Ways of Seeing

Dr. Samuel Johnson once explained to James Boswell his mind on conversation:

There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials; in the second place, there must be a command of words; in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in; and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures; this last is an essential requisite; for want of it many people do not excel in conversation.

As much as we cannot intellectualize all subjects, we do find a need to challenge our friends, acquaintances, and ourselves. We are social animals, and the need for interaction demands the need for conversation. “Never is there more a need for reasonable conversation than in today’s society, wherever people live.” Do you know where this quote comes from? It is familiar, isn’t it? It comes from no one famous, in fact, because I just wrote it. Yet we have all heard something like it spoken or written somewhere. And, it cannot be more wrong.

Today is no more important, and likely less so, than the dark days of WWII; the blighted years of politically and socially banned books (pick your favorite century); 1,200 years of Catholic Inquisition combating “heresy”; or all of history’s oppression of women. There has been, historically, a distinct lack of social conversation available to people where it could affect change. Much of the “good” conversation reserved itself inside senatorial houses, philosopher’s academies, monarchical courts, and private chambers of the social elite.

Since the advent of the printing press, and, later, parliamentary and democratic societies, people worked at making conversation a vital structure of society’s machinery. Perhaps governments failed too often at debate and compromise, but at least educated people demonstrated ample enthusiasm to conversation’s benefits.

In Parisian parlors of the 17th and 18th centuries, conversation came into its own. A whole coterie of parlor groups met, sometimes in secret, to discuss issues of the day, including politics, male-female relationships, sex (without the potty talk), and art of all kinds. For a time, most of those who met were women (of high means). The French were known already for their manners, their dress, their codes of honor (among both sexes). The women, it has been argue (The Age of Conversation) took it upon themselves to improve society (and their own positions within) by improving the manners and conversation of the French males. Success, on that smallish level, was great. Many of these parlor members kept diaries, recording conversations after a night of talk. Some have been published, but either have not been translated into English, or wallow away somewhere in a long-since out-of-print copy on a library shelf.

Over in England, in the middle half of the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson had elevated conversation to somewhat of an art form. He had become famous for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and for writing twice-weekly essays under the title The Rambler. What Johnson might have lacked in compromise, he made up for in breadth of subjects he was willing and able to discuss. He particularly liked questions of liberty, and arguing against changing one’s religion. Regardless of subject matter, Johnson demanded people bring knowledge to a conversation. Force of character and demonstrative positioning meant nothing if an argument did not come with humanist logic.

I ran across a used book a few years ago, a real gem. The Book of Great Conversations collects a few dozen “recorded talk” between some famous people throughout history: Socrates, Michelangelo, Goethe, Napoleon. People from all walks of life, both powerful and sublime. Its pub date is 1948. Though long out of print, you can still find copies online for cheap. This book is not an oddity, but a chronicle, and notebook, of how people spoke, what arguments they used, how they got on with or pissed off people, their words, and their simple motivations for seeking out people with whom they could talk.

Today’s high-speed media environment could learn a lot from Dr. Johnson. The term “news cycle” has broken any attempt at sustained speech, or conversation. Sure, we have political and social talk shows presented through the media, but too often they flounder in the sea of entertainment channels. And the American mind suffers from this.

While “24” and “American Idol” achieve high viewer ratings that turn advertising into gold dust, can we say they do something for conversation? Perhaps. And what is the difference between those entertainment programs and “60 Minutes” newsmagazine to the initiate of conversation? The tense psycho-political drama brings up important issues, just as long as people see it as drama and not reality. An amateur-hour program can induce people to talk about what vocal art is … and is not. Exploring hot news topics or celebrity can engage social discussion or reminiscences. But do they in fact do this? If one looks at blogs, we find 4-5 sentence “posts” that often quote other sources (some spurious), or else link to an article written by—surprise!—a professional with a byline at a national newspaper or magazine. These posts are likely followed by shorter comments. Both resemble a nature that is difficult to define as conversation. Repetitive banter may more aptly describe their character.

If there is yet conversation among us, and I think there is, it should get into the daily diet of all thinking people. I’m not talking about mulling the “dialogues” of Larry King, Oprah, or Katie Couric. I’m suggesting that people, if they are not doing so, get into the habit of conversing on subjects that come up in their minds—varied subjects—and not necessarily those in the news. What thing of beauty have you seen today? How can you talk about a book you are reading as art? Engagement with society is not a spectator sport, but something, I think, of intrinsic importance to our individual lives.

Tags: Conversation, Literature, Seeing in Progress by mark
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I often write & talk about metaphorical ways of seeing. Ostensibly metaphor includes one’s senses, but I don’t often focus on the senses. Actually, those very senses help we writers create metaphor: smell, taste, heard sounds, the visual antidote to basic life—these all generate associations that get us to use one thing to describe another.

Do any of us focus on our senses who have use of each? Perhaps not often, anyway. We take for granted their at-the-ready use-ness they provide. I certainly do too often, as I yet have full use of each. This is not the case for the blind, deaf, and I suppose mute … even those mildly so. I can’t comment on their experiences, only my subtle renditions of those afflictions when I walk around in the dark, or my ear gets plugged with water, and perhaps also when I’m set speechless at the sight of something that boggles the mind.

When I go to sleep each night, I place a glass of water on a side table for that middle-of-the-night thirst that attacks. I turn off the lights, and there disappears one sense. Or does it fully disappear? Ray Charles spoke of remembering colors, mostly, before he went blind at age four or five. He told also how his boyhood home had a wood chopping block, a washtub in the yard, and pine trees. These are memories, of course, but they are also seeing. Seeing in the mind, a way we recall or remember the past, but also how we can invent story as well. In fact, without seeing in the mind, we often could not perform everyday tasks.

That glass of water on my night stand. In the middle of the night, with darkness around me, I reach out to grasp the glass, but not sure of distance, I have to feel for the night stand edge, and in that movement, I see in my mind its shape, approximate distance from my already reaching hand, and where on its surface I placed the glass. The memory of putting that glass on the table before sleep and turning out the light was enough, I suppose, to link the thought with the action.

This seems almost too obvious to care about, but think of a seeing in the mind act you perform often, even daily. Let’s stay with the idea of a darkened room. With the lights off, you need to get across the room, maneuver through furniture, find a light switch or doorknob, just to get to the bathroom, or the refrigerator. So you make your way through the room, knowing somewhat where your couch is in relation to your body, how many steps to the end of the couch, the turn through the space between couch and table, then across a stretch of carpet or floor (onto a rug?), close now to the light switch, feel the wall at the edge, the correct height, and click, you’ve got lighted vision again. Easy, right? Sure.

Now think about that one time where you needed to walk in the dark, but through a completely unfamiliar room. You step like a baby, your arms stretched out, feeling, groping for a chair or sofa back, something that’s familiar in shape anyway; you knock things over, stub a toe, walk into the wall, even. Here lie the differences between seeing in the mind without promptings or memory, and what we experience every day in our own homes.

Most people call this, I guess, “visualization.” What does that really mean, though? “I ‘visualized’ it.” Huh? No. We say “I see” when someone is explaining an event, telling a story, or working through a thought. Seeing is the word; seeing in the mind the concept behind the words. This phrase is at our fingertips, and it was used in the methodology within the writing program at Columbia College Chicago, where I earned my MFA and also taught for several years. It is the way writers write, painters paint, and even how photographers “see” a shot (or set it up in their minds) before finding the moment to release the shutter. Perhaps, even, seeing in the mind is one way musicians put together a tune. Well…can they only hear the notes in their heads? Guitarists, pianists, flutists, violinists, all must place their fingers on the instrument before anything auditory happens.

Perhaps then, seeing in the mind is our way to structure the world. Our first world, of course, is our minds. All those thoughts bring so many sights that we have to somehow organize them, even as one quickly jumps (or melds) into another.

Memory. Seeing. Speech. Aroma. Associative elements. Metaphor. They play integral roles in many the creative minds’ lives. Philosophers have spoken about one from another. And as a last thought, I’d like to say something to the legacy of that famous philosopher who asked the question, “When I leave a room where a chair sits, is that chair still in the room?” Here’s my answer: If you leave the room, you no longer see the chair, and therefore cannot prove that the chair exists. Well then, if you turn out the lights, you have just as much ability to question the chair’s existence. So turn out the lights, walk across the room, and when you kick that chair and fracture a toe, your scream will tell you the truth about that chair’s existence.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress, Visual Arts by mark
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One important element needed to create art is the need to cross a line. Art is, if we want to show something about humanity, I think, an expression of metaphor. When Humbert Humbert finds that he must pursue Lolita, he becomes a metaphor for action upon hidden desires. It’s only natural, Humbert explains, and has historical roots, in fact, for a man of advancing age to seek the beauty of a pubescent girl. The real-life argument (or inarguable position) of an adult-child sexual relationship plays little part of the ensuing art. Crossing that line, in the literary context here put, is the pursuit of art, and creating that metaphor through language is the assumption of the ultimate success of that art subject’s validity. In other words, what is not talked about in society is intrinsic for art’s subjectivity: what does happen—what can happen—when someone of an ordinary (or extraordinary) intellect turns off the switch that prevents us from pursuing taboos, and crosses the line established by socio-societal norms?

Vladimir Nabokov’s style, his language, the poetry infused in his sentences to create beauty, sustains that art objective in Lolita. If not dealt with from a literary position—an intellectual framework even—as Humbert Humbert devises, the work completely fails as art. Pornography thus ensues, and in this case of a rather demented nature, by most standards, I should think. Yet the lynchpin in this case, I would argue, is the crossing of that line between “tastefulness,” “propriety,” and “accepted social mores.” Nabokov could not have been the first man to think of a situation like that of Humbert, nor of a character like Lolita, who by the evidence in the novel is completely on to Humbert—and she precociously provokes the situation between them. These are real people who can be found in society, in newspaper accounts, in journals throughout history. Nabokov merely took those notions finally across that line.

That line crossed to create art need not be one of such profound separation between “decency” and “pornography” as many would argue is what happens in Lolita. One need only look at Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the story of a foundling given an education and sense of virtue. But Tom has a bit of an appetite for good food, strong drink, and women. Fielding places Tom in situations that often create hilarity because of that line between moralism and reality, given the signs of the times in 18th century England, and all those hypocrisies. Morality often is the line that must be crossed in literature, because establishment norms are upheld by people who cannot themselves attain (or long sustain) that lofty station, even when large segments of society hold themselves in such extremity. Hypocrisy always shows itself, because, as artists down the centuries have proved, human beings are filled with contradictions. Humanity is folly, the artist says over and over, and THIS is what it is like to be human.

That line an artist crosses is not necessarily about thumbing a nose at government or society, but an attempt to show the folly of hypocrisy wherever it shines. For example, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary describes a provincial French woman’s boredom with being a country doctor’s wife, and out of complete narcissism travels in and out of sexual liaisons to find happiness. Flaubert had no notions to say to society, “a woman has every right to fuck around if she gets bored, regardless of society’s and the Church’s mores and rules.” In fact, one finds in Flaubert’s letters and diaries that he did not like Emma Bovary; he thought she a typical product of bourgeois society that could not own up to the lofty ideals they espoused in their middle class ranks. Nearly all the characters of the novel show, ultimately, Flaubert’s dislike of the bourgeois class: Dr. Charles Bovary ends up killing a patient out of shear bravura at the thought of making a name for himself (and becoming rich) in the medical field; Homais is a typical blowhard with superficial ideals, exposed through his incessant talk filled with clichés. Even with the success of the novel, Flaubert was put on trial for indecency, yet even that is a separate matter to its status (and gift to we readers) as art. On his deathbed, it has been told, Flaubert expressed his ultimate view of his anti-heroine, by saying “that whore” would live on in art long after he was dead. He was right: out of his low opinion of the French middle class of his time, he created a character that yet speaks universal truths about marriage and society.

Contemporary literature has license to broach any subject. It were the Fieldings, Flauberts, Woolfs, and Nabokovs who blazed the trails. Nothing today lies shielded behind the veil of “propriety.” Thus, subjects of the so-called prurient nature hold little fascination in the literary realm. But that doesn’t mean there are no longer any lines to cross. Writers such as Philip Roth continue to test the relationship between men and women, the love (or its antithesis) that bonds (or destroys) them in such as a work as Sabbath’s Theater. Norman Rush saw through a woman’s eyes (Mating, 1992) an intellectual exploration of love, its acquisition, and long-term bond extraneous to the physical-sexual desire. In Mortals (2003), Rush approached from the male perspective those bonds, and how desire can upset the balance between husband and wife.

Metaphor is no less important or difficult to attain in art today as it was 100 or 150 years ago. Perhaps as there are so many stories in our literary conscience, we demand that writers find new ways to approach the classic dilemmas of life. That forces new lines, other lines, to cross, lines that are nuanced from the architecture of what has already been written. I think this presents opportunity, rather than obstacles, for the literary artists. Any quick look at society, relationships, sexual power, independence, and individuality, yields numerous possibilities for story. As in pool, art is all about angles one sees between the objects on the table; and then of course, you must take the shot.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress by mark
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At a dinner party last night, we got to talking about Samuel Beckett through the ebb and flow of conversation. I mentioned that people can surf to websites and download the text of many of Beckett’s plays, including Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame. A dinner mate brought around the comment that Beckett’s plays were not meant to be read, but performed. I couldn’t agree more, yet actors must first read the play before they can perform a part, and discuss what’s going on with the play, their parts, and how all that links. Likewise, directors must gain an insight of a play—ideally to what the author had in mind while writing it—so they can stage the drama to its greatest effect.

I read Waiting for Godot before I saw it performed at London’s Old Vic Theater in 1997, with Ben Kingsley as Estragon and Alan Howard as Vladimir. I wanted to “get a handle on it,” as I thought at the time. My reading was quick, as I remember. This wasn’t a mistake, per se, but it did show me something about the difference between reading a Beckett play (perhaps any play), and seeing it performed. I had little knowledge of Samuel Beckett beyond survey courses in university, or what I would pick up in the bookstore while surfing through the stacks. And then came the stage performance at The Old Vic.

The silence that stretched between one spoken line and the next astonished me. And it wasn’t the silence itself, but what was happening during these periods between Estragon and Vladimir’s dialogue. I saw reflection—on what was said, what was meant by what was said, or what could be meant by what was said; I saw where a piece of dialogue had taken a character into his present condition, and nowhere else. I saw expressive countenance, the enlightened eyes or frown-in-flummox. I saw the dramatic gesture, an act with meanings all of itself. I saw the ponderable and the imponderable between Estragon and Vladimir. Silence says so much, Beckett was telling us.

In an interview with Kingsley and Howard near the end of rehearsals for the Vic performances, of which I’ve only today been able to read thanks to web archives, Kingsley and Howard had this to say:

Ben Kingsley: We’ve done such a lot of talking during rehearsals. There comes a time when things have to be allowed to settle. Where our brains ought to be now is veering towards silence.

Alan Howard: We’ve had to dig and delve. It’s the nature of the beast. Godot is made up of millions of fragments and connections.

…..

Howard: I think it would be very difficult for actors to do this play unless there was a natural aptitude for each other………..

Kingsley: ……. to be in on the same joke.

Howard: It can’t be arranged or structured. There’s such an astonishing musicality in the text and rhythms of speaking, intonation and connection, quite apart from what is being said. He uses simple language, which becomes more and more involved. A simple line can carry great complexity with the way it is timed, intoned. The way in which it rubs up against the line before and the line after it. It is a piece of material constantly moving, with 10,000 interweaving strands.

Kingsley: It eats you up. You go home in a take-away bag.

Howard: It’s very, very exacting.

In 1985, Samuel Beckett directed his three most famous plays—Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame—for film productions, grouped under the title “Beckett Directs Beckett.” I’ve read several accounts of Beckett’s directorial involvement, including that he made many textual changes to the acting text of the plays. At one point in the rehearsals for Endgame, Beckett stopped the actor, Rick Cluchey, and asked him to wait a few beats of silence between one word and the next. The silence, Beckett explained, would be all important for the audience to understand.

Who but the author has the last word on interpretation? Some would argue that answer. Especially when you take into context the fact that Beckett made changes to his originally published texts for those 1985 performances. We’re talking as much as 30 years between original publication (and performance) and his final hand in their productions. What did Beckett see? Did that come from hindsight, or just a practiced (practical?) sense to squeeze the most out of the language for better effect? No one knows for sure. Beckett didn’t enlighten anyone (except of course the actors), although the change to his plays will undoubtedly contribute to an answer, as insufficient as that may be for some people.

What is clear, I think, is that Beckett never lost his sense of the absurdity of life—or life’s absurdities: take either for what they say about humanity. The silence of thought, and the space that silence gave between the banter that humans spew because we are language-possessed beings. Yes, Beckett’s vision was silence, always the silence.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress, Theater by mark
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Virginia Woolf played with identity in her fiction—what is/is not known about people, and what those people cannot tell. She got these ideas from the way she lived her own life and the lives of those around her. In fact, the early Bloomsbury group talked about these very things: how much can be divulged about one’s life before, (a) embarrassment veils the story, or (b) ridicule from others shows from the revelation of those facts (stories); and, likewise, how much should be told to friends or anyone else (including, perhaps, physicians).

The Bloomsbury group led open lives—much more so than their Edwardian society around them would indulge, and scandalously so compared to their Victorian roots (and yet living relatives)—and talked about every subject, including debates on the moral solvency of suicide. They were a close-knit group, but their evenings together became famous (some might say infamous) in contemporary society for that very openness. How the information came to be known around London did not come so much from the Bloomsbury gang themselves, but through the impressions they made on the visitors who came and went on those famous Thursday night gatherings. Yet…not everything was revealed about their lives. Not in public (even among friends), and not even in their diaries.

Woolf’s novels possibly expose the most intimate details of any Bloomsbury members, deftly folded into literary stories, characters, and settings she chose. She took from herself, her friends, family, and enemies to build those worlds within the word. Her diaries also tell a story, perhaps the most intimate of all details of the interior life she led. By interior, I mean the life within the mind. Woolf used her inner life as models for the interior story that revolutionized literature.

The diaries are fascinating reading. Woolf writes entries where she battles with herself in deciding what she could write in the diaries & what she must leave out. Somehow, she felt the need to keep secrets from the private journal. You might wonder, How odd to censor oneself even in the most intimate of privacies. Perhaps.

A wider issue needs to be considered, I think, in Woolf’s instance, and perhaps for all diarists. VW wrote her diaries for herself, of course. She reread them often, in fact, retracing her thoughts and the processes by which she came to ideas for stories, and conclusions any other subject. She often argued with herself in these pages. Just as well, she learned something and was not afraid to later (or within a single entry) contradict herself, notice the contradiction, and wonder why & where that all came from (or would lead). This is good stuff. We all do this…. but few of us (and fewer as a whole, perhaps) commit these thoughts to paper (or today, the blog???) for later reading. How Virginia Woolf must have understood herself so completely! In all her flaws and contradictions. I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do this so consistently, and brutally, as VW often did. (But it must also be said that VW just as easily could fool herself, at least for a single entry…as human beings are wont to place themselves in the best light.)

But as Woolf wrote her diaries, she had the idea firmly planted in her mind that someday her diaries would be published. By that notion, she felt she had to exercise some prudence in divulging certain informations. Mostly these came from her life. She could be brutally honest and cutting about her family and friends, as her descriptions and assessments of people show. Those of you who keep a diary (you can call it a journal, men, so you don’t feel emasculated) likely understand the need to “hold back” some information.

When I write in my diary, I often find myself (or is the term “catch” myself) holding the pen above the page, wondering-if-and-what-or-how-much I can or should write about me or someone I know. “What if…” I ask myself, “the diary ‘falls’ into the wrong hands before I’m dead?” Yes, self-censorship. Yes, secrets. Yes, they would not be SECRETS any longer!

And…we all have secrets. Mine are…

I’m not telling.

These secrets we carry are likely nothing momentous to life, liberty, or the outside world. At least I don’t think mine are. Nor are mine illegal secrets (perhaps). They are, nonetheless, informations, events, thoughts, that to no one in this life I would want known.

Vanity? Embarrassment? Something else? Oh…maybe. Whatever the case, they are my thoughts, unavailable to any other. Of course, I doubt very much if my life will be written after I die. Nor shall my diaries be published.

In Virginia Woolf’s case, she held back even her final thoughts of suicide, before she actually killed herself. Her last diary entry was just a few days before she drowned herself in the Ouse River, outside London.

Virginia Woolf’s life has been dissected by dozens of literary historians, feminists, misogynists, cranks, and sycophants. From the straightforward, to the intrusive, to the respectful but truthful, to the outright bazaar, VW’s legacy has been a pincushion for writers. (And, I suppose, I’ve now weighed in?) Whatever your own reading of Woolf is based on biographies and her writing, the rumors of her life, surrounding her childhood, possible sexual abuse, the factual mental breakdowns (and the ridiculous treatments for those, including a milk diet) must be taken as a whole to her writerly life, her vivid insight to human nature combined with her revolutionary literary imagination.

That writerly life, I think, is the real treasure we can find from reading VW’s diaries and letters (many volumes of both). The rest seems all so post post-modern tittle-tattle when weighted against many people’s drive to learn about “the dirt” of someone’s life—not to mention schadenfreude.

That we do not know every though of Virginia Woolf (though there is so much) is good. What there is shows how Woolf established that the interior mind was not only valid as subject for literature, but vital to the evolution of character-centered story.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress by mark
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