On Making and Deification

William Wallace's A Week in the Life of Michaelangelo follows the world's most celebrated sculptor through a the romantic back-looking gaze of veneration. While Wallace takes great care to illuminate the artist's difficulties, daily minutia, and treatment by other members of society with whom he had direct or indirect contact, he often glazes over his foibles, as is common of anyone whom we, as a present culture, deify. Wallace is fair, though, in contrast with historians who encase in marble the famous artist, himself, to preserve their pristine impression of his genius.

Why do we deify people? Individually, I see it as a beautiful justification for the variety of personalities and personal attributes we find in a world of people who are, indeed, not just like us. Culturally though, why do we zombies choose a lord? Why do we imbue a real person with the entire catalog of personal virtues in order to worship them? While plausible that a real person can be gifted with equal measures of some contrapuntal and even contradictory virtues (supreme perfection and supreme speed, for instance), its unrealistic and unfair to practice deification on human beings. But this is how folklore is borne.

As a filmmaker, I find that filmmakers often seek to do the opposite. A historical figure is so bound up in his tall-tale icon, it takes a certain measure of defamation on the part of the filmmaker to bring the genius "down to our level." However, the genius, depending on the nature and sturdiness of his fame can often be reduced to some cheating, swindling ne'er-do-well, and we lose our respect for either the figure or the filmmaker, depending on who we see as the least honest. Because he's dead, does it make it safe to deify the soul of the artist? As a culture, are we simply setting ourselves up for failure? And if that artist was still alive, are we more likely setting him up for failure.

I find in my own personal form of feminism the same problems of deification found in the art historical realm. Culturally if women are or were raised by the romantic and idealistic, upon a pedestal like vestal virgins carved into Michaelangeo's masterfully chosen marble, then there they must rest, frozen in mid-animation and essentially dead to be allowed to continue to exist. A pedestal is no place for a living being. There, under splendid shafts of light, they become stiff in an attempt just to continue living. But once the deity leaves his or her alter-cage, we the idealizers, the cruel romantics, unjustly feel lied to. Who were you that you tricked us so long?! You are nothing but an impostor, a fake and whore whose sole intention is to pretend to be something we will worship!

As woman, we unbound our feet, walked right up to these ignorant romantics and said "enough is enough!" But to avoid a sexist judgment, there are also women who idealize men by created gender roles emphasizing ideas like physical strength, guardianship, etc. there is a something about the discovery of someone who is in touch with the parts of ourselves that we are not, that encourages idealism from the latter. We see sensitivity in artists and assume the possessor of this quality was simply born special. But art is not a medium's occupation. It simply takes a practiced degree of spiritual searching and self reflection, both at our ugliest primal expressions, and at how ugly our individual egos are until we can lose our faces in making. Perhaps spectators are secretly as afraid to lose their egos as the artist who becomes lost in his/her work.

But perhaps it's just this ironic tension that has us making and spectating in the first place.

Thoughts on Icons and the era of images in terms of Nietzsche

In his critique of modernity and his romanticism of Archaic Greek "tragic culture," Nietzsche speaks about the 'immediacy' of the cultural relationship to God(s)/spirituality. People could feel the presence of god directly through a painted vase. That ornamental image WAS God, and you knew because you could experience it with your senses, right now, in the present. What Socrates introduced with his rationalism and logic paved the way for the Martin Luther's and Calvin's Reformation. The Word is God, not the image. The image is of the heathen. This jives specifically with Socrates' ideas, passed on through his student Plato, of virtue. Through the rational and methodical Socratic method, we should all come to the same conclusions. That conclusion somehow, because we came to respect Socrates' groundbreaking suggestions, would need to come to the individual separately of their physical body. That is to say, the body is a fetter and a stumbling block from enlightenment. Therefore the enlightenment of knowing God could naturally no longer come from the experience of our visual sense.

So the Word is law now. And I'm an artist/philosopher, not an Art Historian, but I think it's Barthes whose Death of the Author finally exposed and de-deified Socratic rationalism. Nietzsche would say we had become alienated from our world, first and foremost because we had become estranged from our own bodies. We were not meant to trust our senses as they were physical barriers from our metaphysical ability to discover and understand God. Somehow reading text appears to transcend the bodily fetter with which we experience images. Nevermind how written language developed from glyphs. Like Socrates' universal logic by which we should naturally all of us come to the right and good and moral conclusions we need to live this present, but transient mortal coil of a life, a system of glyphs becomes abstracted,  checked for efficiency, aestheticized, and catalogued as a law. The Word is a system of glyphs-turned-icons that we practice and memorize until we forget where they began. Gutenberg prints, with mathematical perfection, each letter in each word of a doctrine, and we suddenly have forgotten that our minds are looking at a system of images which each hold individual history and personal meaning. Now we are looking at Words.

The printed page lends itself to a new kind of immediacy that is firmly married to the industrial revolution. Machines become the new God as they are fashioned from the rational paths of modern science, the religious pinnacle of the beginning of modernity. I probably need to read Death of the Author again - but I concern myself in part with graphic design and with Letterforms. There is a mathematical preciseness to each letter of a font, which most people take for granted. Each letter in a font is not simply a letter in the alphabet but an architectural structure as meaningful to us in our time as was the Parthenon.

As far as making and meaning, we have been preoccupied with universal systems to unite us. We have abstracted images to the point that they no longer can allow us to experience personal meaning; that immediacy which the Archaic Greeks experienced when they used their senses to experience God. Somehow we still make art out of words. Artists are determined to find and make images that can give that experience and immediacy that we long for as mortals.

Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part II (on Schein)

Apparently no one should survive Wagner's Tristan and Isolde if it were presented in it's purely Dionysiac format. Everyone on stage would die of intense pleasure and pain at the same time when the audience disappeared in a puff of unnecessity.

Well now I have to see this opera, obviously.

And the word 'Schein' translates on Google to "sham"... so interpret this:

"Socrates correctly diagnoses tragedy as a purveyor of Schein, but fails utterly to see the point of this Schein. Part of the reason for this, Nietzsche thinks, is that Socrates is a deeply abnormal, unhealthy man, (and Nietzsche is so different? I mean that lovingly and with a little intellectual crush.) a man of stunted and perverted instincts and a diseased intellect that has run wild. His abnormality take the form of a kind of hyperintellectualized simple-mindedness. When he looks at tragedy, he fails to see it as an instance of life, and thinks it is just a simple lie/illusion." (Ah yes, I assume he's probably an ENTP, but that doesn't make him unhealthy or diseased of intellect. I would also guess Nietzsche was an INTJ or an INFJ, though probably the former since he seems kind of detached from actual people [not the ideas of people he knows] in his life. Also just because I'm an INFJ, doesn't mean everyone whose opinions I like to listen to will be one too.)

However, from the current Cambridge translation by Raymond Geuss, schein means "semblance." I'm still not certain what is meant by this semblance which gets used an awful lot throughout Birth of a Tragedy, but it has something to do with reflecting the well-balanced Appoline dream-image in measure with some good old-fashioned Dionysiac chaos.

Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part I

Nietzsche's 'Will' appears to be similar to Freud's "libido." The underlying tension of the world revolves around sexual desire on a base level. I would jump in and attach some degree of violence to that scenario, but since violent primal urges are not something I have ever experienced, I suppose those who do could classify those urges as sexual too. Because women don't seem to display the same sort of violent urges man can, and because I know from B.W. Pelham's psychological studies of implicit and explicit self esteem that men are less self-reflective and thus less in touch with their own concept of themselves, it is indeed possible that I agree with Nietzsche in that The Will, keenly expressed in sexual desire, drives all humans towards satiation or frustration.

When Nietzsche describes Socrates as the ruination of artistic society, pitting his suggestion that men are capable of controlling their own destinies entirely through the acquisition of scientific and/or moral knowledge, against the previous Apolline/Dionysiac dualism he seems to look far too romantically at what he terms the "tragic culture" of Archaic Greece. According to Raymond Geuss's Introduction to Birth of a Tragedy, "Apolline" connotes a different reference to the Greek Apollo than does the word "Apollonian" which I construe to be about physical magnificentness and celebrity as opposed to the author's suggestion of individuality and self-discipline. Also Dionysiac seems to describe the organic way in which improv happens leaving the home base of structure in music, rather than "Dionysian" decadence and general anarchy for the sake of pleasing the flesh at any cost. I do agree that any institution or being does have both of those concepts within and one is usually more dominant - this explains the Myers-Briggs P (Dionysiac) or J (Apolline) preference.

But the author describes Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, his narrative operas as having that Dionysiac quality and I have never known a musician who didn't discipline him/herself even to the point of bleeding on an instrument during practice. How do you create organic art with others having no socialization in music, no hard-earned skill, no long-practiced repertoire?  Fishy.

Though Birth of a Tragedy was critically panned at publication, I'm fond of the basic problem the critic, Wilamowitz had with it. From Geuss's Intro:

"Apart from various points of detail, Wilamowitz correctly diagnosed and categorically rejected Nietzsche's attempt to do 'philology' in a way that would make it more like philosophy or art than like a strict 'wissenschaft'; the proper mode of access to the ancient world, Wiliamowitz asserted, was through the painstaking study of history 'in der askese selbstverlaufender arbeit' (of asceticism in self-leveling work), not through the mystic insights used in Birth of a Tragedy. It is perfectly true that,given a choice, Nietzsche would prefer Weisheit to Wissenschaft, so there was no real response he could make to that basic charge."

And just for reference from Wikipedia:

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.^[1]

Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin. Classical philology is historically primary, originating in European Renaissance Humanism, but was soon joined by philologies of other languages both European (Germanic, Celtic, Slavistics, etc.) and non-European (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). Indo-European studies involves the philology of all Indo-European languages as comparative studies.

Any classical language can be studied philologically, and indeed describing a language as "classical" is to imply the existence of a philological tradition associated with it.

Two Haikus

I am your body
Forget me not, though I am
Animal and bones

I am your spirit
Forget me not, though I am
Sky without practice

Adventure Scouting

I went on an adventure today to scout some locations off the beaten path that I have seen by chance and photograph them for near future use. I already have ideas for at least one of these locations.

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Richard Dawkins

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9180871

Above is an NPR podcast, which I am referencing in the following rant about Richy Rich Dawkins.

Oh Richard Dawkins oh Rick-tiki-tiki Dawkins, you typical anglo-asshole alpha-male wannabe...

It’s just that it’s such a mundane argument. It’s the upper-middle-class white boy’s argument. It’s all he knows. It’s the only way he feels any purpose insinuating himself into the world. Intellectualism! Science! His argument is bullying at core, which is my problem with him. And while I realize that any dissenting opinion, especially that of a notorious iconoclast, can be interpreted as bullying, this one is just so old, cliché and boring to me.

Religion is boring? No! Absolutely not! Look below, and see how it’s my life’s work. You could say I’m as passionate about exposing the counter-human quality of the anti-religion sentiments of alpha-male characters masking their words under the all-consuming title of “science,” as Mr. Dawkins is about stamping out the “medieval, parochial and impotent” mindset of those who want or need religion to feel that their lives are the most meaningful. It’s not even that I disagree with the statements he makes. I simply hear this argument over and over and see two fanged animals duking it out over an unclaimed piece of carrion or a mate. Science vs. Religion. How trite.

He’s asked why people don’t become more moral as a species, but in response, he asks “If you look at the selfish gene view, the question is, ‘why are we as moral as we are?’” He expresses wonder at the capacity of humans to be altruistic in the face of natural selection. (20:00) As I see it, people are indeed both animals and humans. Like Dawkins describes in his proposal that humans and all species down to the most basic micro-organism share bits of the same “machine code,” we descend from the smallest primordial bacterium. However, we also make meaning. Around 15:40 he states explicitly that people make their own meaning. And yet he scoffs at Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project “smuggling God back in” when we have a perfectly poetic explanation of the Universe without Him (or Her or It).

Again, this says to me, that Dawkins, just like Billy Graham or Bin Laden, is obsessed with being the man (or woman, sure, just to be fair) with the one “true” answer or the awe-inspiring offerings of the “real world,” as he puts it. The world of data collection and organization, the structures by which he is trained as a biologist, as a philosopher, as a person are all a world he has created and which has created him. His “real world” is as real and as rich as that of the religious zealot. To call God “superfluous” or “redundant” when “Science” provides a perfectly poetic and “factual” explanation of the universe, just reveals his personality. What is any less poetic about the abstract thinker’s reasoning that God and Evolution exist beside and of eachother, than Dawkin’s concrete reasoning that “redundancy” is not beautiful. He hates inefficiency. It’s part of his psychological human disposition to dislike inefficiency or neat boxes, just like it is the psychological human predisposition to feel a discomfort with no life after death.

He admits to being a product of his culture, giving credence to the music and art of the Anglican Church. He is also a product of the culture of the scientific community, a no-nonsense, inefficiency untolerated environment of charts and grids – more boxes. People love boxes. Give people their god box to store in it their Einsteinian beliefs alongside their stained-glass windows and choirs.

It all comes back to the Darwinian animal need to be the alpha. Dawkins was right. What he’s wrong about is assuming that the humanity which gives us the capacity to make meaning through religion, art, family, science or whatever else we do with our lives is what’s going to win his argument. If his genes were so well-evolved he wouldn’t need to argue. He could chill out about the fact that religion is as beautiful and as uncertain and as ever-changing as science, or rather that they’re really both the same thing. To take a camp and fight the opposite camp is as futile as the human who hides the animal within himself, or perhaps more evident the animal who represses the humanity within himself. We can never be balanced without respecting both in all people. One man’s universe is only as "true" or "real" as the words he can define it with or the feelings he can impart on another man. The “evidence” (29:48) is as much in the tomes of biology as the Bible, but also as much in the feeling of genuflecting to God in a vast architectural structure as in the awe of looking through the lens of a microscope.