Descent

From Gravity's Rainbow, pages 775-776 (2006 Viking Edition):

                                              DESCENT

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The last image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of a screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see... it is now just a closeup of a face, a face we all know—

And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t. 

There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs... or, if song must find you, here's one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William Slothrop, centuries forgotten and out of print, sung to a simple and pleasant air of the period. Follow the bouncing ball:

                       There is a Hand to turn the time,

                       Thought thy Glass today be run,

                       Till the Light that hath brought the towers low

                       Find the last poor Pret'rite one...

                       Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,

                       All through our crippl'd Zone,

                      With a face on ev'ry mountainside,

                      And a Soul in ev'ry stone....

Now everybody—

I'm not even going to try to analyze everything that's going on here. I'm not even close to capable of doing so, and even if I were (big if), I'm not sure that anyone could. But there is an image here that speaks to my life-as-it-is these days, while I sit on Beinecke Plaza back on campus. The last delta-t.


A friend recently told me that she thought of that concept as a picture of the world collapsing -- not in the conventional sense of the Rocket's explosion and consequent death of everyone in the theatre, but how that last moment, the last delta-t, is reality falling apart into physics. At that last moment, motion and time cease to matter. Form collapses. The only meaningful conception of everything is the presence of the tiny, imperceptible, currently-theoretical fundamental subatomic particles and the empty space that makes up the immensity around each of them. Before the rocket does anything, we become Nothingness. Our lives and our experiences crash and dissolve into mathematics.


But even so, we do not perceive that collapse. At the very last instant before the Rocket hits, the world still is, even if there's nothing we can do to alter that fate. However, I think that the world would look nothing like how we perceive it now. The knowledge of imminent death on the part of terminal patients long before their deaths seems to change them radically, I can only imagine that moment that all of us will at one point share, the last moment before death, does something infinitely more chaotic and infinitely more radical. What would I feel at that precise instant? What would I be thinking of? What would I see, and hear? How would my reality change, or expand, or break apart?


I can't answer those questions. I don't know if anyone can, or if we'll ever be able to. But it feels to me like at that very last delta-t, the minutiae of daily life and the accepted rules -- social, physical, and otherwise -- of reality cease to matter. All that matters is that final tingling of sensation, whatever that may be: from Pynchon's examples of companionship and sexual gratification, to those things that give us solace, or make us find and build meanings or reasons or rationalizations, or joy, or fear, or transcendence, or an inseparability and indistinguishably complete blending with that which we in our arrogance consider to be apart from us, or a sickening grotesqueness (as Pirate Prentice conceives of early in the book when he thinks of that last moment as a rocket hit him precisely on the head, as the tip pressed into his skull), or wholeness or emptiness, or the fullness of life bound wholly unto the fullness of death. Circularity.


That consideration has been important for me, as I try as one of my major intellectual projects to find a way to reconcile my life as a Literature major with a penchant for theory that exists under many labels, many of which are considered "postmodern", with a persistent respect, fascination, and love for science (thanks for the sentence construction, Leah Hauge at Whore of All the Earth). I can't bring myself to think that the two are irreconcilable, however vitriolic the differences and arguments betwixt may seem. There has to be a third way. And that's what the image, beautiful and pure and horrifying and whole, of the last delta-t is for me. It is that moment where subjectivity becomes most important, even in the most oppressive bounds of objective reality. The ultimate constriction of a scientifically-based reality, the calculable parabolic arc of a rocket shot into the sky approaching in its final descent, pulled faster and faster towards the end by a force or by the invariable underlying structure of spacetime in gravity's rainbow, releases us fully even as it fully restrains us, creating the space for a sensory experience liberated from every stricture and every rule. The subjective and the objective become one. 


I hope, with all my heart, that there's a way to do that. I hope I can find what that means before the last moment comes knocking. But until then, I'll be damned if I don't at least try -- because I have no other choice. Here I live, lost at the crossroads of literature, science, and (post)modernity.


Now everybody—

AHHHHHHHHHHT (Or, Why Modern Art is Important)

The other day, I read a blog post over at BlagHag (by Jen McCreight -- lovely blog, and I recommend reading some of the other stuff too) regarding modern art. What the post says is more-or-less a repetition of a really old criticism of modern / contemporary art, and the more broad l'avantgardisme -- that it really doesn't mean anything, or that the artists / art critics / random people are writing obtuse descriptions of pieces of art that don't relate to anything at all, or that the artist didn't really mean that. It's a really tempting argument to make, and Science knows I wasn't very good about understanding art for a very long time, so I understand the impulse. Nevertheless it's not a friendly criticism, and it's a criticism that sort of misses the point of avant-garde.

The argument rests on an unstated, but pernicious, assumption: that avant-garde work either doesn't qualify as "good art", or even "art" at all, and therefore when people treat it as such, their interpretations are meaningless tripe trying to say something profound about something that isn't profound at all. This assumption is strong, but it might be well-founded -- well, if that assumption wasn't exactly what avant-garde argues against in the first place. Let's think about this with a particular piece, this one referenced in the above-linked blog post.

Untitled (1976), Robert Morris 

The AIC describes this piece as "industrial felt", Jen used the word "oversized car mat" to describe it. My initial impressions were based somewhat on the car mat idea, but I think it holds nonetheless. In day-to-day existence, car mats are one of the least noticeable parts of a car, and are by function permanently underfoot (speaking from experience commuting on the 101 for my internship this summer, this is very true), and is therefore generally unconsidered as an object in an of itself, unless something goes wrong -- the material gives me allergies, or it gets stuck under the seat and gets a lump that bothers the position of my feet, or whatever (this conception I originally heard from my professor for Intro to Theory of Literature last semester, who made the same point, but with a bike -- you never notice the actual mechanics of the bike while you're riding it unless it starts to jam or breaks and you get thrown off). 

What Untitled is doing is a general subversion of that principle. It takes the idea of the car mat , removes it from its permanently trampled place in contemporary society, and puts it up on a wall in the middle of a museum with a title and description and space all its own to consider for its own sake, to be celebrated and contemplated. The mere fact that we're able to contemplate it at all means that the work, as far as I interpret it, succeeds. What this piece and other pieces of found art ask is what exactly we mean when we use the word "art". Does it have to be something that's beautiful? Well, we don't agree on what's beautiful, and our conceptions of beauty have this nasty habit of reinforcing the views and opinions of those that are dominant or in power in our culture. So, how about things that have "artistic merit"? This runs into the same problem as "beauty" (to the point where women back in the 18th and 19th centuries, in a number of noticeable cases, either published anonymously or published under male pen names so that their work would actually be considered). Well, how about anything that's put in a museum -- we can trust the artistically-minded curators to be careful about making sure some non-dominant culture's "good art" gets in, right? Well, this would be where found art comes in. It's in a museum, it has its own space, you're not supposed to touch it. If this doesn't qualify as art, how exactly can you frame your views of what is "good" and "bad" art, or even "art" at all, as anything but your own subjective criteria? It's a brilliant deconstructive practice. We value art museums as centers of worthy artistic expression, excluding all that fails to meet the standard, but that label is something we attach to it, not something intrinsic to art museums. The only option we have left is to realize that absolutely everything can be treated as art.

My own intellectual development in this arena has a lot to to with Roland Barthes' Mythologies (Amazon link), especially "Myth Today", the last chapter. Over the course of the book, Barthes does literary analyses of a bunch of different phenomena, from pro wrestling to detergent marketing to car design, and then in the last chapter, he gives a theoretical framework for all of it -- that mythology exists as an influence that serves to normalize certain cultural practices, such to maintain both the preexisting hierarchy of society and in the case of France when he wrote the book, colonialism and imperialism. From Barthes:

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason. If I read the Negro-saluting as symbol pure and simple of imperiality, I must renounce the reality of the picture, it discredits itself in my eyes when it becomes an instrument. Conversely, if I decipher the Negro's salute as an alibi of coloniality, I shatter the myth even more surely by the obviousness of its motivation. But for the myth-reader, the outcome is quite different: everything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept, as if the signifier gave a foundation to the signified: the myth exists from the precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess.

 The "good art" argument works pretty much the same way -- it's a historical contingency, that is, the artistic preferences of white Europeans, usually men, transmuting into a natural and immortal idea, here, beauty. So while the people who make the objection to modern art probably aren't doing this consciously, it's still reinforcing standards of artistic worth and beauty that are, in context, hegemonic. The way to fight this, again from Barthes, is to fight it with revolutionary, political language:

There is therefore one language which is not mythical, it is the language of man as a producer: wherever man speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image, wherever he links his language to the making of things, metalanguage is referred to a language-object, and myth is impossible. This is why revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical. Revolution is defined as a cathartic act meant to reveal the political load of the world: it makes the world; and its language, all of it, is functionally absorbed in this making. It is because it generates speech which is fully, that is to say initially and finally, political, and not, like myth, speech which is initially political and finally natural, that Revolution excludes myth. Just as bourgeois ex-nomination characterizes at once bourgeois ideology and myth itself, revolutionary denomination identifies revolution and the absence of myth. The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

 Of course this was a few years in advance of Derrida, deconstruction, and the Tel Quels, but it's a similar sort of idea -- we fight convention through subversion, or in this case by subverting our conceptions of "good art" with carefully-placed car mats and Brillo boxes.

I haven't done this topic nearly as much justice as it deserves, but it's at least part of a start, I hope. We need to get to a point socially where we can consider literature and art with room for more of a work(wo)manlike understanding and not just worry about the aesthetics. We could learn a lot.