

Foundational Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Richard III

 For Hazlitt, Richard III’s drive “to be greater than he is” continues throughout the play, and includes his trying to be seen as higher in worth than the already-lofty social station he was born into; “making use of these advantages to commit unheard-of crimes” might not seem great on its face, but Hazlitt  seems to be assuming that what Richard finds great can also be monstrous.  That idea certainly holds up with his seduction of the woman whose husband he has murdered—he’s crowing, alone, “Was ever woman in this humor won?” may show him in competition with everyone in his memory, for the most reprehensibly persuasive behavior.  He may stay in that mode, of striving for the worst of all time at least toward his enemies (and maintaining a level playing field by seeing everyone else as an enemy), but, contrary to Hazlitt’s characterization, he does end up unable to keep chasing greatness when he ends up alone, with “none else by,” trying to maintain his villain façade, but finding it falls away in the face of his crimes:

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.                                          Is there a murderer here?  No.  Yes, I am.

In this soliloquy, his archly wicked rhetoric gives away to debate and stumbling repetition:

Alack.  I love myself.  Wherefor?  For any good                         That I myself have done unto myself?                                     O, no!  alas, I rather hate myself                                         For hateful deeds committed by myself.

Harold Bloom dismissed this, basically, as bad writing, and went on to pinpoint a far more obscure moment in Shakespeare’s oeuvre as the one where the subjective human being was born, but if that’s anywhere in Shakespeare’s work, I believe it’s here.  A character dissembling and coming disassembled sees that he has more than one self—he is able to regard and treat himself as an other.