Impromptu Poem

(composed at Starwood, July 2007, at a writing workshop)
(from a slip of paper drawn from a hat reading "guzzle down more emptyness")

"guzzle down more emptyness"
drink deep of forgetfulness
harvest longing
from a farmed crop of planted seeds
of oblivion
of sleep
take hold of the goblet of metaphor
grasp it by handles like similes
tip the brim towards your mouth

don't wait

and guzzle down more emptyness
feast on forgotten rhymes
sit at a table brimming to bursting
with discarded language
dead words
cooked - with spices
having slain them in the hunt
through a forest a woods a wilderness
of longing
with a sideplatter loaded to bursting
with for of to too many prepositions
wipe your mouth (carefully) with an adverb
and taste the salt of a dash of epic
that casts its savor into the flavor of everything
you've remembered

and all that which slips your mind
be careful not to glut yourself
when you become too full
and keep the edge of hunger to your lips
it keeps the flavors fresh
if need be
excrete an adjective
vomit forth a poem
knowing full well that time is a napkin
with 100% absorbency
guaranteed by entropy
and that the feast itself
is all that lasts

eat the words

let them become you and you become them
let emptiness change the constitution of your nature
so that you can know what fullness is
and can taste the difference

between

Comedy Changes the World

I welcomed David Schimke’s essay “Want To Know What’s Really Going On? Ask a Comic” (Utne Sept-Oct ’06), particularly the necessary connection and comparison between today’s satirists and the suffering of Lenny Bruce. But Schimke’s analysis manages to completely miss the major distinction of artists like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the writing and research teams that are essential to their success. Certainly Stewart and Colbert, like Maher and Rock, directly satirize the outrageous abuses of power that make reading headlines an irony-rich exercise. But politics and politicians are not the central subject of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report: their main target has always been (and continues to be) the sorry state of journalism, particularly television news.

Because they are themselves part of the empire of corporate media that they satirize, these comedians must include a level of self-satire and deliberate irony that – while learned from Letterman and company – take political satire and comedy itself into a new dimension of reflection, responsibility, and intelligence. Schimke overlooks how Colbert and Stewart must themselves practice responsible journalism in order to satirize the abundant examples of irresponsible journalism. Perhaps this is one way (among many) that these “jokesters” can in fact change the world, through fake news that provides truth that so-called “real” news won’t.

Nor, Mr. Schimke, would this be the first time that comedians and satirists have changed the world – as the examples of Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Swift, R. B. Sheridan, and George Bernard Shaw should attest.

Lost Formulae

Television drama, like most forms of drama (if not most forms of fiction), tends to thrive in mass production once artists hit on a successful formula. Happily, thanks to the contributions of deconstructionists and structuralism, academic criticism seems to have moved past the knee-jerk rejection of formulae as inherently lowbrow or unoriginal. Roland Barthes managed to demonstrate how narrative formulae are at work in cultural forms one might not otherwise describe as narrative (professional wrestling, for instance, or portrait photography); Stephen Johnson (in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You) demonstrates the potential utility of formulae and variations from formulae as a deliberate and constructed game artists play with their audiences. Kennings and riddle-games, as I've talked about here before, reveal the long history of formulae in texts and hint at their potential cultural utility. We might be able to take a step beyond commercial interest - knowing what formula makes a program successful, sustainable, and lucrative - and examine how formulae and their variations (in TV drama, as an example) enrich a text's potential and empowers its audience.

Take Lost, for example, ABC's quasi-SF hit that helped open the floodgates for a new breed of SF/horror programs this season. At first glance, on first description, Lost appears to fit quite nicely within existing forms and previous parallels. The most apparent, of course, is Gilligan's Island, which also told stories about a group of strangers isolated on a deserted island. The castaways provide a pseudo-microcosm of society in the form of familiar character types (leaders/heroes, ingenues, bungling comedians, sage advisers, mercantile opportunists, romantic interests) and undergo trials both mundane and fantastical, particularly conflicts that arise from petty or personal agendas, but never forgetting the demands of survival or the aspiration for future rescue. Of course, one is a half-hour comedy, the other an hour-long drama, but there are parallels - at least, when we describe the formula this way.

This is hardly a formula, however; it's really more of a description of results. That society should seem to be represented by a microcosm is hardly surprising, since character types are not only ancient models based on observations of society, but cultural paradigms that we use to perceive and program our behavior in society. How the microcosmic relation is constructed is far more interesting than simply noting that one seems to exist. And this is one way in which Lost clearly varies from Gilligan's Island on a generic level: the latter uses character as a given, unquestioned and dependably predictable, while the former uses character as the point of departure, the starting point for constructing plot.

Conventionally, one-hour TV drama has long employed A-plots and B-plots (a better description than "plot" and "subplot" in that "subplots" can often take the foreground for the better part of a one-hour episode), in which two stories are told simultaneously. The best-known structure is that of drama and comic relief - a standby for programs like L.A. Law, for instance, just as it had been in melodrama, American musicals, and variety shows. This is not the only way to deploy A-plots and B-plots, however, and their utility has recently expanded with the rise of series arcs, or long-term plots that last for longer than a single episode. Lost uses A-plots and B-plots to sustain suspense over the long haul of the entire series, while rewarding the audience with smaller versions of the larger arc in each one-hour episode.

What makes this structure work most effectively, however, is the choice to reward long-term investment in the B-plots (installments of the larger, series arc) with short-term narratives that manage to expand interest in the series as a whole, while managing to remain somewhat self-contained. The key to this mechanism is character. By means of flashbacks and retrospectives, character histories are gradually revealed - but always in terms of a current, ongoing action or development (typically framed as a series of choices). This process forms the A-plot: we will learn more about these characters, as each story is ultimately about them; but these characters will grow, change, and often confound our expectations by means of their interaction with each other and the situation as a whole as it develops (i.e., the B-plot). One might look at it as Aristotle's poetic principles in action: plot is the soul of the drama, but the windows on that soul are through character actions as they overlap with and shape that plot, and through their collective choices enact it.

To put this another way - to abbreviate the formula - Lost lays before its audience an assortment of mysteries: strangers. At first we (as the characters do) interpret these mysteries according to familiar patterns - we think of these characters as particular types. But each plot, each episode, subverts and challenges these expectations by exploring characters in detail, and revealing not only details about these characters' pasts, but an ongoing series of actions in which these characters actually decide what kind of people they are going to be. Our suspense is engaged: we want to find out who these people are, and the more we find out, the more mysterious they become. But the focus on individual characters (or individual character relationships) allows us to be satisfied with a single installment, and feel as if a whole story has been told - while drawing out our interest, and magnifying the allure of the series as a whole, through the interweaving of these characters' stories in the larger fabric (revealed in glimpses only). Each episode satisfies; each episode increases our interest in the next.

How does this empower the audience? Insofar as it demands that the audience do the work of seeing how this interweaving of characters' private tales with the development of the whole manages to embody - not some symbolic set of icons representing an ideal society - but the process of constructing a society itself. The show manages through its structure to focus not only on individuals, but on the nature of community itself. A template is not simply presented to the audience as a product to be consumed; rather, a system is devised through which the audience can (through imaginative engagement) play out various scenarios that both challenge and construct community.

It might be obvious, but it seems worth noting, the irony of examining community through isolation - not only the isolation of becoming "Lost" on a mysterious island, but also the "isolation" that television's so-called "wasteland" is supposed to inflict on passive viewers.

American Dreamtime

The ancients lived their lives steeped in myth, living alongside and within it. Medieval consciousness imagined itself as existing simultaneously with the past: while there was an admission of historical time, history co-existed with a way of seeing the world guided and focused by constant symbolism. Similarly, Thomas Mann constructed his novels around the principle that it was possible to tell the story of one’s own life by following the shape of myths; his metaphor was that we walk in the footsteps of heroes, by re-living and embodying their quests in our own lives. Meaning is seldom absent from such a world view; indeed, meaning is literally everywhere. The first Australians call this the Dreamtime: a world of story that is neither long ago nor far away, but mythic nonetheless.

Frances Yates described such a way of seeing in her construction of the ars memoria – the art of memory. In the art of memory, one builds imaginary cathedrals in the hollows of one’s mind, modeled after physical cathedrals. The individual’s inner cathedral was built to contain the story of one’s life, translated into symbols and narratives enclosed within familiar structures, vividly imagined and meticulously practiced. (It is not so impossible an art, I suspect, as it sounds at first.) While the contents of every such imagined cathedral were individual, they were made out of and housed in structures shared by many; every individual house of memory was unique, but the architecture and building blocks were collectively the same. Those who practiced the art of memory built inner worlds – we might call them private infospheres - shaped individually out of shared materials, whose design and components resembled and coincided with the outer world.

We might imagine the infosphere as a postmodern way to perceive mythic consciousness: a world made of shared information combined in infinite variations. We, too, walk inside myth. The American Dream is most often invoked as a description of a common aspiration, but it also captures in a layered metaphor a state of mind, as well: a shared dream, a people defined by a commonly constructed idealism. But today’s American Dream – like the consumption-driven infosphere of today, dominated by a crazed rush to control and brand images and ideas so as to profit from their exchange – lies outside our individual control, and perhaps our collective will, too. We sleep but think we are awake; we believe we perceive, pragmatically but optimistically, what is truly the real world. But we ourselves have shaped our gaze, like sleepwalkers, to avoid the unpleasant cracks that shiver across our collective façade. We are like prisoners who eagerly keep watch on walls of our own construction, unaware even that we are afraid of that which lies beyond those walls. Cognitive dissonance begins to describe this – that state of mind wherein we reconstruct our understanding of the world to avoid and revise those data which contradict or endanger the fantasy, the Dream. I wouldn’t hesitate to claim that America today lives in a constant state of cognitive dissonance – constantly fantasizing, but – and this is the key, since fantasy itself is not the problem – unaware that we are fantasizing. Indeed, we adamantly insist that our Dream is the only Dream.

An early Christian (and apocryphal) myth called the Hymn of the Pearl – a beautiful text whose imagery and architecture can be found rippling through other traditions and times as well, and whose influence can be charted in many influential artists (such as August Strindberg, for instance, in A Dream Play) – tells a similar story. It imagines a hero who disguises herself (or himself) in order to seek out a precious stone she has accidentally lost. In the process of her quest, she loses herself; she forgets who she is, where she came from, and why she seeks the Pearl. The story hinges on the moment of anagnorisis, the opposite of forgetting (and a critical structural element in drama); some early Christians called it gnosis, a remembering of the forgotten divine. The Pearl can be used as a metaphor for this; as is the life of the princess (or prince) who descends into the world and forgets she has descended. The American Dream is a dream without gnosis, addicted to amnesia (because history, like myth, reminds us of ways of seeing that we might prefer to forget or ignore). We are like Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy; we look for the American Character, for a sense of collectively shared identity (perhaps condensed in a cultural crucible euphemistically called The Melting Pot), but blind ourselves in the moment that we grasp what we seek. We have fallen into dream and out of balance; we have forgotten who we are; and we turn our resentment on those very myths that drive and shape our desire, as though the Pearl itself is at fault for our willful, shame-driven self-forgetting.

What would it take for us to awaken? Or, perhaps: what would it take for us to re-claim (collectively and individually) the authorship of our own myths, and thereby of our own lives?

Five Responses in Ten Days

Apologies, kind reader, for the hiatus in my posts here on Digital Runes. On Monday I completed a brief, ACTF-sponsored tour that invited me to drive more than 1500 miles to five different colleges over the course of ten days.

As I see it, one of the most important services provided by KC/ACTF (a national organization for the advancement of college-level theatre) is that of the “response session,” in which a colleague well-versed in academic theatre is invited to respond to a college production. While I volunteered to respond to these shows, I feel honored by each of my hosts to have been invited to share my comments. I’d like to thank them for giving me an opportunity to see their engaging, challenging, and excellently entertaining work:

Thanks to Colby College for their beautiful, surprising, and reflective production of The Tempest. Those spirits (and their plays within plays) still haunt me.

Thanks to the University of Maine at Machias for provocative social engagement and bold silence speaking volumes in their production of The Moonlight Room.

Thanks to Franklin Pierce College (and particularly to Bob Lawson, for his hospitality), where I found myself transported and challenged by an intellectual, emotional fantasia on Edgar Allen Poe in Dark Cathedrals of the Heart.

Thanks to Eastern Connecticut State University (and guest artist Larry Hunt) for fascinating me with poignant and compelling masks and faces in their utterly engaging rendition of Plautus’ Roman comedy in The Brothers M.

Thanks to Dean College for bringing me Plautus, too, (his play, of course, not the man himself), in a Menaechmi both bold and blatant. This Saturday evening was sexy without being cheap, brave without being rash, and kept me laughing all the way home.

Many thanks to Jim Beauregard for making the whole trip possible.

And an additional thank-you to Ashleigh Ward (Saint Michael’s College ’04) for inviting me to Newburyport, Massachusetts, for an excellent cap to the entire “tour” via a fully professional production of a new play, Cannibals, whose irony-soaked investigation of the lives of frustrated actresses gave me cause to reflect on why I chose a profession in academic theatre over the performance industry.

Spinning Coins and Shifting Winds

Imagine two minor characters, rendered famous by Tom Stoppard, standing in a deceptive void. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern await their entrance on Denmark's stage - or Denmark's entrance on their stage (it all depends on your point of view). They pass the time by spinning coins: a simple game of chance, in which one player flips a coin and the other calls it (heads or tails), winner take all.

Upon them creeps the dawning realization that their coins have spun "heads" more than sixty times in a row. "Enough to make one doubt the laws of probability," one ventures. At any rate, sufficient to impart the dawning notion that something is happening, even though the action appears invisible or absent. Something is happening, the winds are changing direction, and our two unheroic heroes cannot tell which way those winds are blowing.

Imagine ourselves, unfamous, infamous, or otherwise, standing in a deceptive void, assured in the knowledge (if you can call it that) that change is upon us, but unable to discern direction or source - like those two expendable courtiers, unable to tell a hawk from a handsaw or even if the wind is southerly. We need weathervanes.

Simple News for a Complex Reality

The need for an authoritative narrative voice will compel most elements of the news media to quickly re-instate the status quo, and move as quickly as possible to a consensus on the outcome of the presidential election. Setting aside for the moment the possibility that differences between exit polls and election results might indicate the presence of fraud, technical failures, or both, and assuming that the vote accurately reflects the choice of the American electorate, it is neither accurate nor ethical to describe a 51% - 49% majority as some kind of mandate. Nevertheless, it is in news networks' and wire services’ best interest to simplify the results as quickly as possible, in order to “heal the nation” and “move on” (i.e. find a new story before the audience turns the channel). It is true that democracy is built on the principle of majority rule, and in 2004, it appears that Bush the Younger was the choice of slightly (2%) more voters than John Kerry. But it seems both naïve and negligent to presume without question that democratic contests should be “winner take all,” and in stepping to the next chapter of the Election Saga, newspeople in all media – by taking up the question of why the Democrats failed (losing the vote) rather than evidence of how they succeeded (marshalling the largest numbers of votes against a sitting President in history) – tell a story that betrays rather than reflects the democratic process.

Democracy in practice functions most effectively through compromise and coalition. One defender of the Electoral College indicated that this was a Constitutional mechanism for ensuring that regional coalitions – the states – would be guaranteed power and influence in a federal (i.e. nationally centralized) system. Multiple-party systems ensure that politicians must compromise in order to be effective (whereas two-party systems tend to encourage politicians to stonewall whenever they can claim a majority), which in turn ensures that a legitimate debate and discussion must take place in the operation of government. Most important, however, is the notion that representative government can lead to the construction of a collective consensus that legitimately reflects the dividing, converging, and overlapping opinions of the people. When genuine negotiation takes place among opposing viewpoints, each side must listen to and understand the grievances and desires of the other. Such a mechanism – upon which democracy is fundamentally based – can lead to the active construction of agreement based on understanding and dialogue.

What we have now, however, is an understanding of our own system that leads to the imposition or fabrication of consensus, not the building of it. No matter who won, media and political operatives alike (and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart) would prefer to simplify the story, because winners and losers are much easier to describe – in nice, clear, typically black-and-white terms – than shifting alliances and demographic variances. Take the red-state vs. blue-state dichotomy that the press now accepts as Gospel: the map invariably used to demonstrate what entire regions monolithically believe only shows who won, not the margin of victory. All of Ohio appears red (even on the county maps); but what if the map were weighted by population, and not by geography? An entirely different story would appear. But this level of complexity is hard to research, harder to explain, and probably (as a result) very hard to sell, at least for an industry that prefers tried methods over experimentation.

Just as exit pollsters simplified the entire landscape of ethics to an empty set (“moral values” – either a meaninglessly broad descriptor, or a code word for conservative Christian ethics), the story our press sells us is simplified by design from complex reality to clarified melodrama. In fact, reporting in the news industry tends to follow a basic commercial principle – keep the audience coming back for more. One of the simplest ways to do that is to promise more conflict. Unless you’re selling comedy, nuance is hard to market. But the actual goal of the democratic process is to resolve conflict by building mutual agreement. If you love democracy – a system that depends on active and informed discussion and debate – which is more important: the winner, or how the discussion led us (or can lead us) to future agreement rather than greater conflict?

Our narratives are very powerful; our stories sometimes seem to be telling us. Given the extent to which the very means of telling stories – our media – are being seized from the public domain by private companies, perhaps this is the reason that I feel more and more as if American public discourse is becoming a dream, further and further detached from experience. Or perhaps I feel this way because – as a dreamer often feels carried by a dream, and unable to steer it – the story America seems to be telling itself is increasingly told with instruments beyond my control, and by storytellers it seems impossible to hold accountable.

After This Fall

A few years ago, Sports Illustrated imagined New England after a World Series victory by the Boston Red Sox. Months after the celebrations ended, an inexplicable malaise would creep through the fans. Without defeat, they would lose direction; the Boston Red Sox, World Champions, would lose the haunting “almost” that made them distinctive.

But when the Red Sox finally won a World Series this year, the story of their victory was more amazing than anything fans could imagine – and yet the story we most hoped for. After lying prostrate before the New York Yankees, these “happy idiots” produced one of the greatest comebacks in sports history. How beautiful that a team driven by impossible standards should meet defeat at the hands of a team driven by sheer joy; how poignant that New York’s impossible perfectionism should fall to Boston’s practical idealism.

Can Red Sox Nation survive now that “long-suffering” must be stricken from the word “Red Sox fan”? Those who think it can’t don’t understand. Our passion was never about our pain; it was always about hope. The Red Sox finished second to the Yankees seven years in a row. For a Yankees fan, that level of defeat would be intolerable. For a Red Sox fan, this was a fountain of hope. It hurt – it definitely hurt. But I could always count on the Red Sox to make things interesting. Like many other fans, I never loved the Red Sox because they lost. I loved – and love – the team because every game was a thing of beauty. That’s what loving the Red Sox, for me, has always been about: blind, passionate, unfathomable but unquenchable hope – and a beautiful story to make the game worth watching.

Some have said that the Red Sox, those “lovable losers,” will by winning lose their lovability. But no Red Sox fan loves losing. What we love – and what defines that land without borders, Red Sox Nation – is possibility itself. Possibility is what makes every game new, every season “next” season, and every struggle an epic. I can’t thank these Red Sox enough for telling a story, time and again, that kept me coming back for more. If you think this year’s story was amazing … just wait ‘till next year.

Dreams of the Body Politic

Once again, the speculation runs rampant over reasons why one presidential candidate or the other has slipped or advanced in the polls. I could accept this most easily during the debates, since these imaginary facts serve nicely to add dramatic tension and narrative depth to the story news agencies wish to sell the public; shifts in polling numbers help “raise the stakes” of the debates by amplifying any perceivable effects on the public. What none of these news agencies bother to say is that most of the time, the margin between Kerry and Bush in any particular voter poll tends to fall within the polling agency’s margin of error. Journalists – with pressing deadlines and corporate managers who value profit more than accuracy – apparently feel compelled to make somethings out of nothing. It would seem that ambiguity and uncertainty don’t really sell.

With each passing day, it feels as if the body politic is asleep, and the news media have taken over its dreams. I’ve always felt that performative arts – particularly mass media – constitute an imagination for our collective identity (our body politic, if you will). But the stream-of-consciousness associations that drive the day-to-day speculations about causes (before effects have been clarified or verified) and consequences (for events or choices that have been, at best, imagined by reporters and pundits) now appear so distant from verifiable experience that I’m left feeling as though the voice of the press is content to wander freely … through possibility … without sensing any need to wake up, and look at what we actually know.

Out of Your Head

It's time for a brief rant; please excuse the soapbox.

I think it was within the last couple of weeks when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to the national press corps, repeatedly confused Osama Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. The Daily Show has already enjoyed the comic potential of this sadly frightening episode - in which one of the most powerful men in the world demonstrated an alarming level of hysteria as well as confusion - but I found it reminding me of a conversation I had a few months ago with a family friend.

She asked me to explain why I felt that President Bush wasn't as dumb as he sometimes seemed to be. Rumseld's frightening gaffe, I think, helps explain my position. Rumseld himself is a veteran of politics in the White House, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated ruthless cleverness. How could he possibly confuse Bin Laden and Hussein? While I enjoy entertaining conspiracy theory - it is possible that this was yet another deliberate effort by the Bush administration to juxtapose two independent concepts (like Saddam Hussein and 9/11) through relentless talking points - his almost manic delivery suggests it was an accident.

I suspect that the tactics deployed by the Bush administration are so compelling that the politicians now believe their own hype. Logical contradictions and contrary facts have no place in this world-view, which is built on a bedrock of unquestioning faith. As the authors of All The President's Spin carefully demonstrate, misdirection is one of the most effective tactics the Bush PR machine uses. As Michael Gazzaniga observes in his discussion of how humanity thinks, we are more susceptible to such techniques than we imagine; he suggests that it's very much a part of how we see the world.

Gazzaniga describes a famous trick ("Out of Your Hat") performed by Harry Blackwell, Sr., in which the magician created the illusion of pulling a full-sized donkey out of his top hat. Magicians "use the simple device of redirecting our attention to make objects that are in our full view, that we know our retina transmitted to our brain, go unnoticed." (The Mind's Past, 1998.) By carefully directing the audience's attention towards a lovely assistant and some elaborate gestures - using speech to focus that attention - the audience completely overlooked another assistant simply walking on stage in full view with the donkey. It was only when Blackwell re-focused his audience's gaze towards the donkey that it "appeared" to them.

Now, imagine a situation in which the trick goes on as planned, but Blackwell has begun believing his own powers of conjuration. Perhaps he startles himself when the donkey appears. This is not unlike the situation we now face with the current administration. Through repetition, constant misdirection, relentless adherence to talking points, and fanatical secrecy, our current leadership has managed to convince itself that the illusion it's been selling to the American public is real.

Rumsfeld and Bush probably don't deserve to be singled out for this; self-delusion is part of how our minds function. Not only do we revise information as it comes in, we constantly re-write our own histories throughout the course of our lives. (Ronald Reagan, for instance, confounded his staff and the press corps with stories from his life that clearly never took place - and no one could ever really tell if Reagan himself was aware of the discrepancies.)

But this is hardly an excuse. Cynically accepting misdirection as a fundamental part of the way we perceive and communicate is insufficient. As I pointed out in my discussion of skaldic poetry (below) this kind of deception is only acceptable when all sides are completely aware of it. There is clearly a large portion of the American public that actively wishes to be deceived - and has little desire to be disabused of their comfortable illusions. Why believe that American forces might be systematically killing more Iraqis than the insurgents themselves? In the case of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal - which shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the documented history of American conduct in Vietnam - the most popular response to the issue, and Bush's rebuttal, was the repeated assertion that, in essence, "Americans don't do such things." It's almost as if we don't need Bush's help to look away from uncomfortable facts, towards attractive illusions of moral superiority.

The problem, however, is that Rumsfeld's conflation (the summation of years of effort to conflate Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the public's imagination) didn't take place during a magic show, and the news from Iraq - while determined by the conventions of narrative - is not a poetic fiction. We are fooling ourselves by our own active misdirection - from the world around us to what we think that world ought to be. Rumsfeld and Bush are not fools; they are devout believers in a lie.

The antidote, I think, is the same as the skaldic poet's, and the magician's - to constantly remind the listeners that they are playing a part in the act. In the case of politics, however, the audience must stop playing a passive role, and realize that it's playing a role in its own deception.