Casualties of Culture

The Fourth of July is ever the holiday of those simultaneous inventions, gunpowder and printer's ink. For Americans, it is the day of celebration of the colonies emerging from under royal authority as a nation ruled by its people: a democracy. Across the pond, the day goes by without cultural significance for the British descendants whose ancestors were fighting one of many rebellions which the Empire saw intensify each subsequent century from the 17th, on. For most of my generation, it's gaudy flag prints on t-shirts and ripped jean shorts, beer in the cooler, beef on the grill and bags full of controlled or barely controlled instruments of color and destruction raining smoking debris down on friends and family.

A cold autumnal wind has now thoroughly ended my memories of a summer now passed in New York as to the north of us in Concord, Mass. the "shot heard 'round the world" is ringing no more in the ears of our revolutionary ancestors. And what of fall celebrations? Halloween is over, so I'm sick of sugar for a little while, and Christmas decorations are up at work, skipping over the harvest of Thanksgiving. As we are smacked with the grit of miniature shells of media explosions crackling along the ridges of our attention from screens and newsprint, the meaning of days set aside for cultural observances is moot. One forgets to look further into the absence before the next lovely distraction, the next brilliant explosion captures our attention - an Attention tattered and wholly abused, as that flag of Fort McHenry which Francis Scott Key saw from the HMS Tonnant - remember?

Reading

"Culture wars," a phrase I first saw along with the stacks of a large and independent bookstore, a very liberal bookstore, was such a distracting explosion to my senses. Not a "war on culture," which would be too literal, but culture wars - battles featured in every stacked book, many of them new titles written and published in our very new but already worn out century. The battles are fought in the nebulous space that hosts the raging of our minds and wants to know the Cause! Or bolster our confidence that we're on the right side of it all. A cultural battle is usually fought over a virtue we are defending or a vice we're up-ending as a society. And as in actual combat, both sides suffer losses.

T.S. Eliot's 1948 book, and subsequent 1962 edition Notes Towards a Definition of Culture was published on the heels of the Second World War, a very fleshy conflict, but already taking the leap to distance one from witnessing the inhumane at firsthand by a drop of the utmost destruction from the old Enola Gay. Eliot's series of lectures attempt to define the difference between the senses of culture, which are threefold: individual, group (or class) and the whole society, as well as provides an exploration of regionalism in the history and modern creative facility of the European nations in the mid-20th century. The primary concern is over the transcendent quality of all the different senses of culture: culture, no matter at what level, is a particular, "evolutionary fruition, a structure elegantly expressed with literature and the arts," rather than having biological form. These structures are nonetheless living and require defending and protecting as civilization changes. They are organic jewels from elder ages and new changes may chance the disfigurement of their faces.

I read this book alongside George Steiner's T.S. Eliot Lectures from 1971 that was entitled (somewhat) affectionately, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. By chance I happened to have alongside these two "chatty Kathys," as my mother jokes, a piece of mostly late-20th century literary criticism with some personal essay by the writer Sven Birkerts called The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age"(READ: Digital), 1996. It was a 2006 edition with new foreword and afterword and I waded through the molasses-quality first half to get to the second half and its afterword in preparation of his personal/historical hindsight. I'll return to this later.

All 3 of these books are concerned with the probable (or evident by example) degradation of the cultural fabric of Euro-American society during the mid-to-late 20th century. By their estimation, the activity of reading (Birkerts), the transmission of culture (Eliot) and the beginning of a post-cultural phase (Steiner) are all due to a shift in values. Tracing a chronological trajectory, the values which were to become unacceptable to the Sixties generation were already values which had lost their intrinsic meaning at the turn of the century, thereby allowing for the vacuum to be filled by the subjective (and by elimination, only true) value of society: the liberated, modern, democratic, self-interested individual.

In Birkerts, this loss of intrinsic value is due to the rise of technology; in Eliot it is because of the advance of secularization i.e. loss of eschatological meaning/ontological bearing, and the loss of traditional education; in Steiner it is a mixture of the two with a few more culprits to boot - the atomic bomb, the conflation of Humanism with humane social conduct, the breakdown of economic stability, etc.

Walking

I followed the ley lines commonly walked by these writers and found myself often with uneasy footing alongside steep cliffs. Eliot refrains from even defining culture. At most he says it is not what we call education or class or religion, defining it by negation, or by the conception of culture as an inheritance of accumulated past riches. Birkerts puts all of his argument behind the intractable experience of reading and what gets in the way of the process (the screen) pokes holes in our understanding of this cultural fabric. Steiner seems to be the most well-spoken, with this to say:

What is central to a true culture is a certain view of the relations between time and individual death. The thrust of will which engenders art and disinterested thought, the engaged response which alone can ensure its transmission to other human beings, to the future, are rooted in a gamble on transcendence.

One more source of this conversation on culture is relevant to the question of the loss of value in modernity, and it comes from the late Guy Davenport's "The Geography of the Imagination" (1981):

The imagination, like all things in time, is metamorphic. It is also rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it has now, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things.

To this telegram delivery man, it seems that "the thrust of will" for Steiner is the very activity carried out by Davenport's "imagination." Whereas the immanence of a thing in Davenport's measure of the Ancient Greeks was its sacredness, for Steiner (and his intellectual forbearer Eliot) the chance that we take on there being something worth transmitting to future generations is a matter of preserving the center, transcendence, which reconciles or at least keeps in communion the human value of both death and time. There is a risk in this, personal hazard - what shall we not do for the preservation of this value? - but whether the value is immanent or transcendent, we culminate the rite of it only in one space: Culture. The warp and woof of which all of these writers have as their concern - to keep its integrity alive. This is done through the activity of the imagination and it is a sacred rite performed by the artist, as Orpheus did so with his lyre.

Sitting

The Fourth of July: A holiday we celebrate, as the younger generations of my country celebrate, in remembrance of the delight in bright, burning objects which we also saw when we were even younger. Not an observance but a great time to day-drink. Commiseration over the terrible terror-state we now live in while we rarely wonder what it would be like to sacrifice the treasure of our individuality (whatever that really is) so that a generation or two from us can be free from horrors that would pale in comparison to current injustices. Eliot: culture is "evolutionary fruition, a structure elegantly expressed with literature and the arts." Elegance? Perhaps those very motions that people used to perform as a rite in order to give thanks to the origins of their present conditions.

The casualties of culture are the disappearance of these practices and traditions which provided the means by which to perform these rites that are now altered for the convenient "update" or rendered "obsolete." The cause? Either ignorant termination while laying down the pavement of progress or by refusal in aversion - because we do not personally, as individuals - align ourselves with men or women of the past (but mostly men) who thought or felt "that way." We can move beyond them and never look back again. This is our vista, and who knows how it was raised? You know, evolution.

In the phrase "nothing's sacred" - which actually comes from the old adage of admonishment "Is nothing sacred?" - we have what might be identified as the secular dogma. One might broach, but if nothing is sacred, doesn't this fulfill the Ancient Greek "vernacular ordinariness of things" mentioned by Davenport, making everything sacred? And didn't the Greeks gift us that which we value or purport to value above all else in our culture, Democracy? If there is anything to be defended during these culture wars, surely it must be the virtue of Democracy. I'm not so convinced that sacredness is what permeates everything now.

If that were so, there would be devotees in electric temples, for nothing permeates our lives more than electricity and the fields of forces that are produced by its help. Communication, or the opportunity to communicate, is chief of all and positioned by electricity - and yet I find it harder and more difficult to speak to and stay connected with everyone I care to keep close. There is more hindrance than cultus. What's humble about Facebook walls and the blathering of comment sections on news websites? It is most artless and we're fooling ourselves and each other when we try to convince someone of the ingenuity and creativity of the Internet and of current technological interfaces. I rarely encounter what Steiner states as "engaged response" except in chance face-to-face dialogue. There's no sacred space in the neutered vastness of the World Wide Web just as there isn't any inside of the enclosed cables connecting a grid. There's no Internet cultus because there isn't a rite being performed. You type and hit Enter - but you don't go anywhere. Convince me that you engage with and transmit something verifiably precious beyond your own love or hate on the Internet and then we can admit of the existence of dialogue and a culture that values it.

"True Culture"

I haven't even touched the topic of sub-cultures or the schismatic nature of this modern breakdown of values into smaller, subjective truths. There is an eerie fulfillment in Eliot's essays, as he was undoubtedly irked by the predictions of Arnold, Ruskin and/or Morris before him. My reading list keeps increasing on this topic and will likely never keep being added unto. I cannot conclude this article, no matter how hard I try to string the bits together. Though I do remain highly skeptical of "the now," it's not in Luddite fashion because I try to struggle with my relenting to the unrelenting advance of that which we've replaced most of the space where literature and the arts performed the rites that attempted to contextualize time & individual death. What virtues can we have upheld and what vices have we upended if either action done in battle is for the land we can never return to? We'd be worse off than Odysseus.

Sven Birkerts reluctantly submits in his afterword to The Gutenberg Elegies to the incredible efficacy of technology and by the example of his children, the adaptability of coming generations to encountering the wonders of literature and the arts off-the-page. Perhaps they are such rare wonders that my surprise at finding so very much detritus in what is supposed to be havens of culture or representatives of culture is actually the normal state of affairs. I do hope this is so, and I might be forgiving for prescribing any sort of sickness in our post-modern ways or enlarging what is merely a wrinkle. I'll end this with two more quotes from "Bluebeard's" by the inimitable George Steiner to ponder this post:

A culture "lived" is one that draws for continuous, indispensable sustenance on the works of the past, on the truths and beauties achieved in the tradition.

It is the collapse, more or less conscious, of these hierarchized, definitional value gradients (and can there be value without hierarchy?) which is now the major fact of our intellectual and social circumstance. The horizontal "cuts" of the classical order have been made vertical and often indistinct.

Terry Gilliam's Twin Fables

[ First and foremost, apologies to any readers who have been awaiting most of the second half of the calendar year of 2012, and the first half of 2013, for new transmissions from the Observatory here at Waves of Guide. To bring you something new has been to cull what is old and rotten, shake away its stink and musk, and enliven some fresh feelings and thoughts into this tapestry of Life. And so, without further ado, a piece entitled "Terry Gilliam's Twin Fables" ]

Few films project their own light free from a theater screen through the days of my youth and upon the years of my adulthood as do Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981) and his Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Perhaps it is because of this writer's constant exposure to Monty Python's absurd antics and particularly British humour by his father's incessant tuning-in to comedy channels on the TeleVision. Or, maybe the connection made between one's impressions received in youth and an awareness created later in life by certain stories, told by certain creators (whether "original" or "inauthentic") maintain something within that just keeps nudging you, over and over again, as your life goes on. From chance encounter to deeply intimate experience, there they appear with gentleness and honesty, the children of his fables - Sally of Baron Munchausen and Kevin of Time Bandits 

The Fable of Romanticism

The children in these films go on journeys apart from their "realistic" worlds, but as one knows, if one remembers, we were born from that world apart from the real world, the imaginal world, and are gradually pulled away, forgetting its sensation. [See the Introduction to the Work of the philosopher who coined this term "imaginal" at Henry Corbin Project] Sally lives in a world of war, pseudo-rationality, and the utmost evil of these conditions - bureaucracy - in the form of a magistrate played by Jonathan Pryce, in a vastly different (and French) role than his portrayal of Sam Lowry in 1985's Brazil.

In Munchausen, the risk of death is present not only in war, murder & disease, but also in the form of the Spirit of Death itself which continually seeks the Baron. Sally still senses/lives in the imaginal world, and so she is the only one who sees Death for what it Is, and sees through what it masquerades as in the end for the Baron - modern Western medicine. Sally carries this dark gift but is disowned of her story-telling heritage as the daughter who goes unrecognized, poster after poster, in the advertisements for her father's theater troupe. She is barred from the inheritance of imagination in an increasingly unimaginative world. We meet her father's troupe performing for the city's bombarded people the unbelievable "true" stories of Baron Munchausen. Sally needs Baron as much as the people need his stories, to show the length and breadth of a life lived with the thirst for love, for honor, and for the journey through it all, even facing danger - and death. Military science and the machine of bureaucracy is a wheel spinning just above the ground, and the city of Man which it's purporting to protect is falling...

Historically, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Munchausen, was a real figure who served in the Russian campaigns against the Turks during the 18th century. The exaggerated stories of his travels were first published in England in 1785 by German exile Rudolph Erich Raspe. Gilliam mines Raspe's stories for the action of his film, but expands upon the intrinsic value of such elaboration as an essential elaboration to counter-balance the stolid reality of a modern world. The director wryly titles the opening scene as, "The Age of Reason," before we are brought into the siege of the city. In this way, he is inviting us to compare the level of destitution caused by the grim methods of warfare, paired with the increasing capacity for an idolatrous humanity to deem itself more learned, more rational, and more ethically justified to do "good." The Mind had now been raised higher than the Spirit. This is farcically shown by Pryce's character 'The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson' condemning a Heroic Officer to death, played by a young Sting, for going "beyond the call of duty," capturing cannons and saving men. Sting is a recognizable artist, and his character's death is also a parody of the artist's death (to some folk's subjective delight, but we're leaving that aside here).

Munchausen is the spirit of Sally's world and the very quintessence of the era of Catherine the Great of Russia, the energy of the French Revolution, the European world invigorated by Classical mythology and expounding Nature's affect in poetry. The world before the Scientific era (and oddly, the spirit of the reactive artistic movement after the Age of Reason, Romanticism). Sally maintains wonder for this old way being eclipsed by the new. When Munchausen-on-stage, played by Sally's father, is flayed of his prosthetic nose by the real Munchausen, the film begins a process of pulling the seams apart between the deteriorating theater of the world (which is literally being blown apart by Turkish cannon fire) and the true substance of our life that gives living whether in a "reasonable" war or in an unreasonable story any meaning. Munchasuen takes responsibility for the play and the war, then sets out on the adventures that shaped both. His faults throughout are his virtues. Sally won't have him give up his spirit to Death, because our Spirit is what's truly under siege, and death is always out to take it from us, wearing many disguises, all antithetical to the imagination. The end of the film is a hopeful one, Sally receiving her inheritance of place and name in the troop, though she could not keep Death from taking the Baron's soul. Time Bandits offers no such gift.

The Fable of Modernity

"So we create a world that isn't true to a realistic, naturalistic world, but is truthful" - this is Terry Gilliam on his film-making practice, and on storytelling. In Time Bandits, Kevin is a modern boy fascinated by the annals of history, his walls adorned with his drawings of ancient, medieval and turn-of-the-century images. They occupy his entire imagination. His parents watch a television show "Your Money or Your Life" and eat from ready-made meals of the Microwave, disinterested in their son's young life. Kevin has a taste for what has been lost in the sands of time, lost to the immediate present, and finds only the dessicated remnants of it in his books.

Enter the little people, the common stock, the otherworldly. The bandits of the film's title steal not time exactly, but a Map of points in space-time, where they plan to steal treasure from history's notables. The troupe of 6 are joined by Kevin, the 7th, and they fall through time, which takes them further and further away from the Supreme Being, whom they stole the map from, and towards the Evil Genius (played by David Warner). Evil's intentions are quite different than the small bandits for the wealth of the world they created, or Kevin's for a life of substance - he wishes to acquire the knowledge he needs of the latest machinations made by man, to understand computers, and become as a supreme being himself. This is taking Horatio's conception of the world to its logical extreme.

It is worth noting that when Kevin and the bandits make for the Time of Legends, space between what "happened" and what is lost in story, is bridged. This is also where and when the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, where the Evil Genius dwells, is accessed from; a bridge where mythology and history meet has, from a modern standpoint, little meaning, only for archaic or faddish New-Aged knowledge. This is the trick of Warner's character, that he lures them into believing that the greatest treasure is beyond the edges of the Map of space-time, the very same intriguing idea that lures many a person to religion, mysticism, sorcery, etc. Metaphysical truths are the seeds of physical experience. The "beyond" is where they do find the Supreme Being, or rather he finds them, but his characterization is nothing more than that of a watchmaker-type God (played by Ralph Richardson) whom neatly cleans up and makes orderly where mistakes of his own were made. "Why does evil exist?" Kevin asks him. He momentarily walks off behind a broken pillar and comes back to answer, "I think it has something to do with free will." So begins and ends any theological considerations in the film. The bandits are then re-instated as the workers of the World, and Kevin is sent back...

What is most vexing about Time Bandits, if you will sympathize with my own vexation, taking notice of not my review but poor synopsis of the film's parts, is that in the end Kevin is not allowed to stay with Agamemnon in antiquity or anywhere else but ends up back in his own time - as his house is burning. One single chunk of the Evil Genius remained and traveled back with him, lodged in the Microwave. His parents touch the chunk and are incinerated before his eyes. The camera lifts away and we are left much as how we are in Gilliam's other film about time travel, 12 Monkeys (1995), with the child alone and dispossessed of a future. Where will Kevin now be sent? To live with a Munchausen-like relative who like an indemnitor gives him new hope for a coming age? Or like James Cole, will he now have the greater grief of succumbing to a human movement underground because of a new plague of our creation which wipes out most of the world's population in 1996? The questions raised in Time Bandits are unresolved, being a film about modernity's own unresolved complications. 

Conclusions(s)

Complication is essential, as simplicity is co-opted by that very evil with which the modern era touts its own ideologies for the sake of any number of conveniences, to the debilitating effect of complacency and disinterest in the individual - as it was with Kevin's parents. The Imaginal world, as Corbin shows, has not a fable of its own, for the true substance of our imaginations are made of its material and are woven in this reality. Film, and I think Terry Gilliam would agree with me, exemplifies this transcendent notion of Ideas expressed in the Forms of the World, that very dear Platonic teaching. The images and sounds fabricated remind us that the actions upon the screen of the theater are as the activities of our Imaginations which manifest themselves in our worlds and our lives. The questions is: What stories are worth telling well? Gilliam has at least been consistent enough to give a thoughtful and era-appropriate answer with each one of his works, even up through 2011's web-only release of his 20-minute short film "The Wholly Family" (available to 'rent' for $2.99 at terrygilliamweb.com). There is a much different outcome for this new 21st century child Jake than for Kevin, but I will withhold my spoiling of that cinematic fruit and instead shall urge you, the receivers, to view, reflect, and make something of your own in response.

When He Came Through, We Gathered

Hand made collage

Newspaper clippings, plastic sheet, magic marker