The Continuity of Consciousness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pereira

Were the Greeks onto something when they coined the roots of the word "consciousness" and "continuity"? To be conscious is to remember the last moment of perception and to link it to the next, to have your brain relate perceptions into some coherent short term stream, so that you can feel and act on it.

Consciousness is continuity of perception. As you fall asleep, that continuity gets fragmented and you tend to forget the next moment, you lose consciousness and continuity.

Consciousness depends on the existence of the short-term cache used to process incoming data from the senses. It has to be fast, and it has to integrate the information for the deeper layers, the one that drive action and long term memory. It has to draw upon memory as well. Short term memory is limited in size because it is big on processing power. Lots of neurons required.

Current research on cognition suggests that we have a bunch of neural bundles in the brain that do this work all in parallel, that these compete for bandwidth, and the resultant dynamic network signals are what we can call consciousness. The signals that have control of the bus at the time, and that pulse it to make us act and remember are the Self.

This model does not address the big question of the Me. What makes a writer want to take this flow of perceptions, call them ideas, record them on secondary external memory and publish them so as to possibly communicate and affect the behaviour of others. The Will to Power?

What links us to the world as Beings. This is what the better religions are struggling with, and Zen Buddhism comes close to understanding it when it concludes that the universe is Me, and that the relationships between beings is the Universe. Still, a loop. Maybe language is the issue. We have an object-oriented language, and that is a flawed model, as many programmers and programs are discovering. The world cannot be entirely described as a hierarchy of "objects" What is an object anyhow, except an integration by the senses, a model. Another loop.

Some drugs like alcohol, anaesthetics, and sleep hormones allow these neural bundles to slow down, to rest and possibly to re-organize, do to maintenance. Caffeine and other stimulants speed up the bus somehow.

We feel and act differently under these influences because our front end processing changes, the continuity of short term memory and of sensual processing changes, thus affecting our sense of self and our relation to our longer term memory and patterns of integrated behaviour.

Musicians and visual artists discover new patterns under the influence. Whether they create "better" work or play better is difficult to say, but I think that the intent is to explore different avenues, which can lead to better work when edited. Write drunk and edit sober said the late Kingsley Amis.

Architecture is predicting the future

When an architect is asked to design something, part of the challenge is to anticipate the effect that this usually large built and immovable object will have on the many people that will see, use and possibly inhabit it.

Conceptual art approaches can help, for example making a building evoke an idea, or using an idea to start a design, but they are never enough. That my building is 1776 feet high may help get sponsorship, but in it will hardly be perceived.

Fame or notoriety help. Celebrity architects draw buzz and crowds. One can invest genius in a built object and the aura of the famous designer creates a culture around the space.

The inescapable challenge of architecture however is to be present in time and space in a significant way.

Here is an example of how things can go wrong:

In my little town, the well-meaning heritage preservation committee got involved in the review of a design for a pump house that would sit along the waterfront. The building would need to have the volume of a large two storey house.

The committee looked around "for context" and found a nearby older shed that had two stone gable ends and a very symmetrical sloped roof, a kind of 19th century shed. So they strongly suggested that the utility's architect (or most likely engineer), take the cue.

The intention was to reflect the heritage of the industrial waterfront area.

The result was a large, white stucco covered imitation of an old shed, like an over sized paper model of it, sitting there contrasting against the dark water and sky.

I don't think that was the intention. I also think that any architect would have easily anticipated this and informed the client of the danger. Unfortunately, the heritage preservation committee is wedded to form and mimesis (a pompous architect term meaning copycatting). Unfortunately, it is an easy notion to sell, a concept that seems to make sense, reflect shapes, and if you are lucky materials.

An aside:
I agree with many of my colleagues who say that if you are going to do some restoration work or add to an older building, choose one: re-use material or re-use form and proportion, but don't do both, at the risk of getting some half-assed mimesis.

Ok, so back to the story. This thing now sits on the waterfront, annoying, out of place, and a reminder of industrial sheds we lost, but bigger and worse.

So instead of learning a lesson, this heritage committee moves on, job well done, and is now addressing the problem of our train station. Again, mimesis is being suggested, but this time there is no proximate context, so they looked in the pattern books for old train stations with huge eaves, and came up with some hybrid Frank Lloyd Wrightish stone bunker, because they wanted the stone of course.

What is galling is that the railway people had proposed a very nice, airy design, with proper functional overhangs to protect people on the platform, but with nice glass, and curves and a good light feel to it, considering the barren context of the area, a jewel that may have lightened the oppression of the district.

I don't think it will be realized, because no-one thinks that architects can predict the future, especially when the heritage preservation committee is locked in the past.

Half-baked vs open to possibilities? A manifesto.

studio series A. Barake 2008

I like the unfinished.

Whether it be studies, sketches, snippets of songs, or first drafts.

They seem alive, they allow for the future.

The future that I can choose to defer, giving me the hope of potential, of life going on.

Half-baked means that dinner is coming.

I also like the fully realized. It is post-coital, closure, comfort, time for closing the eyes and savoring.

So what is left not to like in this spectrum?

The mediocre, the completed in haste, the delivered for money not love, the faked, the cliche , the pandering to mass appeal, the blue smoke sentimentality of bad films by Spielberg and his ilk.

Playing the devil's advocate, I can see that the charges of laziness and lack of discipline can be laid. Other lesser judgements could be "wishy-washy", indecisive, uncommitted.

Yes, all valid categories for this approach, but the Venn diagram is flawed. These are not super sets of the incomplete. The incomplete is the super set of the attributes I list, and of many others. The incomplete action is the existential act, the rest is just noise and judgement. Being incomplete may not lead to riches, mass appeal, or to classic status, but it can reflect life and happiness. Certainly for me.

Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello device

I am working my way through Coetzee's novels in no particular order, and I have just finished Slow Man. Elizabeth Costello's role becomes clear there. Coetzee, no doubt all too aware of his self-centredness; in fact he keeps alluding to it through his secondary characters, who keep asking if they really can be considered secondary, if anyone can; so as I was saying, to deal with that dilemma, he creates this other author's voice, to take him outside J.M. In a sense it works. He manages to see things differently, and I am sure the choice of gender helps him. Empathy is strong in his writing, but it is a clinical empathy, one rooted in observation, like a photographer that sees misery, captures it and then moves on. It is not care, it is halfway to care. So The Elizabeth Costello device pushes the plot towards action, towards mistakes, she forces him to do and to confront.
Again, why the fuss? Why not just write from the perspective of other voices than his own? Probably because he is so honest and is not wired that way.
The method succeeds in making his work interesting, but as John Crace in his pastiche of Coetzze in the Guardian  notes, he keeps writing the same book. Why not?

In fact I have argued the other way for songwriters. Is the medium a factor? Can songs be egocentric, since they are an accepted form of wooing? Are novels different? No answers here.

Kundera talks with Houllebecq

I am tempted to write a fictional dialogue between Milan and Michel. Their world views and attitudes to sex are ripe for collision. Michel finds it challenging and Milan could not find it easier. Michel is looking for connection and so is Milan, but in such different ways. One lives in a sensual existential world, the other in a world of isolated points with possible lines. What triggered the idea was the change in the title of the English translation of Les particules elementaires from Atomized to The Elementary Particles in later editions. Kundera had written essays on how not to betray an author when translating, and he advocated simple direct non-interpretive translation to avoid adding extra semantics. And then I thought about how Kundera writes of sex and how Houllebecq does too, and how both see it as light, but in such different ways. They need to talk.

The Guardian and Harry Potter

The Alps at New Year seen from the northwest Swiss side - Copyright 2003-2008 A. Barake

I wrote earlier about a Nick Lezard Guardian posting that strongly criticises JK Rowling's prose. Recently, there has been another Guardian article about the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in English public life. There may be a link between the two. JK Rowling did not attend these prestigious schools, yet she writes about them in the Potter books - in fact King's College at Oxford was used as a setting in some of the earlier films. So is Lezard unconsciously chaffing at the gall of it all? She is successful, very successful, and yet she does not come from the rank of the elite, she did not attend Oxbridge.

I like the Guardian, I think they are very balanced and fair, but there is a snobbery factor there, which, I am guessing, comes from this elitist attitude that is probably part of the legacy of such a prestigious education. The few graduates (less than 10) of these schools that I have met have been overly dismissive and difficult when their opinions and statements have been challenged in a social context such as a meeting or workshop. A lot of clever sophistry has been put on display to discredit their interlocutors during such occasions. Debating skill is a good thing, but taken to excess can be quite offputting. So I will probably remain prejudiced until I gain further experience in the matter.

Joseph Conrad

A wonderful article on Conrad in the Guardian, which contains this quote from the man:

"Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation. The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope."

An enlightened grade 10 teacher made us read Heart of Darkness - and it was way beyond us - yet how could we not feel the depth of his style, his circling of the story and the way the words were like ruminations of the subconscious. Re-read it several times since, and it never ceases to bring forth strong emotion. And this is not a sensual book, but almost a pure intellectual one - wrapped around a journey - a river trip.

And don't miss - in the same issue - an interview with Richard Ford.

Dylan and Drake - Ego spectra

(Picture copyright A. Barake, 2007)

Have been reading a book of interviews with Dylan. I also mentioned here that I read and recommend Joe Boyd's memoirs. I "discovered" Nick Drake through these, and subsequently listened to some of his music. The stuff I like most is him singing to his own guitar accompaniment, sparse but deeply moving. It is full of melancholy. the ego struggling to emerge but battling emotion. Drake committed suicide.

Dylan's interviews and songs reveal a different type of ego, one that is dominant, defining of a reality. The person is re-invented with every appearance, and is making us consider adopting some of this vision.

This spectrum of ego - from the struggling and disappearing one to the inventive, playful and somewhat monstrous one is particularly interesting given that these are solo artists, both very original, defining themselves in the difficult music business. The support of others is limited, until you break through. Your belief system is mostly held near your heart.

In Dylan's case, the media circus and controversy tried to take hold, and he built a humorous shield to deflect the ego distorting forces and to maintain his creative force.

Drake was trying to break through and seems to have been struggling against his handlers as well as himself. He was more alone, in a sense, than Dylan, or at least not ego maniacal enough.

As ego is questioned, depression sets in. An argument can be made that depression in a loss of ego, a flattening of it that leads to inability to make the future for oneself. A strong ego influences destiny (character is destiny) by changing the perceptual environment. Management types would call it "selling yourself", missing the underlying irony.

It is easy to sell a template ego, for example the "MBA persona", or the jock persona, but in the arts, individuality and novelty are the goal, so the frame of reference gets pretty narrow, the market too. Success means enlarging that frame, creating the market. Dylan did it through force of character, strong confident performances, new poetic lyrical modes, and hubris. Drake did it too, but with his music and style. It took longer.

For most of us, the ego is sustained by our family, our friends and to some extent our peers at work. We adapt to these micro-cultures (or not) when we interact. Depression can occur when there is indifference or forced adaptation that violates beliefs and upbringing.

It is therefore important not to let any erosion of the ego occur through lack of self-respect. Unfortunately, our ape behaviour is all about climbing the ego ladder, and this erosion is all too common in groups.

Solitary artists, like writers and the afore-mentioned performers sustain the ego through their art. The songs are externalizations of the ego, and provide a hedge against the erosion. Criticism of the songs can be destructive for that reason. I think Drake was very susceptible to this (from my reading of Boyd's memoir of him). Dylan would be too, but then the songs are held up by all the fans and many have become classics - he is immunized.

The most important thing

(picture by mistermeta)

Jammed last night, recorded a couple of rough originals. We rarely miss a weekly jam, even when the rest of our lives are chaotic and priorities pile up.

Why?

I think it is because creation is the most important thing we can aspire to. Everything else is a means to this end. We are wired to create.

Is it an exaggeration to say that that is the purpose of life?

So being in a band, making paintings, making something, even money, is a basic urge, like sex. Cultures use music to consecrate political ideas and rituals, using the beauty of real creation in an attempt to associate it with an agenda.

Ultimately it is the music and the art that are sacred, and the other stuff just borrows from it.

A big aside....
Above, I mention that making money can be one of the possible results of the creative impulse. It is, but it can also lead to cancerous destructive growth, as we know, since the creation of wealth can often be the destruction of structure to the benefit of some abstract currency, for example mergers and acquisitions, junk bond trading, leveraging, and other means of translating work back into the abstract minimal concept of cash. Accumulation of abstract wealth is naturally checked by the so-called market forces. There is a point of balance, since creative urges of many individuals compete. But this competition, when not criminal, is a complex thing. A positive, creative accumulation of wealth needs to be ultimately a cultural rather than an individual pursuit. It is no wonder that the conquest of cultures is often accompanied by the desecration of art - think of the Aztec.

Individual wealth requires a covenant with the culture to honour and protect it, it needs to contribute to the entity or organism we call a culture. Cultural (real) wealth implies collaboration. Something that (neo)conservatives forget or ignore.

Growth, unchecked becomes cancerous of course. At some level, the wealth can translate to power, and we end up with a situation where individuals try to declare “l’etat c’est moi” - I am the state.

Jane Jacobs, in one of her lesser know works Systems of Survival, addresses the issue. She observes that viable cultures need to have a tension between two opposing interests to survive. One is the monetary creative urge, or the “commercial” impulse, and the other is the “guardian”; one that protects the established traditions. In artistic terms, we are talking about producer and director, or in political terms, the legislative and the judicial, or in legal terms, the barristers and solicitors, and in business terms, the dealer and the regulator.

So for creativity (and I mean it in the largest possible sense, including the commercial) to be positive, it needs to be embedded in a cultural context so that it can be naturally checked.

Artistic creativity, as it stems from the individual is usually limited because it is not industrialized, at least not in the Western tradition. The new is valued, since it provides avenues for cultural growth. When art becomes commoditized and mass produced, we call it "traditional", or "the entertainment industry", and sometimes, as Milan Kundera observed: "kitsch".

Commerce is usually checked by market and legislate forces, but industrialization can make it overtake the natural balances of the environment, to a level where the checks become environmental, where we exhaust resources and ultimately force the planet to provide the final check.

Technology strives to optimize this process and maintain its viability, so it is creative, but the experiment is hubristic.

I think that political systems that try to embed the humanistic checks and balances are well-intentioned, but rules are no substitute for real constraints and tensions. This is the argument against socialism and communism. In the end, art gains its importance by illuminating the tension between this need to create, to climb up the entropic curve, with the need to balance it with the survival of others - the need for “goodness”.

Buddhism and especially Zen recognizes this harmony in tension. It serves as a guidebook and signal mechanism rather than a set of rules.

Art illuminates the creative urge and exposes the destructive and constructive aspects of the creative urge, but art must not encourage or participate in the destructive industrialization of creativity. This is why I love the Andy Warhol factory conceit and despise Jeff Koons’ ambiguous game.

Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes

(picture by mistermeta)

To follow-up on yesterday's post about criticism, here is my critique of Wim Wenders' 1990 documentary on fashion.

He was commissioned by Le Centre Pompidou to do a film about the fashion industry, and he initially thought it too shallow a subject, but went ahead, and found depth. In fact there are so many layers here that it opens up all kinds of cultural avenues for exploration.

On one level, he covers the Paris show of Yohji Yamamoto's fashion design firm, from his workshop in Tokyo to the courtyard of the Louvre where the runway is set up. On another level, he explores the ephemerality of video versus film, the film uses both media, sometimes simultaneously. On another level, he does a character study of Yohji through interview and observation. He draws out his attitude towards women, his father, the 2nd War, creativity, death, aging, cities, and most importantly identity.

The theme of the movie is Identity. Clothes are one way to begin to address the subject, but it goes far beyond this, into history and the moment of design, and why we strive to capture things that are in decay - as in film. Wenders makes analogies between film making and fashion design as well, and throughout, this jamming with ideas resonates into a coherent whole.

Wenders has said that he is not an intellectual, and I think this means that he is concerned with the surface of things, uses them to draw out emotion. He is sensual, and the themes, although abstract, are not part of the rational discourse we associate with intellectual thought. I have a feeling he said that as a subtle boast.

Wenders seeks harmony. This makes this subject - Yohji - particularly suitable for his vision. He draws out the deep value of doing with the senses, using material and images to make identity. In the end, he captures a place in the imagination, a stake of humanity.

His idea emerged while making the film I think, and the editing is subtle. The DVD I have shows outtakes, and he left out some central stuff, like Yohji's mother, who plays an important thematic role in the interviews. The omissions are not gaps, because the rest of the film makes these ideas emerge more powerfully than if they were explicit.

There is a sense of melancholy mixed-in with deep harmony and longing in this film, a present that cannot be captured, but that is somehow being put into the clothes and vision of this designer, in a subtle and gentle way. His history as a war orphan, his urge to recapture the comfort of his childhood surrounded by women, his perfectionism all merge and are captured in one of the scenes where we see the models' shoes walking along the runway, back and forth, and in the obsessive cutting and drawing of patterns before the show.


The rapport established is Wenders' achievement, his usual seeking of harmony, like a comfortable couch that he is compared to by Yohji.

The Critics

(Image by Mistermeta)

I recently read a comment by Doris Lessing where she criticises critics. She notes that the creative process is about developing an idea and expressing it through the filter of the artist's vision, whereas a critic is usually there to break things down into the components that the culture can understand, an inherently destructive process.

So what about critics who are artists? There are many, like John Updike who reviews books for the New Yorker, and the invited writers in the Guardian, what about their approach? Is it necessarily a destructive process when one tries to re-interpret another's work? Here is what my ideal critical approach would be:

1. Begin by deciding whether the work in question is a development of an idea, or an exploitation. By that I mean try to make a distinction between a formula and an inspiration. If it is a formula, then review it accordingly, does it bring anything to the genre, how does it relate to its antecedents etc. This would avoid the kind of lopsided blindside that people complain about when, say, Nicholas Lezard reviews Harry Potter books as if they were literature.
2. If the work is deemed a development of an inspired idea, then let's run with it. Let's try to dig out that idea and reconstruct the process through its results, and gauge its success that way. This is what the much maligned deconstructivists talk about I think. The questions to ask become: "Is the idea developed in a way that can transcend the vision of the one artist?", "Does the work add anything new to the idea, anything that most of us could not have added after 3 minutes of thought?".

You get my drift, criticise constructively by deconstructing.