by Sheila Heti

What Should the Unemployed Thespian Do?

2011-02-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

I recently spent a week on one of the Gulf Islands off the coast ofVancouver, a place now largely populated by lawyers who were oncehippies—people who somehow had the good sense, back in the sixties, to buyland. For decades, they have been coming together for dinners after spendingtheir days chopping firewood, and I was invited to one of these dinners. Twelvepeople sat around the table, including a woman in her late forties. She wasblonde with wide-set eyes. She had the tense, dry look of an actress who nolonger worked, which is what she turned out to be. She had done some CBC moviesand B-movies in her day, and now taught drama to kids. “I am old,” she said,“and I am ugly.” She referred at least four times to her “European” cheekbones,and reminisced about her early, energetic days as an actress in Edmonton. Her wholemonologue, her self-presentation, made my rhubarb pie taste like sand and dust.There are few conversations that spoil a meal more than the story of an actresswho has outlived her career.

What do we do once we can no longer do what we did? It’s a problem foranyone, but it seems to affect the actor most acutely. Even when an actor is working, it’s not unusual for her togo entire weeks and months without a part. The customary thing is to takeacting classes, work undemanding jobs, exercise, meditate, see friends, readplays. The actor’s life is about finding ways to fill in the time between gigs.Even when one has an acting job,there is still a lot of waiting around: while the lights are being moved, whilemake-up is being done. Once the actor’s career is over, I imagine there isstill a sense of waiting, as though the spotlight might eventually return.

Sitting across from the actress at that dinner, I wondered how an actormight root herself, artistically, in these downtimes, or after her career isover; that is, how an actor can always be acting, and learn better how to act,and make the world better by acting.

1. CHARITY

I don’t want to say that the actor—any more than any other person—shouldspend her life in a charitable manner. But if the actor wants to imitate anaction, what could be better for the world—and her own self—than to imitateselfless giving? Why shouldn’t the actor, in her off-hours, put herself at thedisposal of old people, sick people, people who need help, and act the part ofsomeone who cares? Acting caring leads to caring, and in this way actors mightturn themselves into the most fulfilled and happy of all the artists. As it is,most actors can hardly take their eyes off themselves. The actor in thisscenario must use narcissitic qualities to imitate the action that will bringher the most praise. Eventually, she will become worthy of genuine admiration.This discipline would be called “Acting Your Opposite.”

2. SUBMISSION TO A NOVELIST

Actors should put themselves at the disposal of writers, once in awhile. What writer wouldn’t benefit from sitting in her easy chair andlistening to an actor read out her day’s work? Playwrights know that it’simpossible to tell whether what they’ve written is good or bad until an actorspeaks it out loud. Novelists rarely think this way, but they could. After all,readers speak the book silently to themselves in their heads. An actor readinga novel out loud is a simulation of the reader’s experience—the closest anovelist can get.

The hidden problem for the novelist is that she only ever reads her own workone way, forgetting that there are so many meanings in any one sentence, somany different intonations and interpretations. In this way, thenovelist can hear her words in the cadence of someone other than herself.An actor could make herself very useful this way, and she would gain fromperforming for an audience of one—one who cares deeply about the words beingsaid.

3. IMPERSONATING

One of the sad and strange—and perhaps most beautiful—things abouthumans is that there is only one of each of us. The problem for any individual inour culture is how to be oneself most authentically. The problem for any actoris how to best play a given part. The ordinary person strives to live in tunewith her own wisdom and intelligence, her sense of what is right, her instinctsand inclinations. The actor attempts to uncover these things in each role sheplays.

Could there be a service that hooks up—for a lifetime, or some shorterlength—an actor with an ordinary person, with the actor acting as that person’sclone? The actor would try to dress, speak and move like the person she iscloning (let’s call her Abigail), and poetically interpret her. She would tryto understand Abigail’s cognitive pathways and emotional responses. There wouldnever be a performance, just a perpetual following-around of Abigail. She wouldread Abigail’s emails. She would meet with Abigail’s friends, when Abigail wastoo tired. Trying, on a long-term basis, to get outside of herself and intojust one other role would teach the actor so much more than any single theatreclass. So many of the secrets of human nature are in the distance between who Iam and who you are.

The actor would then become like a painter or writer, whose whole lifeis given over to the perfection of a master work. The in-between jobs wouldturn into gigs taken for money, like journalism often is for the novelist, orwedding portraits for the painter. The acting in those “in-between jobs” (thatis, roles in plays, films and television) would become much more lifelike. Thisactor would know what a person truly waslike, from her ongoing imitation of life. And how endless this task ofimitation would be, since Abigail would be changing week in and week out, ashumans supposedly do.

As for Abigail, she would get what many humans secretly loathe andcrave: a witness and a mirror. To see oneself portrayed through the gestures ofanother person, to see oneself interpreted, is to know what we otherwise neverknow: how we appear to the world from the outside. I would hate to be theperson having an actress following me around, but why should everything be socomfortable? Maybe having this real-life imitation would allow us to live ingreater proximity to our insides—closer to our motivations and our fears.

I do not want to be an actress, yet I grew up wanting to be one. I actedand wrote from the time I was a child, but it gradually became clear to me thatI was not good at acting. Though I had enthusiasm, I knew there were peoplewho, while acting, had feelings I did not. As I acted, I looked at myself withscepticism and embarrassment.

Yet the person who is an actor in her bones—who needs to act but has to wait for an opportunity that doesn’t alwayscome—probably dies a little inside from misuse. An actor who cannot act is likea cat that cannot lick its own fur. Every creature has its own nature, andhappiness and fulfilment is being able to express that nature.

Of all the options I suggest for the actor, I think the last one—whilethe most unpleasant and dangerous—is best. Only when we throw ourselves intodanger is anything of worth accomplished. We live in our cities, in our littlehomes. But we are animals, and we are primed to respond to threat. When we livelives with no real danger, our instincts find things that are not dangerous andmake these things dangerous. So why not invite into one’s life somethinggenuinely horrifying, and come face-to-face with oneself?

We should all have actors trailing us around. This would mean that allthe other genuinely non-dangerous areas of your life would lose the sense ofterror they currently carry. You would begin to feel real fear. As MarkEdmunson wrote in the New York Times:

Shakespeare'sfools are subtle teachers, reality instructors one might say… Hamlet gets Yorick; Lear gets his Fool; Olivia, Feste; Rosalind,Touchstone… In Shakespeare, to have a foolattending on you is generally a mark of distinction. It means that you'veretained some flexibility, can learn things, might change; it means that you'renot quite past hope, even if the path of instruction will be singularlyarduous. To be assigned a fool in Shakespeare is often a sign that one is,potentially, wise.

What actor doesn’t want to be useful—to be a real fool? Now go and find an actor to follow you around—you who wantto change, to become wise.

A Marriage Tract by Marie Stopes

2010-06-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

At one point in my novel, Ticknor, the character of George Ticknor reads a "marriage pamphlet" which is handed to him by a woman in the street. I wrote this marriage pamphlet at the time of writing Ticknor, but I never put it in the book. It is adapted from the writings of Marie Stopes (1880-1958), a controversial birth control reformer.

It is not good to be alone. For some reason beyond our comprehension, nature has so created us that we are incomplete in ourselves. It has happened many times in human history that individuals have not only been able to conquer their natural craving for a mate, but have set up celibacy as a higher ideal. Many saints and sages, reformers and dogmatists have modelled their lives on such an ideal, but such individuals cannot be taken as the standard of the race.

However much he may conceal it under assumed cynicism, worldliness, or self-seeking, the heart of every young man yearns for the fulfilment of the beautiful dream of a life-long union with a mate. Perhaps you say to yourself that your history proves you unfit for love, unfit for learning, unfit for living, for society, for companionship. Yet those who set off on higher endeavour or who consciously separate themselves from the ordinary course of social life are comparatively few, and it is not to them I am speaking.

///

The best type of young man today is tired of polygamy. He has seen enough in his father’s and his friends’ lives of the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy that rots the race under the protective cloak of the supposed monogamy of our social system. As for the man who desires companionship but cares not whether he finds it with one woman or many, I ask him: Of what value is a freedom that takes us from the arms of one person into the next without ever the promise of satisfaction or the relief of finding it? And will he not be wounded when he encounters a woman who rightly sees in the sex act a sacredness, or consider her chastity an insult on his desirability rather than what it is – a high regard for the dignity of his person? The debauched do not know that the infinite variety and colour in the life of the good is far sweeter than the difference between one night of vice and the next, where there is no coming to understanding. Its rule is eternal seeking and never resting. Its law is endless disappointment; a desire to love rather than loving.

A man may be tempted, but it is the rare woman who knowingly tempts a man. Often an older man will set an example and flaunt a lifestyle that is appealing, particularly to the young and unschooled, who do not witness what inner poverty such a life has wrought. He will disguise the true outcome of his wanderings, as often to himself as anyone else. With time the transgression becomes habitual and the stain on the character is deep and lasting. For with the ordinary man, the sexual impulse is seldom yielded to without remorse. The incontinent man is indulging a servant who, if he becomes a master, will be, as Cicero called him, a furious taskmaster. The sexual feeling has made many a misanthrope. The slave of his passions has no easy life.

///

The first time a kingdom is put in possession of liberty, the result is anarchy. The first time a child has a sharp-edged tool in his hand, he cuts his fingers. The first use a man makes of his every power and talent is a bad one. A man always misuses his talents and powers at first, and it is always through thinking that the evil is good and calling the good evil. But only having called the good evil and the evil good will he come to see which was in fact the good and which was the evil. It is not from being evil that a good man looks in evil places for the good – it is innocence first, ignorance later.

In some cases, the morality a man devises for himself in a time of innocence is insufficient to bring him happiness through the course of his life. Yet a man who has visited loose women in the night should not think himself unworthy of a true wife. Certainly it is a struggle that exists even in the most pious. The learned translator of Bishop Liguori said, “Do not allow your daughters to be taught letters by a man, though he be a St. Paul or St. Francis of Assissium. All the saints are in heaven.”

Once the passions of the flesh have too long been given the rule of the man, those qualities of patience and self-sacrifice which ennoble the soul will have been so corrupted and lost to sight that it is no surprise when a man views with a sceptical eye the possibility of a life beyond the realm of his most basic desires. Man must be cautious of forming for himself rules to live by at too unschooled an age.

///

The pleasures of the immoral life are apparent to the most noble, but the pleasures of the good life are deep rooted, hidden from those who would only linger there awhile. The pleasures of the good life do not offer themselves to the passer-by. They does not dress themselves up in rubies and gold. The attractions of the immoral life are like the dresses of a showgirl, all glitter on the surface, but flimsy.

Man’s opportunities for exploration in the cities are few, and the loose woman is one of the most obvious doors for escape into new experiences. He will see in those immoral adventures the source of whatever happiness he has managed to feel, in spite of its numbing effect on his spirit, and he will not attribute his unhappiness to that life when he has managed to extract a few passing pleasures from it. It is no wonder that many of our best men seek not beauty but ugliness, and seek not thoughts and experiences that cannot elevate their spirits but which only reassure them that they cannot be elevated at all.

///

He who is not moral cannot be happy. Yet when the young man, who for so long has heard preaching about the pleasures of the moral life, finally starts on the road to this life, he often discovers only the absence of the pleasures that his life of immorality offered him. Having come so close to touching what is right, such a man will no sooner escape and return to what he knows – the frustrated wanderings of the debauchee, which, being familiar, will cause him none of the discomfort of the good. Such a man will no doubt reassure himself that the good he touched was truly evil, and he will forever be lost.

It is only when he stops trying to gain the same joys from the good as he gained from the evil that he will discover new and different sensations, and will come to value these above the pleasures of his former life. In time, his feelings of unworthiness and confusion, and his discomfort at not finding the pleasures he expected will cease, and he will regard whatever pleasures he took from his career of vice to have been shallow and fleeting, and the happiness he gains from the moral life to be rich and lasting. He will grow satisfied and at last feel at rest.

///

Many an unmarried man fears his capacity for patience, loyalty, devotion, love – qualities he fears will separate him from the dazzling diversity of life’s riches. Yet it is these very qualities which bring him reward. If a man is in a position to marry, by all means let him do so. Marriage is the one tried form of insurance a man has for a life of health and happiness – if the woman is a good one. If she is not, he is sure to encounter immeasurable griefs. Still, there are enough worthy women in all the ranks that when a man has the good fortune to find himself with one, he would be worse than a fool to hold to her indifferently, without thought of the future. It is exactly such a woman who can raise the man she loves out of the squalor in which he is living, and the man who does not seize on the opportunity to be saved will seldom find himself saved.

///

If he encounters his life’s love early, by all means, let him marry early. The man who marries at a tender age more easily adapts his or her personality to that of his partner, and better sexual adjustments result. If his sexual desires are strong and his intellectual powers not great, early marriage will keep him out of much mischief and temptation. I am compelled to endorse marriage as a most important sanitary measure, alike for enabling a reasonable gratification of the sexual instinct as for the avoidance of disease.

///

In marriage, each one dreams that he will find the Understander, the one from whom he may set out into the world in search of treasures of knowledge and experience, and before whom the spoils may be exhibited without thought of rivalry, and with the certainty of glad appraisal. Treasures dear to our own hearts but of no value to others should here find appreciation, and it is here the tender, supersensitive germ of an idea may be watered and tended till its ripe beauty is ready to burst forth upon the world. The exquisite, unselfish tenderness which is aroused in a man by a sense of mental and spiritual harmony with a wife who sympathises with him because she understands his needs is one of the loveliest things in a marriage. A wife who knows how to waken this tenderness in a man raises him out of the self-centred slough in which so many men wallow unhappily. Of this palpitating, winged, livéd thing, which one may perhaps call the Real Marriage, I would say little, for indeed it is only fitting and possible to speak of it by indirect language and suggestion, lest one risk rudely dragging it from its sanctuary into the light of common gaze.

///

More than ever today are happy homes needed, and the man who pleases his wife sexually will reap the rewards in devotion, affection and understanding. The man who has never desired to do this may be suffering from a real malady; sexual anaesthesia. This is the name given to an inherent coldness, the lack of the usual human impulse of tenderness, while being quite unconscious of the lack.

///

It is never easy to make marriage a lovely thing; it is an achievement beyond the powers of the selfish and the mentally cowardly. Many men find themselves lacking the knowledge that is needed for a happy sexual union, but are too embarrassed to admit it. Then there are the less corrupted, still more innocent men whose heads are filled with romance and who know nothing about the sex-act, and when coming to it at last, satisfy not themselves nor their mate. It is my experience that in the early days of marriage the young man is even more sensitive, more romantic, more easily pained about all the ordinary things than the woman, and that he enters marriage hoping for an even higher degree of spiritual and bodily unity than does she.

When a Lancashire lad says I love you, it means far more than a poet would get into many verses.

///

No man wants to begin his marriage as his father did, fumbling in the dark and winning the disappointment of his young bride. Over time, the wife who is not pleased sexually will grow cold toward her husband. When she is left sleepless through the neglect of the mate who slumbers soundly by her side, it is not surprising if she spends the long hours reviewing their mutual position. Deprived of the physical delight of orgasm, she sees in the sex act an arrangement where pleasure, relief and subsequent sleep are all on her husband’s side, while she is merely the passive instrument of his enjoyment. More than that, if following every union she has long hours of wakefulness, she also sees clearly the encroachment on her own health of an arrangement in which she is not merely passive but actively abused.

The husband who loves his wife as a mistress, ignores her as a mother, and hates her for the irritability and hysteria which he himself has produced, is a criminal! And this is a view taken by many of our noblest men.

///

A man must consider whether he knows how to satisfy a woman, before he proposes to spend his life with one. If he is ignorant, let him seek out knowledge. There are few women who complain to their best friends that their husband pleases them too much. A man must learn that if his marriage is to be any joy, if his house is to be truly a home, then his duty will have to be carried out with knowledge.

In the normal woman, especially of the higher social classes, the sexual instinct is acquired, not inborn, and since there is so little in place to educate women, it is men who must be educated – even those isolates who have encountered women only in their dreams.

///

It is my regret that in our nation we allow our young people to go so under-educated in the art of marriage and sex. There are many men who live on the streets for fear of marrying, or who could have married but grew scared at the crucial moment, simply because they suspected they would not be able to perform as men with their beloved.

There also exist men who have enjoyed the company of prostitutes and so believe themselves to be beyond instruction, while it is rather the case that often these are the most in need of instruction. When men look to prostitutes for the sexual psychology of women, they find only their own mirror. The prostitute is an automaton. In her private life she may be a woman, but in her work she is but a machine created by man, made to respond more like man than woman. Resultantly, for many men who have lived their lives on the streets, the idea that a woman is in truth so differently stirred from himself is a revelation.

For most men, it is enough to think passingly of the female form to become sexually aroused. Thus, the young husband who observes that one week his tender love-making and romantic advances win his wife to smiles and joyous yielding, then perhaps a few days later the same, or more impassioned tenderness on his part is met by coldness or a forced appearance of warmth, will be left bewildered. He does not understand that a woman’s body has its own seasons. Misunderstanding this, and while he may make no comment upon her behaviour, her moods hurt him acutely. Men like to feel that their beloved is a rational being, and this deep and inexplicable hurt is often the beginning of the end of love, if the husband is misinformed.

Woman has her own, developed, not infrequent rhythm, but as it does not equal man’s he has tended to ignore and override it, coercing her at all times and seasons. Often a man will be blind not merely to what his wife’s rhythms are, but to the very fact of herhaving them.

The over-stimulation of city life tends to speed up the man’s reactions but to retard hers. The majority of men have grown up thinking that women should submit to frequent, even nightly, intercourse. For the sake of a few moments of physical pleasure such men lose realms of ever-expanding joy and tenderness. It is the greatest mistake to imagine that the semen is something to be got rid of quite frequently. All the vital energy and the precious chemical substances which go into its composition can be better utilized by being transformed into other creative work on most days of the month.

///

The best regulation of intercourse in marriage for the benefit of both the husband and the wife is to have three or four days of repeated unions, followed by about ten days without any unions at all, unless some strong external stimulus has stirred a mutual desire.

To fail to render a woman ready before uniting with her is an act of inhumanity. Thus, we advise the married man to touch his wife under the skin, near the entrance, and to rub her lightly there or with force, more or less vigorously, as the woman desires. By stimulating her in this way, lubricate will begin to form inside her in readiness for the entrance of the male.

Few men need to be told that it is good to fondle a woman’s breasts in lovemaking, but few know that the purpose of this is not to have felt them oneself but to have caressed them in such a way – softly, not with the clumsy handling of a schoolboy – as to make the woman feel sensual and responsive.

Gentle kisses on all parts of her frame will show a woman that her husband takes delight in every part of her body.

Techniques such as these may render a woman ready for the affections of her mate, and the others can be discovered by a man and his wife together through practise. Continual discoveries are necessary, for a woman’s body is ever-changing, ever responding to the influences of her environment.

///

The man who is not roused by the tender blush of satisfaction in the cheeks of the woman he loves cannot call himself a man, and he who has lost the art of stirring a chaste partner to physical love deprives his wife of a certain glamour, the loss of which he deplores. As for the man who finds his wife old or unattractive, he has missed out on the secret of the nature: that he can always make his wife beautiful and youthful simply by bringing her joy sexually. For the husband who even once loved his wife, seeing raptures on her face that he himself inspired will restore whatever youth, beauty and vigour she might have lost in the long years of tending to him.

Nature accords beauty and youth alike to the happy and healthy, and if people grow ashen and dour you can be certain that they have forgotten the sweetest lesson of youth: to love.

///

Many think that merely by loosening the bonds of marriage, making it possible to start afresh with someone else, their lives will be made harmonious and happy. But by many such reformers it is forgotten that one who knows nothing of the way to make a marriage great and beautiful with one partner is unlikely to succeed with another.

For many young men, family is regarded as no better than a jail, a restriction on their freedom rather than the source of freedom itself, and for the restricted and fenced, man’s instinct is ever to escape. Yet even a child might understand that a marriage requires somerational forbearance and self-control, and it is quite intelligible that there may be cases in which a little outside pressure of social opinion or even actual law may be helpful for the supplementing or reinforcement of the weak self-control of those concerned.

There is little doubt that any social changes which allows for the cheap and continual transfer of affections from one object to another will be disastrous both to the character and happiness of a population. It is for this reason that the beautiful sense for love in the hearts of the young should be encouraged. They should have access to the knowledge of how to cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the clamour for the “freedom” to destroy it.

There are millions of people today who never could happily marry, however favourable the conditions might be, simply because their natures do not contain in sufficient strength the elements required for loving surrender to another. Yet one cannot be ennobled except through these very affections.

So long as the human heart remains what it is, natural tragedies will sometimes arise. A person can no more promise to love or not to love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise is to take good care of his life and his love.

Love is doubtless the last and most difficult lesson that humanity has to learn, but in a sense it underlies all the others.

How To Set Up Chairs For Things

2010-06-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is a sample chapter from the book Misha Glouberman and I wrote together, called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which will be published by Faber in July 2011.

There’s a kind of thoughtlessness to how people think about their audience that’s reflected in how they set up chairs. You can see that thoughtlessness immediately. An example will be: There’s a reading in a large room, and what they do is they have a few tables spaced out far from each other near the front of the stage with chairs arranged around them, then behind them they have a couple of rows of chairs, theatre-style, then behind that there’s space for people to stand.

Now, this is terrible, and what it reflects is the degree to which they haven’t thought about their audience. I really feel I have to keep saying this: The chairs are where the people go!

Here’s what you’ve done when you’ve set things up like that: By putting those tables and chairs spaced out in front of the stage, you’ve wasted all the space that’s close to the stage, so you’ve ensured that the vast majority of the people at the show will be far from the stage. Why do you want that? Everything is better when you’re closer to the stage! If you ask people at Trampoline Hall how the show was, you can draw a pretty direct correlation between how much people liked the show and how close they sat to the stage.

Leaving space for people to stand in the back – for a reading! – seems to me ridiculous. Who wants to stand through a reading? You’re pretty much almost intentionally designing things so that a lot of people will find the reading boring – because it’s hard not to be bored when you’re watching something from far away and you’re standing. Those people at the back will talk to each other. So not only will they have a bad time, but their bad time will make it worse for everyone else.

You have to think about where you put your chairs. You have to think about your audience. For some events, it’s good to have few, if any, chairs. At a cocktail party, you want people to mingle, and if you put down a lot of chairs, people won’t move around at all. For a show – if it’s music or something that people can talk through – the same thing applies. It’s great to have people standing, and for music standing is fun because you can dance or talk or move around. At a rock show, that’s not a problem.

For a play, it’s okay to put people fairly close together and on raked seating so they can see the stage. It’s okay to have them be in the dark because they don’t need to see each other and the performers don’t need to see them. For a show where the audience’s interaction with the performers or with each other is important, it has to be different. As always, you want as many people as possible as close to the stage as possible. You can pack people in tighter than you might think, and they won’t mind. If people are drinking, you can scatter a few tables around where they can put their drinks, but you don’t need as many as you might think, because every table takes up space where someone might be sitting. You also want to make sure that there’s some light on the audience, and if you can, it’s great to set things up so the audience can see each other a bit. If you can get them into a quarter-circle around an area that extends from the stage, then the people in the audience can see that they’re not alone watching the show.

Setting up chairs takes a lot of time, but anybody can do it. If you’re running a project and you want to get people involved, ask them to set up chairs. People like to set up chairs, and it’s easy work to delegate. It’s even easier to get people to help put chairs away.

At a conference, if you want a discussion groups to happen, you can set up chairs in a circle, and you don’t need a table.

If you’re going to brunch with your friends, it’s better to sit in a circle or something like a circle than to sit at a long table, because then everyone can talk to each other. I hate when you have to sit at a long table, because it means you have to talk to the same five people throughout the whole meal.

Everyone should know these things.

There is No Time in Waterloo

2010-06-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

This piece was commissioned by McSweeney's and printed in Issue 32, a speculative issue with fiction about life in 2010. It was reprinted in the anthology, Darwin's Bastards. The version below is slightly different from the two published version (which also differ from each other, slightly.) This piece was conceived with Margaux Williamson. With special thanks to physicists Sean Gryb, Aaron Berndsen, Lee Smolin and Julian Barbour.

Everyone in Waterloo was an amateur physicist, and they endlessly bugged the real physicists as the physicists sat in cafés talking to each other. The amateurs would approach and put questions to them; simple questions, obvious ones. Or else they asked questions that even a physicist couldn’t answer, or questions that weren’t in the realm of physics at all, but had more to do with biology or straight computation. People who know almost nothing about what they’re talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot, so they do all the talking, while the ones who know their shit stay silent and get red in the face.

Whenever a real physicist would start to correct or explain a point, the amateur would smile and nod, and would loudly proclaim that they’d read something about that in a magazine or book recently. Then they would start explaining it and the physicist would listen, tight-lipped, or else abruptly put an end to the conversation, in frustration.

Then the physicist would return to the Perimeter Institute, which was built on the top of a gently sloping hill, and sigh in relief to be home again, standing at the chalkboard, working out equations.

///

One afternoon in March, a rumour went around town that some boy’s Mothers had predicted that a kid was going to blow up the mall on the left side of town, so all the teenagers got on their scooters and sped off towards the parking lot there.

As Sunni was leaving her apartment, her mother called out from her usual place on the couch and asked where she was going. Sunni returned and explained about the rumour, saying that she was really eager to see the mall be blown up; that she and her friends had so much pent-up energy—they were wild with energy and simply couldn’t wait.

Sunni reluctantly went back and explained about the rumour, admitting that she was really eager to see the mall be blown up; that she and friends had so much pent-up energy – were wild with energy – and simply couldn’t wait.

Sunni’s mother felt a bit of regret that she was going to watch the mall be exploded, but didn’t object; after all, if that was Sunni’s destiny, who was she to interfere?

She replied, “I guess if some boy’s Mothers is saying that one of you is going to blow up the mall, then one of you is going to blow up the mall.”

Then Sunni became emotional and started to cry. She said to her mother, “Please look for a job!” Her mother had lost her position as a law professor after the City shut down all the University departments that weren’t considered excellent enough. The Perimeter Institute had elevated Waterloo’s intellectual pride, and the City wanted to be as excellent in every field as it was in physics, or else not engage in that field at all.

Now her mother replied softly, as she had many times before, that her Mothers said she should not look for a job. At this Sunni cried harder and got out, “Don’t you know that whenever a Mothers say not to look for a job but just to stay on the couch, it means you’re going to die?”

Her mother had been on the couch for a year and a half. Of course she knew, but she just shrugged and looked down at her Mothers and flipped it about in her hand. Maybe it really was that there were no jobs out there. Or maybe she was going to die. She told Sunni that she had no choice but to listen to her Mothers. Sunni said she understood, admitting she did not know her mother’s destiny. Then she left the apartment and went downstairs and got on her orange scooter and zoomed off.

///

At the mall the teenagers spoke excitedly with each other, drawing together and apart, eager for the show to begin. They asked around to discover whose Mothers had predicted the explosion, but no one seemed to know. When after an hour the mall still remained standing, undisturbed, they started checking their Mothers to see if they were the one destined to blow it up. It appeared that none of them were.

Now they began to grow tense and upset. It was not the first time something like this had happened. A week before, some boy’s Mothers had predicted a fight, but no one had thrown the first punch. A month ago, there was supposed to have been an orgy in back of the other mall, the nice one, but after standing around awhile they had checked their Mothers and learned that the probability of their participating in an orgy was really low.

It started to rain, as a weatherman had predicted. Dispirited, the teenagers began to drift off. Only Sunni and a few of her friends remained, to finish the conversation they’d been having about film. They each had their own distinct opinions about art, but came together in agreement that surprise in drama was an inaccurate reflection of life; the best stories followed the path of greatest likelihood. Indeed, when you thought about the best stories down through time, their greatness and terror came from the fact that the most predictable and probable thing always occurred.

“Like in Oedipus,” Sunni said, watching her friend as he lit up his cigarette with an old-fashioned butane lighter whose flame danced high in the air. As the boy tried to snap it closed smoothly, a fumbling occurred, and it tumbled, aflame, onto Sunni’s hand and her Mothers, igniting the casing in a sudden burst.

“Oh, fuck!” Sunni cried, batting her Mothers into the air, which arced, smoking, and dropped on the pavement, the lighter clattering beside it.

“Oh my God, Sunni—is your Mothers dead?” Danny gasped.

“Nope! Nope! Luckily no!” Sunni replied, picking it up. It was burning hot, and she tossed it from hand to hand. Looking down as it cooled, she saw that the screen had been melted into a squinty little eye. The keys were matted down to their wires, and the casing was tarry and charred.

“Still works!” Sunni announced. Then she got onto her scooter, feeling like she was about to faint, and rode to the parking lot around the other side of the mall, her Mothers propped behind the windshield. She kept glancing at it, but no glance transformed it from the twisted, charry mess it had been in the glance before.

In the back parking lot, she stopped her scooter and got off and doubled over, hyperventilating a bit, then ran a distance to throw up. This vomiting might have been because she was pregnant. Most of her friends were; they knew that there was a greater probability of having a successful career and a nice-looking body if they gave birth while still young, and their Mothers pushed them in this direction.

When Sunni returned at last to her Mothers and saw it there on the windshield, she was overtaken by a spell of vertigo. It wasn’t clear yet whether its destruction was the worst, most tragic thing that had ever happened to her, or if this was the most exciting moment of her life. She only knew that she had never felt such dizziness before, and upon asking herself what to do now, then glancing down reflexively at her Mothers for the answer, she grew overwhelmed by vertigo once more.

///

Twenty years earlier, the citizens of Waterloo had grown enthralled by a book written by a physicist who had been invited to spend some time Perimeter. The book was called The End of Time, and its author had argued in a persuasive and beautiful way that time did not exist; the universe was static. There were a slightly less than an infinite number of possible moments hanging about, like paintings in an attic, all real but out of reach, and each person’s destiny was nothing more and nothing less than the most probable of these possible futures.

The people most taken with this idea led fervent discussions on how to best realise the theory in one’s life. Like humans anywhere, they didn’t want to waste their time. They hoped to reach their destinies as quickly and efficiently as possible—not their ultimate destinies, just their penultimate ones. And so it made sense to try and act as much in accordance with probability as they could.

The executives at the BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo decided they would capitalize on this desire, and they began producing a machine they tagged The Mother of All BlackBerrys. It remained a phone you could email from, but it had an added, special feature: given ongoing inputs, it was calibrated to determine for each user what they were destined to do next.

“It will be a device that determines a person’s most likely next action based on previous behaviours. If the input is one’s life, then the outcome is one’s life,” an executive explained to the rest as they sat around a table.

“Brilliant!” said another executive, reaching for a Danish. And they all reached for Danishes, and toasted each other, smiling.

///

The Mothers—as people began calling them—were at once a huge success. They eclipsed everything in culture at that moment, like any great fad down through time. People in Waterloo consulted their Mothers at every turn, and it quickly became as impossible to live without a Mothers as it had once been to not check email. People wondered how they had managed their lives before the Mothers. They even bought Mothers for their babies.

If life became somewhat more predictable as a result, it was also more comforting, and soon the citizens of Waterloo didn’t even notice that they were going in circles; that it was always the same thing over and over again.

The physicists, though nominally to blame for the proliferation of the Mothers, were largely skeptical and had a hundred doubts, so it was not unusual to be standing in a supermarket line-up and hear one of them testily provoke and challenge an amateur physicist who was checking his Mothers, if the physicist was having a particularly bad day. “So, do these Mothers calculate quantum or classical probabilities?” the physicist might ask; a question over which the amateur might stumble, only to regain his footing upon consulting his Mothers about whether continuing the conversation would be to his benefit, to which the Mothers would reply that the probability was low.

///

What will Sunni do without her Mothers? I sometimes ask myself a similar question. What would I do if I didn’t know what was to come? If the inputs of my past were to disappear, I’d have no idea how I behaved in relationships past, and would not know how to behave in them now. I would play it all differently, not knowing how I was likely to behave. I might forget how much I once hated to be on a soccer pitch, but was forced onto the field, and avoided soccer ever since. I might, while lounging in a park, say to the soccer players, while rising, Do you need an extra player?

///

If you draw a line across a piece of paper, that is King Street. Now draw a small, perpendicular line crossing King Street near the centre. That is Princess Street. That is the part of town where losers, misfits, and orphans hang out. It’s where someone crosses the street drunk, and someone else crosses the street with ripped jeans and a lazy eye.

On either end of King Street, draw a square. These are the two malls. The mall at the right end of town is in the richer neighbourhood, near the Perimeter Institute, the University, and the Institute for Quantum Computing—all those institutions representing the heights of Waterloo’s excellence. The other mall, the one the teenagers gathered at, is situated near the Old Town Hospital, City Hall, and the more run-down establishments that deal with humanities and the human body.

Now watch Sunni speed along the long line of King Street, arriving within minutes at Princess.

///

Sunni was like all her friends and all her friends were like Sunni. Their machines represented the part of the brain that sees patterns and nothing but patterns. To that part of the brain, everything fits. There is no randomness to life, no chance. If ever their Mothers missed something, or something not predicted occurred, it would correct for the future, learning from what had happened and fitting this new thing into a better, more complete image of the whole. In this way, if not everything was already accounted for, Sunni and her friends had faith that in time it would be.

Sunni had always avoided Princess Street, since only losers hung out there. But since nearly every teenager whose Mothers broke wound up on Princess, it was where she decided to go now. She still had the instincts of someone with a Mothers, and wanted to waste no time before moving on to the likeliest next stage of her destiny. She parked her scooter and walked straight into one of the bars, pushing its red door open.

Two teenagers she had never seen before were sitting on tall stools, smoking and drinking, and upon entering Sunni could hear them whisper: Doesn’t she look like Shelly? No, but she reminds me a lot of my grade-four gym teacher. Actually, today in its entirety reminds me a lot of grade four.

Sunni went to perch on the stool beside them and said hi, placing her hand below her slightly heavy belly. They regarded her blankly. Without waiting for a sign of their interest, she explained that she had lost her Mothers that day.

The boy nodded solemnly. Once your Mothers is dead, he knew, it’s gone for good. The factory had shut down years before due to a lack of demand for the Mothers beyond Waterloo, and not a single repair shop in town knew how to fix the machines. The boy explained that the very same thing had happened to him four years ago, but told Sunni not to worry; life would not be as different as she feared. Having said this, he turned to face his friend, finishing up the anecdote he had been telling about his childhood, concluding, “And I still feel its reverberations today.” Then the two of them put down their money and began packing their bags to leave.

“Wait! Wait! Where are you going?” Sunni cried anxiously, and the boy sighed deeply and said, “Relax. Personality is as static as time; it’s a fixed law. People don’t change. As long as you remember that, you’ll be all right. Now we have to go and write in our diaries.” And they left.

Sunni, still sitting there, glanced down at her Elders pin as it began to blink and beep. Then she jumped up from the stool and left

///

Time is a measurement of change. The change in the position of quantum particles cannot always be known, because they don’t seem to exist in any fixed spot. At the level of human bodies, we can see that time has passed because one moment I’m here at this bar, the next I’m at City Hall. But at the quantum level, everything is cloudy. This is the mechanism for the disappearance of time. The people of Waterloo liked the timeless theory because, deep down, they felt it. Their lives, in so many ways, reflected it. The science simply stamped their intuition with the air of authority and truth.

///

“No,” said a physicist, standing in the park under the gazebo, to the twenty-odd citizens picnicking around her. “We don’t all believe that time is static.”

The picnickers smiled up at the physicist. They continued to eat their bread and sandwiches and throw their strawberries into the grass.

///

Though Sunni left for City Hall as soon as she received the call, she arrived a little later than everyone else. The other Elders were already there, waiting for the emergency meting to begin.

The teenagers of Waterloo, whose Mothers had been receiving inputs since the day they were born, were believed by everyone to have a more accurate grasp of what the future would hold. Compared to their Mothers, their parents’ Mothers were deeply lacking: twenty, thirty years unaccounted for. So a special place in Waterloo was reserved for the young. They were given much respect. They bore the official title Double Special Elders, since having a particular destiny is the essence of being Special. They were paraded about on ceremonial occasions and called in to advise the city on all the important matters.

Sunni crept quietly through the side door, up to her seat in the fourth row of the dais, which seated thirty across. Already Waterloo’s two hundred and fifty native-born teens were in their seats, and they glanced at Sunni and watched her take her place, though she had tried to make her entrance subtle. The mayor, standing at the podium before them, was in the midst of explaining the current crisis, but after two minutes, Sunni was still totally lost, so she whispered to the boy beside her, asking him what she had missed.

He replied quickly, “This morning Perimeter received word from Africa that all the problems in physics have been solved.”

“What?” she whispered back. “Are you sure? The measurement problem and—”

“Yes, yes, everything,” he insisted hotly. Then he rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask me.”

Sunni slumped back in her chair, stunned. The mayor was now on to the mundane, municipal details, explaining how much it cost the city to fund the institute, claiming that it would be humiliating for Waterloo to carry on the project of physics when the field was now kaput. He gestured at the two physicists who had come to explain the proof, should anyone want to hear it. He said that they represented the physicists who believed the institute should be kept alive—not because the African proof was wrong; it wasn’t—but for reasons that he, the mayor, did not completely understand, though if one of the Elders wanted to hear their reasoning, the physicists could give it. As for the rest of the physicists, they were too preoccupied with going over the proof to attend the meeting that day.

“Would any of the Elders like to see the African proof?” the mayor asked.

Sunni looked around tentatively. No one else seemed to want to hear it, but she wanted to know, so she awkwardly raised her hand. The mayor nodded at the physicists, and the younger of them stood and went to the whiteboard and began drawing an equation and a little diagram. He turned to the Elders and began to speak. He was only a few sentences into his elucidation when the mayor interrupted him to exclaim:

“Aha—look! It’s like an earthworm praying!”

At which point the young physicist violently threw his marker onto the ground and left the whiteboard and sat down beside his friend. He was too upset by the events of the day to push forward. It wasn’t even so awful that a proof had been found; the pain in his heart was about how unsatisfying a proof it was. It just wasn’t the beautiful, elegant thing that everyone had been hoping for.

Sunni wanted to ask the physicists what the African proof said about the unreality of time, but just as she was about to raise her hand again, the boy next to her leaned over and pointed at Sunni’s Mothers, which she still reflexively clasped tightly in the palm of her hand.

“Is your Mothers dead?” he gasped.

Sunni, hiding it quickly beneath her sweater, replied with feigned ease, “Nah, it’s just a new sleeve. My architect friend made it. He’s cool.”

“I wouldn’t want a sleeve that looked like that.”

“Never mind.”

“You should take that sleeve off.”

“One day I will.”

Then the mayor turned to the teenagers and asked, “Should Perimeter be closed?” In this way voting began.

The first Elder spoke: “Yes.”

The second Elder looked up from her Mothers, which knew that once you began talking about ending something, usually that thing ends. “Yes!”

The third Elder spoke. “Yes.”

And on and on it went: yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Now it was Sunni’s turn. She hesitated, glancing down at the blank screen of her Mothers, which she had pulled out again. It was still a twisted, black, charry mess. She took a deep breath, and said very quietly, though loud enough for everyone to hear:

“I am no longer Special.”

Then she stood up from her place on the dais and climbed carefully down the steps. It was a humiliating walk, one others had performed before her while she had watched in pity and fear. Behind her there rose a wall of whispering; it was the world Sunni had been part of, sealing itself off behind her.

She walked past the Mayor and beyond the physicists, towards the doors at the end of the hall. Just before she slipped out, she heard the mayor announce the tally of the vote: it was unanimous. Perimeter was to be shut down within the hour.

“Fucking teenagers,” the older physicist muttered.

///

Sunni stepped out into the breezy air of the afternoon, blinking in the brightness of the day. Her face felt oddly hot. She stood on the steps of City Hall, faintly bewildered. Her eyes rested on a tree that stood a short distance in the grass, and she watched it gently sway, moved by the breeze. What would move her, now that her Mothers was dead? With each day, she felt, her destiny would be less and less clear, and less and less would what was probable be the law that ran her life. She tried to imagine what other law might come to replace it, but no other laws came to mind.

Perhaps, she mused, she could learn about living from this tree—let the laws that moved it move her as well. At base, she knew, she was made up of the very same substance as the tree; she must be, in some sense, treelike. She stepped down onto the lawn.

At that moment, her attention was distracted by some vague sounds in the distance. She squinted. Son she could discern a lethargic parade approaching from the far end of King Street. After watching a bit longer, she realised what it was: a small tide of physicists was flowing from the doors of Perimeter. They came closer, heaving down King Street with stooped postures, dazed, carrying boxes of computers, papers and chalk, streaming towards their cars, which would take them back to the university towns from which they had come.

“How pathetic,” came a small voice.

Sunni turned around and noticed that sitting cross-legged beneath the tree was a scrawny boy around her own age. From the first glance she could tell that he was a loser, but such a loser he wasn’t even a Princess Street loser.

“They don’t have to leave,” he said.

“But it’s their destiny.” Sunni replied, moving closer. “I was in the meeting. I saw it happen.”

The boy looked up at her sceptically, pushing his bangs away. “Destiny? What a word! These physicists don’t believe in the future. Most of them don’t, anyway. I know it. I’m good friends with some of them.”

“But—” Sunni shook her head. “If there’s no destiny, how can you know what’s going to happen next?”

The boy, whose name was Raffi, frowned. He paused a moment, then went on to quietly explain, barely raising his voice above a whisper, so that Sunni had to move closer to hear.

He told her that last year’s Bora Bora proof, which contributed to the African proof, revealed that not everything that comes to pass can be known in advance; rather everything is in a continuous state of co-creation and co-evolution with everything else. The future is utterly non-computable and non-predictable – possibly not mathematical, in essence, at all. No future can exist until it exists, since we are all creating reality together in a radically flexible present. “Like, things can happen all sorts of different ways,” he said.

Sunni sat back hard against the tree. She was flustered by all that this boy was saying. But the Bora Bora proof was impossible! Absurd! She turned her head as the Double Special Elders began emerging from the tall doors of City Hall and spreading across the lawn, heads bent low over their Mothers as they decided where to go next. She was about to say something when, in the distance, a blue spiral burst into the world, lighting up the sky. Sunni felt like she was going to vomit, felt like her insides had been scooped out with a spoon.

“It’s the action,” Raffi said quietly. “It’s coming closer, I see.”

“What action?” Sunni asked.

Raffi said slowly, looking at her again, “You’re a Double Special Elder through and through. You didn’t even know.”

Now another explosion burst blue in the distance, near the mall on the left side of town. A high-pitched radial whistle was emanating from the spiral, and Raffi got up like a smooth animal. He bent over and started rummaging in the large duffel bag that had been lying beside him in the grass.

Sunni pushed herself closer to the tree, scared. In the distance, a physicist in a red overcoat turned around and began walking towards them. Raffi looked up to answer the question on Sunni’s face and said, “It’s a Spiral. We might know how to handle this.” The physicist came near and Raffi walked off with her, in the direction of Perimeter and through its front doors.

Now Sunni was alone. She found herself, for the time, watching the Elders, many of whom were gazing into the distance where the spiral still hung. Sunni observed them glance down at their Mothers to make sense of it; to know how to respond. But their Mothers had no valuable insight; could not fit the spiral into the pattern; had never known such a thing before.

Get on your scooter and go home, was the instruction that appeared on their screens; an instruction applicable to many situations, and the most common one.

The teenagers made their way to their scooters, seemingly sure in their movements, for somewhere inside they felt a reassurance: it was not that their Mothers lacked insight about this new thing, but that the question they had posed to their Mothers about the explosion was not a pertinent one. What happened in the distance had nothing to do with the patterns in their lives. It had nothing to do with all the ways they were Special.

They got on their wheels and, like the physicists, sped off from the heart of town.

Sunni looked up as an acorn fell from the tree and landed on her head. She thought about what she knew.

Good Machine

2010-06-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

Written for The Writing Life, published by McClelland & Stewart. An anthology about the writing life, the proceeds from which went to PEN Canada, 2006

There are many machines in the world, so now we know something about machines.

They are what we like best until they fail us, and until we can figure out why they have failed us, there is nothing more frustrating than a machine. It is not that the power cord is unplugged. It is not that we have spilled Gatorade all over it.

Everything in a machine must be doing its little, private job, if the whole machine is to be doing its single job, which is perhaps to turn out a bottle of Coke, or perhaps to let us send and receive email, or perhaps to suck up dust and condoms from the carpet, or to turn out ten-dollar bills.

A person who works at an office is like one part of the vacuum cleaner, or one part of the machine that turns out six thousand bottles of Coke a minute, and so it is important that each part works. But when what needs to be made is a story, then the machine is one person, and if the hands are able, and if the brain is not asleep, and there is no writing coming out, then one must detect what is wrong.

One thought is that we were wrong about this machine; we thought it was supposed to make books, but that was just vanity. It was to make children, or a fool of itself, or nothing at all, just to lie down on the sidewalk and die.

I have gone into myself tinkering and come out with nothing, no answers. I have not been able to find the element that is off, but to spend so long aware that every part must be working properly, and to not know what the parts are, or what is ‘properly,’ this is a strange maintenance job.

Motto: To work awkwardly, then. To spit dust onto the carpet. To produce cars with three wheels. For the Coke to be on the outside, and the bottle on the inside.

Interview with Frank Stella

2010-06-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

This interview was published in the November/December 2008 issue of The Believer.

Frank Stella had come to Toronto to help promote an exhibition of his prints from the collection of a friend of his who owned The Adelaide Club, where the prints were being shown. The night of the opening my boyfriend and I went and realised that The Adelaide Club was not, as we’d expected, a gentleman’s club with bookshelves lining the walls, but rather a health club, a fitness centre, and so among those who arrived in all their elegance to drink the free wine and eat the canapés and hear Frank Stella say a few words were men and women sweating through their spandex, passing among the hob-nobbers with towels thrown over their shoulders, on their way to and from the locker rooms. It was bizarre.

The next day I met Mr. Stella in The Adelaide Club once again. It was 11 in the morning. All signs of the former night’s elegance were gone. The squash courts, which had been obscured by long white drapes, were pulled back to reveal men in white shorts and wristbands. On the counter where there had been white wine were now cups of yogurt and granola. We sat at a high table and Mr. Stella wore a fleece vest with “Team Stella” embroidered in small letters above a pocket.

Frank Stella, born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, has been considered a major American artist for almost fifty years, becoming, in 1970, the youngest artist ever to have a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He is best known for the moving monochromatic pin-stripe paintings that first brought him to prominence, which in life have a very moving, vulnerable quality, and (a few years later) colour field paintings on irregularly shaped canvasses. He helped legitimize printmaking as an art in the late 1960s, and his work in the 1980s included paintings in high relief, on objects such as free-standing metal pieces that contrasted with his early minimalist works. He seems to be all over Toronto – a bright, mural-sized work of intertwining half-circles from 1970, “Damascus Gate, Stretch Variation,” hangs high on a wall in the David Mirvish Bookshop, where I first saw his work as a child. In the past twenty years, he has taken on architecturally-scaled sculptural commissions, such as the design of the interior of the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto, as well as an installation in front of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Frank Stella spoke especially quickly during this interview, with much energy and an air of distraction. While I was waiting for the elevator to go back up to the main floor of the mall, I noticed Mr. Stella leaning over a railing, staring at one of the paintings he had made in 1980s, hanging 30 feet over a fleet of Stairmaster machines below.

HAPPY TO BE THERE

SH: There’s a fiction writer in Canada who’s fairly famous—her name is Barbara Gowdy. When I interviewed her a few years ago, she said that her first love was to be a concert pianist, and it was her theory that everyone does their second love, and that’s sort of our condition. I wonder for if you’re at all doing your second love or if painting is your first love.

FS: Certainly there weren’t any other arts that made much sense for me. Being tone-deaf, music certainly was not in the cards. My mother painted and there were paintings around the house, and I was interested in painting and I stayed interested in it, and I sort of, in a mild – actually fairly straightforward way – practiced it at the level I could at a young age. It’s not like with musicians, say, where there is exceptional technique and ability at a very young age. I was not exceptional, but I liked it and I worked at it and I was satisfied by what I was doing. I mean in terms of, things would occur to me and I was never finished. There was always something ahead of me.

SH: You say you weren’t exceptional in any way. Then how do you account for the place that you’ve reached in your career and art history and in relation to others painters of your generation, which is obviously pretty high?

FS: I work at it. As I say, I have no particular talent, but I have a familiarity and a lot of experience with the materiality of painting, since I’ve been doing it since I was 12 or 14. That counts for something. I have a lot of experience – way more experience than ability. I also know what I like and I’m not shy about making a judgement about what’s worth doing.

SH: Is it possible for someone to be a very great painter if they don’t have a lot of familiarity with paintings and art history?

FS: Yeah, I think that happened to me. I understood art from Manet to Pollock. I really knew what that art was about. I was pretty confident, and probably rightly so, about my take on what was called modern art, and it’s what I wanted to do, so I both studied it and was immersed in it. But I knew that I didn’t have much of a sense of the painting that came before, so around 1980 I got involved in writing a bit, and I started to look at the art of the past, but from the point of view of having made art myself, which was a slightly different way of looking at it. Then I found myself to be fairly comfortable in it and I was able to have an understanding of art back to the 13^th century. I went to look at Austrian painting. I went to all the great museums, as they say.

SH: Did that bring about a new way of thinking about art for you – to be straightforwardly analytical?

FS: I don’t think it was so analytical. It was about seeing, and it was about seeing the real thing in the real place, either the museum or – I mean, the biggest turn-on for me was Caravaggio, not because I like Caravaggio so much, but because in Rome you could see the Caravaggios where they had been made – not where they were actually painted, but a few blocks away, and then they were moved into the churches. That’s a totally different kind of seeing.

SH: When you started out, you wanted your paintings to have total stability and total symmetrical organization. Then the work became more dynamic and was less about being totally stable, and I wonder if it seems to you that the need for total stability and total symmetrical organization are the needs of a young man.

FS: Yes, it could be. You like to have a structure. It’s not so bad to make something that you feel is strong enough to build on, so then you gain a certain confidence.

SH: When you look at that early work of yours now, does it seem like it doesn’t have emotion in it? The black paintings for example…

FS: Actually, it’s the opposite of that. The goal is a level of feeling beyond the normal feeling, which can be relatively trivial, so the search is for the absolute or the pure feeling.

SH: And do you feel like there’s a range of absolute and pure feelings, the same way that there’s a range of trivial feelings, or is there sort of one ur-pure-feeling?

FS: I wouldn’t dwell on them being trivial feelings. I would say normal feelings.

SH: Daily feelings, okay.

pause

SH: So do you think that in any way changes the human being – to have abstract art in our consciousness?

FS: Well, I don’t have a lot of faith in the efficacy of art in relation to living a life, but for some people I think it can be comforting. It can be uplifting. It can be a challenge. From the professional point of view, it’s the challenge that’s kind of great. But in the end, look, I’m part of an enterprise of painting, which is painting in my time, and I’m a very small part of that. And if you take the totality of it, the organism of visual culture or art, which is kind of evolutionary, I’m an infinitesimal part of that, but I’m happy to be there.

JUNK IN A COHERENT FORM

SH: You wrote an essay in which you said that there are certain things you don’t consider art. You don’t consider performance art art, you don’t consider photography art, you don’t consider –

FS: Yeah, I got on a tear one time.

SH: – video art isn’t art…

FS: There are a lot of things I don’t like.

SH: Do you actually consider that work not art?

FS: Well it’s, I don’t know, it’s a tawdry kind of art. It’s art that hangs onto the kind of art I consider really worth doing. But look, I would love performance art if they had their own performance art museums. There should be photography museums. There should be video art museums. I don’t need to go to a museum that has painting and great art in it to look at videos. They should have their own place.

SH: So you want to segregate?

FS: I think they should be separate but equal, yes.

SH: Yet you’re obviously interested in architecture. Do you consider that art? Richard Serra said it’s absolutely not, because if you have to worry about plumbing, it’s not an art.

FS: Yeah, well Richard has a limited view of a lot of things, but you know, there’s a tradition, at least since more or less the Renaissance, of the fine arts being painting, sculpture and architecture. And that’s quite broad, and I like to stick with that very broad definition. Of course, in actuality, there was a lot of performance art during Renaissance. They painted on the front of buildings and they did all the painting for the parades and marches and everything. It wouldn’t be what’s in museums now, largely because it’s ephemeral and didn’t survive. So perhaps it’s not quite right to say what I said, but that’s the way I felt about it when I wrote about it. I was getting tired. I didn’t like the museums being overrun with just a lot of junk! I mean, I’ve produced plenty of junk myself, but in a more coherent form.

SH: I interviewed the art critic Dave Hickey a while ago, and he said the important thing was to want to win – you have to want to win. Do you agree?

FS: No. Like I said, you’re a small part of the enterprise and an infinitesimal part of the organism, and you don’t win anything. You’re just lucky to be conscious for a limited amount of time, and what you’re able to do with your consciousness is up to you. You don’t win anything. There’s nothing to win.

SH: Do you feel like you have any personal stake in abstraction continuing in any direction? In any essay you wrote, you said that the values of materialism should inform abstract art rather than the values of spiritualism.

FS: Well, I never was very big on the spiritual aspect. I’m interested in the final – the concrete expression of those feelings. Abstract art continues to get made and to my mind it’s usually the better art, so I’m happy with that.

DONALD DUCK AND NAKED WOMEN

SH: You once said that you only have enough time to be a painter – you don’t have enough time to be an artist. What does that look like to you – an artist?

FS: Artists are worried about their career and being artists and looking like artists, I guess. I only worry about what I do, I don’t worry too much about how I’m perceived as a person. I worry a little bit about the perception of my work, but not about what people think about me.

SH: And what about the perception of your work do you worry about?

FS: Well, I don’t worry that much about it. Usually the negative criticism is what you hear most of, but it pretty much evens out. If you were to go through all the criticism – which I don’t recommend to anybody – the praise is more or less equal to the criticism or the negativism, so the positive balances the negative. I mean, it’s pretty much a push or I wouldn’t be here doing this interview if the negative things overwhelmed everything. I probably wouldn’t be around.

SH: Do you feel like it’s taken away from your life at all to be an artist, or only given you things?

FS: It’s not much of a judgement for me to make. I don’t know anything else and I really can’t actually imagine anything else.

SH: You’ve had two children, right?

FS: Actually I’ve had five children.

SH: Oh, five children. And –

FS: That creates a life of its own, so you don’t have to worry. I mean, I don’t have extra time on my hands.

SH: Were you really engaged with child-rearing?

FS: Well, yes, I mean – yes. I – you know – I didn’t do a very good job, but I was plenty engaged.

SH: And you were married to the critic Barbara Rose, I guess, for a while –

FS: Yes, yes.

SH: I’m a fiction writer, and well, it sounds ridiculous to say that I’m no longer married but it’s true, and I was also married to a critic, and I just wanted to know whether you had any thoughts on an artist being married to a critic. Is there a weird –

FS: Well, I’ll put it as straight as I can. Barbara was a better critic when she was married to me than she ever was after.

SH: What does that mean?

FS: You can think what you want to.

SH: Was it based on the conversations that you guys would have together or was it simply –

FS: I don’t make a judgment; I’m just pointing to the facts.

SH: You once said, “I do not have a secret desire to put Donald Duck or naked women in my paintings, although I know they harbour a secret desire to be there.”

FS: Yeah, I think that it’s true. (laughs) Naked women always want to get into paintings. They always want to take off their clothes. They always want to be photographed. That’s a fact. And Donald Duck is pretty aggressive in that way, too.

SH: Of all the Disney characters.

FS: Well, I could have chosen another but I like Donald Duck and naked women. They went together. That was a literary conceit.

LEO CASTELLI’S NEIGHBOURHOOD BODEGA

SH: Do you miss that time in American art, the fifties and so on, looking at the art world now, the kind of things people are doing –

FS: Well, it’s pretty amorphous now, and there are artists that I like – and don’t ask me who they are because I keep forgetting the names – but I know the work and everything, and there are quite a few. I see things that I like quite a lot all the time, but I don’t get much of a sense of relatedness or coherence, and I see the other stuff around it as being not so interesting – you know, very average kind of landscape painting and this semi-pseudo porn. It seems like a waste of time to me. But look, I don’t really care actually. It’s not relevant to what I do or how I live.

SH: Do you buy that old Arthur Danto formulation about the end of art and that basically the movement of art has stopped happening and it’s just going to be this pluralism for good?

FS: It’s not a bad idea but I doubt that because I assume that the better work will coalesce eventually – or at least how we see it – so it will look like there was something serious going on and that there was coherence. It’s pretty hard to believe that now, but I don’t know that it was ever that true before.

SH: You don’t think?

FS: No.

SH: You think it was just put together by the critics –

FS: Yeah, it was kind of exaggerated. Take cubism – okay. Braque, then Picasso really got into it. So okay, two guys were doing it. Then four or five years later, there was Juan Gris. A lot of people got into cubism, and it showed up in Mondrian, Malevich – it showed up in a lot of people and in a lot of other places, but it wasn’t a real movement. It was people using the ideas of the people who generated the original ideas, making them essentially more diffuse, although some of them had good consequences. So I think there’s always a diffuse quality to movements.

SH: So you think there are people who have an original way of doing things, and then there are copiers, and they lift –

FS: Well, that’s a brutal way of putting it, but some artists have great – a greater degree or a more significant profile or originality than others. You can’t deny that. Art historians, if they’re being complimentary, they’ll say, This work was without precedent. That pretty much tells the story.

SH: I might be mistaken, but did you once say that an artist whose art does not resemble them is to be trusted?

FS: I don’t think that’s my way of thinking, no. I’d be more interested in the other. The more it resembles them the less interesting it sounds to me. (laughs) I’m all in favour of the shifty artist.

SH: I know you speak a lot about “quality” and quality in art – do you think it’s just as legitimate to devote your life to quality in some other area, other than art? Like a really quality pizza shop or being a really quality teacher?

FS: Yeah, you know, nobody wants to fly on an airline that’s 85% successful at landing their planes. So one of the things about art is – I think it’s a problem – that you can’t train an artist anymore. There was an assumption before – with the academies – that you could get a trainable result, and that would result in quality, but that hasn’t been the case in a long time. Art actually doesn’t have a style of education, although we continue to have art schools. All my teachers told me, Don’t go to art school. That was their absolute advice.

SH: What do you mean, anymore? Do you think there was a time one could train artists?

FS: Well, certainly in the 17^th century we had academic training, and there was the apprentice system in the Renaissance – people did learn certain techniques. But we don’t have that now. With the rise of abstraction and the demise of mimetic art, when you’re not trying to make an image that represents something so someone can tell what that image is supposed to be, what kind of technique do you need? I mean, you need technique to make the image arresting or something you could care about, but you can pretty much do that any way you want to.

SH: Were you a good draughtsman?

FS: No, not at all. I never was – I never studied art conventionally.

SH: Is that weird to you? Does that ever feel awkward?

FS: Uh, no. I was born in 1936, so by then abstraction was established, so I studied that. (laughs) I wasn’t a bad student either.

SH: Is that when you got your teeth knocked out at school? In a lot of those early pictures, you don’t have front teeth.

FS: That was in the fifties.

SH: I think that would be kind of neat, to wander around university without any front teeth.

FS: I had a plate in university but I had bone in there. It was kind of botched; it wasn’t about being neat or having an image. It was about imperfect dentistry.

SH: So they didn’t do it well?

FS: Well, I had the plates but they always hurt because it came out about six years later – a piece of bone in the top.

SH: Speaking of Picasso and Braque, and I wonder if there’s been any friendships like that in your life, art friendships that particularly –

FS: Well, I don’t know how friendly they were when Picasso ran wild over Braque’s ideas. (laughs) I was friendly with artists and I still am friendly. It was small and it was quiet in the 60s. I was very active, and it was active – not really quiet, but it was small, so the artists, we saw each other a lot, and Leo’s gallery was sort of like – I don’t know; galleries now are so business-oriented and whatever, and Leo’s gallery was sort of like a mom and pop shop, a neighbourhood bodega.

SH: I have a painter friend from Shanghai, and he just had his first solo show in New York and he was really depressed because the day he arrived, the gallerist didn’t take him out for dinner, he had his assistant take him out for dinner because he had just bought a yacht and wanted to wash or touch his yacht.

FS: Well, there are infinite amounts of slights that we endure.

GAMBLING WITH LIFE VS GAMBLING

SH: You once wrote that “life is more wonderful than the imagination and recall of the people who life it,” and I wonder if to any extent making art is an engagement with art at its –

FS: Yeah, I think that’s what you feel when you see a great Ruebens or Velasquez or – that’s what a great painting does for you. It reminds you of that fact. Whatever they were, it’s gone, and their consciousness has evaporated, and something magical was achieved above it all.

SH: Are there some things you can now say for certain about art, that you know for certain about art?

FS: It’s just too tempting to say that you know that there’s no certainty. I mean, the way you frame the question that makes for a kind of inevitable answer. (laughs)

SH: Then are there things you’re more sure about than you were then?

FS: I mean, you have more experience. You make a lot of decisions based on experience, and you’re sure of them based on experience, but you know, you could be wrong. Also, your experience is fragmented. I mean, you tend to think of it as sort of systematic – you did this, you did that, you know this, you know that, but after a while it’s a mish-mash, so – a lot of artists say it, and a lot of people say it about everything, but in the end you have to temper your experience with intuition – in the moment. That’s why I like racing. They have to do it in the moment, and they do it on the basis of how they think they’re going to stay alive. (laughs) But it’s a very quick decision.

SH: Do you like betting, gambling?

FS: No, actually. I gamble a little but my whole life is a gamble as they would say, so gambling doesn’t interest me. That’s a trivial level compared to what I expend on trying to make art. I mean, if I could temper that habit, probably I’d be a lot better off. Maybe I should go to Art Anonymous.

SH: I know you have a horse farm and that you like racing horses and so on, and in your talk last night you said that there’s no connection between art and sport. Do you really believe there’s no connection?

FS: Well, all activities generate their own sense of beauty and accomplishment, so I suppose in that sense they’re connected, but sports really is about winning, and art really isn’t. Art’s about being able to make something that’s beautiful. There are millions of really great sportsmen who really love the beauty of the game, but in the end they’re happy to win ugly. They say that all the time: If we have to, we’ll win ugly. But you can’t win ugly in painting. Though guys have tried.

Interview with Mary Midgley

2010-06-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

This interview was conducted for The Believer and was published in their Feburary 2008 issue. The version below is longer than what what was, in the end, published, and it is the edit I prefer.

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Mary Midgley lives in a small cottage-like house several hours outside of London in Newcastle-on-Tyne, a university town where she was previously a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy (now retired), and where she has written her influential books of moral philosophy. She published her first book, Beast and Man, in 1978, when she was fifty-six. This was followed by eleven others, including Wickedness (1984), Evolution as a Religion (1985), Science and Poetry (2001), and a memoir, The Owl of Minerva. Recently, Routledge has been re-releasing her major works and has compiled a companion, edited by one of her sons: The Essential Mary Midgley. The Financial Times praised her work as “commonsense philosophy of the highest order,” and she was characterised in The Guardian as “the most frightening philosopher in the country… the foremost scourge of scientific pretension.”

In recent years, she has found herself engaged in fierce public battles with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, over what she has deemed their ideological approach to the story of evolution – arguing that they are attempting to do the work of myth-makers rather than scientists. When I visited, she was working on a pamphlet for teachers in British schools, to help explain the evolution vs. creationist debate.

Midgley is a tall, formidable woman. I arrived at her home by train at four in the afternoon and, though I would be staying overnight, she requested that we begin the interview immediately. We spoke for an hour and a half, after which she grew tired. Then she cooked us a vegetarian dinner. When I followed her into the kitchen and asked if I could help her with the preparations, she remarked, very dryly, “It’s no use being helped.”

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Sheila Heti: I want to talk a bit about evolution as the reigning creation myth of our time, and how it affects our idea about what a person is and what life is. In your book Evolution as a Religion, you criticize some scientists for attributing to Darwin’s theory of evolution certain things which shouldn’t be attributed to it.

Mary Midgley: Well, I think it’s a matter of getting the story right and not misusing it, and there are two ways in which the idea of evolution has been misused. One is the optimistic way which says it’s all getting better and better, and we should go along with it – that evolution is a sort of escalator which can take us anywhere. This was Lamarck’s and Hubert Spencer’s view, it was not Darwin’s, but people think that Darwin proved it. He did not. But if we believe this, it produces a belief in progress, which means that whatever we do is better than whatever there was before, and we only want more of it. But the idea that growth – for instance, economic growth – is natural and required – is a mythical idea. This can’t be right, because things do not grow indefinitely; they grow until they’re big enough. Imagery is terribly important, you see. But Darwin didn’t even use the word evolution, did you know that?

SH: Yes, I’ve read that.

MM: And people think this is Darwinism, and that it’s a great scientific discovery. What it is is myth, and if one says it’s a creation myth, I suppose it is, in the sense that it’s one of the stories which different cultures have to explain why things are as they are by saying how they were before. The other main misunderstanding is the one which says that the universe is runby hostile competition between individuals. This is also not Darwin. Herbert Spencer picked it up from the laissez-faire economics of the day which said that all you need for progress is savage competition. The idea was that if you had enough savage competition, eventually things would come right. But this is a fantasy about how life was made, because organisms cooperate constantly. The little bits in our cells were originally separate organisms which settled down to work together. If you don’t have an enormous amount of cooperation of that kind, you can’t have organisms at all. And the sort of “competition” by which they get ahead very often has nothing to do with fighting anything else, but finding a new place. You find a new food source, or you start photosynthesis, or something of that sort.

SH: Richard Dawkins is somebody you often criticize for going too far.

MM: Well, I do find it surprising that Dawkins, for instance, quotes Tennyson at the beginning of The Selfish Gene. “’Nature red in tooth and claw’ represents our modern understanding of what natural selection is,” says Dawkins. Well, it doesn’t! That story about bloody-mindedness is one terribly one-sided story among many that might be told, and one shouldn’t be enslaved to any such story. There are plenty of other ways you could talk, and the metaphors that are being used are powerful metaphors of a nasty kind and are quite arbitrary. They have a very strong effect.

SH: When you look at human nature, it’s so much more complex than just this one myth. What would you say is your view of human nature, as connected with a story or a myth or a structure?

MM: I mean, it is equally misleading to treat people as wholly cooperative – though I don’t know that anybody quite does that – but we do have a variety of different motives. Freud’s simplification was to say we think of nothing but sex, so to speak. With Hobbes it’s all about power. These things are always one-sided. But it does seem to be very unfortunate if a one-sided story acquires the authority of science, because science is meant to be impartial, isn’t it? Scientists as such aren’t necessarily impartial, but the ideology which is boiling out of books of that kind gets sold as science, because the book’s supposed to be a scientific book, whereas the person is really acting as a guru or a prophet who should be judged on the merit of his prophecies.

SH: You have said that many scientists don’t even realise they’re doing the work of myth-makers.

MM: Yes, I think so! And it’s very unfortunate. The education of scientists, particularly in English-speaking countries, tends to be very specialized. They haven’t had philosophy or history in their background. If you are specialized, you have a simple idea of truth as correspondence with facts – but big concepts don’t correspond directly with facts. They are ways of assembling facts. What has often happened is scientists who are scrupulous in the main body of their work, when they get to the last chapter, they have a holiday, you see.

SH: And the debate in America in the schools between what they call Creationism and I guess evolution – could that exist if evolution wasn’t one of the atheist myths of our world?

MM: That’s right – it could not be seen as the opposite of religion unless it was seen as something of the same kind. I think it’s really very very unfortunate what’s gone on. I really hadn’t taken in how strongly American Protestantism had been cut off from the rest of thought. I mean, all these unfortunate early immigrants had a very hard time. They couldn’t have taken very little with them to America except their Bibles. They couldn’t take most of their culture. They just had to leave it behind. A lot of them had been members of Protestant sects, and were persecuted, and their Bible was what they were living by. So when – long before Darwin – people began to be told that the facts were otherwise, they couldn’t take it in. It was not tolerable. And they got into the habit of simply saying, “That’s what the smart-alecks in the town think, the people like the lawyers who did us out of our field.” They got into the habit of regarding it as another tribe’s doctrines, so at the end of the nineteenth century they had formulated this fundamentalist doctrine which hadn’t been ever said before – that all of the Bible was true. I mean, people before that did assume that the ancient history in the Bible was true because they hadn’t anything else to compete with it, but as time went on, people gradually got used to the thought that it wasn’t literally true, and it didn’t have to be. But they didn’t get used to that in the hinterland of the United States. The confrontation now is terribly hard, but it does seem to me that this Dawkins business makes it much harder. And Daniel Dennitt is doing it too – simply saying religion is rubbish, it’s indisproved, it’s time we got out, you know. But you’ve got to try and understand where people are and make it possible for them to take things in, and it’s very hard. There’s so much politics behind it right now. But the idea that science is the only book – that it will supply the meaning of life –

SH: Right, and I mean, the meaning of life – typically human life and humans are explained to us in literature. It’s not in science, it’s not in –

MM: No, no. I mean, big scientific theories do bear on the central meaning of life, but to get factual accuracy in the details of science hasn’t got a lot to do with that.

SH: What does science tell us about the meaning of life? Has it told us anything definite about the meaning of life?

MM: It shows you the sort of order in which you live, doesn’t it? I don’t feel that it’s a total waste of time. Curiosity obviously is a human attribute, and people often do spontaneously wonder, “Why is that frog green?” or something of that kind, and they find the answer and they think, “Ah, this is satisfying.” So it’s something about finding an order where you previously didn’t. This makes the world seem a little more akin to you, a little less alien, and if someone’s a dedicated scientist, I think he is pushing back the frontiers of our understanding in a useful sort of way. It’s not a matter of vast metaphysical truths, but there’s a continuity between science and the big questions about life. I mean, Copernicus – it’s quite interesting to think, “Is life different now that we know we’re not in the middle?” Well, yes it is, but of course that’s not just science, that’s also philosophy.

SH: There’s this thing people do – which is compare humans with machines – and you’ve written that the only reason we can plausibly do this is because we’re animistic. We look at computers and invest them with human qualities and can’t see them as completely impersonal – and that if we could see them as they are, we wouldn’t be drawing these analogies. I wonder why you think people like to use this metaphor of the human being a sort of computer.

MM: Well, that’s interesting. There’s two ways of looking at it, isn’t there? Whether you concentrate on us or on the computers. First, for a very long time there has been a romanticising of machines. And the suggestion is quite often made that the world will be much better place when these things take over because they’re much more sensible than us. You’ll see these solemn arguments to prove that computers will shortly succeed us, and it seems a point on which people don’t think very clearly because their imaginations get excited. So machines become a kind of magic which will remedy the ills of human culture, and the fantasy is that the mess humans make can be avoided once these robots get here. And we’re wonderful because we can make these things which are going to be greater than us. Then there is the other side, where you think of people as machines, which behaviourist psychologists very much like to do, and you have only to engineer the machine a little bit differently and society will be greatly improved. That’s a different angle, isn’t it?

SH: Yes.

MM: I suppose they’re both power fantasies. Certainly it’s an area where all kinds of plots and plans emerge. I regard it on the whole with gloom, though. I like Frankenstein and I like good science-fiction, but when people who are merely being sensational want to get an excitement out of this relation, I don’t attempt to care for it.

Sheila: Yes, yes. I wanted to bring that up because in Evolution as Religion you write about how we misunderstand DNA, and we believe think that we can sort of tinker with our DNA, we can take genes and replace them with other genes, and that this is a misunderstanding of how genes work.

MM: Yes, there is the temptation to regard human beings as one more machine in the garage, which you can sort out by suitable tools. It’s perfectly clear that what led people to first suggest the idea of genetic engineering is the thought that people could be made like cars and could be altered easily and conveniently. This is simply false. When people suggest this, they are exaggerating their power and exaggerating their knowledge. Science obviously has made progress by thinking of human beings as assemblies of parts in this sort of way, which is fine as long as scientists don’t overdo it and become unrealistic.

SH: In what way have they become unrealistic?

MM: Well, the hope of dealing with mental illness entirely by physical means, which psychiatrists have been very dedicated to. The idea that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, something floating on the top, and you can always get it right by suitable drugs is wrong. I remember hearing a psychiatrist here saying what a sad thing it was that Virginia Woolf couldn’t have suitable pills, for she would have got straight quite easily. It’s obviously much easier and less disturbing to the people who have to do the work to think that there’s a physical process they have to carry out, and if they haven’t found the solution yet, they soon will and everything will be quite all right, than it is to have to enter imaginatively into the state of the people who are in trouble. I think people are frightened of considering feelings and letting their imaginations loose on what’s going on inside. They find it much less frightening to get out the spanners. So it’s a very understandable kind of illusion, but it really is a piece of gratuitous metaphysics, this idea that consciousness is just an effect and never a cause

SH: Well what would you say against the person who said that if only we had the right pills, Virginia Woolf could have been saved?

MM: Well, it’s assuming that depression is something like maybe TB, a physical illness which can be totally cured by a physical remedy, and that would seem to be extremely unrealistic. Of course, sometimes anti-depressants do cure things completely or even partially, but so many illnesses have both mental and physical sides. It’s pretty clear that indigestion and asthma are partly mental things, because those who have any of these kinds of complaints know generally well that they get worse when one is worried. And there’s no reason why that should not be so, because consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon. Are we onto that side of the mind-body problem now? It has been really medical orthodoxy for the past century that consciousness could affect anything physical. If you find a mathematician who’s working on a problem, it would be rather odd to say that the thoughts that he thinks don’t actually affect how his hand moves. I mean, this is all fairly simple isn’t it, but it has been sort of systematically ignored.

SH: You’ve written about Atomism and Lucretius, and you say people wouldn’t have done the explorations they did, had the story not –

MM: Yes! This is the thing that struck me as extremely interesting, cause I was reading the scientist who said that poetry was a waste of time – and it just struck me that the atomic theory, which is now fundamental to science, came in the first place from the Greek atomists, who were philosophers, and it came via Lucretius, because Lucretius’ poetry is so impressive, you know? He was indeed very much admired and read in the Renaissance when people began to build the atomic theory. I mean, the shape of our imagination determines the kind of scientific theories we can hold, doesn’t it? And our imagination is of course is exercised in all kinds of ways in ordinary life, but literature is its stamping ground. Poetry is tremendously influential. And another example of this lately– some scientist dismissed Shelley as a beautiful but ineffectual angel standing in the void in vein or something, but in fact that revolutionary stuff was enormously influential. His conception of society and how it required equality and how bad it was, and his kind of atheism was very impressive stuff. I think he had a lot of effect on changes in the kind of science that we do, and this does become clearer because in the 17th century they were really moon-struck by clockwork. They thought it was absolutely gorgeous – it was a sort of miracle to them, because they weren’t actually engineers themselves, they just saw these amazing…! And so mechanistic science, the notion that there were mechanisms in everything took over, and did jolly well for a time, but eventually physicists began to realise that actually the tiny particles that are inside everything are not a lot of little balls banging against each other. We don’t live in an enormous car, so we need other imagery, and Einstein and so on used other imagery, and now people say it’s fields or it gets much more abstract. So what I’m on about is that mechanical imagery was there because it was obsessing the society at the time, and peoples’ imaginations were full of it, and when peoples’ imaginations move onto something else, they use something else. And yes, it’s clear that when evolution came along, yes, this economic determinism – theories about the brass law of wages and that kind of thing – free enterprise, capitalism that went with it – that was very strong, and that was what caused people like Herbert Spencer to say the world is essentially run by competition. It was that model being projected into the science. He wasn’t a scientist himself. It was the imaginative pattern that determined the shape of the scientific theories. There’s nothing kind of wrong about that, it’s bound to happen, but one needs to be aware of it. And it does mean that you can’t treat science as infallible, final truth.

SH: Right now I think a lot of the imagery comes from the internet and the idea of interconnection and do you know much about Wikipedia?

MM: Yes, yes.

SH: I think that’s a really interesting social model in which there’s no one author and we’re all the author.

MM: Yeah, that’s right. Well, when monarchical models are not at all fashionable now, are they? Networking is a great pattern at present. And I suppose that ought to help, but the trouble with present-day science is it is rather authoritarian, and big science is run in such large chunks now, it tends to be funded by industry much more than it used to, and there are these great teams in which work gets done. Darwin wouldn’t have got anywhere today. Nobody would listen to this country gentleman. He wasn’t part of some big organization. And James Lovelock produced Gaia on his own, and he called his memoir, The Life of an Independent Scientist. He has very firmly remained outside but he’s been working very hard, and he’s managed to finance himself by making inventions, but not everybody can make inventions that they sell.

SH: Well that’s very interesting – the idea of Gaia. And I think it’s probably a necessary antidote to the idea that we’re essentially competitive creatures. How would you sort of crystallise or describe Gaia?

MM: Well, and it’s also an antidote to the idea that we run everything, that the earth exists for us and it’s simply a lot of resources which we can use exactly as we please because human begins are the only thing that really matter; we’re the end and everything else is the means. That has been a very powerful notion in our culture, and is quite unrealistic, biologically. It seems that by now the scientists have mainly come round to the Gaia idea, which is that earth and the things on it are a self-maintaining system – that living things have always have worked to keep the atmosphere and conditions on earth suitable for life, and that there are limits to the conditions in which they can do that, so if you disturb the thing it doesn’t work so well for us. I mean, the thought that we ourselves are only a little bit inside a great concern or organism like that is far healthier, and it’s also true that it is – or should be – an antidote to the extreme individualism, because the social Darwinist idea that by everybody fighting things will come right is not how nature works actually, and it’s not only true of human society that it doesn’t work very well, but also by relation to the other organisms doesn’t work very well. Yes, the imagery of the earth as a parent or mother is indeed very contrary to the thought of this red in tooth and claw. Now, there are limits to using any of these images, but the one is no more superstitious than the other. But scientists don’t like the idea of Gaia. They like the science of it now, but they don’t like the imagery of it, but they do like the imagery of the selfish gene.

SH: And why do they not like the imagery of Gaia?

MM: I think they find it embarrassing because it’s personal, and they don’t want to have to engage in anything like that.

SH: You use the word imagination a lot in your writing in a very – you give it a lot of weight – but I don’t feel the general use of the word imagination gives it much importance.

MM: No, you’re quite right. I do it deliberately because of that. If one thinks what’s imaginary is not real, so to speak, or if by imagination one just means having fantasies about something, that wouldn’t do. But Coleridge and Wordsworth got this right for us, didn’t they? They said there’s a fancy, which is just for fun, and the imagination which works. Itis the form in which our feelings go through to our thoughts by recollection – emotion recollected in tranquillity. You can’t, as it were, use raw feeling directly. It’s got to be processed and brought into relation with the rest of your life and made into thought and then it will come out.

SH: A lot of my friends are artists – either painters or writers or musicians – and when I talk to them, most of them seem to feel that this is not important work to be doing – maybe they should be political activists, and I wonder if you think there’s something about the times we’re living in that would cause artists to think that way?

MM: What’s wrong with doing both? I mean, there’s a bit of time left over from writing and painting.

SH: Well no, I guess more the problem is they don’t even see the value of doing artistic work. Like a lot of these people do do political work, but they say the artistic work is just selfish, so there’s a devaluing of the artistic work.

MM: Well, that’s wrong, isn’t it? Even when you are saying things which you mean to have a political effect, the imagination is a terribly important organ. Prometheus Unbound is really Shelley’s dramatisation of the revolution he hopes to follow from the French revolution – you know, from the liberation of mankind. Most of his writing is more or less about that, and he was a tremendous inspiration to people in the next generations – and Blake too. It’s a matter of putting in some explosives somehow, and if those people hadn’t been terribly concerned about social conditions, they wouldn’t have written it. I think if you can get through to other people and enable their vision of the life around them and make them say, “Ah, I see something,” then you’ve done something of absolutely first-rate importance, haven’t you?

SH: I guess. I wonder, is there any characteristic in humans that makes you most optimistic about the way things can go in the world?

MM: I wouldn’t say I’m particularly optimistic about the way things are going to go in the world at present. But I mean, humans are much more versatile and spontaneous and liable to pop up with something new and different then the theorists are suggesting. When they are confronted with difficulties, I think they deal with them amazingly well. I was struck with that in the war. People got cross, but then very quickly they would devise something – they are extremely inventive. I’m sure people are at their best when things are hard. And then if you give people everything, they start behaving very badly. Quite a pity.

SH: There’s a great deal of interest in our culture in curing oneself by going to a therapist, and I know tons of people who go to therapy and psychoanalysis, and I wonder what that says about our concept of the human – that we all feel like we have to somehow cure ourselves.

MM: Well, we are social beings, aren’t we? And we do constantly interchange thoughts and feelings with those around us. If there’s something wrong with our thoughts and feelings, it’s not strange that we try talking to somebody else. In any culture there have been people provided who will do this or that. That we look for the remedy in talking to someone – well, if one says that’s odd, at least it’s better than just shooting people, is it not? There’s other alternatives which would be worse.

SH: Yet I wonder, with so many North Americans feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them – is it really possible that that so many people right now have these big psychological problems that prevent them from functioning, or is there something else going on?

MM: Well, I think there’s considerable difference between different countries. I mean, I think there’s more therapy per square inch in the States, isn’t there?

SH: I think so. Particularly in New York.

MM: Would it not be sensible to say that any country composed by immigration is importing an awful lot of problems? I mean, your parents came from Hungary, people come from all kinds of places. It’s a terrific operation to shift oneself, is it not? And then, because of that, there’s a great emphasis on the need for success. The fear of getting stuck in that great chaos at the bottom is terrible. So people are competing. I think in most other societies people grow up a more cohesive group.

SH: But psychotherapy seems to exacerbate the isolation to an extent, with this obsessive focus on the self.

MM: I’ve never been happy about one-to-one therapy, because it is so isolating. I have a friend who works in group therapy, and that’s obviously difficult, but it’s obviously a more healthy and nearer to the ordinary human model. Whereas the more separate we try to be, the more we each get left with our own problem, don’t we?

SH: Yes. You talk a lot about how there’s too much emphasis on individualism and not enough on working collectively, or being part of a collective, or being someone who can be useful to other people, and I think that to focus on one’s own issues and sickness, as opposed to whatever cultural issues and sicknesses there might be, kind of blinds one in some way.

MM: Yeah. Well, you know, when war is declared, suicide stops, so to speak. Depression goes down. When people feel more unified with their group, many of their difficulties are resolved. There’s something very demanding about the degree of independence which we’re supposed to have in modern society.

SH: You’ve written that we should consider ourselves liberated and not imprisoned by the fact that we have one personality or one character our entire lives, and I wonder how it’s liberating to be just one person, to have to deal with one –

MM: Well, this is interesting, I think the puzzling thing about human life is that, to start, one has an enormous range of possibilities, but by choosing anything actual you cut out an awful lot of the others. But I think being actual is rather important. If somebody were to say, Well I want to keep all options open, so although I like music very much, I’m not going to spend very much time on it because I want to do all these others things – well, you’ve still chosen. You’ve chosen to be a jack of all trades – and that’s a good choice, but you are notnow that very specialized musician. This isn’t a deprivation, really, not really, because you couldn’t be everything at once and be one person. I see that it may be a little odd to talk about it as a liberation, but I wish to deny that it’s a dreadful deprivation. You see, Einstein ended up rather bad at the violin. I don’t know what would have happened if he’d stuck to it, but I don’t think it’s a tragedy. The liberty todo the thing that you do do, actually and properly, seems to me to be the important one. Yes, this is something that interests me but does not horrify me. How do you feel about that?

SH: I don’t know. Well, I always feel like it’s sad that I can’t be other people –

MM: Yes! Ah!

SH: Like I would love to experience what it feels like to be another human being.

MM: Well indeed, that’s indeed very interesting, and I think yes, you’re right that one deplores the limits of one’s own experience, that’s right. But if you went round madly trying to have everyone’s experience –

SH: No, or even just one other person’s experience for ten minutes.

- - - -

SH: I understand that you didn’t start publishing until you were fifty.

MM: That’s right.

SH: And you wrote somewhere that it’s a good thing because before that age you wouldn’t have had anything to say.

MM: I wasn’t confident enough in what I might have said. I think it’s terribly hard that young academics are forced to publish all the time, whether they know what they want to say or not, and I think it often happens that people are rather slow to form opinions, but anyway it certainly did happen to me. I started writing some magazine articles in my fifties, and eventually did more of that and it went into books, but yes, I did not have the confidence and I think a lot of people don’t, and if you’re forced to commit yourself when you haven’t really got the confidence, you’re inclined to shout too loud. That’s probably what I would’ve done if I’d thought to do it earlier. You get yourself into a row that you don’t need.

SH: Would you say that the experience of raising three children helped your mind?

MM: Greatly, yes indeed, they’re very educative things, our children. And I really hadn’t had anything much to do with them before, but one thing which I became clear to me at that point was that they are not blank paper at birth. The behaviourist idea that everything’s conditioning was quite strong at that time, and I think that I rather assumed it, but when you have particularly not one child but two and it turns out quite different with the second one, you think, Gosh, where is all that coming from? Yes, I got a much more realistic idea about what human beings are and how they start. It is so surprising how much comes with the clay. It’s very cheering.

SH: I really liked your book, “Can We Make Moral Decisions?”

MM: Oh yes, you came across that. It doesn’t get sold very much.

SH: It’s very interesting, and I wanted to talk to you about that, because you said in the beginning of the book that you see a generational difference – you were talking about your students at Newcastle and how they have this additional problem, which is that they don’t feel comfortable judging.

MM: Yes, yes! Terribly conscientious about it. They were terribly ashamed. [big laugh]

SH: What do you make of that?

MM: Well, when they think of moral judgements, they’re thinking of judgments made by self-confident people of other people who they are not bothering to understand. They are not thinking, for instance, about when you’re judging what you’re going to do yourself. This is not an intrusion. And if a friend comes to you and says, “I really don’t know what to do about this,” and tells you the story, you aren’t going to say: “Well you mustn’t do that.” You’re going to say: “Well I do see the advantage, but I wonder about…” You’re going to help them in the making of it, and you’re going to have to make little moral judgments on the way.

[laughs] I mean, I don’t think it’s hard to sort this one out, but I suppose a point that one should discuss is it’s not actually an injury to be judged. If somebody forms an opinion about what you’ve done, they have a right to do that, so to speak, and it shouldn’t kill you.

SH: How is it not an injury to be judged?

MM: If you tell me what you’ve done, it’s not an injury that I form an opinion. Is it? We have to think, “Is that right or wrong?” Because if we don’t have any sort of range of examples, if we can’t form opinions about what anybody’s done ever because we’re being so jolly careful, we don’t get our standards, do we?

SH: True. I think this is a particularly contemporary, North American thing, like maybe one doesn’t even want to think about standards and values, because it's more comfortable to say, “Let them do what they want – I’ll do what I want.”

MM: There’s certain matters in which this is suitable, and there’s other matters in which this is not. If we’re getting into paedophilia and kidnapping people and killing them and so forth, you’ve got to have an opinion, don’t you? Haven’t we sorted out Mill “On Liberty” yet? It seems to me he did the job pretty well. If what people are doing doesn’t hurt anybody else, probably it’s no one’s business to interfere, but it’s not always easy to be quite sure that it doesn’t hurt anybody else. And he did regard morality as it were as a social mechanism for keeping things right – and that’s a pretty modest way of regarding it. It’s not that you think you’ve got access to supernatural or unnatural qualities to say something’s right or wrong – it’s a social remark. Of course, what tends to happen is that people, when they’re very young, have this really excessive fear of forming any opinions at all, and then after a while they feel that isn’t working, so they jump over to being rednecks and know everything. [laughs] It’s always so hard, isn’t it, to stop in the middle. Somebody said to me once, “Join my society for the dumping of pendulums.”

SH: For the dumping of pendulums?

MM: Dumping of pendulums – stopping them – yes. Yes.

SH: Hm. What about judging oneself? What criteria do you feel is important for a person to use in determining whether they’re good and acting well in the world?

MM: C.S. Lewis says somewhere that a man is not usually called upon to have any particular opinion of his own merits. That seems to me to be right. I mean, you need to make judgements about which way to go and which life to live and which person to be, but I don’t think they’re about giving yourself marks, are they? There is something that a Buddhist group that I went to used to say, and I thought it very sensible – that the Christian emphasis on sin was really rather mistaken in that it caused you to keep on thinking about yourself. Lewis is very strong on this I think. Have you read him?

SH: Yes, I’ve read him a lot – I find him veryinteresting.

MM: He’s very good. He said humility is not clever people trying to think they’re stupid.

SH: You ask in your book about making moral decisions, “Why aren’t we more aware of our conceptual needs?” You say that if somehow something is going wrong – if the system in our head by which we explain the world doesn’t match up with the world – or is too limited or too one-dimensional – or if the ideas conflict with each other – then it’s an important task for the individual to try and sort these things out. One should take it seriously.

MM: Yes, look at free will for instance. A lot of people are very confused and unhappy about that, aren’t they? A lot of scientifically minded people think we haven’t any, and then they go on as if they had it. I mean, this seems like a noxious statement. It’s what I mean by the term “philosophical plumbing.” That is what we must do. People go on with a bad smell for a long time and don’t take up the floorboards, and then they get upset if somebody mentions –

SH: That there’s a bad smell.

MM: Yes. You see, the theme of that book is, Why bother to do philosophy? But teaching it, one really does encounter many students who are suffering considerably because they’ve got beliefs that won’t mesh, and in those cases, simply saying, “Well how about defining this? And do you really mean that?” can do quite a lot of good. I wish that a bit more philosophy was taught simply for that purpose. You see, we started talking about therapy. Well I think often that’s what therapy is.

SH: I’m curious – I haven’t noticed in your writings whether or not you have a feeling for there being such a thing as a God in the world.

MM: Well, I’m rather puzzled about this, Sheila. I should explain that my father was a parson and I was brought up in an Anglican background. I always thought this stuff was all right, but I could never get any impression of God being there. I think it is very puzzling that some do and some don’t have this kind of experience, and I’m prepared to believe that the world is big enough for both. I mean, it seems to me if there is anything out there, it’s much too big for us to be able to think about it clearly. But I think this obviously is a terribly important human concept and human experience, and it is ludicrous to try to amputate it as if it was some kind of tumour. The visions of the imagination are a crucial and real part of human life, and what is operating there is real. What’s your situation about all this?

SH: I don’t know, I mean I don’t believe –

MM: You were brought up without it now.

SH: I was brought up to think that anybody who believed in God was an idiot –

MM: Yes, yes, that’s the way to start, I think.

SH: Really? So now I’m much more sympathetic to religious people, and I have a very strong feeling for, There’s so much that we don’t understand, There’s so much mystery – but I don’t know that I attribute that to a single creator.

MM: Well, I think not knowing and regarding it as a sacred mystery is entirely proper. I’m sorry to be unhelpful, but that’s what I always have to be at this point, yes.

Stealing Glances

2010-06-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

This essay was written for Spacing magazine, then later reprinted in the Utne Reader. I wrote it in 2005.

Sometimes I feel an urgent need to get out of Toronto, and this is one of those times. The strain does not come from difficult friendships or celebrity magazines or the noise, so much as my relationship to my fellow pedestrian. The crisis is almost always a crisis about strangers; it’s a crisis of eye contact. Someone approaches and the problem of whether to look away or look at them — and if to look, how long to keep looking for — does not resolve itself easily, quietly, in the background. It becomes a loud problem, and as people pass by, the anxiety of how to act and this question about responsibility to my fellow humans, paid out in a momentary acknowledgement of our mutual humanity, prohibits me from thinking about anything else.

In such a state it is difficult to accept that we really are free on the streets of Toronto; free to look or not look as we choose, without consequence and without affecting anyone for the better or worse. In times like these, it feels as though what it means to look at someone and what it means to decide to not look is as central an ethical dilemma as any; that the question of our responsibility to each other really comes down to how we interact with people we do not know. What degree of regard are the hundreds of strangers we pass in a single day worth?

That walking among others should present itself as a dilemma is pathetic. Perhaps it is because we are primarily a culture of drivers, not pedestrians. Even if we do not drive, still we share the streets with many who do, who do not occupy the sidewalks with pleasure but rather are wishing there was less space to travel between the restaurant and their parked car. “Urbanity and automobiles are antithetical in many ways,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust, a history of walking. “A city of drivers is only a dysfunctional suburb of people shuttling from private interior to private interior.” This is also true in a city of transit users — we rush to the streetcar stop, take a seat, look through whatever newspaper is lying closest. Walking is no longer, as Solnit points out, “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.” As a result, we are jarred by our encounters. Eye contact is an irritation. It disrupts the work of getting somewhere.

Most of us accept as inevitable the sort of eye contact that is most pervasive, that rushed and fearful glance. You might argue that this way of looking is respectful; that since privacy is so scarce in a city, it is gracious to look away. But I have experienced such gentle looks away — giving them, getting them — and they’re not what I am talking about and not the norm. There still remains that quick glance away, which often leaves me with a feeling of shame or a sense of the diminishment of my humanity. And as I sweep my eyes rapidly from someone’s face onto the mailbox, I recognize that, in my wake, I may leave that person with this same anxiety.

For some people, it seems clear, if someone looks quickly and uncomfortably away as soon as eye contact is made, no matter. This crisis doesn’t exist for them; the interaction barely registers. I wonder if such people are suffering from what George Simmel calls “the blasé attitude.” He defines it as the result of the over-stimulation of nerves that accompanies life in a metropolis, which results in a “blunting of discrimination, [so] that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other.” The lamppost, that boy, same difference.

But for those of us who are not suffering from the blasé attitude, who are very conscious of the reality of the people we encounter, why do we look away embarrassed or scared, rather than gently, politely, in good conscience? Perhaps in every glance there is desire expressed. I don’t mean sexual desire — though sometimes there’s that — as much as the sort Constant Nieuwenheuys described when he wrote, in 1949, “When we say desire in the twentieth century, we mean the unknown, for all we know of the realm of our desires is that it continuously reverts to one immeasurable desire for freedom.”

Perhaps the desire expressed in every glance, that we see in another person’s face and they see in ours, is a desire for freedom — which on the street comes down to the freedom to look at each other. We are naturally curious about other people. From the start, as babies, we are drawn to the eyes of our parents. Imagine a cat, neurotically trying not to look directly at a passing cat. We need eye-to-eye contact. We want to see each others’ faces. It is why we take and keep photographs, watch television, hang portraits in our homes. There is something terrible about looking at each other, only to have reflected back our own (and the other person’s) thwarted, repressed desire to look. Somewhere we have failed magnificently.

Our culture is such that a greater value even than freedom is productivity, utility. I was having a conversation with a friend about leisure, and she was saying how much she enjoys doing nothing, just wandering aimlessly around her house, thinking. “I find it so productive,” she decided. Even an activity we enjoy precisely because it is not about production we must ultimately justify by way of its productivity. This being the situation we find ourselves in, how can we ever justify to ourselves or to each other the value of those most fleeting relationships, lasting at most two seconds long, with a stream of people we will never see again? What is the utility of the quarter-of-a-second-long relationship?

When we look and look away, we reveal what we want — communion, citizenry — and what we lack — communion, citizenry. It is not unreasonable to think the health of a culture can be judged by how many seemingly inconsequential encounters and experiences are shared among its citizens. Take the option of making real eye contact with strangers — frank, fully conscious, unafraid, respectful, not obtrusive. This level of engagement would be satisfying, but so exhausting to sustain; possibly too relentless and demanding for a city-dweller, since to look at someone in this way is to acknowledge and recognize how they’re like you, how they are like everyone you know and love, and so to become responsible for them, just as you are responsible for those you love. But while your duty to your friend is directed only at your friend, as needed, your duty to a stranger can be paid only to the collective, constantly.

We need to learn how to look away well, but we cannot fake it. We cannot look from someone’s face comfortably until we find what we are looking for in it.

The Whitney Biennial

2010-06-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

My review of the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York (February 25 to May 30, 2010) ran in Border Crossings Magazine, Issue 114.

There’s a beautiful Kierkegaard parable where a man stands before the gods in heaven and is granted the privilege of making one wish. “What would you most like to have?” the gods ask him. “Youth? Power? A beautiful woman? A long life?” The man considers, then replies, “I want only one thing: to always have the laugh on my side.” The gods think for a moment, then laugh. The man smiles, gratified. His wish has come true.

This same question might be asked of the curator of the 75th “Whitney Biennial,” the anticipated showcase of work by contemporary American artists. “What one thing would you like this show to have? Political import? The energy of the new?” It’s a significant question for a curator, if one is going to elevate one’s selections from being just some pretty good but disconnected visual art. The show’s title doesn’t help us: the survey is simply called “2010.” 2010 can be anything! What does 53-year-old Italian, Francesco Bonami, want it to mean?

In an interview with former Biennial curator Lisa Phillips, Bonami identifies the show’s hoped-for essence as: “regeneration through art.” His decision to limit the size of the show—there are only 55 artists participating—now makes some sense: it’s hard to feel regenerated after being stuffed, a sensation Bonami may be cautious about. His curating of the 2003 Venice Biennial was reviewed by The New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman as the “largest, most sprawling and also by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless biennale that I can recall.”

The 75th Whitney is not sprawling, not sloppy. It’s refined and modest. If passion is still somewhat lacking, it’s from the absence of a sense of risk, as though the artists feared muddying the carpets. They mostly tread lightly, looking to pin down beauty and meaning within reach. Possibly it’s a reaction to the hubris that led to America’s recent financial crisis. Few here want to embody that destructive spirit. But destruction is part of regeneration—at least it is if we are speaking about the dramatic sort of regeneration that comes after an uplifting battle with an equally-vigorous opponent. This sort of regernation allows for a sort of spiritual rebirth.

But I think Bonami had a different regeneration in mind: regeneration in the sense of cyclical renewal. Every spring the buds come back. It’s predictable, natural.

Is it predictable that we would return to the realm of beautiful paintings—of beauty for its own sake? The show is filled with work in this vein, in the vein of humility—or some would say purity. There are the drawings of sculptor Charles Ray whose series of 47 x 31.5-inch flower drawings in ink on paper are among the refreshing and wonderful pieces in the show. R H Quaytman takes over a small room with a suite of canvases: small, white canvases with narrow rows of white sparkles glued on; op-art canvases with thin bands of red, green and grey paint. Maureen Gallace’s meditative, small-scale paintings of New England recall the Platonic world of Morandi. Tauba Auerbach’s large, trompe l’oeil paintings of thick fabric folded are at once exceptional and sort of gaudy. The small, dark, haunting canvases of Lesley Vance—abstracts mimicking still lives—are too assured to be precious or banal.

Without the inclusion of two incredibly powerful photographic series in this show, there would be no shadow here at all—no hint of the state we are regenerating from.

Nina Berman’s photographic series of a young American Marine sergeant, returned home and preparing to marry his fiancé, is like some forgotten fairy tale; the young man’s face, having under gone 50 reconstructive surgeries after its shattering by a suicide bomb, is a horrific mask—huge, bloated, earless, scarred, nostrils wide open. He stands in his uniform beside his crestfallen bride.

A reminder that when there is beauty in one place, there is suffering in another, comes from Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of Afghan women being mended in a hospital dedicated to burn victims: their bodies are bloodied, scarred and yellowing, but their full-body burns were self-inflicted; a hoped-for escape from abuse at the hands of husbands and family.

These two series are documentary. None of the artists who create out of the fictional realm come as close to imagining comparable horrors. Why not? The lack of deep moral imagination is Bonami’s, I think, and is most apparent in his selection of video works, which almost unilaterally celebrate the exertions of the untried, youthful body. This makes the beauty and lightness that’s on display feel more like an aesthetic proposition than a cyclical return, or something thirsted-for.

In the end, one does not feel regenerated, and it’s unlikely the gods burst out laughing even once. Laugher is an explosion of relief—which only comes we have escaped from some darkness. But if the darkness isn’t shown – and it isn’t, here – the lightness is less light.

The Miracle Worker

2010-06-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

This review of the 2010 Broadway production of The Miracle Worker at Circle in the Square was published in The Globe and Mail on March 4, 2010.

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Halfway through the first act of The Miracle Worker, the much-anticipated revival of the Helen Keller story on Broadway, a hush falls over the theatre – punctuated only by the sounds of a crashing plate, the thump of arms on a table and the rustling of dresses against each other.

Twenty-year-old Annie Sullivan (played by Canadian Alison Pill) is struggling in the dining room, alone with Helen (Abigail Breslin) – famously struck blind and deaf as an infant, a child who won’t understand, won’t behave. Annie tries to make Helen sit at the table and eat from her own plate. Biscuits fly. Annie is thrown to the floor.

It’s a mesmerizing and profound piece of stage choreography, and one of the most transcendent moments I’ve seen in a theatre in years. We’re viscerally engaged in the “miracle” of the play – that humans can surpass their limitations when engaged in a battle whose essence is love.

In this case, the battle is between teacher and student, equally matched in strength. Although the play does not move beyond Helen’s sixth year, the audience knows the outcome: a great friendship, which lasts until Annie’s death 40 years later.

The Miracle Worker is a tale well-lodged in our cultural mythology. Based on Helen Keller’s 1903 biography, the story has become something of a template for narratives of personal triumph. Even those who haven’t seen the play or the film adaptation could probably recognize Annie teaching Helen words by tracing letters on her hand. All of which makes the first Broadway revival of the play since 1959 weighted with expectation. The cast have classic performances to reimagine: As Annie, Anne Bancroft won a Tony as well as an Oscar; Patty Duke also received an Oscar in her role as Helen.

This time around, Alison Pill plays Annie. The 24-year-old, originally from Toronto, won raves for her work in Milk and In Treatment and was nominated for a Tony for The Lieutenant of Innishmore. As Annie, she is a compelling presence. Her timing is exact, her movements without frill: so precise is her delivery, it’s as though a drummer inside her is keeping the beat. A fierce consistency of will is the driving heart of a character who must succeed in breaking through to Helen; the stakes are believably high.

The brilliant 13-year-old Breslin (nominated for an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine) plays Helen as a gifted, strong-willed child, who is riddled with bewilderment and frustration. To watch her body sag and straighten, her face light up in self-enclosed raptures, is to witness the physical capacity of a classically trained dancer set loose and backward.

The story here focuses on a conventional Southern household – save for the presence of a locked-in Helen, who has come to dominate. She throws tantrums, suddenly administering a swift kick to the shins, then joyfully cradles her doll, eyes rolled ecstatically to the ceiling. She is, in the words of Annie, “a pet,” indulged by the adults.

The play is staged in the round, and the set, by Derek McLane, is ingeniously constructed: a dining room table surrounded by chairs, a bed, a desk, and six other heavy stage pieces are lowered from the ceiling from scene to scene; doorways rise up from the floor. The cords which attach to the furniture call to mind a puppet show, which, in a sense, every faithful revival is, the hands of the original production somewhere on the strings.

The costumes and the accents are calibrated to Alabama, late-19th-century, except for Annie, who leaves the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston to teach Helen to communicate.

At every turn, Annie is frustrated by the acquiescing love of Helen’s parents, which leads us to the main, moral conviction of the playwright: Pity is not love. Annie fights with Captain Keller (Matthew Modine), who resents this strong-willed female intruder. Neither he nor his wife, Kate (Jennifer Morrison), can understand what they are doing wrong, or why Annie must be so brutal with Helen.

Unfortunately, neither parent manifests enough intelligence or wit to compete with Annie, and the scenes lack tension: Modine should be a more convincingly dominating figure, while Morrison’s supposedly corrosive love, which should be equal in strength to Annie’s unsentimental love, is only tender and warm.

The second act promises to return us to the more vital struggle between Helen and Annie. They move into a small house on the Keller property where Annie can teach in private. But the intensity and intimacy of the dinner-table scene is never regained. Their battle becomes more verbal than physical, Annie repeatedly insisting, “Things have names!”

Why not cut some of the dialogue and rid the play of the irrelevant subplot between the Captain and his son (which is the stuff of conventional theatre) and emphasize movement even more? It seems a wasted opportunity when you’re staging a play in the round – like a sporting event – and when you have such talented physical actors to work with. One thing theatre has in its favour is bodies in a room before us; we crave seeing these bodies pushed to their limits.

In the end, Annie does finally get through to Helen. It’s the end we’ve all been waiting for: Pity is shown up, we are genuinely moved, and the play ends abruptly on that note.

We leave convinced that a brutal, physical love is necessary for anything great to be born.

Portraits of the Insane

2010-06-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

This interview was conducted in the spring of 1999, in Toronto, on the campus of the University of Toronto. Bob (not his real name) was eighteen, perhaps nineteen years old. This is the complete transcript. It was part of a project I was doing, while in university, just for myself, called Portraits of the Insane. Bob was one of half a dozen people I ended up interviewing. I asked everyone the same questions, and the questions were prepared in advance of my conducting any of the interviews. I felt very embarrassed, asking some of the questions, but I made myself. An article about the feelings and thoughts leading up to this project was published in the New York Times Magazine.

What is your basic romantic illusion about your life?

Um. I haven't really had much experience in romance. Well any sort of real relationship. It's basically “all love is unrequited” pretty much sums up what I've seen in my life. Girls that I have liked – I have a few cases where I've thought I could really do something, go on in a relationship with them. Nothing ever happens. Either they've had a boyfriend or they weren't actually interested. It was really depressing basically.

What lies do you tell yourself to keep you happy?

Well I try and convince myself that I can get along well with people. I'm not sure if it's true or not. I've been lying to myself long enough that these may be truths, these may not be truths. I remember things about my childhood that I'm not sure if they actually happened, because I may have just made them up to make myself feel better, and when I had a paper route I always made up these little anecdotes for my customers who gave me extra tips. I'm not sure if that's my actual childhood or these are just things I made up. I can't tell anymore.

Is there one specific lie that keeps you going?

Well I haven't been telling myself any major lie to keep myself going. I can more or less face the world with the truth but it's more or less a personal philosophy of life that keeps me going. I see a lot of balance in life and everything will balance off in one way or another. So if I have bad luck in one area it will be good luck somewhere else. If I have bad luck in one time maybe later on in life something will be better. So.

Have you ever stolen anything?

No, actually I haven't. I've taken a few things around the house like my parent's pop and stuff like this – the diet cola that my brother and I aren't supposed to drink, but that's pretty much it.

What do you consider yours in the world?

Well I consider what's mine is everything in my room like my computer and my television and VCR electronics stuff like that. And my own personal creations like any stories that I've written I consider mine, anything I've done like my web page I consider to be mine. It is me and I'm very proud of the stuff that I've done.

How great do you think you are?

Um. I don't really think I'm that great. I think I'm just another one of the masses, but I would like to be great. I aspire to be one of the great ones and to be a great writer or something, but I'm not sure if it will happen and I feel that if I prop myself up too much and expect myself to be great it won't happen and it will just be more of a downfall.

In the spectrum of humanity where do you place yourself?

Well I always consider myself to be a little bit, um, left of centre of basic humanity because I've always liked things that aren't like the number one popular thing. Like I'm left-handed and I've considered that makes me a little bit of an outcast. And I'm red-headed, another thing that makes me feel that I'm different from a lot of people. I see myself as somewhat of an outsider in a lot of cases, yet I can still be part of a group. I can hang out with a group and then if I'm not really quite into that group I can go in and join in with another group for a temporary amount of time.

What you makes you superior to other people and what makes you inferior?

Um superior. Well I... I try to think that I'm a lot more rational than some people can be. I think things out and I try to take everyone's opinion into consideration. When I voice my own opinion, I try and see things from every angle, whereas I see a lot of people who just take things from their point of view and that's that. As far as inferior, well sometimes I don't stand up for myself when I should because I'm too concerned with the other people and I should be more concerned about myself sometimes than I actually am.

What are you concerned about?

Well, when I'm on like a mailing list when I'm talking with someone I don't want to say anything that would offend them even if they are offending me. I may say "Please don't offend me." I don't really want to go and intrude on them or offend anyone else.

How come?

Well I've always been a person who who liked knowing a lot of people and having a lot of different friends. Like when I was a kid I didn't have that many friends. I was very much of an introvert. And then about grade nine or ten I started becoming more extroverted getting to know other people and I found out that if you offend people they may shun you away and they may not talk to you. So I just try and stay in everyone's good graces.

Do you think you're becoming more or less great?

I like to think that I'm becoming more great, because I am becoming more extroverted. And introverted, anti-social is... I really don't like that that part of me. Because when I was a child I realise I didn't really do much. I didn't enjoy as much as kids do. I never really rode a bike, I didn't go skating and stuff. But now I am enjoying things. I talk to people in the Student Council and stuff. I'm actually a part of something greater than myself and therefore I feel that I'm greater.

And the greater thing than yourself is?

Well it's various aspects like the Student Council or newspapers or even the university as a whole, doing something that's a lot more people, not just something that's my own personal work. It's the work of many others involved as well. The reputation of University of Toronto, I feel I'm becoming a part of that, and it's a great reputation so in a way I'm becoming greater.

How would you characterise your mind and the way that you think?

Well I guess an analogy would be a computer that looks at every single possibility and tries to narrow down what the best solution is. And I try to think what the smartest move would be. I always calculate what I'm doing a lot of times and I make sure that I step where I want to step and not just go aimlessly and make mistakes.

How does your mind communicate with itself?

Well I usually just run through different scenarios on what can happen if I do something and I basically imagine what the future could be from all sorts of different angles. And then I see which the best angle is.

How do you visualise your soul?

My soul? Well. I see me and my soul as part of the exact same thing. My soul is just something that will carry on past this life, past this planet. Because I can only be here for at most another hundred years and I'd really like to be here for another hundred years but somehow I doubt I'll be here that long. My soul is something that will carry on longer. I don't know how exactly. I haven’t really come to a conclusion about that but I know my soul will be older than I and will live longer than me.

What is the main difference between you and your soul?

Well I just see my soul as having nothing to with my physical body has nothing to do with really with my mind that much. It's mostly my heart and how I feel about things is what will be carrying on to the next life.

If you had to visualise it as a concrete thing what would it be like?

Um, I guess it would sort of be the black box they have in airplanes. Something that they find to figure out what the life was all about. It will be the black box of my life. You'll see my soul and you'll understand what my life was all about and what happened to me. Things along those lines.

Do you think you know what you look like?

Um, sometimes I do sometimes I don't. It all depends on how I actually feel about myself, so I see myself in different lights. I see myself as strong some days, weak on other days, good-looking one day and ugly the next, so I don't think that I have any idea what I look like because my opinions keep changing from day to day.

Do you recognise yourself when you look in the mirror?

Um, some days yeah. I look in the eyes and that's how I recognise myself. Other than that I'm not really sure it's me.

What about when you catch yourself in a store window?

In a store window? That's when I think it's someone else. It doesn't look like what I think I look like. I can't define what I think I look like but it's not what I see in a store window.

What do you see in a store window?

It's just another person walking by, another stranger, someone who's just another one of the crowd. It just doesn't seem to be me in some indefinable way.

Do you fear you are shallow?

Um in some respects yeah I think I am shallow. Because I've gone for various elections in my life and I've lost both of them and have been bitter about it. And I've tried to come up with excuses why, and it's that the people are wrong, the people are idiots, the voting masses can't make the right decision. When I should be looking at myself and I'm probably the reason why something is going wrong. I'm either doing too little or too much and I'm scaring people away and I don't really know what but it's probably something wrong with me. I should take responsibility for my actions.

In any other context do you fear your shallow?

Not really. I try to be a nice person and I don't really see being a nice person as being shallow. I've noticed sometimes when I'm taking public transportation like the TTC and people push me or something. I feel I'm being sort of shallow at least for the momentary glare at them or when I'm tempted to make a comment. I tend to avoid doing that stuff so for the most part I don't act very shallow, I think, no.

How do you express your rage?

That may be sort of my problem. I don't express my rage very often. When I usually do it involves hitting some sort of inanimate object. I've broken many video game systems because I was angry either at the video game or something else that happened. I've thrown shoes down the stairs because I was in a bad mood. It's physical actions against something inanimate that can't hit me back.

Do you think the world is ending?

Well I don't really think that the world is ending. Humanity maybe. I think the world itself will go on. It's just a matter of humanity is eventually going to end up destroying itself because of the various habits it developed particularly over the last hundred years, but nature will set its course right and nature will continue with or without us.

What other signs do you see?

Well I see various strange things. It's partly to do with all these things these ways of the next millennium, economic collapse, there's going to be computer problems in the year 2000. All these major cataclysmic problems that are going to be occurring soon. They all seem to be happening in the same time and that kind of stuff can lead to massive destruction and could put the end to humanity.

What do you think is going to be the effect of the year 2000?

Well I think it's going to be pretty significant but not as significant as people think it will be. Everyone looks forward to the year 2000, all these different changes are going to happen, this millennium bug and stuff, and I think a lot of it may end up just being hype because you're talking about being more scientific about all the weird things that are supposed to happen in the year 2000. Technically the year two thousand was probably two years ago cause basically the chronologists screwed up on the date of Jesus' birth, so they are probably four years off which means we are probably already in the new millennium. So the year two thousand is a nice number. It looks really neat to see all those zeroes in a line but other than that I don't think it really has...

Do you see yourself as inherently different from people or essentially the same?

In a lot of things I see myself as different cause I look at things differently. I'm not sure if this is partly because I'm left-handed but I've noticed that I seem to see the world differently. Even people I've known for years, friends from grade school, I still see things differently from them because I see myself in a minority group being lefty or red-headed or whatever. I see myself as some sort of minority group which gives me a different take on the world. It's not really a minority group in the sense like blacks or females where there actually has been obvious oppression but even in the case of lefties weird things that I see, little tiny details, that I don't think other people actually notice.

What do you risk that makes you courageous?

I don't think I am courageous cause I don't think I risk very much. I basically go very carefully through life. I mean, I calculate what kind of risk is going to be involved in something and if I can avoid a risk I generally will. I'll try and do something the safe-cautious route. Aside from gambling, buying lottery tickets, that's as much risk as I've taken in life.

What traits do you want that you see other people having?

Well I see people who can just walk around and be in total control of their situations. Even though sometimes I may look like I'm in total control I tend to do things to put things out of my control. Like I don't do essays when I should, I don't have a punctual nature. I don't get homework done right away, I always leave it to the last minute. But if I could I'd like to be able to set myself straight and do it right from the beginning, rather than waiting until it's too late.

Presuming you're a lunatic what would you say is the nature of your madness?

Well my nature of madness would probably be that, um, I'm a strange mix of romantic and realist. Because I would like these various ideals yet I think that they're implausible and they won't happen. It's difficult to describe but I see a girl who I would like to get a relationship going with, but a part of me says, "Yeah right it's not going to happen." And it never does happen merely because – I'm not sure if it's because I don't put the effort in or if it's because I decide that I shouldn't try it at all. Or even if I do put the effort in sometimes it doesn't work out that way. But I live by these romantic ideals yet I don't act by them.

What enrages you that seems to enrage no one else?

Well I'm enraged a lot by rudeness. I don't like it when people are rude to me or rude to someone else. I see a lot of people particularly on public transit, when you push someone, nobody else seems to care. I don't really appreciate getting pushed and I'm sure the person getting pushed doesn't appreciate it, and it enrages me when I see that kind of stuff happen. I'm also enraged when people are angry that their little world has been intruded on even though they're taking up more space than they should. Someone taking up two seats because they're sitting down and their coat’s on the other seat, you sit down and they move the coat and glare at you. Cause they were taking two seats and you needed somewhere to sit they should be polite enough to give another person the seat.

How in any way are you being oppressed?

Well it goes back to the lefty thing again. A little obsession of mine is being left-handed cause I notice all these different things that work against lefties. I've had the lefty calendar for a couple of years and I've noticed all the little things, and it brings to light to mind things like the word sinister always mentioning as meaning evil or wicked, but it means left-handed. I'm left-handed and I consider that as a personal affront. Also things like there'll be right on and right away whereas left is like left over left out. It's things that have come to light in my own mind, little oppressions that I have to deal with as a lefty. For grade school what screwed me up from a couple of years is the teacher said, "The right hand is the one you write with." So I thought my left hand was my right hand because it is the one I was writing with. They try to a teach a lesson to everyone but they're ignoring that ten percent and that ten percent isn't really oppressed but it runs into a lot of various problems because of that.

When did being left-handed become an issue for you?

Well it's probably, I found it weird when I was a kid being left-handed, I'd run into other lefties and I always thought it was kinda neat. But it was a couple of years ago I saw a left-handed calendar, I thought, “That's a pretty neat idea I'll take a look at it.” And I was taking a look at it and every day I learned something new about who was left-handed or various things that happened to left-handed people, and that's when I really started noticing things. And I took a different look at my world and I noticed things that I hadn't seen before. Like my grandfather always shook when he was writing something. I didn't really figure out why until I heard out that back when he was a child at that time they would smack his left hand with a ruler if you tried writing with his left hand. So even though he was writing with his right hand he was still in his mind subconsciously afraid of his hand getting smacked with a ruler. So it's because of the knowledge of things that have happened to other lefties that I noticed what was going on and it did become an issue for me because I found out all this stuff about it.

Do you see it as a pivotal event and all that?

Um I don't really see any sort of pivotal event, it was just going through reading about all these various different people who were left-handed, Charlemagne, massive numbers of American presidents. It's just a collaboration of the calendar which really did it to me. It's also because of a fencing course I took a couple of years ago, and it was really frustrating in that fencing class because although the teacher made sure to point out that when he said left I was supposed to take it as right when he said right I was supposed to take it as left, the fact that he was speaking to everyone else and I had to translate for myself was also very frustrating. So I think that's when it started becoming an issue – when as more of an adolescent slash adult I noticed that the oppression and exclusion was still there. That's when it became an issue for me I think.

What do you think would be the worst form of madness to inhabit?

Um I think the worst form of madness to inhabit would be to be anti-social, because I remember when I was just a little child I had just a few friends, and when you look back there's not really much in the way of memories to have when you only have a few friends. If you're mad in a more eccentric way where you have lots of friends, you talk to lots of people, and you become a more known figure, I'd rather be the crazy guy on the bus who goes to all the sports games then the crazy old lady who doesn't let anybody near her house and doesn't give out candy for trick-or-treat.

When did you become so strange?

Well I think I started becoming strange in grade nine when I first met other people who were into writing and science fiction role-playing and stuff like that, and I started getting more into that group, and in grade eleven I was nearly a goth because I started wearing the black trenchcoat and I had the black T-shirt with skulls on it, but I don't really think I'm that strange because I saw what was going on and I was becoming part of this strange group and I backed away from it and became one of the masses again to avoid being part of that group. I wouldn't say I'm that strange. Sometimes I have different ideas but not too often.

How solid is your personality?

Well I'd say right now my personality is pretty solid. When I have an opinion I'll stick with my opinion of that. I will argue for the opinion how I feel it and I will contest anybody who tells me otherwise. I've become more and more stubborn about my opinions and I don't even know really how to word this. My opinions are my opinions and they won't change unless someone proves to me otherwise. They can have a significant amount of evidence but if it's not total factual proof that categorically denies and disproves what I believe I'll probably still end up believing my way.

When did your ideas start to solidify?

My ideas started to solidify probably a couple of years ago, but they solidified in one area and they've slowly moved over to another. When I was in grade twelve I started to agree a lot more with a lot of socialist ideas and the ideas of a communist state of probably working better than capitalism, cause I've seen too many homeless people and had various financial problems in my own family's life that I really didn't like the idea of capitalism, and that everyone shares is really a much better idea. But then I became more realistic about people themselves and the problem behind capitalism and socialism is that man exploits man in either one. So it's not a problem with communism or capitalism, it's humanity, and it's a matter of developing my ideas, seeing the various faults in my own argument as I became more settled in how I feel.

When are you most yourself?

I'd say I'm most myself when I'm at home watching TV or on the computer, particularly when I'm with friends, emailing friends, or talking with friends on ICQ. That's when I feel that I'm more myself because I'm expressing the opinions how I feel and I'm not bottled up with any sort of pressure. I can just relax and have fun.

What are the qualities of a friendship you had with someone that you met in person, versus someone you've met online?

Well actually I haven't really met that many people online, it's more friends who I have met in person who are now online and it's a lot easier to communicate that way, cause instead of having conference calls we can set up a little chat room and just talk that way. I have met other people online but I haven't really gotten that much detail into knowing them. Its more them sending files to my web page or people who are also into the same stuff I am like Babylon V, but really that's it. For the most part my friends are people who I know in person. I'm not comfortable with just meeting someone on the internet and developing a good friendship like that yet.

Do you communicate differently with your friends in a chat room?

It's a little different because when you're in some sort of chat room you don't want to send a big long message, you just send short curt responses rather than a lengthy explanation. In some sort of conference call or when you're talking among friends you can explore the idea, you can keep talking and they can wait until you're finished, whereas in a chat room you know that your idea is going to be cut off in a couple of seconds when someone else starts typing and the topic will change before you know it. So that's the main difference between talking in a chat room and talking in real life, cause in real life the other people will know what's going on and they can wait for you to finish.

Delineate the progress your insanity took.

Well my insanity probably started in grade nine. I didn't think I would know that many people cause I had only been going to one of the funnel middle programs in one year cause I had managed to get into a gifted program from grades four till seven, and then when I was in grade eight I started re-meeting all these people from before that, and when I got to high school all sorts of people seemed to know me partly from the neighbourhood I was from and other people from the gifted program who had also gone to the same high school as me and they ended up talking to all these different people saying, "Oh that's Bob, don't you know him?" Next thing I know people I didn’t even know saying hi to me in the hallways. I think that was the start of my insanity. I just found it really strange all these people knew me. And through that and people already knowing me, I was able to break out of my shell a lot more and talk to people more and from there. I just kept getting to know some people better, getting more involved with things, various writing groups and things like that. I saw a chance to start being myself and I saw people who were along similar lines as me and I think that's how my insanities developed.

When did you first realise you were insane?

Well I probably first realised it three or four years ago when I started noticing how I changed and I looked back at how I was as a child and how different I had become. Instead of being the lonely child with two friends I had friends everywhere I went on a high school trip to New York. I knew maybe two of the people who were there and I didn't know them that well but by the end of the trip I knew everybody even though it was a four day trip. I knew everyone who was from my school and I considered myself friends with all of them. That's when I noticed a really significant change. I said, Okay I am starting to go a little crazy here. I can actually communicate with people I don't even know that well, so I would never even thought of doing this when I was little.

So is there insanity in communication?

Well there's insanity in a certain amount of communication. I've talked to people I've met on the bus sometimes, and in that way communication can be insane because you're just meeting someone, you have no idea who this is, you're just striking up a conversation with them for the sake of striking up a conversation, and I think that's a little insane cause you don't really know if this person is a maniac some homicidal killer or something or just somebody who's just there. You don't know who it is. I think that's a little crazy sometimes.

How soon after you realised you were insane did people start picking up on it?

Well I think for the most part my insanity is my own little secret. Most people don't notice how open I am to discussion because a lot of times I've I'll be on the GO train or something and I'll start up a conversation or something and if the other person doesn't respond, okay fine, I'll not bother carrying on because I don't want to make them feel awkward. The people I do end up talking with, they probably think there's nothing strange about it, so really most other people haven't caught onto me being a little bit crazy I guess.

Do other people's insanity or normalcy jeopardise your stasis more?

I'd say other people's insanity because part of insanity is individualism. I am my own person and I am a very individual person. There really isn't anybody who is totally like me. If someone else is crazy in the exact same way as me and becomes me, then that's a threat to my insanity because I'm no longer an individual and I'm part of someone else, possibly part of a group, and that's more of a threat than normal people

Do you feel alone in the world?

A lot of times I do because I can be a part of something yet not fully be a part of it. I was involved in Junior Achievements actually, all five years of high school, and I noticed particularly towards the end of my Junior Achievement years that I knew these people but they didn't know me. I wasn't really a part of their group. They'd be talking about going out and getting something to eat or getting together for a little party and I noticed that I wasn't invited. They'd be making jokes or inside jokes that I didn't get so I noticed that I wasn't really a part of that group. This happened also on that New York trip. Where I'd be walking along with someone, we'd be going down Rockefeller Center, and they'd want to go in somewhere that I didn't really want to go in so I'd split up with them and go join someone else. So I've been alone a lot because I'll be a part of a group as long as it's going the exact same way I am. As soon as a group goes a different direction, I'll go in a different direction.

What is your chief obsession?

My chief obsession? I'd have to say my chief obsession is trying to get myself to do some actual fictional writing. I've tried numerous ways to actually get myself to actually put the pen to paper and it's an obsession because I've had trouble doing it and it's really difficult for me to make myself commit to doing it. I've written stories sitting down in hallways. I've written stories because my muse spoke to me while I was typing at my computer, in fact I've even started writing stories when I'm on the GO train just because when the ideas hit I try to put them down on paper, and that's my obsession, all these ideas that I need to start putting down on paper, and the only way to do it is really obsess about it and keep reminding myself about it.

What is the basic fallacy you have about the way other people operate?

Well it's probably the fact that I see people who are totally calm and relaxed and can handle anything and they're probably not, because a lot of times I can look like I'm calm and relaxed and in control of everything and I have no idea what's going on, and they may be going through the exact same things as me. They may not know what's going on but they don't want to act like it. But that's my problem sometimes. I see people who look like they're in control and I think that they're in control where in fact they may not be.

What lies do you tell yourself about yourself over and over?

I tell myself that things will get better for me, my life will improve, I will find ways to get around all my problems, I will teach myself to write when I need to write, I'll teach myself to do my homework when I need to do it, and I'll teach myself how to get into a good relationship without totally screwing it up by acting like an idiot.

Acting like an idiot in what way?

Well stuff like I'll be talking with someone who I'd want to get into a relationship with and I keep hanging around with that girl because I'm hoping that way maybe I can actually bring up the nerve to ask her out, and in most cases she just begins to think I'm a little weird cause I keep hanging around for no apparent reason.

What's your idealisation of a relationship?

Well I'm not really sure what my idealised relationship is because I can see it going so many different ways. Most important thing to me I think is someone who will actually understand my writing as something, so who cares about my writing and is able to help me along in that avenue.

Do you think anyone really understands you?

Um, to a certain extent I think some people understand me but they don't really totally understand me, because I haven't let anybody get close to totally understand me. They may understand one aspect of my personality but they can't really get the whole picture because they don't really know me well enough.

If you put together all the ways in which people know you would that knowledge be the knowledge of you or not?

Well I think that the sum of all of the different parts of my personality is actually a lot more than my actual personality. Because a lot of times I just put on a mask and act differently than I would normally to try and fit in with a group. I may follow ideals that I don't particularly agree with; in most cases that's the way I get in with the group. Like Junior Achievement was a perfect example of that. A lot of capitalist ideas – we'd go out, spend the money, and get people to buy the product, things like that. And I don't really agree with some of the ideas of capitalism in the way they work out. Like the free enterprise system. If people put that aspect of my personality in with the rest of me they'd be wrong because it's not really a part of me.

Are you disgusting?

No I don't think I'm disgusting. I'm just – I consider myself a – I'm rather normal when it comes down to those kinds of habits. I don't know how to express this. I don't, no no, I don't consider myself disgusting. It's something I don't even really know about. I can't even really see myself from that angle, that could be it.

What would be the judgement you would fear from someone who could see all your thoughts?

Someone who could see all my thoughts, the main judgement I'd be worried about was that I think too much and I try to find out everything that's going to happen regardless of whether or not I can control it. I'll try and plan out what's going to happen in a lecture when it's really not my issue to determine what's going to happen cause it's all up to the professor. That's what I'd be worried – people thinking that I'm trying to plan everything and be in control when I know I can't be.

What's at the root of your contradiction?

The root of my contradiction is I want and need to be in control and I am afraid to be in control cause I don't want to make any mistakes and cause any problems and I don't want to be held responsible a lot of times. I want to be in charge but I don't want to be in charge. It all depends on a particular day whether I want to be responsible for someone else's actions or not.

How much more mad are you than you let on?

I'm usually a lot angrier than I let on. Sometimes I am pretty calm and relaxed but when I do get mad I don't tend to let on because I do more or less end up taking it out on an inanimate object. So I may get really mad at my brother when he shuts the door to my room when he isn't supposed to, and he figures it's just cause he shut the door. It may also be because he stole a chocolate bar I put aside for myself, he ate my bag of chips, or he's otherwise intruded upon my life, and I'm not really expressing that cause I'm just letting it pass for the moment and it all builds up.

What do you try not to think about more than anything else?

I try not to think about what I'm going to be doing as far as actually putting my time on a schedule. I generally think I'll start this whenever and if I get it finished great but I will let other things throw me off. If I want to start an essay and I find out there's something on TV, well I may end up watching TV while I write my essay, I may not. More than likely I'll end up watching what I want to watch on TV.

When did you first realise that you were a bad person?

I don't really think that I am essentially a bad person. People may view me that way because a lot of times when I do get opinionated about something and there is a discussion going on I generally won't relent in the argument because I want to make sure that the other person knows full well what I'm trying, to say and that may put me off as a bad person because I'm constantly trying to put my opinion on someone else, and I'm just trying to reaffirm to myself what I feel about the issue.

Why do you think I picked you to interview?

I think it's just random. You saw someone who was just standing there, perhaps I mentioned something, I'm not even sure what I mentioned, and you thought, “hmm, that person might be interesting to talk to.”

Do you realise when you're lying anymore?

It depends on the lie. If it's a new lie, yes I do recognise when I'm lying. But if it's something I've been telling myself over and over again or telling other people over and over again, I may not recognise it anymore.

Do you actually believe your own lies?

Some of them. The ones I've told myself about things that I've done which may actually be from a sitcom or something... I have lied to myself in those cases and a lot of times I believe it.

When did you first discover lying?

Well that probably was when I started getting a paper route, because I noticed when I told people these little stories about my life, that they were very interested and I might get a slightly bigger tip about it, and I thought, “Okay this is a pretty good deal.” It was a shorter matter of time before I used up all my actual stories so I started making things up. And when I made things up it seemed to work just as well if not better because the stories had a better ring to them because for the most part they fit into the twenty-eight minutes and forty-eight seconds of a sitcom and they have the nice little wrap-up you have in sitcoms stories rather than real life which can be rather open-ended.

What is the main reason you're not completely honest with people?

Well I think now I am completely honest but at the time I wasn't completely honest with people cause I thought my life was rather boring and there wasn't much going on in my life, but I wanted to seem more interesting and I wanted to seem like I actually had more of a life than I did, so I made up the stories for my paper route.

Why are you lying to me now?

I'm not sure if I am lying to you right now. There may be lies somewhere in there but for the most part they're true.

How do you want people to think of you?

Well I want people to think of me as just me. When people think of me they don't really think of me being connected with anybody else anything else, and I may be part of that but first and foremost I want people to think of me rather than what I stand for or what I've been a part of. Like if they think of frosh week or something, they don't think of the people I hung out with they think of me and then the people I hung out with. It's a little selfish, I guess, but I'd prefer people to actually think of me first and recognise me as an individual, rather than see me as part of a group.

What is keeping you from being the full expression of yourself?

I'm afraid of making an ass out of myself and doing the wrong thing somewhere down the line, so for the most part I hold back and I don't really express everything cause I'm afraid maybe one day something will go wrong and I won't be able to take it back.

Is there anybody holding you back from being the full expression of yourself?

The only person holding me back from being the full expression of myself is me because I'm afraid of what will happen. Certainly nobody else is holding me back.

Who do you most resent?

The people I most resent are the typical sports jocks who just walk though everything in life, have great athletic ability, and do things so easily, like shoot a hockey puck and get it into the net every single time, or shoot a basket and make it every time, things that I can't really do. I'm not that adept at sports and I resent people who are good at sports mainly because a lot of them also have the cocky attitude to go with it.

Who do you most resent for normalising your personality?

Well I'd say as far as normalising my personality I'd have to probably resent myself for doing it cause I want to fit in with the group and I don't want to be a total outcast and I want to be able to communicate with people, so if there's anybody to resent or blame for it it's me.

How can you even be sure of who you are?

Well who are you is a present tense thing, it's exactly who are at that particular moment, it's not who you were, it's not who you will be, so the easiest way to be sure of who you are is to look at yourself from the moment and that way you'll know exactly who you are.

Why should someone like you?

Well they should like me because for the most part because I'm a nice guy. Nice guys tend to finish last and what also fits in with being a nice guy is being last a lot in things. Not say academic things as much as sports and relationships. I've always been at the bottom of the heap and that's where nice guys tend to end up.

Are you afraid of being found out as a fraud?

No, I may have a few little lies that I tell and I don't really fear having to acknowledge those because all they'd take is a little apology and then the problem's solved. A fraud I think is someone who totally fabricates what's going on totally makes up what their life is about. I may have done that a little bit, but for one, that was when I was younger, and for two, there was an ulterior motive of trying to get better tips out of it.

In what way are you most a fraud?

Probably just the little lies that I tell to make my life seem more interesting.

In what one recurring action do you most betray yourself?

Um, I probably most betray myself in recurring actions of glaring at people who just cause me trouble because they are being selfish or greedy or just plain old rude. And I always betray my personality when it comes to that because I will glare at them when someone pushes me, or when someone takes the seat I'm just about to sit down in. I do glare at them and I do let them know what they’ve done, and even on people who aren't necessarily being rude but are just causing problems that they shouldn't necessarily be doing, like people on the escalators who don't walk down the escalator like everybody else, and I stand there and may stomp my feet a few times just to let them know that I'd like to walk down there, so I think I betray myself a lot when I show how I feel about what other people are doing, either little actions or just glaring at someone or even the odd smart comment.

How do you live with yourself?

I just live with myself realising that tomorrow is another day and there all sorts of possibilities, things that can change, so many other avenues out there for whatever I want to do. If I want to play sports I probably could find a team of basketball players who are worse than me, I probably could find a team of hockey players who are worse than me. I'm not the lowest on the totem pole when I really look at it, because it's a big world out there, and it's a big university, just plain old big.

What was the pivotal event in the development of your insanity?

My insanity's pivotal event was... it's difficult to pin down when exactly it happened cause there's different ways I could look at it but I'd definitely have to say it started when I took a public speaking course and I really started becoming more of an extrovert, cause I was able to stand in front of people and talk about sometimes very impersonal things. I could tell sarcastic jokes to a roomful of people. That's when I started becoming a lot more extroverted than I was before and that was a pivotal change in my attitude.

How do you indulge your insanity?

I indulge my insanity a lot, because I'll spark up a conversation with someone for the hell of it; I've done it on the train numerous times, I've done it in my classes, I'll make a snide remark on what's going on with the tutorial, the lecture, see who responds, and will continue a conversation with whoever is willing to respond to it.

Who are you performing for?

I think I'm performing in a way for myself and for anybody who's willing to watch, because I crave some of the attention; I like having friends, I like knowing people, so I'm performing for the people who are willing to watch, willing to become my friend I guess.

What is the essence of yourself?

The essence of myself is a constant effort to make sure other people know who I am so I can be remembered; people will know who I was, see my name, and they'll remember my name.

Daniel Cockburn

2010-06-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

Written for You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different, the 2009 Daniel Cockburn monograph.

What is being funny all about?

Why does Daniel Cockburn speak so dispassionately about subjects which he is so passionate about, subjects which he knows are too annoying and tiny to be passionate about?

Daniel Cockburn stands beside himself and looks at what repeats in himself. Then he tries to communicate the tininess of what repeats in himself. There are certain comedians whose delivery his delivery resembles. These comedians pretend that they do not want a laugh. Maybe they don’t actually want a laugh. Maybe they want everyone to sigh alongside them. Maybe they want the audience to actually put its head down into its folded arms. Maybe they just want a warm pat on the back, or a hug after the show. Maybe for these comedians a laugh is always an insult.

The comedian plays with tempo and timing in order to make the joke work. What would it mean for Daniel Cockburn’s videos to work? Does he want to make a joke or does he want to make us miss the joke?

If he wants us to miss the joke, what is the joke he wants us to miss all about?

A joke wants to make the bigness of the world small, compacted into the size of a joke. Daniel Cockburn seems afraid that the world will never be any bigger than the smallness that his obsession makes it. A big world reduced to something small: just a tempo. How to make the small big again? How to make the joke unfold beyond the joke? How to make the world-made-small-into-a-joke into something big again, like the world?

Maybe it’s not a question, if the world doesn’t actually feel big to begin with, if it feels constrained within the boundaries of one’s own obsessions and preoccupations. A single sentence from Wittgenstein. A beat hit onto the chest. A lined grid.

But there’s something sad about the comedian who doesn’t even want a laugh. There’s something lonely about the comedian who starts off not even wanting to produce a laugh in his audience.

When the subject of the joke is one’s own smallness, one’s inability to see the greater things – knowing they’re there, but one’s thoughts always reducing themselves, endlessly, into the smallest fragments – then a laugh is not necessary. Because someone who tells this sort of joke does not want a laugh of complicity from the audience. That will just make him sadder and lonelier. What he wants is for the audience to say, No, it’s not true at all – look, see this! And to show the comedian, standing there on the stage, all the millions of colours that the comic is talking about missing and having missed, and living his life lonely for.

///

On the internet there’s a page that shows X-rays of people with strange things in their skulls: nails from a nail gun, a pair of scissors lodged in the nose, the leg of a chair smashed, in a fight, down through the eye socket, out the back of the neck. Most of these people know that they have things lodged in their skulls, but some of these people don’t know. They’ve had a cold for twenty years, then they go into the doctor’s office and the doctor says, You’ve got a three-foot nail lodged in your sinus. The patient replies, I thought I took that nail out. Or, I thought I felt something go in twenty years ago, but I wasn’t sure.

Daniel Cockburn – what do you have lodged in your skull that you don’t know about? What is occluding the rest of the world? Do you have twenty-four razors, all lodged in the strangest parts of your skull, that you don’t even know about? You should get an X-ray.

///

A lonely man, preoccupied with the little things – for everything big reduces to the little things – doesn’t even know that for fifteen years he has had a magnet in his head that reorders everything. This magnet reorders whatever comes into its proximity. So if a beautiful sunset is seen by the man with the magnet in his head, the magnet’s force reorders it into the shape and outline of a grid. Same with new love. Same with a cat crossing the path. The man doesn’t know about the magnet; all he knows is that everything always comes out feeling and looking the same, no matter what the input, no matter what the stimuli. If he knew about the magnet, or where it was located – if he only went to get a fucking X-ray! – he could maybe take it out. But art takes a lot of time, and doesn’t pay well, and he only goes to medical clinics. He hasn’t had a family doctor since he was a boy.

So he tries to figure it out himself. He thinks, Maybe my art will solve this problem, or if not solve it, then at least express it – for expression, for an artist, feels like a solution.

Why Go Out?

2010-06-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

This lecture was delivered at the Trampoline Hall lecture series in New York on March 22, 2006. Two other people spoke as well. The event doubled as the book launch for my second book, the novel Ticknor. The speech was later reprinted in the literary journal, Brick.

I.

I wonder why I am up here on this stage when I’d rather be at home, when being at home would be so much more comforting. And I wonder why all of you are sitting there in the audience, when so many of you would also be happier at home.

At home, you can wear your pyjamas. No one is going to snub you or disappoint you. At Trampoline Hall, you could be snubbed, or disappointed. The scotch is not cheap. It is less depressing to think the same thoughts you thought yesterday, than to have the same conversation you had last week. Few of us will get laid. Why did we go out? My father never goes out. His emotional life is absolutely even keel. He is a deeply rational person. He doesn’t see the advantages.

For many years I have asked myself, Why do you spend time with other people? but I never really attempted to come up with an answer. I always believed I was asking myself a rhetorical question, but this week I thought I would try and find an answer, because a question you ask yourself a thousand times eventually deserves to be answered.

And I figure if I know why I go out, I might feel less suspicious of myself for going out. I might criticize myself less. I might be able to look around a party without thinking, What a fool – why did you come – you should have stayed at home.

II.

The first thing I did in my search for an answer to “why go out” was write down a list of every single reason I could think of to go out – there were about twelve – and then I noticed, after staring at the paper, that those smaller reasons could be divided up into four major reasons for leaving the house:

1. Desire (for sex, love, companionship, whatever).
2. Sociological curiosity / aesthetic appreciation.
3. To test ourselves.
4. Someone else wants to hang out.

III.

A couple of years ago I quit smoking, and to help myself along, I read a book called Alan Carr’s Easyway To Quit Smoking. (‘Easyway’ is written as one word and has a little R beside it, meaning it’s a registered trademark. Despite those two details, it is a really excellent book, and I highly recommend it.)

Now, Alan Carr’s basic premise is twofold:

First: you have to accept that smoking is not a habit, it is a drug addiction; and
Second: the only way to quit smoking is to never have a cigarette again.

He goes on to explain that every smoker has brainwashed themselves into believing that smoking helps them in some way – calms them down, allows them to focus, makes an event feel more celebratory – when the truth is, all smoking a cigarette does is temporarily satisfy the craving for a cigarette, while reintroducing into your body the very substance you will once again crave.

What the smoker needs to do to quit, is undo the brainwashing that cigarettes help them in any way, then suffer several weeks of physical withdrawal – a feeling he likens to a physical longing, but not unbearable – and then never have another cigarette again. Oh, and a positive frame of mind is essential. When you experience a craving, you’re to take this as a sign your body is transforming into the body of a non-smoker, and you should cheer, “Yippee! I’m free!”

Well, I followed his advice, and it worked.

The other day, I was sitting alone in a Mexican restaurant and wondering whether it is possible to quit people, and good old Alan Carr came to mind. It’s maybe because I recently ended a relationship, and also have not been spending much time in my city, and my body has been experiencing very similar sensations as it did when I gave up cigarettes two years ago; it’s a physical ache that comes and goes, that’s almost painful, a sort of gaping emptiness, a void that needs to be filled. It often seems like the only way to cure myself of this craving is to give in – to return to him, to sleep with someone new… Not until you tear yourself from everyone you love does it appear that you are actually physically addicted to people. The longing for a person is almost identical to the longing for a smoke. It’s weird.

Anyway, I am not a stoic. My response to withdrawal – which has been to flee into semi-soothing rebound relationships – has prevented me from being able to stand before you today and declare with confidence that it is possible to renounce people, to bear the weeks of physical withdrawl symptoms, and thereafter attain the qualities that Alan Carr claims the non-smoker is in possession of: “health, energy, wealth, peace of mind, confidence, courage, self-respect, happiness and freedom.”

But though it wasn’t recent, I have spent time alone in the past, and in my memories of these times – the happiest times of my life – I really did seem possessed of substantially more courage, confidence, self-respect, freedom, energy, and peace of mind, than those times when I’ve surrounded myself with people.

And if that’s the truth, and my memory’s not lying – why go out?

Alan Carr advises smokers who are considering quitting to put the following three questions to themselves, and I think we can also ponder them as we consider whether it is worthwhile to try and be cured of our addiction to people. As the smoker considers smoking, we ask of socializing:

1. What is it doing for me?
2. Do I actually enjoy it?
3. Do I really need to go through life paying through the nose just to stick these things in my mouth and suffocate myself?

1. What is it actually doing for me?

As I suggested earlier, we get together with people to satisfy desires – the desire to love and be loved, the desire for sex, talk, companionship, good times, all those things. To which Alan Carr might retort: “We talk about smoking being relaxing or giving satisfaction. But how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place?

And truly, who has ever been satisfied by people?

A few weeks ago, for instance, I was deeply insulted by a conceptual poet who lives in your town, who had come to my town to do a reading. I admire his work, so I went – knowing as I left my apartment that I was risking my admiration for him – “What if he is an asshole?” I asked myself, closing the door. “Never mind,” I replied, turning the key, for my curiosity surpassed my fear.

Arriving at the bar that night, I spotted a small man of nearly forty years old, wearing an ostentatious suit and hat, walking about the room like he had a cock the size of Kansas. “He must be the conceptual poet,” I said to myself, and I was right. I begged not to be introduced, but my friend introduced us anyway, calling me, as she did so, a “novelist.” I told him how much I admired a particular book of his, and when I was done, he sort of looked me over and said, “You’re a novelist? Really? What interest could you possibly have in my work?”

… … … In case you missed it, that was the terrible insult.

Of course, telling someone your insult is like telling someone your dream; the specific emotional core of it cannot be communicated; all that comes across are disconnected and meaningless symbols. But let me assure you, this conceptual poet was digging his nails into my heart – he knew it, and, five minutes later, I suddenly felt it, too – which led to a week and a half of fuming in bed, unable to sleep, me declaring this man my enemy, the reconceiving of a magazine article I was writing in such a way as to include a subtextual layer that would annihilate conceptual poetics, a week and a half of going out every night and talking through the insult with each of my friends – what am I even saying? It took leaving the continent for the insult to finally recede into the background of my days, and for me to regain my equilibrium.

But anyway, it is pretty be far-fetched to claim that people provide satisfaction and relaxation. Or at least, if they sometimes do, they as often do not.

Alan Carr’s second question: “Do I actually enjoy it?”

Does anyone actually enjoy more than one party in six? Does sex lead to satisfaction, or merely make us want more sex, better sex, different sex, even as we’re having it? The same goes for conversation, companionship, everything.

No, other people don’t satisfy us, but rather, like cigarettes, give us the temporary illusion of satisfaction, while prolonging our dependence. And if we weren’t dependent on other people?

Alan Carr’s Easyway lists the following psychological gains from quitting:

1. The return of your confidence and courage;
2. Freedom from the slavery;
3. Not having to go through life suffering the awful black shadows at the back of your mind, knowing you are being despised by half of the population, and worst of all, despising yourself.

And so, let us for the moment renounce people! Not in the doomed-to-failure way – renouncing while imagining we are depriving ourselves, forever plagued by doubts –

“how long will the craving last?”
“will I ever be happy again?
“will I ever enjoy a meal again?”
“how will I cope with stress in the future?”
“will I ever want to get up in the morning?

– but rather joyfully and willingly let us renounce people… and bring on self-confidence, courage, energy, peace of mind, and self-respect.

IV.

I have a friend who has made it his sort of art project to set up nights at which people amuse themselves in various ways. He has taught charades classes, he has invited the city into a bar to play board games, he has organized a roomful of people to play Torx, which is a child’s toy, a robot stick that issues instructions on how to bend it. He has been profiled in a local newspaper as someone who is providing fun alternatives to concerts and bars and house parties, which, of course, are old-fashioned and worn-out. But I know him well enough to know that he doesn’t much care whether Nadia or Jim are getting enough fun in their lives. What my friend is up to, I believe, is something more sinister.

First, a few details to paint the scene:

1. His calls his games night ‘Room 101.” The event is held in a bar and people eat cheesies from bowls and play Scrabble and Pictionary and other games at small tables, and every twenty minutes or so he get up at the front of the room on a little stage and rings a bell and forces only those people who seem to be enjoying their game overly much to terminate the game and disperse and play something else. If he had peoples’ fun in mind, I contend that he would not force those who are having the most fun to abandon their game.

2. His promotional poster for these nights show a boy playing Monopoly with two rats. Also, if you look closely, you can see there are little bars on the window. He took the name ‘Room 101’ from the book 1984; it refers to the room in which they torture people, and it turns out his secret motto for these games nights is: “We torture you with fun!” Which might be the motto of every party ever.

Finally: His charades class was not called “How to play charades” or “How to have fun playing charades,” but rather: “How to be good at playing charades.” And his introductory talk to the event only cursorily involved which hand signals to use when; mostly he talked about what he called “charades skills” – like, how being good at charades is about being a good communicator, and a good listener, and requires imagination, and sympathy, and understanding – all of which are, more truly than charades skills, life skills.

And so his students or audience or whatever you’d call them – if they’re no good at playing charades – can only assume one thing. Since the terms for “goodness” were laid out very clearly at the beginning of class, if you’re not good at playing charades, you are forced to conclude that it’s not because you don’t know the hand gestures, it’s not because you’re not a good actor, but rather it’s because you can’t listen, or you’re not sympathetic, or you don’t have sufficient (as he put it at the beginning of class) “intellectual-analytical skills, motor-expressive skills, creative skills, and emotional-inter-personal skills.” The secret lesson of his charades class is: if you’re not good at being a charades player, maybe it’s actually because you’re not an entirely good at being a person. This is called being tortured with fun.

Yes. I’ve come to the conclusion that what my friend is trying to do is organize events that capture and crystallize and reproduce the effects of ordinary socializing – which is not quite about fun, or about learning how to be good at having fun, but, more distinctly, about learning how to be good at being a person, and, the unfortunate corollary of this, seeing how far from good at being a person you are.

Why go out? Because if what we want more than anything is to attain self-confidence, health, energy, and peace of mind, we should stay in. We could be like little Buddhas, meditating and masturbating and watching TV. And we could imagine ourselves to be brilliant, and kind, and good lecturers, and good listeners, and utterly loving – and there’d be no way to prove it otherwise.

One final story: For the first six months of 2005 I lived alone in Montreal; I went because I was overwhelmed and I picked Montreal because I had no friends there, and for the first few weeks all I experienced were pangs of withdrawal for everyone I loved. It was awful and all-consuming… and then it passed. And once it passed, I was in heaven. There I sat in my lovely, cheap apartment – no distractions, no email, surrounded by books. There was a grocery store across the street. The mountain was two blocks away, and I could climb it whenever I wanted. Self-confidence, health, happiness, the equanimity of the non-smoker – all were mine.

And then… I destroyed it. I met someone and then another person and before I knew it, all of the chaos of life came back, along with all my self-doubt and anxiety and fear.

But perhaps that’s what it’s for – self-confidence and courage and energy and peace – perhaps it’s to be used in the world. Perhaps there’s only one thing to do with it: spend it.

I’m always super-conscious of how whenever I go out into the world, whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am. And I continue to go out even though who I am always comes up short. I always prove myself to be less generous, less charming, less considerate, not as bold or energetic or intelligent or courageous as I imagined in my solitude. And I’m always being insulted, or snubbed, or disappointed. And I’m never in my pyjamas.

And yet, in some way, maybe this is better. Each of us in this room could suffer the pangs of withdrawal and gain the serenity of the non-smoker. We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short… because we want to learn how to be good at being people… and moreover, because we want to be people.

And so, to return to Alan Carr’s final question to the would-be quitter: “Do I really need to go through life paying through the nose, just to stick these things in my mouth and suffocate myself?”

Yes, Mr. Carr, yes.

Claudia Whitten

2010-06-21T12:28:00.000-07:00

Written for the Oxford American Music Issue, 2010.

Claudia Whitten never recorded any song other than this one, a deep-soul melody which she sings in a voice that is at once womanly and girlish about wanting a real good man. Later it turns out what she means by a real good man is a man who will—well, discipline her. She wants a man to not “spare the rod.”

Because she recorded only one song, everything we imagine about her has to be drawn from this one song, which is like trying to understand a person’s life by looking at just one day. I wouldn’t want someone to look at the day I just lived and think, That day reveals everything we need to know about her whole life. Yet if I look back to the morning, when I rose at six a.m. (it’s one in the morning now), I have to admit this day contained a lot of what’s repeated throughout my life. You could get a pretty good read on me by looking at just my today.

So we have just one song, but the DNA of the artist is in this song, let’s say. Something I always wonder about an artist is, What makes her make art? Because if you know the engine of her art, then you know the engine of her life, and if you know what makes her live, you know what makes her art live.

And this song does live—it haunts and follows you. It takes up a place just as substantial in the world as any person or stalker you might know. The song lives—not because there are any details about the life of Claudia Whitten to attach to it—because there aren’t; at least not in the public realm. I have no idea whether she made tea in the morning or didn’t get up because she was too drunk or what.

Of course, in this song she’s talking about making it work with a man, but I like to think she’s also talking about making music—and making it work with a man and making it work in art are aligned, really. At least for me, these two realms have always traveled similar tracks. I want to get away from writing the same way I want to get away from my boyfriend—whoever my boyfriend is and whatever it is I’m writing. It always feels like too much.

So perhaps this song by Claudia Whitten can be used to discern why it’s her only one: either because she found a real good man, or because she didn’t find a real good man. (There’s that refrain: “I want a real good man”—then the line at the end where she sings what she means by a real good man: “If you don’t want to spoil the child/You better not spare the rod.”)

Either way, the presence of a good man or the absence of a good man is critical. And, sure, the man she’s singing about is a literal man like a boyfriend, but since art is always also about the art, the man she’s singing about can be seen as the man inside her—the tyrant inside the artist who either turns out to be a tyrant who helps the artist make music, or a tyrant who prevents it; who’s so tyrannical that the whole country ceases to function, and you look at the country in that woman and think: So much soul! If only the tyrant was a little less tyrannical, that country would be top of the nations, putting out every toy the whole world consumes!

I have a friend whose boyfriend is pretty abusive, and she tells me that she loves him more than any man she has ever loved. She always wants to leave him, she doesn’t want to leave him, and she gushes—happy, dismayed, confused, resigned to it—This man has gotten under my skin! He’s become the tyrant inside her, I suppose.

Anyway, that’s a man who knows the right amount of rod to give her, if giving it to her makes her love him so much that she’s thrown away her whole life and the last of her childbearing years to a heroin addict. I’m just saying.

Either Claudia Whitten’s tyrant spared the rod and she got so spoiled that she sat around eating cake the rest of her life and didn’t make another song, or, more likely, that tyrant could have spared the rod a little more. Because the rod can scare a child, too, so the child can barely lift her hand to make another song, fearing its tyranny—oppressed under it, I mean. There’s got to be the right measure of sparing and not sparing. No rod at all and nothing gets done. Too much rod—nothing gets done. That’s why the man’s got to be a real good man.

That’s what she was looking for, but I figure that’s not what she got. Only one song came out—but what a song! Those bars repeat and repeat, like the heartbeat of a body; like it’s the rhythm of her deepest life we’re listening to; leaning in, getting at something, like waves dancing and advancing and retreating. The waves come up to the shore and beat down, pulling back and coming up again to beat so gently on the lip of the shore.

She beats down on the shore for two minutes and fifty-two seconds, then the music of Claudia Whitten goes dark with permanent night. The moon disappears and the tides don’t beat.

Ah, well. None of us gets the tyrant we want.

Two Free Men

2010-06-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

Written for McSweeney's Issue 28, the fable issue.

A depressed man and a suicidal man were hanging out near a very tall wooden bridge over a muddy ravine. The depressed man was pacing below it, looking down – for depressed people never look up, only down. And the suicidal man was standing up on the bridge’s edge, talking himself into jumping.

Just because one was above and one was below, doesn’t mean they didn’t have similar problems, or similar reasons for being there. Both were living in a very strange country where every man’s first obligation was to be “free.” What this meant was: any time they felt themselves falling in love, they had to remind themselves that the proper thing to do was pull back. After all, a better girl might come along – and if they missed that opportunity, it would be like missing life itself.

And although they were living in the very same city, their lives there were provisional. After all, job opportunities might arise in other cities, meaning they’d have to pack up and go. So although they had apartments and friends, they were only half-there in their homes, and half-there among their friends. The other half was ever on edge, in case something should call them away.

All of which, if you look at it, is a very lonely way of being.

And they were. One was suicidal, and the other was depressed.

Well – and these things don’t only happen in stories! – at last the suicidal one stepped off the bridge, and he fell through the air with increasing speed, and expanding in his mind was the thought, “I don’t want to die!” – when he collided in an awkward way with the depressed man, who’d been pacing, collapsing them both to the ground.

For a minute the men lay there groaning, rubbing their heads and elbows and knees, but once the shock began to subside, they raised themselves to look at each other. Two sets of brown eyes adjusted focus, then blinked. They were surprised to see how similar the other man was – in colouring, in physique, in expression. It was like meeting one’s own double. The suicidal man found this particularly shocking: his plan had been to end one life – and now he was confronted with two.

A feeling came from inside the depressed man, surfacing like a rubber duck thrown into the sea: “I did something in this life! I saved a man from dying!” And then, without having a chance to correct himself or pull back, he decided: “I was put here under this bridge by fate. This man is forever in my charge.”

He said to the suicidal one: “You don’t have to worry. I will never leave your side. I’ll always be nearby to catch you.”

Now, the suicidal man ought to have been repulsed. Not even a woman – no matter how fervent her professions of her love – had sincerely promised to be by his side forever, or said that he was her charge.

“I will always catch you from falling,” the depressed man reiterated, for saying it twice is a pact. Then he said it a third time, for three times is a promise – and he felt himself getting less depressed each time he said it.

The suicidal man, hearing these words clearly, felt a smile rising in him. He couldn’t help it.

He replied, feeling a purpose growing within him too, “And I will keep jumping and falling.”

Shary Boyle

2010-06-21T12:15:00.001-07:00

Written for Otherworld Uprising, the 2008 Shary Boyle monograph.

Shary Boyle lives in a small apartment on the second floor of a Victorian row house in Toronto. When I went to visit her, she was on the verge of leaving to research and work in England for six months. Everything she wanted to show me was packed away in boxes, but among the décor and the furniture that remained there was nothing particularly contemporary; nothing that made one aware that it was 2006. The chairs we sat on in the living room were second-hand and fragile. The small radio was tuned to a classical-music station, and the light coming through the windows had a sparkling, gentle quality, all of which gave that afternoon a feeling of eternity—like a static, bleached-out memory, even as it was happening.

It occurred to me that Shary Boyle wanted nothing in her physical environment pinning her down to some arbitrary now, just as, in the past few years, she has avoided putting anything into her work that would definitively mark this time and place.

Boyle’s earlier work was full of depictions of bullies from her childhood in Scarborough, clothed in ripped jeans and teased hair and lots of makeup. During our conversation, I asked why she didn’t draw such things anymore.

“I’m afraid there’s so much banality for me in terms of images,” she said. “It’s so saturated. We have every kind picture of life as we know it at this second. I really feel the need to create an alternate world, a vision of what might be magical and beautiful and fantastic about being human. Maybe it’s because I find the world so depressing. Or not the world at all, but culture, what we have done with this culture.”

Until talking with her that day, I never though about how hard it must be to make images in a world so full to bursting with images. I had only felt sorry for myself and my writer friends, that we have to make words for a culture that loves its images best. So I had not before considered what questions and dilemmas an artist might have about which images to add to the world.

Later, walking from her place in the dying sun, I was reminded of a quote from Baudelaire. Finding it on my shelves that night, I read:

"In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand different ways. “Copy nature; just copy nature. There is no greater delight, no finer triumph than an excellent copy of nature.” And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts, even to the novel and poetry. To these doctrinaires, who were so completely satisfied by Nature, a man of imagination would certainly have had the right to reply: “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.""

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Orthodox religious art is perhaps the most straightforward expression of how the quotidian surface of human life is bound up in the ever-present mysteries of being – of the impulse against “just copy nature.” But since such symbols come ready-made, the function of religious art is less to tell us something new than to be a focal point for our meditations about things already accepted and known – like the presence of the divine in life, or moral tales that express our profoundest fears and longings.

As religious art is typically created for a religious community, the receiver of the art and the creator of the art share a vocabulary of symbols. As the art critic Arthur Danto explains in the introduction to his 2006 collection, Unnatural Wonders, religious art therefore calls forth the viewer’s emotions and associations only insofar as the viewer can appreciate the symbols. In the case of much contemporary art, he says, it similar; the “ample wall texts” reassure the viewer “the art has a certain high moral and intellectual purpose,” yet “often the distance between object and argument is so wide that without the text we would badly misread the object.”

He continues:

"This is not that different from traditional art as one might suppose. Think, for example, of how little a realistic 17th-century crucifixion scene tells us about the meaning of the man-and-cross it shows or why it is appropriately hung in chapels. Who would know—who really could understand by means of visual perception alone—that the twisted figure is redeeming through physical suffering the taint of original sin that humanity until then allegedly carried? The meaning of much [contemporary] work is at just such a level of abstractness, relative to the object intended as its vehicle. In this respect, contemporary art and traditional art have a great deal more in common with each other than either has with Modernist art, which sought to convey its meaning by visual means alone."

The difficulty for the contemporary artist is that either they share their symbols with their community, meaning the symbols tend to the commonplace – a nose ring, bleached blonde hair – and make as banal an impression, or else they are esoteric, the artist alone appreciating their total complexity.

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I am thinking now of a pious Christian woman with a wooden cross above her bed. Or a Jewish family with a mezuzah at the front door. These objects are reminders in a world of inertness and banality there is spirit present with us, too, and more meaning to the repetitious gestures of our days than it may seem to bare eyes.

It has always been to my disappointment that such icons are not effective on me. These objects that speak so urgently to the religious have rarely, if ever, helped me by conveying significant stories about my life or my world, at once making life richer and more bearable. I never thought I’d find an icon that could do that.

Several years ago, however, I was at an art fair in Toronto when I was forced by some inner compulsion to stand stock still before a small Shary Boyle statue. At a time when I had little money and no habit of buying art, I wanted this piece for myself. It was not because it made me feelany particular emotion. I didn’t want it to beautify my apartment, but rather—and this was the closest I’d ever come to sympathising with a man who wears a cross hung from a chain around his neck—I wanted it to always be close.

Like much of Shary Boyle’s work, it has that twinned, paradoxical character of both familiarity and strangeness, as though the image or figure has been with us all along, and at the same time was just unearthed from the ground.

The sculpture is about the height of a thumb, and there are two heads, one on top of the other. The head of an old woman serves as the base (she has no neck), and, growing from the top of her head or perhaps perched on it (also without a neck) is the head of a young girl in the bloom of her youth. The sculpture is hollow inside and is delicately painted on the outside. This was one in a series of fifteen pieces made from the same mould but each one painted in its own way.

I think I bought the plainest one, since it came closest to the essence of what the work was about for me: aging. Indeed, I sensed I was buying it to help me with the process of growing older, which I knew it would, though I couldn’t have said how. Yet it felt like an urgent and necessary purchase. I was 24 at the time.

For the first several years I owned it, I strongly associated myself with the girl perched on top; her gaze seemed to mirror my own curiosity about the world, and my openness. I understood myself to be young like her, attractive, unwrinkled—the object of the admiration of men (at least in theory). I loathed the idea that one day all that would be lost, and I’d end up like the old woman on the bottom, sagging, wrinkled, self-contained, unsexy, ironic—surely a worse existence.

I moved around a lot, and did not have the piece on display in every apartment. When I settled into the place I live now, however, I placed it on a small shelf near the front door, so I would pass it every time I left or returned home again. And although I only bought it six years ago, I already have a completely different relationship to it. Recently, the young girl has not looked curious to me but vacant, receptive, needing to be filled.

The essayist Mark Grief writes in his article “The Afternoon of the Sex Children:

"We know the beauty of the young, which it is traditional to admire—their unlined features, their unworn flesh,” but we also can know that the beauty of children is the beauty of another, merely incipient form of life, and nothing to emulate. One view of the young body is as an ideal. The other is as an unpressed blank."

That is how the girl’s head looks to me now. I neither relate to this blankness, nor envy it. As for the old woman, I’m starting to appreciate her virtues. I no longer see her as a degraded and ruined version of the girl, but as a completion of what the girl’s head promised: a settling into her flesh and herself, which before was only potential.

Of course, all this might look different next Tuesday.

But I’ll bet that for the woman who looks at the crucifix—surely she doesn’t do it every day, but when she does, she finds its meaning always slightly altered. When she is going through a hard time, perhaps it reminds her of the depth of her strength. When life is good and she has much to be grateful for, it gives her something else. That wooden cross has always been inert to me, but this sculpture of Shary Boyle’s is a living thing.

Like the cross, it has become a symbol of my faith—in this case, faith in aging be okay. I didn’t have this faith before I got the sculpture, but I have some of it now. In these times, growing old feels like more of a sin than any outright sinning. I can fuck whoever I want, but to deal with the inevitable decrepitude of my flesh? I can’t do it with platitudes about beauty being skin deep. Nor with religious iconography. And certainly not with the help of Bridget Bardot, who replied in a recent interview that the thing that revolts her most about her body is her own skin.

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I never thought much about the word “iconoclast,” and it is one of those words you probably don’t think too much about until you’re confronted with the true meaning of it, which I was when reading Northrop Frye’s introduction to Milton’s Paradise Lost:

"Man can do nothing directly to achieve his own freedom: what he can do is to indicate his willingness to be set free by knocking down his idols, and so allow the Word of God to circulate freely in human society. The prophet is not a Utopian or a social planner, but an iconoclast, a breaker of the false images that man worships."

For the past few months I have had that vividly in my mind, but always replacing “prophet”with “artist” (though artists can be prophets): The artist is not a Utopian or a social planner, but an iconoclast, a breaker of the false images that man worships.

The world is full to bursting with false images for worship. So how can the Word of God circulate freely in human society with such obstacles, and how will we be set free?

The sculpture of the two heads—this is an iconoclastic work. Boyle’s art doesn’t so much create feelings as break some of the spells that certain images in our culture have spun before our eyes. This is the work of the religious artist, too—to break the spell of banality in order to allow the spell of mystery to overtake us. The religious artist and the secular artist share a purpose, but the secular artist’s work, in speaking to a secular audience, is achieved by opposite means: not by idolatry, but by iconoclasm.

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And this is how she does it. She takes off all her clothes, gets down on her back and then pushes herself up into a bridge. With one hand she grasps an ankle, and folds the other arm under her for support. She holds this posture—awkward, but not impossible—and in the patient sustaining of this pose, a fluorescent orange stream leaps from her mouth. It lands between her breasts. From between her breasts jets a bright-green stream in a smooth arc to land on her cunt, and from there jumps a third stream, ending in a little blue puddle at her feet.

This is perhaps my favourite of Shary Boyle’s sculptures. As with all her pieces, to fully grasp it, one must imaginatively put oneself in the experiential state of the figure. We are not merely looking at the woman here- we are the woman. Or consider the porcelain lady with red flowers growing out of her arm. She gains no pleasure from this wonder. It’s as if a woman’s beauty, even if amazing, cannot be integrated into her ego. It’s this tension between how a figure appears and how it’s feeling—which is present in almost all of Boyle’s work—that contributes to its spark of meaning.

At first I saw only the beauty in the woman arching her back, but then I sympathetically imagined—like the Christian who suffers to see Christ on the cross—what it must be like to maintain that posture: a terrible effort! What awkwardness, exertion and stamina are necessary in order for the figure to create those fountains. It is not a matter of girl + fountains = rare and strange charm. Its surface appearance and interior life, synthesised, are a manifest model of creation.

Though the making of art might, on a surface level, look like someone sitting and typing at a computer, or standing at a canvas or kiln, the essence of the act, the living soul of that ordinary posture, is this icon, which argues that creation is a sustained contortion. A significant part of the artwork’s beauty, always, is that it springs from the human body, which wills it and sustains it, but nothing can be produced without taking the posture.

While writing this article my mind was half on something else: the seeming endless labour of a book I was writing. I wanted to email Shary in England: Has anyone bought the piece with the three fountains coming out of the girl? I needed its wisdom. I wanted her to make it small, out of smooth gold, so I could wear it on a thin chain around my neck. I wouldn’t even take it off in the shower.

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A week ago, I accidentally deleted from my computer the Shary Boyle penis sculpture. It depicts a woman’s kneeling legs, which morph into a torso that resembles an erect penis. Or perhaps it’s the erect penis that’s kneeling, ankles crossed, in the posture of a woman giving a blow job. I suspect this sculpture too painfully recalled a recent, heart-sickening affair of mine, which was not sufficiently far enough in the past that her piece didn’t remind me of all its more sordid aspects.

The sculpture is like a contemporary companion to a more ancient image which also attempts to symbolize the male/female union, drawn from Plato’s allegory of love. In it, the human creature was once a monstrous thing of great harmony. Man and woman were joined at their backs, with two heads, four arms, four legs—and this creature tumbled over itself like a wheel, arms and legs extended, as it moved across the earth. But these creatures were cleaved in two, and since then, we have been fated to wander as half-souls, in search of our mate, to try and achieve that original wholeness.

In Shary Boyle’s sculpture, both man’s submission to and dependence on woman and woman’s submission to and dependence on man are expressed. It’s a fragmented, and perhaps limited, vision of sexual and romantic bonding for a time in which we come together and split apart, not as whole creatures, but limited parts of wholes.

Yet how painful (and what a relief!) to see the inner truth, the iconoclastic truth, in place of those all-too-pervasive illustrations—such as models groping each other in advertisements—which feel less true than this kneeling penis, which I understand so well, for I’ve been there, felt like that – closer to that than any image of a sexy man and sexy woman doing it. This sculpture is something for those who now and then desperately need to lift the heavy veil and let the fresh air circulate.

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Beauty is not the meaning of art, nor its purpose. The philosopher Elaine Scarry argues that a work of art must be beautiful, for it is by its beauty that we can identify it as art and trust it. If beauty is absent from a work, we can shrug off its truths as rather paltry; we don’t alight to it the way we do to beautiful works. But its beauty is not the message. It is only, so to speak, the seal of God, saying, My word is here.

Then one has to ask, What is the word?

According to Alain de Botton, the ancient Romans put on one side of their coins the image of the goddess Fortune to remind them that at any moment in their daily life—such as while going about the business of buying olives—a chariot might throw itself tumbling into the square and knock their eldest son dead.

On the back of our penny is a goddamn maple leaf which reminds us—what? That we live in a country of so many maple trees?

There are objects of art which could be of such utility but are relegated instead to the marginal realm of appreciation. As the philosopher John Dewey writes in Art as Experience: “Objects that were in the past valid and significant because of their place in the life of a community, now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin.” Set apart from daily experience, works of art merely “serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture.”

What worse fate is there for what might be handled as a work of genuine iconoclasm, to instead be beheld in a state of disinterested, primarily aestheticcontemplation.

It’s not good enough! I want these images in wide circulation: on our coins, on our street lights, made into icons to hand out to girls when they first get their periods, or to couples when they move into their first high-rise apartment, to hang over the sink. It will tell them what they can expect, and what their daily postures really look like, and really mean.