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Category: culture

You Can Never Hold Back Spring

Published January 1, 2009 by cgerrish

Jeri Southern

The first music for the first day of the new year presents an interesting choice. Does it set the tone for the next 365? Traditionally we might select an optimistic piece that speaks to us of new beginnings. But especially this year, as we enter the new year, we can’t leave the old one behind. There’s a feeling of melancholy filled with possibility, the old year hangs in the air like an unresolved chord.

I turned to Yo-Yo Ma first. He’s an artist who’s been coming up in conversation recently. Born in Paris, raised in New York, he performed at the White House for John Kennedy at the age of seven. A superlative and joyful musician, it’s his work with the Silk Road Project that seems so important at this moment in time.

The Silk Road was an extensive interconnected network of trade routes, not only a conduit for silk, but for many other products and was also a very important path for cultural and technological transmission by linking traders, merchants, pilgrims, monks, missionaries, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers from China to the Mediterranean Sea for thousands of years.

Yo-Yo Ma’s idea of a modern Silk Road where many cultures meet and cross-fertilize is a positive vision for a new networked world. I chose a piece from his Dvorak Album called Silent Woods.

I then turned to Jeri Southern, because the very thought of her makes me smile. There’s something of the indestructible American spirit in her voice. The photo at the top of the post is Jeri in her backyard with her daughter and dog.

And finally Tom Waits brings it home with his song You Can Never Hold Back Spring. A reminder that seasons change, and there’s a point at which the shortest day of the year is over and the light begins to return.

At the dawn of a new year, that unresolved chord can be seen in a new light. At one time we would have waited patiently in the audience for the musicians to finish the song. But now we look up and see they’ve left the stage, the chord still ringing. Yo-Yo Ma points the way with his new collaborative piece Dona Nobis Pacem. It’s up to us to take up the song and bring it to its proper conclusion.

You Can Never Hold Back Spring
Tom Waits

You can never hold back spring
You can be sure that I will never
Stop believing
The blushing rose will climb
Spring ahead or fall behind
Winter dreams the same dream
Every time

You can never hold back spring
Even though you’ve lost your way
The world keeps dreaming of spring

So close your eyes
Open your heart
To one who’s dreaming of you
You can never hold back spring

Remember everything that spring
Can bring
Baby you can never hold back spring

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Theatrical Self-Impersonation, Platonic Spirits and Heteronyms

Published December 26, 2008 by cgerrish

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Richard Avedon

Earlier this month I was wandering through an exhibit of work collected by Philippe de Montebello for the Metropolitan Museum. I found myself in front of a photograph by Richard Avedon of Marilyn Monroe. The context of the photo was the idea of theatrical self-impersonation. As Avedon tells the story, there is no such person as Marilyn Monroe.

“Marilyn Monroe was someone Marilyn Monroe invented, like an author creates a character.” Recalling a session that took place at his studio on a May evening in 1957, he continued: “For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.”

In the networked social space created by our new modes of communication and interaction we enact a similar form of theatrical self-impersonation. Most of who we are is hidden from view, each identity is constructed and by definition, incomplete. Shakespeare’s words ring true today as we signal to each through roles constructed and manipulated at a distance.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

Monroe established an economics for her self-impersonation and her product was, and is, in high demand. We see a similar dynamic in the blogosphere where economic value is created through the theatrics of self-impersonation. Steve Gillmor has written an excellent post that gives us a backstage pass to the theatrical process Mike Arrington uses to write a Mike Arrington post. One might add, of course, there is no such person as “Mike Arrington.”

But we shouldn’t limit our exploration to the commercial sphere, there are other modes in which this idea of theatrical self impersonation can play out. One of the stories that Ray Ozzie has been telling lately to introduce himself to Microsoft and the world has to do with a online system called Plato. An experience Ozzie had 33 years ago on an online network captured the promise and depth of this new space of interaction.

By the mid-1970s, PLATO’s many features included email and an instant messaging feature dubbed “Talk-O-Matic.” Ozzie wrangled a job working on the project, and, while doing so, communicated online with a collaborator who worked remotely from off-campus. Ozzie was impressed by the eloquence and intelligence of his offsite workmate and the two quickly bonded. Ozzie’s only complaint was that when they sent instant messages to each other, his offsite colleague was a frustratingly slow typist.

After their joint project was completed, Ozzie met his remote partner in person for the first time during a party at the partner’s house in 1975. Only then did Ozzie discover that his colleague was a quadriplegic, bound to a wheelchair, whose slow typing was a result of having to interact with the keyboard using a stick held in his mouth.

The incident had a profound effect on Ozzie. He was struck by how the technology allowed them to connect so closely, despite physical constraints and without preconceived judgments. The two had met in a shared mental space that was uniquely enabled by networked technology.

While we sometimes think of this networked social space we’re exploring as new, in an era where innovation occurs at lightening speed, the roots of the basic interactions reach back to a time out of mind.

The visible artifacts of these theatrical creations become detached from their originators and float freely in a field of play– currency traded in our social dance. Paul Ricoeur talks about these artifacts as “oneself as other” (Soi-meme comme un autre). While some talk of a technology that will allow us to aggregate the disaggregated, scooping up all the disparate pieces of personal identity and weaving them into a whole, the element of time renders these attempts necessarily partial. Perhaps we’re due for an exploration into the polar opposite of the single whole identity. The poet Fernando Pessoa created the literary concept of the heteronym. A heteronym possesses distinct temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles– Pessoa had more than 70. Would the words I write here be the same ones I’d exchange with you over coffee at a little cafe on the other side of town? I really couldn’t say…

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

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Pinter’s gone (pause) He’s well out of it now (silence)

Published December 25, 2008 by cgerrish

Although in our later years we had some disagreements, there was a long period where I read everything he wrote. Devoured it, like a starving man. Harold Pinter was a towering figure in the literature of our theater.

– pause –

The plays are very difficult to do well. Many of the works are an exercise in game theory, in wordless competition. They unfold at the level of everyday speech and a strange and dangerous undercurrent of action.

– silence –

It’s as though in his works, language reveals its potential as a strange and cruel weapon. The words spoken have multiple meanings and very sharp corners. But it shouldn’t be over-thought, it’s more like a game of catch with a hand grenade. Usually only one of the game’s participants knows when the explosion will occur.

– pause –

Pinter’s writing was part of what attracted me to theater in the first place. The plays engaged the human situation at a fundamental level with energy and ferocity. Looking back, I now understand how rare a playwright he was. And as time passes, his work only grows in my estimation. His passing, and the time of year, brings to mind Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats. “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.”

In Memory of W.B. Yeats
by WH Auden

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

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Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Published December 22, 2008 by cgerrish

The discussion of Rick Warren’s participation in the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States has stirred up a number of thoughts. These ideas were given more focus by listening to an episode of Philosophy Bites on Derrida’s idea of forgiveness:

While Derrida says that national reconciliation is a separate matter, forgiveness itself, is worth some serious thought. In short, Derrida’s thoughts of forgiveness run as follows. A forgiveness that has no cost, is not worth much. It is forgiving the unforgivable that is the essence of the act. And also seemingly impossible to accomplish; it asks us to do the undoable.

This is a very disturbing idea because it seems to run counter to the idea of justice, or at least a rough form of justice. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – these practices can lead to an infinite negative feedback loop. For a change to occur, one side must do the impossible.

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