I was just at Whole Foods getting some groceries. It’s been a week of middle distance gazing and a bit of crisis around who I am and what I am doing. I sometimes think 25% of art is this crisis, which is maybe more readily described as trying to understand the relationship between purpose and meaning.
I wandered the whole length of Whole Foods once without really taking in what I was supposed to be doing, which meant, like a typewriter, I had to fling the return back to the beginning and start my traverse all over again; the Whole Foods as blank white paper with the partially dressed LA glamorous hiding in the margins.
In moments like this the sights of the world can feel a bit like tennis balls bounced off a practice wall during overly hot summer days.
My current condition made me think a lot of a movie I had just watched, Another Round. The premise of the movie is that a group of friends decide they are going to spend the day partially drunk in an attempt to prove whether human beings are meant to operate with a constant, slight elevated BAC.
What was interesting about the movie is that the protagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen (who on recently hearing his name from a friend declared, “How’d you come up with THAT name?!?” as if it was fictional), comes to this experiment in a moment of unoriginality in his own life: his relationship and career are steady, but steady in that way that stagnant water in unkept parking garages is also steady; he is lonely and slightly used feeling: a penny abandoned on a highway, still currency but battered and with no sheen.
He is adrift.
The movie reveals the exuberance that drinking brings back into his life as well as the downfall that comes with the eventual excess. But neither the upswing or downswing is total. It is jittery and unfinished, bouncing between the good and bad without showing moral certainty; a bouncy ball down attic steps, but ending up always in the attic. What I loved about the movie is that it put a vice (alcohol) in relationship to the constrictions we create in our own life. The vessels that we hold ourselves — relationships, career, spirituality — can be filled with the infinite or can be filled with a poison that will sink us.
Much like a wine glass the containers of our lives can bring joy or destruction depending on how they are utilized and what practices we make around them. The movie made me think about how much we condemn vice while never looking at the more broad cultural constructs that lead us to them.
In a way, containers (ones of vice or culture) can be mechanisms to view the totality of something: something that tears us from our multitude to see only a single vision. “I believe in X so this means I am Y”. But instead an infinite can be seen in any container. Much like Henri Bergson or the like talk about a number being made of a unit of measure, where the number is this multiplicity as well as the object itself, the way we decide the units of our containers, change the density and countability of those containers. One hundred can be made of a hundred singles or one hundred can really be two hundred made of what we think of as halves.
Carl Jung said, “A decisive question for man is: is he related to something infinite or not?”.
I think in days like today, where a pandemic draws a box around my experience, I feel a certain dryness in the last years of my creative practice, and my friends (and wife) are cast at distances which now are harder to travel, it is easy to loose the ability to see the infinite. The imagination seems to be at a place where it actively discounts the parts of life that give it a multiplicity; or maybe fixates on what is missing. I think William Blake had something to say about this in relationship to his idea of Ulro.
I once dated a woman with a heavy french accent (a great tongue twister for a heavy french accent, “Terry Richardson lives in a wardrobe”) who wrote me a long email about the pain of living in a world that had, among other things, Nazis and social security numbers. I think she was maybe talking about boxes of different types; containers. And I still look to her with inspiration for the fearlessness that became her box, so tightly wrapped around her, as she flung conventions to the way side, pounding on the doors with those eye slit openings and used ammonia not to clean her studio but cook crack.
We need to be aware of our countable containers. We need to find ways to see their edges. And then step half the distance and half that and half that… and finally just see the infinite steps.
As I finish my second pass in Whole Foods, a woman in fashionable layers, with skin and thin fabric on a date to some desert rave, walks a small dog through the canned goods aisle and I watch it sniff and pee a little on a can of beans.
I buy some anchovies and pasta and head back home.
Today I was driving behind a truck that was dragging a large metal beam on a chain. The beam was bouncing all over the peaks and valleys that are south LA roads. A single spark flew off towards the sidewalk screaming at the top of its lungs, echoing the conversation of two old carbon atoms sitting around a pit of ice and talking about when they were kids.
But the spark also whispered something about prairies and homesteading.
Another two sparks jumped off at a particularly high frequency wave of concrete. They shouted about the life that they heard about in the city. With no protection, they shared an electron.
It was hard to hear their voices over the clatter of the beam.
I’ve been reading about New Materialism recently as it’s popped up tangentially in a few other things I’ve been reading; reading begets reading. Unbeknownst to me, there’s a bit of a scuffle going on in the backrooms of New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, with people pouring out into the alley that connects them, taking swings near where they both dump their recycling. Some of it seems like subtlety that is only important in an academic sense of needing to define why one idea is different, but possibly in practice quite the same, as another. If I drove up next to your Ford Focus in my Toyota Corolla (how great would it be, if you had three kids, to name them Corolla, Camry, and Avalon? They’d just power through life. At 40, they’d get their first checkup at the doctor, be fine, and then live for another 160 years) and you said to me “nice car”, and I replied “mine is Japanese”, it wouldn’t really be adding anything to the conversation more than my spite of you.
A lot of New Materialism and OOO scuffle seem a bit like this. BUT there are also, obviously, some differences, many of which I ignore because they aren’t really relevant to the part of the world I want to look at. Which, in itself, is interesting about camps of philosophy that take architects, designers, and artists under their conceptual wings. Like how much do I actually follow a New Materialism way of thinking, or really care if I’m 30% NM and 70% OOO? Is it necessary to be philosophically complete in the pursuit of a material expression of ideas that are themselves reaching for withdrawn parts of ideas? I don’t think so.
AFFORDANCES. This is the thing I came across and love. The following is from a short article, “Digital Tool Thinking: Object Oriented Ontology versus New Materialism”, by Neil Leach
Let us turn, then, to Gibson’s ‘theory of affordances.’ This theory suggests that there is a particular set of actions ‘afforded’ by a tool or object. Thus a knob might afford pulling—or possibly pushing—while a cord might afford pulling. It is not that the tool or object has agency as such, or the capacity to ‘invite’ or ‘prevent’ certain actions. Rather, it merely ‘affords’ certain operations that it is incumbent on the user to recognize, dependent on pre-existing associations with that tool or object. Likewise, those operations are also dependent upon our capacity to undertake them. Thus certain operations might not be afforded to those without the height or strength to perform them. Moreover, certain tools afford certain operations, but do not preclude others. For example, we could affix a nail with a screwdriver— albeit less efficiently—if we do not have a hammer at hand. Similarly, it is easier to cut wood with a saw than a hammer.
I love that this approach to the object takes out the need for the object to ACT in some way in relationship to us: to have purpose outside of some that we give it. But it also doesn’t meant that the object is necessarily passive in the sense that it can evolve as the ability for us to be perceive it in new contexts also change. As Sjón points out in From the Mouth of Whale, a hammer is just a hammer as a tool for hitting nails until someone uses it for violence, then suddenly it becomes something quite different.
In some ways this makes the object a slightly less communicative person in a new conversation. Language is a lot like light, in that it bounces of something (a person) and given that things affordances (is that person receptive to conversation?) we can engage and create a space between us. If I throw some light at a horse shoe, it affords me its shape that I can then engage with using my physical self and combine these affordances with my muscle movements to toss it at a stake in the ground and play a game called horse shoes: affordances as an idea allow for a hooking into an object both conceptually and physically.
In some ways my car analogy from before isn’t quite as hyperbolic as I set it out to be, as cars are not just an object that affords transportation but culture has latched into affordances around class and hierarchy that are available between us and a car. Objects have affordances to culture, particularly if culture can put people in relationship to that object in a “us vs them” way.
(I think my parts of speech are all over the place (shut up, Aaron, I hear you), but hopefully the idea comes across.)
OH. A last thought in this age where we all know more about the mechanisms of viruses than we would like to. This idea of a receptor in a cell being misused for other means, which is the reason Covid can spread so easily in our bodies, is a bit like the Sjón comment on the hammer.
Covid is a bit like a hammer used for violence.
A yoked heart means a dead human. #hypertension
