I was very pleased to see essayist Tim Kreider's op-ed piece, "In Praise of Not Knowing," in the Times today. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19Kreider.html?_r=1 And a bit surprised at the synchronicity, after my post just last week (see directly below) about the very same phenomenon. It's obviously a markedly different piece, but still manages to echo some of my sentiments about this topic.
Interesting how we both link to childhood, innocence v. experience, children and wonder.
I really enjoyed his conclusion:
"Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know."
19 June 2011
11 June 2011
On Safari in the Jungle of Knowability
Mourning the Death of Mystery
It’s hard not to notice the absence of mystery in life these days. There’s simply not a lot of je ne sais quoi. Little could be described as arcane, hermetic, or hidden from view. Thinking back to the years before the Internet, we used to enjoy a state seldom encountered these days: wonder. A time when questions loomed long enough that our fantasies had time to fill in the blanks. A place when not knowing the answer was a perfectly possible and reasonable state.
These days, not knowing is equated with not Googling. And not Googling appears both lazy and … mysterious.
Why don’t you know if you could know with just a few keystrokes and a mouse click?
Take, for example, “I wonder what ever happened to the celebrity I idolized in 7th grade?” Today that’s a question easily answered via a quick search, a scan through some highly condensed information, and the almost inevitable resultant disappointment--likely involving a cocktail of DUIs, drugs, divorce, bankruptcies, and maybe even prison stints.
Pre-Internet times, that very same teen idol would have remained eternally 21 with beautiful long hair and an oeuvre of treacly but sincere love songs. But don’t take my word for it. Try Googling Leif Garrett. You remember '70s heartthrob Leif Garrett, right?
More recently, he looked something like this.
When I was a child growing up in the '60s and '70s, I remember puzzling over what kind of people my favorite writers actually were. I recall reading S.E. Hinton and trying to envision this guy who wrote so compellingly about street kids. I must have read The Outsiders five times, and each reading more thoroughly convinced me that the book was flat-out autobiography. It was not until I was well into adulthood that I found out that S.E. actually looked like this:
Yup, Susan Eloise, from Tulsa. But in 1972, there was simply no way to access even basic information like that, and publishers seemed to like it that way. More…mysterious. And frankly, I was much more intrigued creating a picture in my mind, a composite of the characters and their milieu.
My musings later extended to a certain J.D. Salinger. There again, the absence of a name, the coolness of only initials, lent an unquestionable aura. What little I could glean of him was the folklore…the recluse who never wrote again after Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, never granted interviews, succumbed to a life of romantic literary retirement. I imagined him lingering in the New Hampshire woods near his home, alone, ethereal and otherworldly, while his characters made their ways in the world, enchanting children for generations. I adore the notion of a permanent recluse who never comes back. It is far lovelier than the one who emerges from “retirement” 25 years later, driven by penury, touring a new book and pounding the blog- and tweetospheres.
And then there were teachers, in grade school, beloved; in high school, be-lusted, all of whom I knew precious little about (sometimes not even first names!). I remember the glorious day I found out—god knows how—that my Russian high-school-teacher crush, Mr. T, was actually known to most of the world as “John.” This was honestly a big deal, and served as plenty of information for one day, week, or month. In century 21, kids actually friend their teachers on Facebook. Now, that to me is one tricky proposition. Finding out that Mr. T enjoyed bad bluegrass music, watched TV shows I did not respect, and was a member of the Republican Party and Shania Twain fan groups might have sent me over the edge.
But unfortunately, in contemporary life, these are the details with which our mind forms impressions, judgments, opinions—accepts or dismisses without any further body of experience. However, this shortcut creates three little problems: our information is insufficient, out of context, and often wrong.
Children now grow up having farrrrr more information about their idols than we ever did. They know farrrr more about Justin Bieber’s daily life than perhaps his mother does. And they can probably glimpse his very soul with an iPhone swipe. What are we doing putting so many hard facts into the hands of the so very young? How do they use it, when they hardly know how to use an iron? And what happens when their idols make that inevitable fall from grace? As children of the late Neolithic age, these events were hidden from our view, and leaving much to the imagination was a respectful choice for those thought too young to handle graphic detail. Today's philosophy seems to be reality without filters--for anyone, no matter what age. But is it really preferable to watch your idol self-destruct, to succumb to human failings (sometimes all at once), than to be allowed to hold a fantasy of your idol as somehow superhuman?
When I think back on the idols I had when I was young, I realize that I have no desire to know the "facts" of his/her existence. I love recalling a certain actress as a character in a film I saw in 1978, not as someone who was very ill with cancer for 20 years. And thus, I limit my Internet reading about her--and can still smile.
While I’m not advocating delusion or being lied to, isn’t there room for the little fantasies that keep us going?
Living in the age of the know-all, tell-all has proven, mostly, a major bummer. In centuries 20 and before, our celebrities had a certain sanctity and inspirational quality. And maybe that was utter hogwash, but it worked. Gave us something to strive for, a bit of beauty in life otherwise mundane. Allowed us to believe that a life could be charmed, like a day of gliding down 5th Avenue with Audrey Hepburn.
This month alone we have seen the genitals of our politicians, the results of those genitals, and our political campaign contributions being used to pay for the actions of those genitals. Thanks to Facebook, we know the intimate daily life of boyfriends we had in college. We witness those we dearly loved saying vapid things online and posting photos of themselves looking like lunatic fringe. We look up a potential date and realize that they’ve made contributions to far right-wing politicians, have execrable musical taste, or can barely spell simple 5th grade vocabulary words.
It’s a jungle of knowingness out there. And familiarity may still breed contempt.
The days of spotting someone across a crowded room and getting to apprehend them through direct experience over time have ended. The days of going home and holding them in your thoughts as a new fascination, a beautiful blank slate, are unlikely to return, unless the world’s wi-fi coughs, sputters and dies.
Our vastly knowable world leaves little room for dream and fantasy. And even less room for our highly human tendency to want things to be as we remembered them, not as they actually were. The blanks can all be filled in—often in under 60 seconds. For some, it may lead to happily gleaning discrete points of fact from which conclusions may be drawn.
Others, like me, are left wondering what to wonder.
It’s hard not to notice the absence of mystery in life these days. There’s simply not a lot of je ne sais quoi. Little could be described as arcane, hermetic, or hidden from view. Thinking back to the years before the Internet, we used to enjoy a state seldom encountered these days: wonder. A time when questions loomed long enough that our fantasies had time to fill in the blanks. A place when not knowing the answer was a perfectly possible and reasonable state.
These days, not knowing is equated with not Googling. And not Googling appears both lazy and … mysterious.
Why don’t you know if you could know with just a few keystrokes and a mouse click?
Take, for example, “I wonder what ever happened to the celebrity I idolized in 7th grade?” Today that’s a question easily answered via a quick search, a scan through some highly condensed information, and the almost inevitable resultant disappointment--likely involving a cocktail of DUIs, drugs, divorce, bankruptcies, and maybe even prison stints.
Pre-Internet times, that very same teen idol would have remained eternally 21 with beautiful long hair and an oeuvre of treacly but sincere love songs. But don’t take my word for it. Try Googling Leif Garrett. You remember '70s heartthrob Leif Garrett, right?
More recently, he looked something like this.
When I was a child growing up in the '60s and '70s, I remember puzzling over what kind of people my favorite writers actually were. I recall reading S.E. Hinton and trying to envision this guy who wrote so compellingly about street kids. I must have read The Outsiders five times, and each reading more thoroughly convinced me that the book was flat-out autobiography. It was not until I was well into adulthood that I found out that S.E. actually looked like this:
My musings later extended to a certain J.D. Salinger. There again, the absence of a name, the coolness of only initials, lent an unquestionable aura. What little I could glean of him was the folklore…the recluse who never wrote again after Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, never granted interviews, succumbed to a life of romantic literary retirement. I imagined him lingering in the New Hampshire woods near his home, alone, ethereal and otherworldly, while his characters made their ways in the world, enchanting children for generations. I adore the notion of a permanent recluse who never comes back. It is far lovelier than the one who emerges from “retirement” 25 years later, driven by penury, touring a new book and pounding the blog- and tweetospheres.
And then there were teachers, in grade school, beloved; in high school, be-lusted, all of whom I knew precious little about (sometimes not even first names!). I remember the glorious day I found out—god knows how—that my Russian high-school-teacher crush, Mr. T, was actually known to most of the world as “John.” This was honestly a big deal, and served as plenty of information for one day, week, or month. In century 21, kids actually friend their teachers on Facebook. Now, that to me is one tricky proposition. Finding out that Mr. T enjoyed bad bluegrass music, watched TV shows I did not respect, and was a member of the Republican Party and Shania Twain fan groups might have sent me over the edge.
But unfortunately, in contemporary life, these are the details with which our mind forms impressions, judgments, opinions—accepts or dismisses without any further body of experience. However, this shortcut creates three little problems: our information is insufficient, out of context, and often wrong.
Children now grow up having farrrrr more information about their idols than we ever did. They know farrrr more about Justin Bieber’s daily life than perhaps his mother does. And they can probably glimpse his very soul with an iPhone swipe. What are we doing putting so many hard facts into the hands of the so very young? How do they use it, when they hardly know how to use an iron? And what happens when their idols make that inevitable fall from grace? As children of the late Neolithic age, these events were hidden from our view, and leaving much to the imagination was a respectful choice for those thought too young to handle graphic detail. Today's philosophy seems to be reality without filters--for anyone, no matter what age. But is it really preferable to watch your idol self-destruct, to succumb to human failings (sometimes all at once), than to be allowed to hold a fantasy of your idol as somehow superhuman?
When I think back on the idols I had when I was young, I realize that I have no desire to know the "facts" of his/her existence. I love recalling a certain actress as a character in a film I saw in 1978, not as someone who was very ill with cancer for 20 years. And thus, I limit my Internet reading about her--and can still smile.
While I’m not advocating delusion or being lied to, isn’t there room for the little fantasies that keep us going?
Living in the age of the know-all, tell-all has proven, mostly, a major bummer. In centuries 20 and before, our celebrities had a certain sanctity and inspirational quality. And maybe that was utter hogwash, but it worked. Gave us something to strive for, a bit of beauty in life otherwise mundane. Allowed us to believe that a life could be charmed, like a day of gliding down 5th Avenue with Audrey Hepburn.
This month alone we have seen the genitals of our politicians, the results of those genitals, and our political campaign contributions being used to pay for the actions of those genitals. Thanks to Facebook, we know the intimate daily life of boyfriends we had in college. We witness those we dearly loved saying vapid things online and posting photos of themselves looking like lunatic fringe. We look up a potential date and realize that they’ve made contributions to far right-wing politicians, have execrable musical taste, or can barely spell simple 5th grade vocabulary words.
It’s a jungle of knowingness out there. And familiarity may still breed contempt.
The days of spotting someone across a crowded room and getting to apprehend them through direct experience over time have ended. The days of going home and holding them in your thoughts as a new fascination, a beautiful blank slate, are unlikely to return, unless the world’s wi-fi coughs, sputters and dies.
Our vastly knowable world leaves little room for dream and fantasy. And even less room for our highly human tendency to want things to be as we remembered them, not as they actually were. The blanks can all be filled in—often in under 60 seconds. For some, it may lead to happily gleaning discrete points of fact from which conclusions may be drawn.
Others, like me, are left wondering what to wonder.
06 June 2011
David Foster Wallace - Quote of the Day
— A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
04 June 2011
John D’Agata’s About a Mountain – Fallout in the Nevada Desert
One of his primary metaphors is the injection of thousands of tons of nuclear waste into a mountain less than 100 miles from downtown Las Vegas. This rightful property of the Shoshone Tribe was taken by government force, and despite incredible risks to public safety, an ill-considered plan to store highly toxic materials in a leaky vessel in all-too-close proximity to Sin City slid through Congress in 1982.
But D’Agata’s lens is far wider-angle than no-nuke polemics. Instead he points us toward greater themes: the casualties of human hubris and how it fares when pitted against the tides of nature. Regardless of the magnitude of will or scope of desire, impermanence continues to hold sway over our existence. Despite the author’s biases, often expressed with the deepest of deadpan, he ultimately offers a sense of wonder as to why we create the tableaux we do. D’Agata seems to understand that black and white is hard to come by in the grey shades of human landscape. And that the truth of our existence lies in the tension between rampant self-interest and a quest to understand vaster but ultimately unknowable truths.
The author is at his sharpest when describing the surreality of Las Vegas and its denizens—easy marks, certainly, but executed with a sharp-eyed wryness that relishes quotidian detail. Here he describes local reaction after the Nevada Test Site was established:
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce did its part during this time by distributing free twelve-month color calendars inscribed with the schedule of the site’s atomic tests.
The Atomic View Motel would boast “the best views of the blasts from anywhere in Vegas!”
At the Sands they held an annual “Miss Atomic Bomb” pageant.
And at a women’s hair salon inside the Flamingo, they lifted women’s coifs into a bundled-up creation that they called without irony “the mushroom ’do.”
Stylistically, the novel utilizes a series of jump cuts slammed directly against each other to create a collage of rapid movement—the kind humans full of hubris generally use as they shove Indians off their land and nuclear waste into mountainsides.
One of the book’s most fascinating segments describes the dubious attempts of a panel of experts assigned by the US government to create a sign warning generations 10,000 years hence of the dangers tucked inside Yucca Mountain. After realizing that all currently spoken languages will be virtually wiped out, they decide to search for a display of emotion that may be universally understood for millennia to come. One panelist suggests filling Yucca’s basin “with a mournful constant cry,” via playing music in minor tones. Ultimately, part of the solution consists of “a small engraved image in the apex of each stone that reproduces the anguished face from Edvard Munch’s The Scream.”
D’Agata deftly juxtaposes this reportage with far more personal stories: that of the family tragedies that inspired Munch’s painting, his own stint as a volunteer at a Las Vegas suicide hotline, and a boy who jumps to his death from the Stratosphere Hotel. While he never specifically connects the dots, these stories share an organic bond with the more political material. Not only is it a writerly feat to be able to pull this off and sustain coherence, it’s also refreshing to be allowed to draw our own conclusions.
Human actions opposing the natural life of the planet always generate fallout, whether in a literal, nuclear sense or in creating a platform from which humans can tumble—sometimes willingly. And incursion into the natural world creates a tension in even the most well intended of us, as D’Agata illustrates with an interesting tangent about meeting Edward Abbey’s son. Apparently Abbey Sr., for all his environmentalism, came with his own set of personally unsustainable practices. D’Agata excels at revealing such inconvenient facets of our rarely cut-and-dried world. And then asking us to make sense of the seas of contradiction.
14 May 2011
Illinois River, Going Under
Same wave as yesterday's photo, four panels of what lies beneath...such a strong current--almost visceral, the power in these knots of surging water...
Tangentially...this reminds me of a public radio show I really dig called Undercurrents, which I listen to every weeknight when I am home. Host Greg McVicar, such a chill guy, plays this fascinating mix of Native voices, classic rock (in the true sense not the gak sense), people you've missed hearing from, new stuff from the oldies, newbies you can stand to listen to. A lot of times I'm working on photos and need a soundtrack to get lost in as I chip away at the image to see what it wants to be. This is a show you can kind of fall back into and let the music and images converse.
undercurrentsradio.net
undercurrentsradio.net
13 May 2011
08 May 2011
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A River to Skate Away On
When you wake up to 5 degrees that feels like -1, your thoughts naturally turn to being outdoors. OK, I love cold a lot more than your ave...
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After the last post, I found I needed a bit of reassurance that books aren't really going away. A few dozen Googles later, I see growing... -
When you wake up to 5 degrees that feels like -1, your thoughts naturally turn to being outdoors. OK, I love cold a lot more than your ave... -
1/Spaulding at Melrose, LA. Photo: George Szakall. 2/Cabbagetown, Toronto. Photo: J. Diggity. 3/Leiden, Netherlands. Photo: Maurits Burgers....