Psychological Epigrams (weiter erweitert)

From random reading, things worth noting -- things worth quoting.

(Plus some of them I made up myself.)

(0)

If analysis worked, the Japanese would long ago have adapted it, and flooded the market …

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 205

(1)

The self-betrayal of another  is sucked in through all our pores.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

(2)

In localities where people belch at meals,

it is unwise to ask after the womenfolk;

and in localities where people are asking after the womenfolk,

it is unwise to belch at meals.

-- Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964)

(3)

Fat people  are more inclined to eat their object  than to bite it.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

To appreciate the epigrammatic force of this,  you need to know that, in psychoanalytic parlance, “object” refers, not to an object,   but to a human being.  -- The basic idea behind the epigram, is that of Caesar:  “Let me have men about me that are fat / bald-headed men, such as sleep o’ nights …”

(4)

The dream is not prophetic of ill  but is ill itself.  It is bad to dream certain things.

-- Jonathan Towers, characterizing shamanism; in Io viii (1971)

(5) Re joining the “Magic Mountain” sanatarium for consumptives, Hans Castorp (etwa the naïf of the novel) observes:

Manche gewöhnen sich nie, sagte mein Vetter mir gleich, als ich ankam.  Aber man gewöhnt sich daran, daß man sich nicht gewöhnt.

-- Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)

 (6)

The quicker  second childhood kicks in,

the happier U will B.

-- Bozo the Button Buster

(7)

Prostitution ist ja eine Angelegentheit,  bei der

es einen grossen Unterschied macht,

ob man sie

von oben sieht ….

od-er    von ….

un-ten  betrachtet …

-- Robert Musil, Der Mann ohneEigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

(8)

Observe the curious working of history:  Archimedes’ death is familiar  because of Plutarch’s interest in Marcellus;  of Marcellus  it is generally remembered  only that  one of his soldiers  murdered Archimedes.

--  James R. Newman, ed. World of Mathematics (1956), p. 179

(9)  Freud on Nacktheitsträume and the origins of Paradise:

Diese  der Scham entbehrende  Kindheit 

erscheint unserer Rückschau später  als ein Paradies,

und das Paradies  selbst

ist nichts anderes

als die Massenphantasie  von der Kindheit des einzelnen.

-- Die Traumdeutung (1899)

Actually, if that were true, you would expect an individual’s conception of Heaven to correlate strongly with his personal experiences in early childhood;  but seemingly they do not. 

I myself, for example, had quite a nice childhood, with storytime and Pooh-bear and my very own coonskin cap.   But my idea of the Afterlife  is purely that of doing math, with the insight of angels.

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

(10)  

Civilization consists in progressive renunciation;

 contrariwise  the superman.

-- Sigmund Freud, letter to Wm Fliess, 1897.

(Note:  Very early in his career;  don't call him on this.)

(11) Finally, one perhaps pardonable autocitation:

Every normal male must repeatedly withstand the beckonings of his testes, and is the better for having learned to do so.  Yet some of those who do not share his natural inclinations,  are proceeding extraordinarily far in punishing and repressing that inborn bloom, on the strength of which -- and without which, not -- civilization has managed to survive and thrive, through wind and wars and pestilence.

-- Dr J, Looking at Someone Up and Down

Der Mann ohne Eigenschatten (weitergespiegelt)

In a lengthy novel, more admired than read, Robert Musil depicts the initially spring-fevered, ultimately autumnal society of Vienna under the Hapsburgs;  the novel opens in 1913.   Its title is the haunting Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (literally, a man without qualities or personal characteristics) -- haunting despite or rather because of the nagging fact that, like some paradox in a dream, it makes no sense.  The concept is looming and formless -- something best unmentioned, or to scare the children with.

Yet now it occurs to us (and we seem to have been the first to notice this), that the familiar “plain-text” title with Eigenschaften   is a Deckname, a cryptonym for something … darker, yet lying phonetically  just beneath the surface.  And so exactly does this key  fit that lock, that the hidden mechanism  springs open at a touch:

~  Der Mann ohne Eigenschatten ~

So what would be this “Eigenschatten”?   

There is a technical meaning of the term, defined in Wikipedia:

Der Eigenschatten (auch: Körperschatten) eines Körpers  ist der Schatten, den der Körper auf sich selbst  durch sich selbst  verursacht. Dabei sind aber nur Schattenflächen gemeint, die auf den jeweiligen schattenverursachenden Flächen liegen. Anders formuliert ist der Eigenschatten die Menge der nicht beleuchteten also die der Lichtquelle abgewandten Seiten.

But that is not the meaning that concerns us here.  We allude rather to one who, for grievous diabolical reasons, can cast no shadow -- who has no shadow to call his own.

I'll just take this, now ... you won't feel a thing ...

The notion is familiar to students of German literature:  it is the central plot-device of Chamisso’s celebrated  novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, in which the hapless title character (a Pechvogel, and eponym of all later schlemiels and schlemazels) sells his shadow to the Devil -- a bad bargain.

(Cf. additionally  the opera by Richard Strauss, “Frau ohne Schatten” (1919).)

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin Adelbert von Chamisso, and I approved this message.)

~        

The eerie image of the man-without-a-shadow -- penumbrous dual of the shadow-without-a-man --  yet came to our author  innocently enough.   From Karl Ude’s introduction to the Goldmanns Gelbe Taschenbücher  edition of the work:

Die Erzählung ist entstanden aus einer zufälligen Frage an Chamisso, der sein Reisegepäck verloren hatte,  ob er nicht auch seinen Schatten verloren habe?

 

[Note:  I use the term “dual” here  in its mathematical sense;  yet the kindred notion of Doppelgänger  is here curiously appropriate.]

*

For another, exceedingly strange story,

and not unrelated in theme,

try this:

A Case of Possession

*

~

Orthoëpic interlude

So -- how do you pronounce the guy’s name -- Chamisso?

The man was French in origin;  and the worthy Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary, to which I myself, as editor, contributed not a few pronunciations (though not this one), gives -- for its pronunciation in English -- a value of orthographic “ch” which derives from French (here I translate into “newspaper-style” transcription):  sha-MISS-oh.   But the name is quite odd, for French or for German;  I do not know how his drinking-buddies called him.

An idiotic stab at the pronunciation is offered here for internauts:

http://www.pronouncehow.com/english/chamisso_pronunciation

Ignore it.

 

~

To resume.  

The man was, as we say, French, of noble origin (whence the “von”) and had to flee the overexuberant antics of the French revolution.  He spent the rest of his life dedicated to German life and letters.   With what results, we mention here.

And yes, I am aware, there is a parallel, between his Lebensbahn and mine -- ich, der ich Fremdling und Flüchtling bin,  nun jetzt in Herbstesalter,  in deutschem Kulturgut  fummelnd…

Yet there is a more deep-cutting parallel:  and this, between Chamisso and Schlemihl.   For Chamisso himself was a Mann ohne Eigenschatten -- living in dreadful exile, his roots quite sliced, condemned to stammer in an alien tongue.

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

[Update 6 Aug 2013]  An interesting article by Costica Bradatan  explores the writerly bilingual dilemma here:

In her exploration of the Catholic religion, “Letter to a Priest,” written the year before her death in 1943, Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.” The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who was one such writer, talks of the change of language as a catastrophic event in any author’s biography

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/born-again-in-a-second-language/?src=rechp

~

To recur to the thorny subject of the Eigenschatten.

The poet and mystic Christian Morgenstern  has discoursed in rhyme  upon this matter:

Das Lied vom blonden Korken

Ein blonder Korke spiegelt sich

in einem Lacktablett –

allein er säh’ sich dennoch nich,

selbst wenn er Augen hätt’!

Das macht, dieweil er senkrecht steigt

zu seinem Spiegelbild!

Wenn man ihn freilich seitwärts neigt,

zerfällt, was oben gilt.

O Mensch, gesetzt, du spiegelst dich

im, sagen wir, – im All!

Und senkrecht! – wärest du dann nich

ganz in demselben Fall?

This we have managed, by a heroic feat of compression, to reproduce, for a world-wide anglophone audience, the original dozen lines by a mere six:  thus doing our ecological bit to stave off the impending Global Pixel Shortage (“Peak Pixel”):

A cork upon a mirror stood;

though had he eyes, ‘twould do no good,

because he stands on self upright,

his mirror image -- out of sight.

E’en we! beamed forth  beyond the sky

see not ourselves  with inward eye.

(This miracle of minimalism we achieved by means of Korf’s own invention,

described by Morgenstern  in “Die Brille”.)

Monostichon ohne Eigenschaften

~

~      ~

wie Leichen   früherer Gelüste

~      ~

~

[Found-poetry, from Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)]

WDJ Dec 2010 - Dec 2012: (dépôt de) bilan

Er hatte erwartet, sich auf einer Bühne  welterschütternder Abenteuer zu befinden,  dessen Held er sein werde,

und sah mit einemmal  einen betrunkenen jungen Mann  auf einem leeren weiten Platz  randalieren,

dem  nur  die Steine  antworteten …

-- Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)

“I am writing for only five people at present.”

-- Sigmund Freud, 1914, quoted in Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 177

 

In the two years that this blog has been in existence, the statistics have indicated a steady increase in audience.   These were important, both for general morale, and for indicated which essays evoked the most interest, thus pointing the way towards further development.

It now appears that the bulk of the reported pageviews  are bogus -- nuisance-bots.  I have been speaking to a mostly empty auditorium.

If I do occasionally post in the months to come, it will largely be simply to organize my thoughts (the hyperlink and Label features being quite useful in that regard), as well as for the benefit of any reader who might happen to stroll by.  But there is little point laboring to feed a hunger that isn’t there.

If, by chance, you do happen to feel peckish, there is a wealth of fare to sample.  One way in is via these topical indices:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/index

Or check out some of my books:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

There is also our sister site,
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/
which is being newly updated in response to a recent surge in sales of these vernacular-but-philosophical detective stories.

Valete, quirites.

~

[Update] According to the Blogger stats, WDJ has just passed the milestone of Fifty Thousand alltime pageviews.
Picture yourself giving a series of Chatauqua-style lectures, with a cumulative audience of fifty thousand.  -- Of course, we're talking about an audience  most of whom walk out after a minute and a half on the site.
Only, in any event, according to Google Analytics, the bulk of these hits are bogus to begin with.

New site slogan:

~~ The World of Dr Justice ~~

~~ Serving the ex-Soviet Web-bot community since 2011 ~~

[Update]  Example of a thematic index.  Here, the selected quotation gives a sense of the flavor of the essay from which it is drawn.

O Tempora O Mores

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/dont-blame-neuroscientists-for-this-one.html

The Duke University English Department has a lot to answer for, having been instrumental in the deconstructionist desecration of academia.  The latest object to plop out of that orifice  is reviewed in this morning’s New York Times. 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/maximalminimal.html

Warning !  The videos linked-to are rated NC-53 !!  No-one under the age of 53 or so should watch them !   And even these, only after making Confession…

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/parable-of-samaritain.html

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster …

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html

Tares planted in the Endarkenment (humorously known as the Enlightenment) have sprouted to weeds that choke the vacant lots where atheists briefly couple and depart -- unacquainted with Temptation, since  now  to desire  is incontinently  to take; and unable to commit adultery, being after all strangers to vows.

~

[Update 13 I 13]

Upon learning of the high percentage of Web-bot hits in the WDJ Blogger pageview stats, I had resolved to post less frequently to my (it now appears) little-read blog, and to read and think more deeply about lasting things, before penning anything, rather than reacting incontinently to the froth of the day’s headlines.  Yet the post-Modernist mindlessness of this morning’s NYTimes  requires a rejoinder -- the very stones cry out.

So now there is this :

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/la-nostalgie-de-la-boue.html

Viennese Street-scene, 1926

Der kleine Hans:  Kuck mal, Mutti, den Mann da!

Die Mutter:  Pfui!  Nicht mit dem Finger zeigen.

Der k. H:  Awe Mut-tii…. Der da, der hat ja halt keine Eigenschaften!

Die M:  Sch!  Das ist gar nicht artig von dir.

[So:  A Man Without Qualities.
--  Or is he ??? !!!
Secret details here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/memoires-de-la-conspiration-riemann.html ]

Weiteres zum Thema:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/brandenburg-parable.html

*

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weiterblättern möchten,

hier klicken:

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Entartung im Zauberberg

In Thomas Mann’s great novel, we see a microcosm of decaying European culture  on the eve of the Great War, depicted in an elite mountain-top sanatorium.   There a particular self-generating and self-coddling culture  grows as though in a petri dish.

And now the virus has descended zum Flachland:

Quand l'université diplôme les malades

Après Paris, l'université d'Aix-Marseille va créer une formation diplômante en santé pour les patients qui s'impliquent autour de leur maladie.

Les patients sont devenus des acteurs de santé à part entière. Fort de ce constat, le président de l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, le Pr Yvon Berland, a annoncé le 14 décembre, lors du 4ème colloque Médias & santé, la création à la rentrée 2013 d'une «Université des patients» ouverte exclusivement aux malades chroniques.

http://sante.lefigaro.fr/actualite/2012/12/28/19643-quand-luniversite-diplome-malades

Such are the honors of our post-Arrowsmith age,  where we celebrate as heroes (or more usually, heroines) not the physician, but the valetudinarian.  (The article is accompanied by a photograph of invalids in mortarboards.)

An American counterpart of such sensiblerie would be the cult of Henrietta Lacks, crossed with the para-academic “credit for life experience” movement.

The broader phenomenon is nicely analyzed by Pamela Haag, here:

http://theamericanscholar.org/death-by-treacle/

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

~

Superficially, the antics in Marseille and Paris might seem heart-warming, or, at worst, just the sort of goofy things people do, like dressing up dogs in little outfits, or electing a kitty-cat “King for a Day”.  (“For a day-y …?!%!#!”)  But like blood in the urine (an apt metonomy for this sort of glurge) it is pathognomonic of a deeper malaise.

To cull stray citations almost at random from current reading:

From a noted historian:

These days, my discipline and our culture  like to deny the historic importance of individuals.  … Ours is an age of denigration. … The denial of greatness traduces experience  and diminishes our collective lives.

-- Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (1999), p. 250-1

A caveat against a lax misreading:

 “Individuals” are indeed central to contemporary PC-thinking;  but these are essentially individuals ohne Eigenschaften, save such as they inherit automatically by virtue of their membership in some identity-group.   And crucially, these individuals are without historical importance since, across a broad socio-political spectrum, the trend of the Zeitgeist is the denial of history.

Likewise  someone might stick at “an age of denigration”.  There is also exaltation -- but of a self-undermining kind.  When the likes of Lady Di or Lindsay Lohan can become celebrities, it makes a mockery of any genuine achievement.

Within my lifetime, there arose in America, the practice of applying the word genius  not to rocket-scientists (or mad scientists -- our colonial relation to the essentially European notion of genius  has ever been rocky), but to, um, baseball-players, footballers, like that.   Those, that is, of a certain cast.  This -- along with the gleeful self-flagellating pouncing upon the entity bordering the Kaap die Goeie Hoop -- was part of the reparational self-abasement of the cowed and right-thinking, a peace offering toward those who, truth to tell, mostly just wanted jobs.  It seemed a quintessentially late-American moment.  Yet, what was my surprise, upon encountering this passage, in chapter 13 of the first book of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930), referring to Austria in the years immediately following the Great War:

Es hatte damals schon die Zeit begonnen, wo man von Genies des Fußballrasens  oder des Boxrings  zu sprechen  anhub.

Nothing new under the sun!

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

Related posts:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/dont-blame-neuroscientists-for-this-one.html

 

Eigenschaften ohne Männer

I am at present engaged in gnawing away at a novel that everyone praises but few actually read, at least not all the way through.  It is Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (vol. I: 1930; vol. II: 1932) by Robert Musil, better known to  algolagniacs  as the author of Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906).   It’s the sort of book that you (and by “you” I mean, that tiny segment of humanity that is the sole intended audience of this blog) -- that you always mean to read, it’s on your list, along with A la recherche du temps perdu and other hefty, worthy tomes, but you keep putting it off, and putting it off;  until one day  there comes a knuckly knock on the door, and there he stands, The Reaper, with his hollow skull and even hollower grin;  and your jaw drops and you stammer “B-but - but - but … I haven’t yet had time to read Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften !  Just give me another year!”

Then slowly, slowly, Death shakes his head:  “I haven’t yet got around to it either;  and I have all the time in the world -- this world and the next.”

The enigmatic title of this novel (“The Man Without Qualities”/”L’Homme sans propriétés”) is part of its media appeal:  though in truth, it would seem a more promising premise for a sketch.   To labor through over a thousand dense pages concerning an individual who lacks … qualities (characteristics, traits), recalls the Monty Python skit about the “Invisible Man” (“O….ver…. heeerrrrrre, … Dave …..”)

It is one of the few major novels whose protagonist is presented as being a mathematician.    Now, mathematicians are (if you please) god-like beings;  yet with very few exceptions (Galois,  Erdös ..) they do not lead colorful lives.  The man who settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, for instance, Andrew Wiles, is … um …. ahh… actually, I cannot think of a predicate -- he just is.   As a group, they are less given to florid personalities than, say, theoretical physicists:  one labors in vain to recall a figure so publically obstreperous as Murray Gell-Mann or Wolfgang “What Professor Einstein says is not so stupid” Pauli.   (Well okay, Grothendieck;  but he is extra-terrestrial.)  You might say:   A mathematician swims so deeply in the realm of ideas (qualities of transcendent reality) that he has no time for foibles of his own.

And this particular médaille has an appropriate revers -- its mathematical dual, we might  posit.  For:  Mathematical properties might well be described as Eigenschaften ohne Männer, since  in their essence  they are independent of whatever species happens to perceive them (or whether they are perceived at all, here below).  

Nay more:  Though a Platonist, I readily concede that mathematical “objects” could be described as dingsda ohne Eigenschaften, since individually they have neither heft nor taste, but only patterns linking them:  the patterns are primary, the ‘objects’ are but nodes.

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

[Notice to obligate anglophones]

Obligate anglophones, like obligate anaerobes, are severely stenotopic.  Nevertheless, we at the World of Dr Justice  have a heart  as big as all outdoors, and solicitously cater to one and all, however severe their disability;  and accordingly bring you the good news  that Musil's massive work  has been expertly re-translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (available from Knopf  for the low-low price of sixty dollars).    Some German writers, like Christian Morgenstern or Karl Kraus, are halt unübersetzbar; but Musil manages to fall within the subtle toils of this fine translation-team.

[Even so, a stab at translating Morgenstern  here.]

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

(Update 12 III 14) Listening to a bit of “Fresh Air” re the movie “Grand Budapest Hotel”, sent me back to reading that other MittelEuropa-phile work by an American, Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project.  Slowly taking in each sentence.  The work has been superbly translated, and is very dense -- though its depth does not match its density.  And I’ll have to revise that halt unübersetzbar:  Franzen and his German collaborators have done a splendid job. More here.

~

Consult as well:  der Bube ohne Eigenschaften


.

Dollhouse

".... aufreizend leblos ..."

--  Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)

Someday, I may have something substantive  to say about this.

In the meantime...

Françoise Hardy / Non, ce n'est pas un rêve
[ok, the Blue Meanies have zero'd that one;  try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aazFGKz_b1o

(and, with different visuals):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aazFGKz_b1o

And this, from Polnareff at his best:

La poupée qui fait non 

Plus (more fetishism than satire -- it just gets weirder and weirder -- along with the unplaceable accents):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUFOzvVrqEg&feature=related
(A very creditable cover.  Giveaway:  "vraiment joli" statt "tellement joli" -- a retrogression syntactically, in terms of "distanct dependencies.
BTW ...  all very fun but ... some guys have willingly gone to prison,
for a very long time,
in pursuit of such visions ...) 

Cf. 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/la-culture-francaise-atteint-son-comble.html

Sleeping Beauty

(No! No!  Not the one for kids !!)

Omigosh, even weirder ...

Bebe Lilly "Mes betises"

[Update Jan 2016:   Okay, the Illuminati managed to zero that one.
But the international Riemann Conspiracy  retorted with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUZYqWd5qNU
Warning:  In certain countries,  you could be imprisoned  even for watching this. ]

Bébé Lilly - La Jungle Des Animaux

Are we *all* living in the Dollhouse ???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwRrXjWgkaY

["Wild Thing", the Troggs; non-album]
[Update Jan 2016:   Dang.  The Illuminati have trashed this one as well.
OK -- here's a replacement.   Not very good, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWcw6GEPBkY
This one's better, and very Retro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEOM0Lw-TFk]

"Dollhouse" plus "Persona":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtj3SHIikQ

("Il y a deux filles en moi")

The Japanese are the world champions of doll-fetishism.

E.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94i1qRMUFM&feature=related
[update Jan 2016:  zeroed by the speech-police'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52WdLVhXM2E&feature=relmfu

(And if this turns you on ... well... don't tell anyone ... ... ...
[Update Jan 2016:   O! O!  O!])

Nipponese Robobaby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjwXjqSuBZw&feature=plcp
(Quite sick.)

*

For a cool dude

and a hot dame,

check this out:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

~     ~      ~

Attempting to make sense of any of this, I stoop to copying an e-mail  I sent out a while ago
to some friends, concerning the then-running (and soon-canceled) television series, conceived and directed by Josh Whedon, and starring many of the actors from his previous cinematic and televisual ventures.

(not proof-read; not vetted;  probably nonsense;  but what can you do ...)

In Defense of the Dollhouse

OK – admittedly – so far – as storytelling, as television -- it isn’t actually any good.  But as analysts, we abstract from that, and tease out the reality behind it.

*

This series, I would suggest, is not like most, which is simply a series of car-chases or what have you; or like a basketball game, a sequence of near-identical mini-climaxes, signifying nothing.  Indeed, the metaphor of the memory-wipe  would more appropriately apply to the audiences of the latter, than to Echo.  The episodes never build; you are always back to square one.
Dollhouse is – so we speculate – more like a chess game.   It begins in a leisurely fashion;  this is positional play.  Pawn to King’s Four; reply in kind; Knight to King’s Bishop three – who can get excited about that?  But it needs to be done.  And later, in a seemingly innocent move…

It is not given to many, to create a ‘verse; the Buffyverse, in the present instance.  And having seen where such things may lead, presumably Whedon et cie. have blocked this thing out from the start.  Michaelangelo did that, for the Sistine Chapel; he didn’t bother to get the colors just right  until much later.  What you’ve seen so far is basically just people bringing on the scenery, while the actors foozle around like a diva doing scales before the opera, or an orchestra warming up.  Then some fool captured that on film, and…

*

Consider the following, recently read:

George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966), p. 197f:

From the standpoint of … this book, there is no more important phenomenon than the organization of insect colonies. …The most remarkable development is the permanent sterility of a large proportion of the offspring (workers and other servile castes)… Nevertheless, they [the genes that, 99 times out of a hundred, would make the carrier a sterile servile] would continue to be favorably selected if they increased the success of the reproductives by more than a hundredfold.”

This passage, with its talk of “the reproductives”,  was brought to mind by a linguistic trick of Dollhouse: the nominalization and pluralization of adjectivals: “actives”.  Both venues gaze upon living creatures  clinically, as acting out an assigned role, as playing a part.  Yet neither smugly assumes the coherence of what is beheld; each is amazed by what it sees.  Each says:  What I see here, calls into question  my basic principles.

*

The Dollhouse premise is, on the face of it, so creepy,  that one well could wonder  how the show could be noticed, by anything other than invective, by anyone calling himself a Christian.   But in fact there is an assumption at the core of the series, which is precisely Christian, and without which the whole thing would fall apart:  namely, the absolute and inviolate integrity of the human individual, an inner identity so strong that it can survive these repeated and violent “personality wipes” – a Something which we may style:  a soul.  On Materialist assumptions, the series would be mere gibberish, with no interesting story to tell.

One is reminded of that famous sequence in the film, American Beauty: consisting simply of a lone plastic bag, against a nondescript background, blowing about, and about, and about….
[You can behold the spectacle  here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDXjnW3nIWg  ]
It was quite memorable, and moving, to many people.  Why?  On Materialist assumptions, the episode was absurd, even degraded.   The actual effect was quite otherwise, because it reminded the viewer (unconsciously, in most cases) of his own – forgive me for saying this, it is not mentioned in polite company, but logic impels – his own: 
immortal soul – alive and aloft, and wafted about, though incarnated into so vile a receptacle as the contemporary secular plastic-wrapt American Consumer.  --   What – this is a stretch?   You have an alternate explanation?

Okay! – look! – so it sucks! – so what? --- A baby sucks.  Give it time.

(Somewhere in Platonic heaven, there floats a fine series, called “The Dollhouse”.  It just hasn’t been incarnated yet.)

The enigma of a woman’s heart,

finally espied  by a Private Eye,

for less than the price  of a Valentine …

This Rose

[Kindle]  [Nook]

=================

(And then this -- a random e-mail ... to which no-one responded.... so probably it sux .... but What can U do ???)
--
Post-Mortem on “The Dollhouse”

In his short story /sotie  “Ministers of Grace”, written during the Edwardian era, Saki posits a lad who can replace the selves of quarrelsome Members of Parliament with angelic succedanea (the original personalities being displaced into the bodies of handy animals – a Gadarene swan, for example).   At first the improvement is marked, but then things go awry, and by the end, we have the old moral “Watch what you wish for”.

Modulo a century of social and technological development, we have seen a similar idea embodied in the television series “The Dollhouse”, whose own swan song was sung last Friday.

In a post that marked the beginning of the series, I remarked that, if the show was to turn out  any good at all, it would have to cultivate the positive Faustian thrust of the premise, rather than dwelling on the aspect of tawdriness or victimization which was most remarked upon among the generality of viewers.   And indeed it partly took this path.  In the final episode, one of the dolls, released from her contract, actually thanks the Dollhouse as she leaves, saying that time has flown by;  Echo – with Buffy-like bravado -- remarks that she now has 38 brains; and Alpha actually alludes to Nietzsche and the Uebermensch.   But alas – he is rather an Untermensch; for  in a motif reminiscent of Frankenstein (in which the doctor, meddling in the Creator’s role, inadvertently implants a criminal brain into his golem), before becoming a doll, Alpha had been a homicidal sociopath; and, well, breeding will tell.  With that, the plot takes a disastrous turn.  Instead of Spartacus, we get just one more d***ed serial killer.   That is not an interesting kind of evil.  Topher is an interesting kind of evil. 
-->

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~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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*

The headlines, and the upswell of history, underlying the conception as it originally appeared, is that of artificial enhancement: cosmetic, athletic, psychological, and now intellectual.   (These are, by and large, at presstime, respectively:  legal; illegal; legal with prescription; in a gray area, involving off-label uses of prescription drugs.) The serious journal Nature recently had an editorial  somewhat nervously defending the growing fad of cognition-boosters among the younger intelligentsia – to placate the wrath of the Boeotians, the editors suggested that the less gifted will benefit relatively more, thus leveling the playing field rather than widening the gap between the intellectual haves and have-nots.  (Don’t believe a word of it.  The typewriter did away with the advantage of people with good penmanship, and computers made obsolete the skills of those who can do sums in their heads; but both enlarged the field of feasible achievement, and the gap widens apace.)

But “The Dollhouse” eventually went off in a slightly different and unexpected direction: emphasizing, not the simple bionic beefing-up  enjoyed by both vampires and slayers in the Buffyverse, but rather the presence, in a single frame, of numerous personalities-cum-capabilities – at first merely sequentially, but then increasingly co-present, and raising the crucial necessity of Integration.   This latter theme received its classic cinematic treatment in “The Three Faces of Eve”, a really bracing and anagogic work.   It seems a much more arcane topic than mere Artificial Enhancement (anyone who has ever drunk a cup of coffee has experienced that), but perhaps there are some everyday analogs.  Indeed, as I get closer to the end of a life of ceaseless study, and as the old brain increasingly feels crowded, I am faced with the problem of somehow integrating a number of different imagos that I have successively been, or at least retaining random access to them.  Each, at one time, defined who I was; and each is largely incompatible with each.  There is the Poet; the Activist; the Chem major; the Math major… and lest the latter seem like close kindred, they are more like antipodes:  the chemist dicks around with particular bits of physical equipment, and deals with actual objects, and numbers with decimal points; the mathematician considers the entire physical universe to be at best a smudge upon the lens.  I actually spent last weekend re-reading my freshman chemistry text; it’s like The Past Recaptured.

Now, Alpha is hopelessly unintegrated; he’s not a polymath, he’s more like the octomom.   But if Echo ever manages to get those thirty-eight brains truly working in harness, she might have a shot at the Riemann Hypothesis.  Now there’s a good idea for a TV show!
 

*

An entertaining blog  floats the idea that perhaps everyone in the dollhouse is a doll:

http://io9.com/5246901/why-everyone-in-dollhouse-may-be-a-doll

That conception reaches back as far as the Myth of Plato’s Cave (or in its modern incarnation, the Brains in a Vat).  There is a widespread modern nervousness about that theme: an anxiety that can only increase, with the spread of teleconferencing, telecommuting, crunching numbers rather than growing corn, and the metastasis of the virtual online world.  In fact, the only known defense against being imprinted by Them, is to line your beanie with aluminum foil.

~

Dollhouse is an original, fitfully interesting variation on the old theme of metempsychosis, which has been with us since the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare (mocking their doctrine), and now again in the latest thriller from Stephen King:  End of Watch (2016).   Both that novel and Dollhouse present the soul’s transmigration as occurring aided by software.

 

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Another e-mail.  
At this point, I'm not even editing.
After all, I might   die  tonight ...]

Further Adventures of Balloon Boy

There’s a Levantine proverb:  Taali` yaakil, naazil yaakil.  Literally “It eats going up, and it eats going down.”  The literal reference is to a handsaw; metaphorically, it refers to extravagance.

Such, now, is our media.  First they pump up ratings with the latest pseudo-event; then they pump them up again on the rebound, “debunking” it.

            Omigosh, it’s Joe the Plumber, speaking truth to power!

            Omigosh, he isn’t a plumber!  Omigosh, his name isn’t Joe!

            Olookoverthere – a balloon!

Whereas, an alert spectator could do some pre-debunking.  Take again the Acorn case.  A video appears on YouTube; Seeing is Believing; Case Closed.

Yet little logic is being applied – not even everyday emotional logic.  Thus, imagine that you yourself are in your office, and a couple of creepy-looking strangers bust in out of nowhere and offer you their criminal proposition.  What do you do?

Probably it’s just Borat in one of his disguises; but possibly this seedy pair  really are involved in what they say they are: setting up a brothel – or maybe a Dollhouse – in downtown D.C. staffed by underage white slaves kidnapped from Latin America…in which case they are tied in with some very scary Mexican or Russian mobsters, and it would be a poor career move at this point, in terms of life expectancy, to say: “Scoundrels!  I’ll have the law on you!”

(And as Keith’s reply to my earlier post informs us, something like the above did actually happen in one instance.)

                                                *

Time was, Hollywood would cook up these fantasies; they would stay safely off to the side.  The problem is when reality itself starts looking like Reality TV.  Thus, Sarah Palin was Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington.  Fair enough; a female remake of an old favorite.  Only, all it would have taken would be one (possibly manufactured and imaginary) well-timed scandal in the Democratic campaign, and a later heart attack for McCain, and Moose Lady would literally have been President.

            Joe the Plumber Speaks Truth to Power!

            Milfy Mooselady Speaks Truth to Power!

            Tragic Victimgirl is tragically victimized!

            Ooh…ooh… balloons!!!

In earlier generations, the quality press set tacit limits on what they would print – discreet, even to a fault.  Things that now would be milked for all they were worth, were not even mentioned: FDR’s shriveled legs; JFK’s amatory escapades.  If you wanted “I Cut Out Her Heart and Stomped on It”, you had to go to the tabloids.

Later we developed a feeder system: the National Enquirer or the Drudge Report  would pick up a story  -- in the important cases, a true story – that the quality press normally wouldn’t touch; this was fanned into a frenzy among the masses, until that frenzy itself became news, and it seeped into everything.  So we wound up with All O.J.  All the Time; All Monica  All the Time;  All BalloonBoy  All – woops, on to the Next Big Thing.

That would be problematic enough (though not without its redeeming features; arguably, the public has a right to know if their President is consorting with Mob molls).  It becomes more worrisome when the residually responsible media at the top of the chain – the CBS of Cronkite days, the Washington Post – disappear, or shrivel, or are decreasingly heeded.

                                                *

Oh, God, here’s another one.  This just in.  Pour yourself a stiff drink, then click on it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-movie17-2009oct17,0,4123180.story
==========
(... beggars description:)

Balloon Boy Nabbbed in Trafficking Scam

To the surprise of no-one, Balloon Boy has been unmasked as the mastermind behind  an Acorn/Illuminati joint venture, bankrolled by Bill Gates and Donald Trump, to smuggle  pre-teen Latinas into the U.S. via  high-altitude balloons, thus outwitting border security.   The girls were destined for a notorious D.C. dollhouse, located twenty-seven stories beneath the Capitol building.  INS has raided the location and seized its client list, reputed to contain most Congressmen and all Senators.

The LA Dollhouse is still open for business, however.

Place your orders  here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/asia/19hostage.html?hpw

(AL-AMAR? AL-ASLAMI?)

===
A-and ... (tragically  too late  to matter ...)
:

 It you didn't watch "Dollhouse" on Friday,  I don't blame you a bit.
The show had been going nowhere, or going unpleasant places, for some time.
But all of a sudden....

Here is an excellent assessment of what happened:

http://blogs.pioneerlocal.com/entertainment/2009/12/dollhouse_review_stop_loss_att.html

 ========