Plato’s “Cave Analogy” tells us that the physical world is a shadow of a spiritual world. Beyond our actual experience is a higher reality.
This is one of those ideas that might make a poetic sense while you are reading. But when you put the book down, you think, “Wait a minute. I’m not quite sure I get it. How is the world a shadow?”
This idea becomes clearer when you look at how modern science has inverted Plato’s formula: The spiritual/psychological world is really just a shadow of the physical.
A boy meets a girl. He feels as though he’s known her for all eternity. He feels as though they were one soul before being split and sent to earth. These feelings are shadows cast by the reptilian impulse to procreate, seasoned with anthropological conditioning for how to find a mate.
A mother gazes at her newborn baby. She feels that she is one with the universe. Everything is connected. Life has meaning. All of this is a shadow cast by elevated levels of serotonin.
God, of course, is also a shadow.
However, to talk about God as just the product of organic processes, you have to clash with Saint Anselm’s famous ontological argument. You have to assert that we could think up the IDEA of God from scratch, regardless of whether God actually exists.
God, in concept alone, is a being who is GREATER than anything you can conceive. If you say that God is ONLY an idea of something that doesn’t necessarily exist, Anselm answers, “Well, then you can think of a greater being: one who does exist.” God is a concept of something that MUST, according to the concept, exist.
Which means, in Anselm’s eyes, that God cannot be a shadow of something else. The concept of God couldn’t spring up as an accident or by-product of natural selection. Only God could project the shape of this concept on the cave wall of our minds.
Yet where could this concept reside in us other than our brain’s organic tissue? What besides hormones could create our euphoric emotions about the idea of being connected to God?
Saint Augustine would have no problem with this. At the beginning of his autobiography “The Confessions,” thinking about how he began his life, he thanks God for filling the breast with milk and making his nurse willing to put the nipple in his mouth.
So we’re back at the idea of a higher reality beyond or behind reality. God makes the mammary glands produce food for a young saint. Serotonin is the vehicle or conduit for maternal love, not the cause. Testosterone is the conduit for Romantic Love or Noble Courage. Or Evil.
The world is a shadow. Or a stage.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Ask Someone Else, God
Attaching here a draft of our promotional video for my play "As Someone Else, God" ... the voiceover will be replaced by the lead actor (Jonah) ... but here, for my adoring fans, I offer the version with the author's voice.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
A Play Descending a Staircase
One cloudless summer day I was coming back to my office from lunch and noticed a shapely woman ahead of me. Not a skinny girl. Lots of curves. She churned down the sidewalk and up the steps into our lobby. I trailed a few paces back, taking it all in.
She was wearing a simple silk dress. Probably artificial silk, because it had a metallic shimmer. It fell straight down from thin shoulder straps. As she moved, points on her body tapped the fabric like a hand behind a curtain. Left shoulder blade and right hip. Inner curve of left torso and right shoulder blade. Right butt cheek and upper spine. From each tap the silk would ripple and trick the eye into seeing a rough sketch of a body – like a rapid charcoal drawing. It was like watching a rapid sequence of nude studies move through space. In fact, it was like watching an animation of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” – except that she was ascending an escalator.
A funny thought occurred to me. If you saw that dress hanging on a rack, you wouldn’t think that it was a work of genius. In itself it would be a failure as an aesthetic object. Just a scrap of fabric. But some design genius knew: “You put this boring piece of silk on a curvy woman, you will see this amazing effect. Especially if she’s in heels.”
This is how I feel about writing plays. A good play is like that dress. It has to be designed for a MOVING body – a moving body followed by a lustful eye. What happens when an actor walks in your piece of silk?
I recall how a really good actor said “okay” in one of my early plays. He paused first then said the word very slowly, raising the pitch at the end. It was full of complex meaning that rippled through the play. And in several performances it got a huge laugh!
But if you were reading the script and came to the word “okay” you’d never say, “My God! This playwright is a literary GENIUS!”
I think the theater is suffering from this paradox – the paradox that what works best on stage is not always “literary.” Yet producers and artistic directors fall back on the literary because they need some criteria for judging scripts. They look to see if plays read well. Like a short story or a poem. Is the silent text a “work of literature”?
This tendency is complicated by the embattled role theater has come to play in general culture. Theater is no longer a truly popular art form. As art forms lose their hold on the masses, they retreat into snobbery. (Consider jazz in this regard.) So it is increasingly important for the play as text to be regarded as a standalone literary object like poetry and fiction.
A additional funny twist. You can see the same thing happening to the screenplay. Movies have, shock of shocks, been dying just like theater as more and more consumers stay home to play Grand Theft Auto and stream porn. Yet there are still tons of people writing screenplays. Pick up at random any “how to write a screenplay” book, read the introduction and you’ll find some variation on the argument that “screenplays are themselves a literary form.” They are not a mere set of instructions that a director throws away when he starts shooting. Translation: please delude yourself that it’s worth writing a screenplay that will never be produced and BUY MY BOOK.
This literary pressure makes playwrights focus on point-of-contact with the readers who might green-light a play. How can I make it impress the reader at Playwright’s Workshop Theater Forum In The Round as a work of literature?
You can imagine the tragedy this would be for my dress designer! So he has this vision. He can SEE this big butt swinging like a bell in his silk number down Liberty Street. He can SEE that the fabric and the minimalist design will transubstantiate this into a living Duchamp. Then he thinks, “Oh, but no one will ever make it if it’s just a shred of silk!” So he selects a swatch of fabric with a pattern. Stripes maybe. Interlocking lozenges. Daisies. And then he thinks, “Oh, I better display my sewing skills.” So he adds some clever pleats. And so forth and so on.
By the time he ships it off to be made the dress will no longer be able to produce the dazzling effect I saw that summer afternoon.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Nasty Little Barbie
I was in the toy section of Target the other day with my daughter. She's now getting into Barbie. Oy. In fact, she'll use the phrase "into." A five-year old saying she's now "really into Barbie." Oy.
Anyway I was rushing after her when something caught my eye. I reacted or rather "experienced" an instinctual, dirty "oooh, baby" before I could filter the source: a Barbie in a short little skirt and knee socks in a box.
Honestly, I don't feel THAT guilty about lusting after a Barbie. OBVIOUSLY, as feminists have taken great pains to tell us, those dollmakers are evoking mature sexuality. If a high school girl walked by in that same outfit, would anyone be surprised if all the boys said "oooooh, baby"? Why should I deny what the Barbie's referring to?
Also, there was something about this particular doll. I mean, she really was nasty in a way Barbies usually aren't. She was like the "I'm gonna stay a virgin but it's okay to blow you" Barbie.
But, of course, Barbie is a problem. Like the Disney princesses. My daughter has this primal Jungian attraction to these archetypes. As a good dad, I desperately do not want her to be imprinted with this shit. And so, mostly I'm right there with the feminists: how can we stop these evil corporations from saturating the world with these negative images.
But unless you argue that my daughter is genetically hardwired to recognize in her dolls the laws of sexual attraction, Barbie, for her, has nothing to do with boys or power. She likes the pretty clothes. She likes girlie things. She likes pink. That same little umbrella skirt that boils my blood is just cute for its own sake for my daughter.
This makes me think of that old joke about the guy who goes to the shrink. Shrink shows him some Rorschach tests and says, "Sir, by your responses I can tell you that you are a pervert." The man says, "Me a pervert? You're the one with all the dirty pictures!"
By which I mean that maybe it's a lost cause to persuade Mattel to make only Quaker Barbie. Margaret Thatcher Barbie. The problem lies in that old feminist cliche "the male gaze." I'm not denying the importance of teaching my daughter that life is about more than tarting yourself up for a man. But I guess it just struck me in some really basic sense that it's pointless to run around trying to remove from the world all that stuff that "the male gaze" might sexualize. We're going to sexualize everything.
Anyway I was rushing after her when something caught my eye. I reacted or rather "experienced" an instinctual, dirty "oooh, baby" before I could filter the source: a Barbie in a short little skirt and knee socks in a box.
Honestly, I don't feel THAT guilty about lusting after a Barbie. OBVIOUSLY, as feminists have taken great pains to tell us, those dollmakers are evoking mature sexuality. If a high school girl walked by in that same outfit, would anyone be surprised if all the boys said "oooooh, baby"? Why should I deny what the Barbie's referring to?
Also, there was something about this particular doll. I mean, she really was nasty in a way Barbies usually aren't. She was like the "I'm gonna stay a virgin but it's okay to blow you" Barbie.
But, of course, Barbie is a problem. Like the Disney princesses. My daughter has this primal Jungian attraction to these archetypes. As a good dad, I desperately do not want her to be imprinted with this shit. And so, mostly I'm right there with the feminists: how can we stop these evil corporations from saturating the world with these negative images.
But unless you argue that my daughter is genetically hardwired to recognize in her dolls the laws of sexual attraction, Barbie, for her, has nothing to do with boys or power. She likes the pretty clothes. She likes girlie things. She likes pink. That same little umbrella skirt that boils my blood is just cute for its own sake for my daughter.
This makes me think of that old joke about the guy who goes to the shrink. Shrink shows him some Rorschach tests and says, "Sir, by your responses I can tell you that you are a pervert." The man says, "Me a pervert? You're the one with all the dirty pictures!"
By which I mean that maybe it's a lost cause to persuade Mattel to make only Quaker Barbie. Margaret Thatcher Barbie. The problem lies in that old feminist cliche "the male gaze." I'm not denying the importance of teaching my daughter that life is about more than tarting yourself up for a man. But I guess it just struck me in some really basic sense that it's pointless to run around trying to remove from the world all that stuff that "the male gaze" might sexualize. We're going to sexualize everything.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Thoughts on Post Modernism
Over the last 40 or so years, post structuralist critical theory began filtering itself into general culture in the form of "post modernism." The complicated term "deconstruction" entered the general vocabulary.
The filtering flowed into a general sentiment -- which is to say that people don't walk around stating aloud: "I regard Tom Waits to be a world class poet/composer of historical importance beyond any narrow categorization as a 'merely' popular musical entertainer." Yet most people I know in my demographic (white, educated, employed, etc.) seem to share a sentiment that Waits "matters" artistically, that he is a serious artist, or that we're supposed to think of him as such.
Post modernism enables you to discuss graphic novels as serious literature and, in turn, conditions your colleagues to fear shame and, worse, irrelevance if they don't take you seriously in this respect.
Not surprisingly, the typical use of post modernism has been to legitimize things that would be considered less than legitimate by older standards -- pop music, cross dressing, video games, etc. We've all been participating in a grand culture project of "deconstructing" elitist distinctions. Isn't it evil to say that the rapper from the ghetto is not as much of a genius as some white European from the expensive conservatory?
One criticism of post modernism is that this revolutionary ideal is bullshit. Capitalism, the need to sell shit and control people, drives popular post modernism.
This argument, of course, sounds overblown and ... well ... stodgy. I mean, what's the harm in letting Spiegelman or Crumb be my Titian? What's the harm is letting Radiohead be my Bartok?
But I've noticed two things over the last twenty years.
First, while the high brow arts are accorded a very high degree of social respect, they hardly constitute some fascist oligarchy of cultural oppression. It is not as though the anonymous cellist playing Bach for a small recital is so much better off than the commercially successful rapper. The theater company producing Shakespeare on a $100,000 per annum budget hardly qualifies as the mortal enemy of television so much so that we need to treat The Simpsons as historically great Art with a capital "A."
Second, what has begun striking me in recent times is how rare it is to see anyone reversing post modern procedure -- which is to say that while I've encountered tons of people who treat Radiohead like Bartok, I haven't encounted too many cases of people treating Bartok like Radiohead. By that, I just mean that I haven't encountered that many people who have used deconstruction to derive pleasure from so called "serious" music. The procedure is almost always used, again, to legitimize something like a band or essentially some trend in fashion.
In theory, post modernism was not an attack on the works themselves ... not an attack on Bartok. Rather it was/is an attack on boundaries as social constructs. As such, post modernism ought to be a neutral tool. It takes away my guilt about reading a Spiderman comic book. But it should also equip people to enjoy Berg. I mean, dial up Morton Feldman on youtube and pretend it's Jonny Greenwood's solo project. It makes a difference.
But I never see anyone doing this -- except maybe Alex Ross. And this makes me suspicious.
The filtering flowed into a general sentiment -- which is to say that people don't walk around stating aloud: "I regard Tom Waits to be a world class poet/composer of historical importance beyond any narrow categorization as a 'merely' popular musical entertainer." Yet most people I know in my demographic (white, educated, employed, etc.) seem to share a sentiment that Waits "matters" artistically, that he is a serious artist, or that we're supposed to think of him as such.
Post modernism enables you to discuss graphic novels as serious literature and, in turn, conditions your colleagues to fear shame and, worse, irrelevance if they don't take you seriously in this respect.
Not surprisingly, the typical use of post modernism has been to legitimize things that would be considered less than legitimate by older standards -- pop music, cross dressing, video games, etc. We've all been participating in a grand culture project of "deconstructing" elitist distinctions. Isn't it evil to say that the rapper from the ghetto is not as much of a genius as some white European from the expensive conservatory?
One criticism of post modernism is that this revolutionary ideal is bullshit. Capitalism, the need to sell shit and control people, drives popular post modernism.
This argument, of course, sounds overblown and ... well ... stodgy. I mean, what's the harm in letting Spiegelman or Crumb be my Titian? What's the harm is letting Radiohead be my Bartok?
But I've noticed two things over the last twenty years.
First, while the high brow arts are accorded a very high degree of social respect, they hardly constitute some fascist oligarchy of cultural oppression. It is not as though the anonymous cellist playing Bach for a small recital is so much better off than the commercially successful rapper. The theater company producing Shakespeare on a $100,000 per annum budget hardly qualifies as the mortal enemy of television so much so that we need to treat The Simpsons as historically great Art with a capital "A."
Second, what has begun striking me in recent times is how rare it is to see anyone reversing post modern procedure -- which is to say that while I've encountered tons of people who treat Radiohead like Bartok, I haven't encounted too many cases of people treating Bartok like Radiohead. By that, I just mean that I haven't encountered that many people who have used deconstruction to derive pleasure from so called "serious" music. The procedure is almost always used, again, to legitimize something like a band or essentially some trend in fashion.
In theory, post modernism was not an attack on the works themselves ... not an attack on Bartok. Rather it was/is an attack on boundaries as social constructs. As such, post modernism ought to be a neutral tool. It takes away my guilt about reading a Spiderman comic book. But it should also equip people to enjoy Berg. I mean, dial up Morton Feldman on youtube and pretend it's Jonny Greenwood's solo project. It makes a difference.
But I never see anyone doing this -- except maybe Alex Ross. And this makes me suspicious.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
God Studies
I’m noticing a lot of God studies, scientific articles and reports that more or less claim to locate and/or explain God.
The neurological articles are the weirdest. Here! This little cluster of cells in this part of the brain … this is God! Or what about this pattern of firing neurons? See how they light up in the subject when we play “Amazing Grace”? This pattern is God.
As a standard disclaimer, most of the scientists insist that they are ONLY studying the belief itself. God’s actual existence or nonexistence is not a factor.
This disclaimer would be unnecessary if you were studying the belief in fairies. You can explicitly ask, “Okay, given that fairies DO NOT exist, what OTHER explanation can we find for this subculture’s shared lunacy?” But scientists feel the pressure to treat God with more respect.
Nevertheless, the studies all assume that human evolution created God. God formed in our collective minds as we were struggling to survive. It’s like that XTC song, “Did you make mankind after we made you?”
For example, the evolving human brain needed to see a tiger in every shaking bush. Maybe an invisible, imaginary God is just a by-product of this brain function?
In light of these studies, it’s fun to wonder about God’s existence in a scientific sense. God, like space aliens, either exists or does not exist. Intelligent life is either “out there” right now or not. And God, factually, either does or does not exist.
Of course, you can say this about anything. Maybe fairies do exist but are just very furtive. The thing is, it’s just too much to ask me to believe in the corporeal existence of tiny humanoids with wings. “Oh, no, I don’t think that they have PHYSICAL bodies.” Then what? Are they made of light? Light is physical. “No, no, I don’t mean that they are made of actual photons.” It’s a slippery slope when you start breaking it down.
But when you’re talking God God … Jehovah as opposed to Pan ejaculating on the crops when we weren’t looking … the prophets were never asking anyone to believe in a man with a beard. Not even 5,000 years ago. They knew that they were talking about a transcendental abstraction, even if they didn’t yet use the terminology. That’s what all that “no graven images” business meant in the first place. God transcends physical reality and being itself.
This means that you cannot simply ask whether God exists. For some mystics, the true God CANNOT exist. Why? Because even existing is too limiting for a truly Supreme being. Saying that God exists is ultimately too much like saying that God has red hair and freckles. So for God to be God, God must not exist.
Weird.
The neurological articles are the weirdest. Here! This little cluster of cells in this part of the brain … this is God! Or what about this pattern of firing neurons? See how they light up in the subject when we play “Amazing Grace”? This pattern is God.
As a standard disclaimer, most of the scientists insist that they are ONLY studying the belief itself. God’s actual existence or nonexistence is not a factor.
This disclaimer would be unnecessary if you were studying the belief in fairies. You can explicitly ask, “Okay, given that fairies DO NOT exist, what OTHER explanation can we find for this subculture’s shared lunacy?” But scientists feel the pressure to treat God with more respect.
Nevertheless, the studies all assume that human evolution created God. God formed in our collective minds as we were struggling to survive. It’s like that XTC song, “Did you make mankind after we made you?”
For example, the evolving human brain needed to see a tiger in every shaking bush. Maybe an invisible, imaginary God is just a by-product of this brain function?
In light of these studies, it’s fun to wonder about God’s existence in a scientific sense. God, like space aliens, either exists or does not exist. Intelligent life is either “out there” right now or not. And God, factually, either does or does not exist.
Of course, you can say this about anything. Maybe fairies do exist but are just very furtive. The thing is, it’s just too much to ask me to believe in the corporeal existence of tiny humanoids with wings. “Oh, no, I don’t think that they have PHYSICAL bodies.” Then what? Are they made of light? Light is physical. “No, no, I don’t mean that they are made of actual photons.” It’s a slippery slope when you start breaking it down.
But when you’re talking God God … Jehovah as opposed to Pan ejaculating on the crops when we weren’t looking … the prophets were never asking anyone to believe in a man with a beard. Not even 5,000 years ago. They knew that they were talking about a transcendental abstraction, even if they didn’t yet use the terminology. That’s what all that “no graven images” business meant in the first place. God transcends physical reality and being itself.
This means that you cannot simply ask whether God exists. For some mystics, the true God CANNOT exist. Why? Because even existing is too limiting for a truly Supreme being. Saying that God exists is ultimately too much like saying that God has red hair and freckles. So for God to be God, God must not exist.
Weird.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Nanny's Bridge
Freud says the psyche is like Rome. I've never been to Rome. But he's thinking about how everywhere you go in Rome there's some ancient wall poking up among modern structures. Similarly, your psyche is a patchwork of bits and pieces from different stages of your development.
To get a good buzz from Freud you have to resist your desire to normalize what he's saying. In this case, you need to appreciate how he's saying that we are fundamentally fragmented. It's not just that we have mood changes. Or that our wishes change day to day. No, the point is that some other self inside your brain breaks through the soil of whoever you think you are at some given moment. Something in you caves in to expose a whole different person. We are all Sybil.
Whenever I drive my family into Manhattan we usually take the Manhattan bridge. As you reach the other side, before hitting Canal Street, you can see on the stone base of the bridge a relief sculpture of a lion. The lion's fat paw is on top of sphere.
My son noticed it one trip and shouted, "I see a lion with a soccer ball." After that we started playing a game every time we drove over the bridge. "Okay, kids, tell me when you see the lion with the soccer ball." They wait. Then one of them shouts, "I see the lion with the soccer ball!" Or they miss it as we drive by and start crying. This has gotten so ritualized that as soon as we get on the bridge on the Brooklyn side I think about when to start the game.
Then it hit me that I was duplicating a game my father played. To visit his mother, whom we called Nanny, we'd pile in the station wagon and drive the 50 mph speed limit up the Natchez Trace Parkway from Jackson to Kosciusko. It was an incredibly long one-hour drive. Seeing a certain stone bridge meant that we were almost there. We'd shout: "I see Nanny's bridge!"
In that seat belt indifferent age, we all crowded over the front seat and competed to see it first. Your eyes would play tricks. In the haze behind every cluster of leaves in the distance was a bridge.
So here I am ... the Manhattan skyline looming beyond the harp strings of the bridge, gritty Chinatown approaching ... and I've turned it into the Natchez Trace. And it's too late to say that I didn't. I am my dad.
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