Essay 4.1: Escaping the zeitgeist of intermediacy and seeing our cosmic signatures
The murder weapon was a reflection
This should properly be a post script as it hadn’t occurred to me until after I had uploaded the previous essay on Narcissus and Medusa. It occurred to me ex post facto that the murder weapon in Medusa’s death had been a reflection; technically, swords and capes were involved in addition to the polished shield that allowed Perseus to look at her reflection and avoid petrification. It was a group of weapons. But it is the shield that interests me most, as it embodies the other—brings the enemy closer—captures the enemy—and is ambiguous in terms of weaponry.
Shields are designed as defense mechanisms; they can conceivably deflect arrows or dampen sword blows. In a way, they function as the zygote wall or the feminine filtration of male suitors. Or anyone’s filtration of suitors—not to be exclusive. A shield can be coded as feminine just as a sword can be read as a phallic symbol—and, also, in the case of the sword, it is the device that can cause castration. Swords are symbolically self-canceling. But returning to the shield, it’s an instrument of deflection and reflection: blows will be parried and one’s opponent might be disadvantageously blinded by reflected light from a shiny shield. Let’s not get into Tennyson’s plumed helmets here. In a non-gendered interpretation, a shield is a membrane-correlative; skin, walls, scales, leaves, clothing, clouds, darkness, bark, housing, cities, anything and everything that is structurally intermediary. In essence, a shield is the zeitgeist of intermediacy, itself. Then so too could language or a bridge be.
A shield ironically re-clads the warrior in the womb.
A shield makes a fetus of the embattled Odysseus. A shield is interestingly not part of the equip of a samurai or a participant in a fencing match. In the latter, the weapons are also numbered: three swords for the fencer—a foil, an épée, and a saber. A samurai’s weapons are numbered, too: katana and the wakizashi. There is also a short dagger called a tanto. Interestingly, no shields. This is unprotected contest. This is sword on sword. There is no intermediary. Antler against antler—tusk clashing with tusk. This is battle without the semiotics or symbolics of intercourse. This is unambiguous in its intent to remove an opponent from the field of possible interlopers. Stark. Sad. Inevitable?
A system of shielding sends two messages simultaneously: a desire to survive that is regressive unto the threshold of an Oedipal desire to reunify with the mother in the matrix and the desire to penetrate the shield wall and function structurally like the father. It is ambiguous, fraught with the yin and yang or normal everyday life. It begs strategy. It must be cast in motion-based game theoretic analysis. Cloak and dagger is the idiomatic casting of this type of contest. It is dialectic. It is part of the symbolics of male/female. It is quantum in the sense that the violence is potential and does not have to be realized. It is the same as bluffing in a game of cards. The cards are the shield. The weaponry qua-strength-of-the-hand may or may not be deployable. Or sufficient.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Shieldless contest, on the other hand, allows much less room to retreat; again, it is unambiguous in its structural dynamics. By removing the fetus-correlative of behind-the-shield-positioning, there is no preservation of life messaging on the field of conflict. (One could counterargue here that the mask in fencing creates a chrysalis-correlative and re-womb’s the warrior. In fact, all clothing can be construed as subconscious longing for the original protection we experienced when we were literally clothed in the warmth of life itself. Or it could just be clothing. Sometimes, as they say, a jacket is just a jacket. And a pipe is just a pipe. But this is not a pipe.
We must return to Medusa and her killer, Perseus. And the cameric (not chimeric, but that applies, too) device—the prototypical shield-qua-camera—that he used as part of his strategy. You see, his attack had to be strategic. It could not be spontaneous. And, as Foucault predicted, he needed satellite imagery to execute his target. For what is a shield if not a satellite from so many millennia ago? It is literally a detachable object of technology designed for deflection that can also function as an image gathering device. Isn’t an array of satellites that intends to make visible the traces of incoming objects the exact same in its effect?
Both shields and modern satellites are two-way affairs. They reflect but they also listen. The famous poet who wrote Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery, may not have had Perseus on his mind when he went to work. And whether the portrait had been upon the shield’s convexity or her concavity is irrelevant. The fact that a piece of metal had been used for real-time conflict-relevant imagery for troop movement against an asymmetric enemy is very modern. Wouldn’t you say that in this case, a shield is not just a shield?
invisibility is redundant
And lest we forget, Perseus had an invisibility cloak. Just like Harry Potter. Although invisibility is kind of redundant when one is wearing a cloak. It’s kind of like calling a knife a “cutting knife”. We get the point. We need not wax to the pleonastic. A pleonasm, in case you were wondering, is the use of more words than are necessary. And as all cloaks are devices to conceal, does it really need to be magical? I say no. But then, I was not in Perseus’s sandals. Perhaps he needed to attack during the day. And, yes, on a hot summer day in Ancient Greece, a black cloak would be anything but invisible. So let’s leave the magic on the side.
The cloak IS the message. If Marshall were to be analyzing this, I think he would apply his famous formula of mediums to war instruments as well. Which we use tells a lot about our intent but even more about our reservations. The cloak is the feminine. Says me. You won’t necessarily find that elsewhere. I am just mapping the draping, long-form, folding, pleated, covering, sometimes labial structuralism of the garment—the raiment, even—onto the anatomy of the feminine. There is no there, there.
That Perseus should cloth himself in the cloak—should literally disappear, as a return to pre-natal non-existence, suggests a deep subconscious ambivalence about violence. To me, at least. As all hiding places are toral—are tunnels, warrens even. They are places of singular egress, perhaps. But they are chambers for metamorphoses. We can become anything while we gestate. We can emerge as warrior or savior. Savior of whom? Of our own delicate innocence. The cloak is the pause. No cloak, no pause. No rebirth. As you might be deducing, I am an idealist and a pacifist. Not that I expect these things to characterize the world. But one can always dream. And dreaming whilst writing is a form of action.
And Perseus had a sword. He had the cloak, shield and sword. He could have emerged or been born with any ratio or ratiocination of gender-indexed-correlatives-to-violence he or she chose. Yes, I am referring to a gendering of violence/non-violence along masculine/feminine lines…not as any kind of prescription or even any kind of description that is unassailable, and it is not an agenda. Just a reference to a moment of historical gender equivalency that seems apropos here. The idea is that Perseus had an opportunity to be reborn. We all do. Every time we have the halcyon security of being shielded—which, in spite of the tragic areas of unprotection currently, many in the modern world have had semi-shieldedness, culturally speaking, along lines of privilege, to be sure—to extend the shield to all can allow for resetting. But it probably won’t. Still, it is important to see this space-time correlative of the womb in terms of private moments of non-combat behind the shield as essential in the games we play.
What did Foucault say?
Let us return to shiny things that allow us to see more than we might otherwise. What did Foucault say? It has been years since I read The Order of Things. Wasn’t his introductory chapter an extended analysis of Las Meninas? Haven’t I too, forever after and in his debt, stared into that painting? Analyzed the quantum-cancellatory function of the mirror that reflects either the viewers of the painting or the King and Queen of Spain? Is this immortality-qua-eternal-transformation of viewers into the king and queen or is this constant revolution and overthrow of the royal physiognomies by the likes of you and me? It is indeterminate. We can’t say.
But we can say that reflections, which are nature’s first photographs, are disembodied and shallow: two-dimensional, and, as such, they beget and enable a moral step-down transformation as to what we do with the images. I mean, literally, images are deletable and shreddable and left in boxes in attics to decay. But they also confer or sanction or are an accessory to murder.
Thou shalt not kill. But thou cans’t if thou want’st tear up a photo. Destroy a likeness. And it isn’t too much of a step to say that selecting a target that one will not kinetically connect with is destroying an image. My intent here is not to overstep or overwrite the politics of defense. Pacifists are purists. They reduce and reduce and reduce. They are agent-relative—I forget the thinker who used those terms of relative and neutral agency, but they are tremendously helpful in resolving the dilemma of whether killing one life to save many is something one would do…classic Asimov. Moral philosophy 101. Most people outsource agent-neutral acts of defense. Soldiers don’t. Civilians do. It is complicated. It is simple, too. But it is complicated.
It is killing if it is with one’s hands or the jawbone of an ass. Or a rock or a sword. Or paper or scissors. If there is two-way contact, it is a homicide. But what if it is contactless? Mediated by an image? Yes, it still is. Of course. There are wisdom traditions that ascribe agency to thoughts of harm. There is also the psychological treatment for the obsessive that requires thoughts to defeat neural-chemical patterns that trap the sufferer in unfounded fears. There is no simple path to peach or health. And yet, wouldn’t it be nice if there were?
Creatures of paradox
Since I am audaciously covering ground from disciplines I am only a neophyte in, and am going the way of the Sokal’s paper, usurping science and math that I can’t remotely comprehend or wield, I may as way go further: Gödel’s incompleteness theorem applied to a framework of morality might suggest that such impasses of inconsistency are inevitable. We can’t have our neutrality and our relativity, too. We may be creatures of paradox. We may wish to codify a grand unifying theory of morality—but wouldn’t that be the total narrative of all biology through space and time? We are complicated. Our complications make us who we are. They forge idealists and antagonists. But what is needed is synthesists. Spiritualism—is it the synthesis of the material and the immaterial? And regardless of the accessibility of literature, such moral quandaries will always find us—you see, narrative is the greatest reflection there ever was.
Story. It is our mirror. It is inevitable.
And that makes reading a kind of narcissism. Culturally diffracted. And perhaps we ought to think of ourselves as homo symbolicus rather than homo sapiens. Because we do not pursue a program of wisdom; on the contrary, we pursue programs of addition and attrition, reduction and production. We pursue everything in the arenas of symbols we have created and re-casted as the departments in our universities: humanities, mathematics, economics, sciences, etc.
The strange and consternational light of the dao seeps through the disciplinary-interstices here and there: from quantum physics to queer theory, our symbolic systems become lattices, fragile and crystalline and vulnerable to kinetic or resonant force. We, unfortunately, have not found workable ways of synthesizing our sciences with our spiritual systems. Are the systems incompatible? Or is one the reflection of the other? That would be a kind of portraiture of the soul, were we to be able to pictorialize wisdom, itself. Some might even suggest it is blasphemy. Some might even suggest this was the program of Babel.
I am not one of them. My hope and my comfort lies not in the reconciliation of systems but in resting with paradox so as to learn more. Narcissus was in stasis—in a pause—in a chrysalis of reflection, both literally and psychologically. Or was he? We can never know the content of another’s mind. However, taking too much time by any pond’s edge, whether it be Walden or wherever Narcisus knelt, irks those of us who are either working or resentful. The lingerers are punished for exclusive self-love. I feel this punishment may be unnecessary; all cessation is punished by cessation, eventually. Ahh, Bartleby. Ahh, humanity.
And all participation and non-participation is entropic. There hadn’t been a need to fleurify the poor guy. Given time, he may or may not have cut out his own rootedness. His shield was non-movement. His shield was the silver water. His shield was more like a platter, and he served himself up to the hatred that all narcissists are wont to experience.
We can’t abide being ignored.
We can’t abide the performative greater self-importance of the narcissist.
It is an existential threat.
But it doesn’t have to be. The third thing at play here and underneath the surface of all these ideas—the spirit that both creates the reflectivity of the mirror and also dissolves it—is time. Time is the weapon-ultima of any conflict—essentially, it is our best weapon in the conflict of our ignorance with our wisdom that plays itself out via the art of storytelling.
We are in a deep hole.
I know I said it was a tower, before. In a way, tower and pit are, topologically, more similar than different. It is piercing that makes a thing unique. So tower or pit, let us move on. The way out is a scaffolding of language-mediated understanding of our environments. Along the way, we name things. Ourselves. Plants. Turtles. We need to name them to slow them down in time. To arrest them. So that we can get closer and closer to motion. But herein we must laugh at ourselves. Laughter, by the way—that unspellable part of language—laughter is really the synthesis you are looking for. It is the effervescence of the material and the spiritual, the real and the unreal. It is the language that would be spoken in heaven, if there be such a place. We must laugh because we can’t, as Heisenberg codified, describe and ride a particle at the same time. Words and symbols ironically function as a kind of knife, cleaving us from non-mediated experience of the now. They create the dead skin of history and the warm tissue of our dreams. I love language. Don’t get me wrong. I use it every day. And whatever skill I have in it was acquired slowly and as the result of thousands and thousands of pages read and perhaps thousands written. And I have loved it since I was 9 years old and I am now 51. It has been perhaps the most constant commitment I have maintained in my life. So I am not anti-language. It is perhaps just that I have become so close to language that I realize it is a kind of snakeskin and I wonder what of sloughing it off? I wonder what is it that it is mediating for me? I wonder if language, well used, provides windows onto what lies beneath? I wonder if writers, the thousands of us that have devoted our lives to playing in language, are really like the blind men and women describing the remote territories of a solitary oliphant or some much more fantastical beast. Or is it a menagerie? What is it? That which exists before and after and underneath and above and within language? What is the force, the qi, the dao, the quantum strings…what is it that we are describing? Isn’t it magical? Isn’t it ineluctable? Is it, perhaps, ineffable?
It is motion that we try to limn with language. But language is always that sloughed off skin. It is never going to be, experientially, one with what it is describing.
And yet we build.
We are builders.
Unaware that the materials we are building with are ironically creating greater distance between us and what we want to understand.
It is a kind of optics that connects us again. A kind of third-eye-way-of-seeing that sees through cultural and historical walls. Plato wrote as much in his allegory of the cave. And that allegory was a nod to photography, too. A nod to the inferiority of images and our own incapacity to take in the raw incandescence of the actual, were we to be brave enough to try to look at it directly. And yet, there is something in the direction of true seeing and knowing in our nascent projects and our adolescent arts. We ought have sympathy with ourselves. To incline toward the creative arts is a way of knowing without seeing.
We must return to Medusa and Perseus, ill-fated couple that they were. Medusa was she who could not be looked upon. Doesn’t one have this right? Or was she that which, in seeing, would destroy us? Well, duh. She turned us to stone. She was knowledge. In a way, she was weaponry we ought not possess. Her head, immortal, was a weapon now dispossessed of a body. Was she a snake-headed terrestrial mermaid? Not necessarily. Again, she was any kind of knowledge we are not ready to possess. Eve and her apple. Pandora. Prometheus. All technology is stolen from nature. It is seen. It is blueprinted. It is transported. Are we ready for it? Were we ready for the rhythmic modulations that became language? I don’t know. Is anyone ever ready for anything? Who is born ready? Mozart, perhaps? They are rare. The rest of us have a lot of catching up to do to reach—not our potential—but our thresholds.
Medusa died by the image
Strange how Medusa died by the image, in a way of speaking. It was reflection that spelled doom for her and for Narcissus. Or was it? Did Narcissus achieve a kind of immortality-qua-metamorphosis? We are our eyes. And yet, we have no idea of what vision really is. What it means to see. It is the river of light we are constantly moving in. It is the water that Wallace’s fish were incapable of perceiving. It is Sidhartha’s river that he can’t step into twice—atman?
Lol—we might re-cast that as @man or @woman…you see, symbols will only ever lead us away from truth. Or spin us around, blindfolded, whilst we are inside the thing we bat at. We are inside truth, always. Truth may be squishy and vibrational and messy. Should we laugh and find delight in our symbolic play—should we play, symbolically, but not let the strife blind us from our potential for kindness and caring, we might get that critical distance from language to see another kind of portrait of ourselves—a trans-temporal-total-panoramic-selfie-of-all-of-us. For, you see, it may be the reverse of us being Jonah’s inside the whale of the symbolic. Perhaps, as Joseph Campbell extracted from the Upanishads, all of the words and all of the symbols are within us—can we see ourselves etched via our energy signatures like declarants of hopeful independents in the constitutional vastness of the cosmic expanse? Can we escape? I think if you are laughing—yes, laugh at this, please—if you are laughing, you have synthesized and realized and dissolved the walls and you are speaking the language of freedom. What a constitution it would be if it were all the notes of each of us, laughing. That would be worth listening to. That would be heaven on earth.