Wilde Gray Area Matters

My last post made me think of Dorian Gray, as other things also did.  Invariably, things give me Wilde thoughts.

Gray, while unaware of his inspiring charismatic beauty, was still a force for good.
As soon as he becomes aware of it and its power to manipulate, he falls in love with the power he can wield over others, & it is all over for him.
How well Oscar Wilde understood the bizarre fact that Life imitates Art.

This is a theme in Gemma Bovery in an explicit way, and in Clouds of Sils Maria (both films, both 2014) too.

And what Robin Williams in Louie and his subsequent suicide display tie in with this theme so very well and is one of these delicious happenstances in which Graham Greene (in The End of The Affair) & I both believe.

What it seems to be: a role can drive a person into carrying out the actions of the characters s/he played.  Consciously or not.

I went back to Wilde and re-read bits of his essay, The Decay of Lying.

It's fascinating to me how an actor can be affected by a role.   It makes so much sense that David Lynch is in Louie!  After all, what was Inland Empire?  How actors enter a character, and the characters live in the actors and take over their lives while they themselves live the characters' lives.  For work! 

It's probably not the case for all actors, far from it.  I do think it is the case for those actors who play characters whose lives have elements which connect, somehow, with their own "real" lives (Binoche, Dern, Williams, etc), which in the case of actors is a bizarre thing, given their "real" lives are made by the characters they play.   I think the best actors are those who have no real life LOL.

Juliette Binoche's character in Clouds of Sils Maria says, while rehearsing with her assistant (she plays an actress who has to play a part in a play): "it is too difficult for me to play this character...you think it is easy because you're reading it, but I am living it." 

Then, I think about actors who are all about:
 
"I go to Africa and adopt kids, I build houses for the ppl affected by Katrina, I join Kabbalah, I vote for Obama, I care about the little kids in El Salvador, I am a good person with many interests, I am against the death penalty, I am An Activist," etc etc blah.  It is not a good thing for actors to let us know about themselves at all.  They can do it, sure. They have "a right" to an opinion, no question.  They're citizens, like any other, no problem.  When they let us, the public, their spectators, know about their positions & personal commitments, they do themselves and their craft harm.

Because when they're in a role in a film, all those things which we, the audience, ought to focus on (the role, the character) is affected by the actor's "real life" (not real at all, on top of it! but put on for public consumption), making the role secondary, which defeats the whole purpose of art!  It becomes harder for us to focus on the character and for us to enter the world of fiction, in which The Truth in The Real has the potential to reveal itself to us.

I know nothing about the "real" lives of some of the actors I like best. I don't want to, either.  Yeah, OK, except for Brad Pitt.  But his life?   That don't impress me much.

So, Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying, which is about fiction and "real life" is one of the most powerful Socratic dialogues I ever read.  :


'(...)
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy "

CYRIL. My dear fellow!

VIVIAN. Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence. "He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the wellinformed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability."

(...)'

I beg to agree with Wilde on this.   He says "lying", provocatively...  of course he is talking about fiction.
Those things which are so crafted as to make Truth (and not the banality of facts) appear out of and within fiction are those things which end up making life imitate Art.

Prapps Williams had already been considering killing himself... "knew" that he'd kill himself before he did.  Then the role he played in Louie awakened in him the emotions and sustained state of mind that brought to his consciousness the desire to off himself, giving him the push to finally do it.

It is a vast and grave mistake one can make to dismiss art or "entertainment" as anything other than essential.  It is so precisely because it is useless in practical terms.  Anything that has a practical use is not art.  It can come to be art at some point, when its practical use proves to be inexistent.

While watching Gemma Bovery and Clouds of Sils Maria I immediately thought of Wilde's essay.  
 
I even commented with my aunt, with whom I speak daily, that I'll have to start to read synopses before I watch a non-action film.  

It is not always good for me to see a film with potential to get in my head/heart and confirm a  particular thought or emotion that is living inside me at the moment or period right before I watch a film, as that confirms and intensifies such thought/emotion.  

Contrast is better sometimes. Contrast is very important.  

Yes, sometimes it is good to indulge (in) one's emotions... a sad film when we're sad... a happy ending one when we're happy etc etc, because it can act as a mechanism of relief, to bring out those emotions we have buried in us and which need to be let out of the bottle where the fireworks are trapped.    Crying or being melancholic or nostalgic or laughing or identifying with  Beauty and Truth from something that took place in one's own life.   Film, music, or painting.  Or anything.  I get that, I finallly get that. It didn't used to be the case for me.  I used to cry from the beauty yes, ever since I was a fetus, but it used to have absonothing to do with my own emotions or life.  It used to be as if I was completely outside whatever was taking place in that art.  
 

Now it is different.  Now I watch things and whatever I see in it that has a direct connection with my own life,  I see at once.   Is why action films are never going to make me cry! haha  (Although! Coriolanus directed by Ralph Fiennes DID! Because of the language.   That's where the Beauty is!  There stood Shakespeare, he could do no other!)

Coriolanus, 2011, Ralph Fiennes

 

Generally, I don't like this development v much, the one that makes me see myself on the screen or in a book. It ends up having the effect of making me look at my own life and self instead of the thing I am watching, paradoxically... while at the same time, I recognize Truth in the thing, because it had such an effect on an actually existing person, to put it in Marxian terms LOL. 

It is seldom good to turn inward entirely and for too long.   We are shaped by the world, and we shape it too.  Plasticity involves a triple movement at least.  We're enriched by what's outside, we enrich it, which, in turn, enriches us. And 'sho on, and sho fort', the way Slavoj Zizek would say.

The massive advantage Music has over Literature, Art, Film, and Series, is its lack of inherent meaning.   There is no way I'll think of my own life while listening to Schumann's 2nd symphony, which I listened to today, conducted by Szell, or Rachmaninov's 1st piano concerto played by Sviatoslav Richter and conducted by Sanderling.... omG they are gorgeous.   
Though I can't read them like I do a book, I can hear them.  And feel them.  That is the most efficient & direct language that exists.

The Rich Poor

I come here with a precise idea:      The Ppl, The Poor, & The Wealthy. 

How do they articulate? What is "The People"? What is "The Poor"?   We all know what "The Wealthy" is, in this context, I think.

I had been reading Orwell's diary and, in it, he says many things which most might be surprised to learn that he thought. I'm not surprised. 

I was thinking of poverty and "the poor", about how perhaps the one thing which distinguishes "The Poor" from everyone else is how they receive language, more than anything else. Vocabulary words and syntactical constructions.  Orwell discusses this in a very short way, reporting something his wife said about how ppl hear elaborate 'upper English' in gov't and galvanizing speeches, where most of the words are perfectly unknown to most ppl.  This stayed in my memory and it won't leave.

Also, it is pretty clear to me, more than ever, that the only ppl who feel patriotic tend to be of a lower socio-economiClass.  The rich usually only use the idea of patriotism (when it is to their advantage) but they themselves don't seem to experience the sentiment of pride in one's country (in sport or elsewhere).   Their country is the country of privilege which they must keep at any price, be it against their own compatriots & at the expense of sovereignty.   

Whoever is ruling, the rich be on that side, if the ruler doesn't challenge their privileges.  Off soil, disconnected from any land and any culture now, from history and the people who made it, from Language, from even Art; from cuisine, traditions, customs, and values.  The Rich are International-ized.  They're mobile in a way no one else is, in a way no other class has ever been before, except perhaps when it comes to being buried when dead.   

Yes: there is still something in common among the dead.  

The Poor are the ppl who make and defend a country, a nation even more so, in the end.   They're the ones who not only believe but also embody the nation when the time comes.   No draft-dodging, no favour-calling there.  

Then:

They keep the language fresh, styles renovated, in most fields; businesses flowing, customs alive.
They are, at the same time, manipulated by patriotic rhetoric when it comes from the rulers, as well as the substance which sustains the very reality of a nation, day-to-day.
They endure the bad decisions made by the patricians, which "usually always" lead to war which get The Poor themselves killed first, on either, on any, side, and when the plans made by The Wise Rulers fail, as they often do (depending on whose perspective we're looking from...), The Poor are there to pick up the pieces of the country and rebuild it.  This is the perennity of a nation.  No matter which one it is.

Yes, in this sense, only The Poor make The People.   

Of course that in a more general, daily, way, this is not true.  This truth only appears when a country is in danger.  Then The Poor leave their individual lives, dropping everything - wife, kids, job, social life, aspirations, hobbies - and go save the nation from the hands of (usually) foreign power (they're not so good at saving it from the hands of domestic tyrants, oddly).

George Orwell is powerful because, among other reasons, he did not start out as The Poor, but lived down his aristocretinousness into poverty.   His gentility didn't prevail in his mind, he saw through the aristocretins' amoral and stateless self-interest.  The Good Ol' Boys' club.  It doesn't matter what form the gov't takes so long as the aristocracy can continue to play cricket in white on Sundays drinking tea & eating crustless cucumber sandwiches.  Or eating oatmeal in a State office while the world crumbles.  The Aristocretinous will not see a major change in their lives.







And if they were still the moral and aesthetic landmark they once were! Oh, then things wouldn't be nearly so bad.  Gone are the days when rulers put their own noble asses on the line, before ANY soldier!  OH, gone, terribly gone, are the days when real princes were first in battle.

Now, then, the contempt the rich have for the poor comes from looking in the mirror and seeing total vampirical uselessness.  Their own parasitical, cultureless, redundancy. 

Yet I am aware that

  

Faith in Science

When it comes to the Ben Stein documentary Expelled, what is of interest to me is precisely this:  The signs that some scientists are reproducing the model the Church once held and monopolized in society and public discourse.    If it deviates from the dogma, it is not allowed.    If I don't accept this from the Church, and I don't, why would I, indeed, why should I, accept it from scientists?   Not to mention the fact their knowledge is specialized.  Most of them have little to no experience with thought outside the scientific method and the discourse which ensues.

That is a large area they know little about.

There are many many things of human interest, areas of human endeavour & study, where science doesn't enter.   Not because of some deep sinister motive; it is simply a question of it not being the right tool to make certain intellectual pieces of furniture.   

The same way I would not think a butcher knife ought to be included in my manicurist kit, is the way I think science is not the right tool to deal with things which are obviously not of a physical nature, such as what constitutes the self, personhood, politics, the place the human being needs to have in a discourse that has political ramifications, and so on and so forth.   

Philosophy is not good if we're trying to prevent my being run over by a car in front of the pharmacy.  Religion won't help me if the questions I have involve figuring out what'll happen if I have a kidney stone.  Medicine won't solve my culinary incompetence, etc.

It seems to me that whatever it is that makes We the People come up with systems, groups, academies, religions, etc, and then purge those who don't conform to the criteria set out by the "in group" has been left intact without proper examination, WHILE we replaced God and "His" creation in "His" own image (the discourse & its implications, I mean, not the correctness or truth of the position that we were created in God's image -- to a large extent that's sort of irrelevant) with no God and no special creation in nobody's image. 

The result in society is that Science (an impersonal faceless system controlled by no one in specific) took the place of God & Church and scientists are the new priests.  Sectarian ppl exist in ALL groups and cultures.  Sectarian thought, dispositon, and discourse, can exist within ANY theory, even the most benign ones.

I am not arguing against Science in any way.  I don't want to change its tenets or its method, I don't want to influence it in any way.  I haven't got the knowledge to back up any such pretension.   What I do want is for ppl to feel that even though they're ignorant of the science itself (most of us are) they can still ask questions and question scientists.  My criticism is of the way some scientists deal with science and its discoveries and possibilities, and the way they deal with non-scientists' discourse and questions.  Then, my criticism is also of how some scientists deal with other scientists.

Now, the scientists themselves, the dissidents, the heretics (right word in this context mos def!) who do have the knowledge and all the diplomas, degrees and experience with the method and its experiments within the academic and scientific worlds, are, a fortiori, even more "entitled" to present their views, indeed it is a requirement--especially when these differ from the majority. 

Like art, and perhaps even more so than art, Science is not and cannot be a democracy.   Just because 78523256 ppl say something, it doesn't make it true.   Just because 1 loner dude says something different, it doesn't make him correct either.  It doesn't make him wrong a priori, though.   Evidence has to be presented and reviewed, and the Maths and equations and what-not have to be analyzed by ppl who know what the hell theyre looking at, because I sure as hell don't.   Most of us don't.   We're like Medieval peasants in a cold CatholiChurch in Bavaria listening to the priest who could read & speak Latin and other languages and spent a whole life studying, and we couldn't even sign our own names.

There is a formula on my Higgs field mug from CERN:  I looked up what the formula means.  The formula is wrong, so "they tell me."   Further investigation revealed this is most likely deliberate.   Apparently, there is a joke in it.  It's an inside joke, because We the People wouldn't be able to tell!  Even that is specialized. And I like this!  This made me smile with strange admiration,and I can totally understand this kind of humour.

I have abso no problem with any scientific theory.   If I am rillly honest, it changes absonothing in my daily life.   Whether the Sun will or won't explode in 852031556 light yrs does not change the fact I want to find work. LOL  Whether God made me or not, whether I have in my core the most sophisticated code ever or not, whether that had to have arisen from intelligence, or not?   Rillly?  Will it change how I see myself and others?  Hardly.  I know I am intelligent and other ppl are too.   It is demonstrated to me daily.   Scientists themselves show me how intelligent our species is.   I have enormous admiration and respect for these ppl, like I have for composers (in a different way but not that different) and for ppl who can come up with a machine like the Large Hadron Collider and prove something as unlikely as the Higgs field (Higgs, who, incidentally, was ridiculed for his theory, too.)

I care because I love ideas and I want to understand them, even the ones I know to be beyond my intel-grasp, or beyond my knowledge, beyond what I can hope to study in one life.

I will not allow anyone or any institution, whether it has a Chief, a Head, a Boss or not, to tell me what I can and can't read, watch, listen to, or consider in my own mind.  I refuse to be intimidated by the possibility of ridicule from anyone - person or group.  

Whether it is Alain Soral, Zizek, Paglia, Stalin, Cardinal Ratzinger, WarrenBuffett, GlennBeck, SarahPalin, Jean-Luc Melenchon, IngmarBergman, or the Chocolate Rain dude?   Reading them, listening to them, finding out what they say, or even having their books or DVDs or whatever around does not mean I am in agreement with what any of what these ppl say.   Partially or wholly, in principle.  This procedure of "guilt by association" doesn't work on me.

Even if IntelligentDesign is distasteful to me (and it is, it is, and my God how could it not be after the negative campaign that was done for decades everywhere one looked into this topic??), I want to know more, because I have learned something from my study of the means of communication and the way language is used in them.   If everyone starts to bash something or someone?  I know I need to look at it more closely.  

To be frank though, this wasn't even the case with IntelligentDesign(TM). I didn't watch it as a noble contribution to freedom of conscience. LOL

I just happened across it one evening on YouTube, by random accident and not at all by intelligent design on my part, and saw Ben Stein and watched it because I like him, with increasing incredulity of both what was being said in the docu (some scientists are being silenced) and of what has been said of IntelDesign so far in the media (misrepresentation of the theory itself).

From what I could gather so far, IntelligentDesign theorists do not dispute most of the elements in NeoDarwinianEvolution even.  It is not true that scientists who study and put their money on IntelligentDesign challenge evolution.

What they are challenging, as far as I know & understand, is the NeoDarwinianEvolutionists' claim that the digital code present in DNA could have appeared without intelligence, and they argue that anytime a digital code appears anywhere it is evidence that randomness could not have produced it.   

Apparently (and again, I have no way of checking for myself), Mathematically, this claim for intelligence holds water-- according to the computations and calculations. 

Even Richard Dawkins, at the end of Expelled, told Ben Stein that he, Dawkins, thinks it could be that "at some earlier time in the Universe some civilization evolved... by some kind of Darwinian means to a v v high level of technology and designed a form of life that they ceded on to this planet" and that "you might find a signature of some kind of designer" in the detail of biochemistry & molecular biology.   His problem is that he says the designer or "higher intelligence" would have to have come from a Darwinian mechanism... that this possible designer can't have come from nowhere.

It's obvious, it doesn't take much arguing, that if the NeoDarwinians are corrrect, or if the IntellligentDesign theorists are correct, I am still here, and so are you, and 6 billion ppl, plus all the other species of fauna and flora.  They can both be true, with some details still to be clarified.

Also, and this is something that annoys me even more, there aren't only these two possibilities in science.   The way this is presented to We the People, this argument...   is the same way CocaCola and Pepsi are presented, or Republicans and Democrats.   Choose one.  There are only two options.  Well, it just isn't the case.   Science is not like that, neither is Art, nor is Philosophy, nor is Linguistics.  

All academic disciplines have many possible explanations going or being considered at any one point, like tactics in footie.  It isn't only "either offense or defense".   There's the midfield!  And even supposing we choose offense, within this choice there are many possible organizations of players.   A coach can go for 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 strikers.

WitcHunt and McCarthyism is very problematic in science, more so than in other disciplines, because scientific discourse and discoveries are the stuff at the heart of everything today, from political decisions to educational methods, and more often than not these discoveries are not given enough time to mature and be discussed properly; their ramifications aren't fully understood before theyre applied.    Everyone's on Facebook time, Twitter time, where one thing needs to follow another in quick succession, lest we get bored.

This is maybe the one good thing that an institution as old, as heavy, and as slow as the CatholiChurch left for us as a sort of last gasp of the hanged man.  "Take your time. The world is more complex than we might think, let alone understand in a week or a short screaming-match on an MSNBBCNN studio stool."

It was unthinkable at the time of Copernicus and Galileo that the consensus was wrong.   Yet the consensus was just that: wrong.  The Earth does revolve around the Sun.

This also goes for plate tectonics theory, the Big Bang theory (scientists didn't want to touch that one with a 10-million light year stick at the time Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest astronomer and physics professor, proposed it!), and others.  

Plus which, to illustrate how two "competing" theories can co-exist without causing the whole academic edifice to collapse, Einstein's theory of general relativity is incompatible with quantuMechanix, yet theyre both correct!   

It isn't as if physicists have it all sorted out.    They admit it in a few documentaries that there is a v big problem in physics, currently.   It doesn't mean they'll stop what they're doing... It means they'll carry on looking, carry on studying.   

But we're told we have to fully abandon one line of thought in favour of another, when they themselves know this is not how it works.  This could all be avoided if they had a Sassy Hegelian Friend.

The problem of these people's understanding and use of language is another one entirely which is, according to me, at the base of so many of the problems which follow, as is often the case whenever we're dealing with a mental/intellectual proposition.    

If we do not agree on what the terms mean ("oh, it's just semantics"), then we can't understand what the one and the other person are saying.  Let alone what the implications are.

Specialist terms are v tricky.   The fact that newspapers employ journalists who half-understand science and then write long, confused articles for public consumption over a casual cup of Sunday morning coffee is a v big problem, too.   

This is one of the main reasons why I think it is important, urgent, that ppl who study philosophy also study a scientific discipline. That a physicist at least read some of the big ideas in philosophy. Or at least learn some grammar, ffs.  Is that too much to ask?  Is that a crime? 

We need to remember to illuminate the obvious truth sometimes, which is in this case that entertaining one idea does not automatically mean we will throw all others in the intel-bin.   We're being treated as a monocellular organism unable to entertain one idea properly, let alone many at the same time.

What we currently have is a lot of scientists who think and say that philosophy can do nothing for science anymore, and sensu stricto, they're correct.   

What they miss is that philosophy can do something for scientists and their understanding of the world, of people, and human cultures, so that they aren't so quick to reduce a human person to some isolated cerebral activities in certain parts of the brain.  So they're not so quick in their conclusions (e.g. coming up with an experiment which demonstrates ppl move their wrist before theyre aware they decided to do so, and concluding this shows free will is "an illusion" and doesn't exist; finding serotonin or dopamine is released when someone is happy and concluding the hormone is what causes said state, instead of even entertaining the idea that it might be a consequence of said state, etc, etc.)   

They can open the human head and look for thought and feeling all they want.   That's been done in the Middle Ages and even well before that.   

They'd do better looking for human thought in books written by humans over millennia.   

Instead, they seem to see the human story as having begun with the scientific method (around the 18th century) and whatever happened before that is irrelevant and stupid.

That shows closed-mindedness not even religions have shown so far.   Because don't let's be fooled:  religionists, especially organized, are the first ones to read & consider things which pose a threat to the way they view the world, so they have enough time and material to come up with the arguments to oppose it.   

"Know your enemy."   I think that's a SunTzu half-quote... something about knowing yourself and your enemies guarantees victory, but not knowing either will inevitably lead to peril.

The sad thing is these ppl don't know what they don't know.  They're sincere in their position that they can learn nothing valuable from a non-scientific discipline.

They know a lot about a certain number of things, and nothing about many things, but they're not aware of what it is these many things are because theyre dismissing a great number of v valuable thinkers before MontyPython's philosopher footie match even begins.

According to me, also, sometimes this smacks of fear of losing one's tiny kingdom -- i.e. position in academia.    

In Expelled, Ben Stein interviewed many scientists who, for fear of losing their grants and for fear of ridicule and professional ruin, accepted to be interviewed only on condition their faces not be shown and their identities be kept secret.

Is this what the scientific "journey" has led to?   Weren't we supposed to be more intellectually free once we got rid of the grip religion has on our societies, on our lives?

Weren't machines supposed to make more free time for us, too?

The beauty of this of course is that the antidote is inside the system.   

Peer-review is a requirement.  How much longer will it be overlooked and tolerated that dissence is being shunned and some scientists are being prevented from publishing their papers in scientific journals?  

How much longer will we be satisfied, as ppls of good will, with having the same story be told to us as if it were new?   WWII style brain stuffing with science?   Another good thing is young scientists only make a mark if they either discover a new thing or if they successfully challenge a theory comfortably in place.  

I keep the faith.