Frayn spends 450 pages scrambling together an injunction against the observable world. Using a pseudo-scientific arsenal of sub-atomic behavior patterns and a dusty philosophy degree, Frayn posits the non-existence of the unobservable. He tap-dances around the basic premise that humanity's cumulative purpose in this junkyard is to fuel the very substantiation of the universe. Would there be a universe if not for our human lips kissing it? If biology did not contain the conceptual strength to fabricate a cosmos, did the tree falling in the woods make a sound? You get the idea.
I love the blind enthusiastic anthropomorphic pride that Frayn, a playwright that I've never heard of by trade, showers down on his pages. He spits on the boiled-up claims to objectivity that the scientific method naively uses to describe exterior phenomenon. He uses the untranslatable chaos of interior consciousness, or should use the untranslatable chaos of interior consciousness, to validate his assertions. Unfortunately, he spends far too many verbs constructing spiraling scenarios of miscomprehension. Nobly enough, the divergent rambling that comprises 75% of the book fails to support the ultra-transcendent leanings of his principle theme.
The most stimulating excursions the book transverses involve the interaction between language and comprehension. All the science words we use to facilitate the sane measurements that lend structure to the cinematic universe are just subjective accounts of dimensionality. Is dimensionality even measurable? I ask. Every galactic pivot contains a quantifiable amount of atoms between the next galactic pivot. There are five flat meters between my toes and the toilet. This post-modern fact is a tool of comprehension outlined in a language of socialized evolution. We are intrinsically subjective beasts hunting for objectivity to align our flittering consciouses.
Frayn, as you should imagine, bounds across the shadowy line that separates fiction from non-fiction, deliberately. There are fictitious facts and factual fictions. If that means anything. Clearly, McLane kills Simon in Die Hard: With A Vengeance, to say otherwise would be incorrect, but since it never really happened, since there is no actual McLane to kill an actual Simon, is the original statement just as false as well? Similarly, Frayn alludes that the entirety of the communicable universe is built upon the associative links we draw from our imagination. The tools of metaphor and analogy are the weapons we've fashioned out of our thoughts to make sense of the waking world.
Frayn points to the seeming centrality of human beings in the universe as evidence for our providential standing. The universe races beyond us and below us at seemingly parallel exponents. Our perspective scale is balanced between the outer-galactic and the sub-atomic. But, like me and my friend Nick would argue, “Of course I'm in the middle of the scale, the universe revolves around me.” Rather than conceding that the universe revolves around my friend, I'd venture to guess that, sure, the explored depths of vastness and insignificance seem equal, but this is because we've been traveling toward them from the same starting point for the same amount of time, not because we're universal spark plugs firing the cosmological cylinders. We are the galactic pivot in our own measurements.
March 17, 2007
There stands a five inch ice blanket that is being used for shock value outside that window. The forty-eight hour reach of this very second included a trip to the barefoot sun-park. It was probably backwards. I wish I didn't like to keep track of time in the normal sense of the term sense. I find it difficult to look clocks in their eyes. I am not brave enough. I always flinch first. Most people think that they are not forever. Most people think they are temporary. This notion seems ludicrous to someone. You can't trust any fact that has been arrived at in the last 10,000 years. Too much obfuscation is woven into society to believe. It was smarter before society because the concept of facts refused to exist. Anyone that tries to peddle you a fact about this universe deserves to be dried spit. People I know and trust have told me that clocks were invented before I was born. This is clearly impossible because time didn't start until I was born. What use would a world that didn't even exist yet have for clocks if time hadn't even started? Unless they were just hanging decorations for walls, which is very possible, and may even be the case today. Most of It comes back to structure. Or, It all comes back to systems. I once heard a genius say that he was going to write a book about systems. I hope he did because I'd like to read it now alone. I don't know where these definitions get started so don't come to my house door asking me where they got started, but the universe is a system. I like to imagine that the universe is composed of sharpened chaos or maybe even refined chaos. Does that sound like it might make sense? Clearly, there are loitering elements involved in the universe. Yeah, elements that stagnate to the metronome -- boring asphalts of the reverse-macro spectrum that stand in lines waiting for relationship advice. You probably know a couple of these elements. You've probably even named a couple of them. Then there's those elements that are bounding out of control. These elements are defining chaos because they had the audacity to invent a language that could conceive of a vocabulary that included the word chaos. These elements don't have names because you can't catch them! They're too dangerous. They are sharpened chaos angles that make variations on the tidal fabric the remote consideration that they are. All too magnificent to be abundant, radical elements reproduce ultra-atomically. It's revealing that decay and deterioration infect absolutely everything. This is the only true indication of time. This is the only way we know that duration is happening. All is decaying -- especially ideas and notions and concepts. You'll recall the earlier idea that black people should be slaves? That idea deteriorated. There was that idea that the planet Earth was the center of the universe. This idea is slowly deteriorating too. Abortion immoral? Won't be for long. A funny stereotype I just invented is of a person from the South that is anti-abortion and in favor of the death penalty. I'm sure there are people that are like that. If I invented a stereotype for a non-existent type of person then that is a remarkable accomplishment and deserves critical acclaim. So, imagining that this kind of person exists, what a hypocrite, right? But even if this variety of personality doesn't exist, the imagined stereotype is evidence of the faulty logic behind belief systems. Organizing beliefs into systems might seem natural because the universe is a system, but those that would adopt a system of beliefs are being deceived by the weight of blind elements. The universe, as a whole, doesn't mean to deceive you (it didn't even mean to conceive you), but the nature of our elemental lineage/ancestry is such that the most believable phenomenon that pass before your eyes are, inherently, the most unreliable barometers of truth. You really shouldn't believe in anything because society is too directionless.
March 15, 2007
In the extensive world of legitimate book reviews, the reviewer is presumed to have read the entire book he is reviewing. That's ok for legitimacy, but the last thing I want people to call askschwartz.com is legitimate. I'm halfway through a really thick book, and I feel like I've got enough of a handle on the two-dimensional forest within to talk about it with your average taxonomical matron.
Fictional people always seem to be getting themselves into trouble. I suppose there are a few troublemakers among us in the non-fictional world, but the percent of fictionals that get into trouble has got to be triplicated at the least. Is it so hard to invent a fake person that lives in rich docility and makes choices with a degree of consciousness? I'll cut Tom Wolfe some slack and chalk up his cynicism to the lingering scent of 1980s iridescent irresponsibility.
This book of aprox.800 words that he wrote in the 80s called The Bonfire of the Vanities (which in my wildest dreams was adapted into a movie staring Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks that I will probably never see; or if any deity remains after the eventual solar implosion of unsaid galaxy, will be turned into a movie that earns a symmetrical 5.0 user rating on the internet movie data.base that I will abstain from contributing to the casting of?) is about New York City. Before the prologue there is an Introduction reprimanding the Earth for not producing a great Novel about hippies. So, strikes two and three before chapter one. Hopefully this is just a reprint misprint and the original pressing abstained from these pretensions.
It's a great New York book, a great time capsule of said decade's ambitions and miscalculations. The book approaches infinite readability. Which makes me skeptical right away. I am suspicious of easy comprehension. Yeah, I struggle to put it down. But then, when it is down, I stop and I think that this thing I'm reading is just filler. It reads like filler. Artists often get a notion in their processes that inspires them to try to capture a city or a time or place that isn't even a city. In the Introduction Tom Wolfe wrote that The Great New York novel is overdue. And he went on to expunge all the research that was involved in writing such a tagline. Apparently, it took some six years of living in the 1980s and exercising visitation rights on The Bronx to write all these 'involved' pages.
On to the real crux of this book review -- Singular-Based-Art -- art that is created with a single interpretation in mind. In his aims to capture the omniscient scope of a towering city, Tom does what a million failures have already accomplished -- he narrows the gaze of the many on to the unfocused retina of a zagging generality. And he should know better. Wasn't he the last pioneer the non-fiction novel? Why would you set out to write about a city? Why would you set out to paint a city? Why would you set out to film a city? It strips away the billion-voice possibility wave of reality and replaces it with a casket of pre-determined outcomes. I love cities, I live in one. I love times, I live in some, but it's as useless to set out to write about a city as it is to write about the 1960s -- hopefully sparring us the great hippy novel.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is like Use Your Illusion era Guns N Roses - epic, involving, and a great waste of three hours. Even some artifact like Led Zeppelin is the same way, these cultural deposits are all surface. There is no relatable guts to these arts. The surface tension bubbles above the vacuum of a boring foundation. This stuff just hits you with the unambiguous bold strokes that define earlier stages of human evolution. Art that sets out to define its own interpretation strictly limits the expansive wanderings of the mind. This calls into question its very classification as art. The Bonfire of the Vanities is not art! Is it just cultural filler? But then what is Use Your Illusion?
March 10, 2007
There are enough stimulus junctions already, I know. The last thing you're probably telling yourself right now is, "Hey, Jackson, I need more tangents to think about!" Least of all should these spasms of synaptration be coming from the nebulous tube of plasma and plastic you're staring into right now. There's enough fonts on the 'net to bore you for the next six linear generations. But if you let yourself stop naysaying for the half-a-dozen metric seconds it takes to read this, we can really have some fun.
We're gonna play a game called Internet vs. Biology.
The Internet is a tool, is an extension of technology. So, it stands to reason, the Internet is something a guy can wield or harness. One tool that I've harnessed before, rather clumsily in all forthrightness, is a screwdriver -- also an extension of technology, the electric-powered screwdriver a further advancement on that tool. If you let me, I'll go one further and say that these screwdrivers are products of evolution. Evolution, as I understand it, meaning the continual progression toward the most utilitarian use of the universe. The Internet is evolution.
Thought is a tool, is an extension of technology. So, it stands to reason, Thought is something a guy could wield or harness. One tool that I've harnessed before, rather clumsily in all forthrightness, is the Internet -- also an extension of technology. Evolution served us Thought using the same ingredients that it used to serve us the Internet.
I don't know if you've tried to wield or harness Thought lately, but it's harder than advertised. Radical daggers of concentration slip in and out of mental projection at a rate of a dozen-million per second. With determined focus we can sustain threads of Thought to extremely useful ends. I could make the same observation about the Internet. Sure, it can be extraordinarily useful in endless capacities. But, if I'm being honest with myself, the majority of my time interfacing with the Internet is a divisive experience in pedantic wanderings. Estimating here, but I'd calculate that only five to fifteen percent of our Thoughts are constructive, and I'd use the same estimate to characterize our Internet usage. The rest is just driftwood.
Thoughts are real in the sense that we really experience them. Can't touch 'em or smell 'em. Can't use any of those five rusty senses to interact with Thoughts. But we do have them, don't we? Every waking second is occupied with some variety of buzzing sensation in the forebrain. The Internet receives a lot of criticism for its lack of reality. "Oh, you spend too much time talking to people on the Internet. Why don't you go outside and talk to someone in real life??!!" Sound familiar? I know I've uttered an approximation of this sentence before. But, it's occurring to me that the Internet, and communications therein, are just as biologically real as the green grass and chemical compounds that make up "fresh air."
Someone might interject that the internet is manmade, whereas Thoughts and verbal communication and grass are natural developments of biological resilience. We had no hand in developing Thought, it sprang from the biologic processes that predate the first Homo Sapean. Well, I'd ask that person to their face, "Did we really have a choice in the emergence of the Internet?" The home version of the Internet that is so popular today developed through several stages of human (biologic) ingenuity. The Internet built itself through the power of Thought. Just like Thought built itself through the power of the brain. Just like the brain built itself through the power of cells. Just like cells built themselves through the power of asexual reproduction. The Internet is the same extension of biologic processes that is Thought. The Internet is to Thought as the electric-powered screwdriver is to the manual screwdriver.
Evolution created Thought because it had to create Thought. Not only are Thoughts real, reality cannot exist without Thought. Reality cannot exist without the brain, without cells. The additional layer of reality that was created by the evolution of human Thought is the same layer that is draped over the creation of the Internet. Reality cannot exist without the Internet.