THE POSTER

I’ve always been a fan of poster art, especially political posters or ones with a sociopolitical message framed in art deco or nouveau. My home is shamelessly filled with it. Artists and activists on my walls took the time to say something substantive, but with flair and taste. And if in a foreign language it only enhanced the effect, intrigue, and beauty of the presentation.

The very first posters were religious, going back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. But citizens also carved political messages on walls expressing their thoughts and ideals. Political slogans were also painted on murals. The idea of the “hero” was also highly romanced (and of course exaggerated) as part of a given “cause.” They were the protagonists of wisdom and beauty. Later, wrote Martin Amis, they were demigods, and still later kings, generals, famous lovers (but still superhuman). Eventually, they turned into ordinary people. Today, they are “anti-heroes, non-heroes, and sub-heroes,” he said. All this coincided with the gradual decline of myth (descending into folklore, then into fairy tale). Through the ages the political poster docketed each stage of man’s descent from the gods.

As long as we’re talking history, there’s a specific time period of particular note, in which poster art was noted for its very strong content, artwork, and political effect on our culture. This was the first two decades of the 20the century. The reason was because of the First World War which then ignited the Russian Revolution of 1918. A new American invention called “propaganda” also got involved which took full advantage of its ability to win over minds and hearts.

Having recently studied a book on Russian poster art, it slowly dawned on me that what I was looking at wasn’t just old politics with an old message. It was the world’s first graffiti art, the first Street art and “Guerrilla” art, expressions we normally associate with the late 20^th century and today. This was definitely not a new phenomenon. Graffiti and Guerrilla are merely continuations of an old method, albeit with minor changes in its tools used and manner of application (photography, spray paint, air brush). The dominant theme a century ago was not just world war but the Bolshevik Revolution (between 1918 and 1921) and the abundant iconography surrounding regime change. If you simply change the focus on “who’s regime,” “who’s cause,” “who’s suffering” and the plea for justice, it’s the same poster on today’s walls and flat surfaces.

The only real difference between art then and now is that today’s Street art is generally more diluted with its message. In other words, it stays mostly to slogans, soundbites, and trigger-words which most people recognize: “Love,” “Save the Planet,” “Save the City,” “Free Caesar Chavez,” “Justice,” etc. And much of it unfortunately makes no sense at all. Any religious offshoot is actually borrowed from posters that reach back to the Middle Ages (“Repent,” “Time is Nigh,” etc.). Street art today is often used to advertise businesses and even just to make an area look visually appealing.

Contrast that with its Russian equivalent a century ago: direct, pointed, alarming, sometimes very detailed, targeting a specific demographic, using words and phrases to get across a specific message. It was even more urgent than religious art. After all, a violent (socialist) revolution was going on. Nearly all art was an offspring of that. In his book, The Bolshevik Poster, Stephan White said, “Russian soldiers came to occupy a more prominent place than before and to be depicted, without false heroism or pretense, as straightforward working people who were carrying out a dangerous and thankless task.”

By definition, Street art is also called Guerrilla art and Urban art (graffiti is also part of the “graphic arts” genre). While alternatively just decorative, Street art also conveys social and political messages meant to evoke public awareness and dialogue. Recent years (since the 1980s) have witnessed considerably more tolerance and general acceptance of Street art. Critics have backed down on moralizing about it. The verdict is still out however with regard to graffiti. – Graffiti, to me, is like the definition of a weed. A weed is anything that grows where it’s simply not wanted — in the eye of the beholder. Where it’s not wanted, graffiti is seen as an illegal desecration, “trash” associated with gangs and homeless people. But when embraced, suddenly it’s “art.”

Unlike graffiti, Russian art was consigned to the public square where the masses congregated and where it would have the greatest effect. It was also printed on heavy weight paper which could be removed and transported. The curse of graffiti today is that its primary medium is spray-paint. Hence, it has earned the wrath of many storefront owners, occupants of public buildings, and users of practically anything with a flat surface.

Street and Guerrilla art redeem graffiti somewhat. They rescue it from total ouster as a legitimate art form. The Russian poster on the other hand had no time to dither with the subtleties of meaning (what it was versus what it did). Posters were issued to appeal for funds for war victims, orphans, and refugees. In those days, viewing them drew large crowds and women actually wept in front of them.

It’s also interesting that the most colorful and visually effective posters were those coming from the peasantry and the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party, not from the bourgeoisie or government officials. The poster was personal and heartfelt, Hence, “the people” drew the biggest and most dramatic posters, as well as the largest number of them. In fact, they served as the blueprint for Soviet (government) posters to come in the post-revolutionary period. It made perfect sense anyway, since the revolution was all about a new “peoples” government – the “informed participation of all citizens, particularly ordinary workers and peasants” (White).

Another tragic parallel between the Soviet poster and Street art today is that, back in 1918, words and inscriptions were dwarfed by pictures. The reason was high illiteracy, especially outside city limits, in small villages and towns. The first census ever carried out was in 1897 and in the following twenty years not much had changed in Russian literacy (only 28.4 percent of the total population between the ages of nine and forty-nine was literate). Other regions were impressively literate (like Estonia), but they were juxtaposed to other regions which were not (like Central Asia). The national average was 29.6 percent literacy.

Again, the word “tragic” applies because the parallels today are striking. The visual effect through the use of fonts, caricatures, and wildly exaggerated lettering is what draws attention (not the words). While some pictures are photo-shopped and superimposed, the purpose is to titillate the senses and leave a lasting visual impression. The visual is then absorbed to hopefully leave a concomitant sensation/impression (“synesthesia”). The old French technique of epater les bourgeois (“to shock the middle classes”) is still the primary aim. Without a strong visual impression the belief is no one will even notice or pay attention.

The bottom line is that it speaks to a tragically illiterate American population. As for resorting to pictures/images, a rather obvious sign of this is with road signs: In place of the word “Airport” one sees the picture of an airplane; instead of restaurant, one sees a fork and knife; instead of “Hospital,” one sees a large “H”; instead of “Motel” one sees the picture of a bed; instead of “Deer Crossing” there’s the picture of a deer, and so on. Academically, 54% of adults have a “prose” literacy rate below the 6^th grade level (according to the Dept. of Education) – 4.1% are functionally illiterate The latest international standing rates the US at “36” among all nations.

Literacy aside, Soviet art had no choice but to also be environmental. That is, it had to incorporate the surrounding environment into the poster. “The people” it championed were symbols of the earth, living and tilling the land. Interestingly, Guerrilla art is also by definition environmental. There is no boundary between the image and the environment. Hence, it cannot be picked up and moved to somewhere else. It is an integral part of the surrounding scene. The ambiance and atmosphere complete the poster itself, and visa versa, as if there is no distinction. – Contrast this with art which is non-contextual and/or disconnected from the environment and it sits as “art for art’s sake,” focused more on what it is instead of what it does.

As for specific posters, one that stays with me today is D.S. Moor’s Help, produced in 1921. The very first time I saw it was, amazingly, in a movie – a scene in the 1973 film The Way We Were (Streisand’s character displaying it on her apartment wall). It left an impression on me unintended by Sidney Pollack. The poster was done in connection with the famine which overwhelmed the lower Volga basin affecting 20 million people. In it we see an elderly and emaciated peasant in rags and barefoot, desperately begging for help. It was, according to Moor himself, his favorite poster and it was his most successful.

To view the messages and images of most Guerrila/Street and graffiti art today is to view the same homeless man, on the same street corner holding a cardboard sign reading “Help!” He’s been around for a hundred years and has gone nowhere.

So much for poster art. Again, I could almost wallpaper my home with it, if I tried, and my best critics (visitors, friends, lovers), have all said that I’m both crazy and obsessed. And I probably am, at least marginally. Nothing expresses the socioeconomic and political environment more forcefully and directly than poster art. It is a passion mixed with intrigue, mixed with aesthetics, mixed with literature, mixed with propaganda, mixed with political enlightenment (or endarkenment). Sometimes one of those features interferes with another; sometimes one validates the other. Sometimes one overwhelms and drowns out the other. There needs to be a balance which only the artist understands. When it happens, whether it’s about the truth or not, it makes an impact like nothing else. – But then, that’s just my opinion.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

FERNANDO PESSOA

When I hear about an author who wrote a book that was “never written,” who was inhibited from finishing it and even more from starting it, who probed into his own depths through imaginary figures (like chess pieces moving backward and forward), who deconstructed himself, saw himself as fragmentary pieces of an incomprehensible paradox, who worked to “make nothing” so that he could be everything – I listen up.

When he asks, “Is the dream you dream less real than the dream you dream you’re dreaming?” – I listen up. When he says that art is the answer to all riddles except for the riddle of why riddles exist (which will never be answered), I listen. When he says that “literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life,” I listen.

I listen because these are the flags and flares that signal a newly approaching literary hero. Even if he died in 1935. It’s not just his writing and thinking but his personality and lifestyle which also draws me. Through many of those details I recognize myself in many ways.

The term didn’t exist in the early 1900s, but Pessoa was unconsciously a conduit of a rare form of (self-) deconstruction. He didn’t analyze language and signs. He simply used many “alters” of himself to see that he was a “profusion of selves.” And through the multiplicity of selves came a multiplicity of meanings, and no meaning. One of his alter egos responded to Cogito, ergo sum saying, “Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!” Nothing begins or ends. Boundaries and categories are arbitrary and fabricated for a false sense of meaning. – This, I listen to as well. How could it not have an impact on the experience of Being?

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese writer, publisher, atheist, and mystic. Intensely private and withdrawn, he lived in his own world and considered the cafe culture (A Brasileira) the one atmosphere to write in and record the world around him. Most intriguing was his invention of multiple characters which were again his alter egos. He wrote under pseudonyms which he called “heteronyms.” Under one such name, Pessoa wrote about himself in the third-person:

Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.

It was his most familiar and dependable alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who then wrote his famous The Book of Disquiet – a book of random impressions which might also be construed as a travel journal or even a “factless autobiography.” of a man who “never existed.” It consists of post-symbolist texts, diaristic passages, poems, short stories and mystical tales.

Some say Pessoa actually “channeled” as a medium, which could explain the numerous personalities he ostensibly became. Allegedly, he would look into the mirror sometimes and actually see another person, what he called “ethereal visions.” It would also explain his awkward and odd ultra-privacy and the fact that he had few friends throughout his life. After all, how does a young person explain these occurrences? There’s no convincing evidence that he was a medium, just secondhand information. But it would explain much.

Indeed, Passoa had extreme difficulty adapting to normal life. He was many contradictions which made him a stranger mostly to himself. On the surface he described himself as a “British conservative,” which was actually more liberal than originally assumed. He grew up around neo-Platonic and Pre-Raphaelite influences, read Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and others. But he was strongly drawn to freemasonry, the occult, numerology, alchemy, theosophy, the Rosicrucians, and so on. He was also a friend of Aleister Crowley’s. His being drawn into those orbits may have also been fueled by his channeling experiences – where he didn’t know where, or who, he was and had no rational understanding of what was happening.

As a publisher he had strong political leanings. He was against Salazar’s fascism, corporatism, censorship, and oppression, and against Mussolini’ invasion of Abyssinia. He described himself as “mystic, cosmopolitan , liberal, and anti-Catholic.” Initially, he supported a military coup and even a military dictatorship at one time to facilitate order during a major political transition. But he regretted it later and wrote critically about dictatorships.

Bernardo Soarez was also the flaneur which Pessoa was not.He describes many of the streets, cafes, office buildings, and shops that Pesseo frequented. And again, he describes Pesseo himself as having suffered, of looking hunched over when sitting down, poorly dressed, locked deep in thought.

Yet through his own fakery, Pessoa accomplished being more honest with himself than most writers, This is because to read Pessoa is to read the words of players who never existed. He begins A Factless Biography saying “These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.” On dreaming he says,

I have to choose what I detest, either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or

action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or

dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I

must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

In A Disquiet Anthology, under “Apocalyptic Feeling,” he writes,

I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a

minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of

abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life

terrifies and tortures me.

Under The Art of Effective Dreaming I, he says

Make sure, first of all, that you respect nothing, believe nothing, nothing. But while

showing disrespect, you should hold on to the desire to respect something; while

despising what you don’t love, you should retain the painful longing to love

someone; and while disdaining life, you should preserve the idea that it must be

wonderful to live and cherish it. Having done this, you will have laid the

foundations for the edifice of your dreams.

Under The Art of Effective Dreaming II, he says,

Live your life. Don’ be lived by it. Right or wrong, happy or sad, be your own self.

You can do this only by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, is the one

that doesn’t belong to you but to others. You must replace your life with your

dreaming, concentrating only on dreaming perfectly. In all the acts of your real life,

from that of being born to that of dying, you don’t act – you’re acted; you don’t live

– you’re merely lived.

Become an inscrutable sphinx to others. Shut yourself in your ivory tower, but

without slamming the door. Your ivory tower is you.

And if someone tells you this is false and absurd, don’t believe it. But don’t believe

in what I say either, because one ought not believe in anything.

Under the Declaration of Difference,

We are likewise indifferent to great convulsions such as war and crises around the

world. As long as they don’t come to our house, we don’t care on whose door they

knock. This attitude would appear to be founded on a profound contempt for others,

but its real basis is merely a skeptical view of ourselves.

Under Maxims,

To have sure and definite opinions, instincts, passions, and a dependable,

recognizable character – all of this leads to the horror of transforming our soul into a

fact, into a material and external thing. To live in a sweet, external state of ignorance

about things and about oneself is the only lifestyle that suits a wise man and makes

him warm.

Under Peristyle,

And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless. It teaches

nothing, inspires no faith, and stirs no feeling. A mere stream that flows towards an

abyss of ashes scattered by the wind, neither helping or harming the soil…. I put my

whole soul into making it, but without thinking about it as I made it, for I thought

only of me, who [is] sad, and of you, who aren’t anyone.

And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless, I want to give it

away; and because it serves no purpose to want to give it to you, I give it to you. .

Some time ago, I wrote a piece entitled The Anamorphic Lens. In it I said this:

The question for today is one of matching creativity with an anamorphic lens, or

intentional distortion. Creative types doff the thick glasses and see what isn’t

supposed to be seen. Cogito (“I think”) originally meant “shake together,” while

intelligo (“intelligence”) meant “select among.” The truly creative select

differently.

A writer once said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking.” He found that writing

had a “powdery quality to it, a light… shining through the haze and heat.” He

“collected words that suddenly seemed to have new meaning… in contexts I have

never thought before.” Creativity is the ability to make juxtapositions that elude us

most of the time. It’s about connecting the unconnected and unconnecting the

connected.

Pessoa was an anamorphic writer. What steered him along was pure imagination which proves time and time again to possess its own intelligence, it’s own language, its own logic, its own “intentional distortion.” One trusts it, or not. Pessoa trusted it to his own detriment, to the point of sacrificing himself. And yet he had no choice about it. One sees what one sees in the mirror.

But if one stays the course and perseveres through his distortions, what comes up on the other end is a kind of understanding of what simply cannot be understood. The only language for it is contradiction and paradox. It refutes language. It was through this that Pessoa dedicated his life to “not living,” to a hatred for “action.” He lived and traveled through dreams and the imagination. The real world was what Catholics called the apocrypha (“of doubtful authenticity”).

The only way to survive in this world, said Soures, is by keeping dreams alive without ever fulfilling them. Because fulfillment never measures up to what we imagine. Living is by not doing, by traveling through the geography of the mind. – “How absurd this seems. But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.”

When Pessoa died in 1935 at the age of 47, he had written only a handful of books that went virtually unnoticed. He wrote in almost complete obscurity. He stuffed his papers away in a trunk before he died which weren’t discovered until 1982, forty-seven years after his death (which again was his age). The Book of Disquiet was published and went on to become one of the “most important literary works of the 20^th century.” Critics have compared it to Joyce’s Ulysses. Such is the way of absurdity, uselessness, perfect ignorance, dreams, inaction, riddles, ivory towers, meaninglessness, and having nothing to say.

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in

the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined – what we, that is, by

embodying our imagination, will have actually been.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

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GOOGLED and GOGGLED

Lots of time is being spent on the dangers of artificial intelligence (“AI”). Even its inventors are coming forward confessing that “just maybe” it’s moving too fast for our own good. Faster than our ability to stay ahead of it. (Paul McCartney just finished a song with John Lennon’s voice, using AI). I sense that it already has such momentum that, in one form or another, it’s going to enter the social network like a runaway virus. It’s just too tempting, and of course, it’s the old axiom that once something is invented (dangerous or not) humans always find an excuse to use it.

Intelligences telling us who we are, what to do, and even making decisions for us is AI’s internal business. But then I wonder what it will look like externally, on the street. I envision scenes of billboards, monster flat-screens, and live messages projected over the facades of buildings in every direction. I see buses and electric cars operating like flashcards conveying innocent looking Newspeak on everything “flat” – that is, anything that can operate as a screen. Where there’s no TV screen, there’s always a car’s bumper, I-phones, ear-phones, anything that can transmit a message.

What I do not see in the future are citizens walking around staring into I-phones, mesmerized by messages from an invisible source. This is because AI will have cornered the market on goggles and headsets. Everything will literally (or virtually) find itself inside a 3D, self-contained universe. Millions will be wearing these contraptions full-time in public and at work. We will look like robots with compound eyes, mimicking the androids we’ve created to become us in the first place – to act for us, go to war for us, invent for us, labor for us, risk for us.

If life imitates art, then it also imitates technology. I see our species having cowered so much from reality that it’s decided to hide under wires and circuits with the power to decide everything for us. So much so that we’ve begun to imitate them, look like them, socialize, behave and think like them. And that includes donning perhaps the first physical trademark of that transposition – the headset.

It poses an obvious problem of exactly what kind of reality will we all share inside our self-contained “rooms.” If it’s a street we’re walking down, it must be a street shared by everyone. Logistically, as long as we’re still physical and literally walking, we need to know where we’re going, correct? Otherwise we’d look like what happens when trying to herd cats. But, not to fret!! I see technology getting so advanced that a shared street will exist, along with other virtual fiber-optic/laser grids, firewalls, and capacities to enable us certain private freedoms. Freedoms, liberties, indulgences monitored (regulated, limited by) AI in such a way that it doesn’t create conflict or interruption.

What will not be interfered with is each person’s opportunity to construct his own small scenarios. We will have remote worlds which we can share or keep private, except when in violation of certain codes and regulations – all while walking down the same virtual street together.

Of course a certain amount of this will require a systemic “programming” of what we agree to be real, the definition of free will, what is mutually desirable, etc. This is all part of a much larger indoctrinating process of headgear given the power to “steer.” We have to agree on certain basic precognitive structures and patterns which led us here in the first place.

We fantasize all the time about our own social circles, real and imagined. We even fantasize about own Utopian societies (our own “perfect” worlds – the stuff of wish and dream). We will disappear into worlds where, if preferred, we’ll never have to see anybody to even talk to anyone with whom we disagree. We can constitute our own governments in perpetually virtuous-virtual exile. Utopia will be our chosen destination, our penultimate dispensation, while at the same time knowing (announcing) that utopias are impossible. We’ll reach for it even though we know it’s not there. Again, it’s too tempting not to. We will simply put it under the heading of “AI,” or scientific advancement. Science and myth (metaphysics) will finally intersect and cross-pollinate.

But Faust always meets his match. What happens when we get too much of what we want? What happens when life gets so predictable and comfortable (when even surprises are unsurprising) and the sunny side of Main Street gets too crowded? Will the interactions between us get tested? Will boundaries and restrictions break down? It’s said that it’s human nature for us to struggle. If we stop pushing boulders up hills we will cease to exist. That’s another problem for another time.

For now (say, within twenty years?) it will already be a problem of self- recognition. Despite solutions for skin-chafing (from “masking”), what happens when the goggles come off? I imagine we will look to the media for guidance on what to do. Our entire 24/7 cycle of life will be in perfect sync with 24/7 news cycles, one indistinguishable from the other. But what happens to that wee-small (Winston Smith) voice lodged in our brains? That memory of “life before AI” still sitting on our shoulders? Will we have run so far, so fast, for so long only to find that we’ve gone nowhere? Only in our headsets? The transposition will be even harder to notice by the fact that goggles eventually won’t even look like goggles. They’ll look like ordinary reading glasses.

The media is the message more than ever. The forms and methods used to communicate messages, said McLuhan, determine the message itself – the message’s perception. And the medium determines not only how we communicate but how we perceive the world. Today it’s Twitter and Facebook and a 40 character limit (as an example). The internet shapes how we communicate and what we say, what we choose to hear and see. It has reinvented the entire social network.

McLuhan said back in 1964 that what was then the “modern electronic media” would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences. “The content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” The medium controls “the scale and form of human association….” – This truth will have carried itself the point of ordinary reading glasses.

Which means it will inevitably incubate the seeds of resistance. There will be those “subversive” types, non-conformists and troublemakers, those who choose not to forget who we once were, who refuse not only to don a headset but to even own one. They will be seen “in public” watching us watch them. The effect will be the equivalent of a sci-fi movie.

The one I have in mind – They Live (1988). The troublemaker here is an unfortunate and innocent unemployed young man who happens to stumble upon a box of generic-looking sunglasses in an alley. He decides to put a pair on and begins to walk down Main Street. Suddenly half the people he sees are skeletal-looking aliens dressed as humans. He’s shocked and quickly doff the glasses, where they reappear again as normal-looking people. The aliens speak and act just like everyone else. He also reads signs and print that (without the glasses) look to be normal messages. But with the glasses on they read “Stay Asleep,” “No Imagination,” “Submit to Authority,” etc. He discovers that humans are being bombarded with subliminal messages from every direction as part of a massive plan to quietly take over the planet.

Our hero dons and doffs the glasses enough times to draw attention to himself. Soon the aliens begin looking at him suspiciously, and one speaks into his watch-radio: “We have one who knows.” And the chase is on – aliens dressed as doctors, lawyers, police, grocers, and bank-tellers in pursuit of this one man “who knows.”

When power and control are honed so skillfully to the form of “entertaining” goggles (or reading glasses), it’s time to do an inventory. But then that requires stepping outside the boundaries of subjective containment. It requires perspective. Heaven forbid someone should stumble upon a box of sunglasses in an alley – or, in our case, decide to surrender his own to a box. He will undoubtedly see and hear things all around him which are unacceptable to that mysterious “source” which sells the glasses and writes the virtual scripts.

Again, when humans invent something, even if destructive and “meant only to deter” (like a nuclear bomb), they always find an excuse to use it. They simply can’t resist the temptation if for no other reason than to simply see what happens. The goggles of today are just prototypes and things for amusement. So was the first computer, the first radio and TV. Now we have love-hate relationships with them stemming from serious addiction. When I heard that people only have sex when I-phones are within arm’s reach, that they have withdrawal symptoms if they can’t sleep with them, I realized how lucky I was not to own one. Oddly enough, that makes me marginally “subversive” – a non-player, a rebel, an anachronism. But if the world slips blindly into goggles as easily as it did the I-phone, and for the same reasons, I personally see AI technology finally taking us over like the aliens in They Live. The aliens will be “us” because we won’t know the difference.

Just imagine!! The custom of encased eyes (goggles, glasses) the absence of which will summon instant stigmas – you’re “odd,” out of sync, anti-social, etc., not to mention a “person of interest” to authorities. The question then will be what happens when glasses morph into contact lenses, as technology is sure to move along? The onus of containment will then require even newer technology, and the chicken will keep chasing the egg. – Then what’s to come after contact lenses? Simple mind-control via microwaves in the air? (And we said man would never fly). The military in fact is already experimenting with microwaves as a potential weapon. The military is always the first to seize technology for its capacity to subdue, manipulate, exploit, control, and kill.

Maybe something like “perspective” skips a generation (or two) now and then. Maybe (hopefully) a new generation is coming up that sees the dangers before being subjected to them. My own generation recognized and protested. It didn’t do much good, but at least we tried to make the world more aware. This time around a nine-year-old prodigy/genius (Soborno Isaac Bari) is doing just that. With an I.Q. Of 190, already a full professor of physics (learned in chemistry, mathematics, and computer science), the whole academic world is listening to his words.

Currently, Bari says that AI is at the mercy of algorithms which cannot think. It can only do what it’s programmed to do. Human thought (i.e., andro-rithms) on the other hand “has consciousness.” The latter runs the former. He says “consciousness” is the key which makes AI very dangerous. What’s even more dangerous though is if AI acquires its own consciousness. But even if it doesn’t, it won’t matter anyway, because we will have already given ourselves to the machine. We won’t know that we’ve traded “who we are” with the machine – or in this case, our headsets.

I’m just glad that someone else, even a nine-year-old, sees the same things unfolding “before our eyes,” literally and virtually. The two (literal, virtual) will become one, and where “consciousness” resides in that blurry continuum will be the question that overrides all others.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

SHADOW PLAY

Plato’s cave was just the beginning (and maybe it’s still the final act). The more I drift along in this techno-insane (tech-no-logic) world, the more I get a clearer view of what’s really going on, at least psychologically. There’s such a push towards the need to be places, do things, feel the full spectrum of human emotions experiences that we’re actually experiencing less. There’s an obsession to compensate for what we’re not admitting to ourselves. A step forward is two steps back.

We can take the reason for this all the way back to the rudiments of language (signifiers and signs), but we won’t. We don’t have to. The postmodern delirium has presented enough to justify an argument about a) either the fear of experience, or b) the mistake of letting technology experience for us. My own view is that the second case has happened because of the first case. Technology takes the hit in case experiences are unpleasant.

As for technology, virtual reality has given rise to new structures of feeling and thought – mostly thought. Back in 1997 Lewis Lapham was already seeing it as a “second epistemological revolution.” The new sensibility is “impatient, easily bored, geared to increasingly short bursts of attention, intuitive, musical, tuned to abrupt changes in mood and scene. Most importantly, it is a sensibility bereft of memory.”

One of the symptoms is our fascination with subtle forms of anesthesia, the actual loss of sensation (not more). We barely feel enough, and everything seems to point towards making sure we don’t. We think we do; we even react with words and emotions. But we confuse the words with emotion itself, the objectification (distancing from) experience. Love and war are things that occur on a screen; people and places are witnessed vicariously on an I-phone or virtual headset. And when flesh and blood are actually experienced vis-a-vis, “it’s not real” is our reaction. It’s less real when framed through a lens or a camera. When unable to frame it, contextualize it, we famously go into denial mode. “It didn’t happen!,” or only parts happened. There’s a rush to quickly separate from it, which means to dilute it.

We compensate in the opposite direction by amplifying what we do feel, as if to make up for the distortions we know we’re creating. A minor bump becomes a major injury. A minor/brief confrontation with a wild animal becomes a “life or death” moment. The slightest unwelcome contact with another person becomes an “assault.” If someone helps an old lady across the street, he’s the “hero of the week.” Doing something which should be ordinary becomes “sacrificed life & limb in the face of danger” (the “hero” is forced to downplay what happened). And, to be perfectly honest, one is automatically a “hero” just by donning a uniform (virtually any uniform today) because of what “might” befall him. He has a medal on his chest even before knowing how (or if) he’ll even handle danger. — Amplification, embellishment, overstatement, hyperbole, and ceremony are about the fear of (filling in, substitution for) real experience.

“Contextualizing” means the ability to mentally remove ourselves enough to “watch ourselves watching the experience.” The impression, the still-photo, and the ability to do an “OMG!” (sent to friends) replaces the event. It’s then cataloged and filed in our mental archives under the heading “real experience.” Meanwhile, the unlikely notion of ever “being there,” fully “in the moment,” fully surrendered to “the present,” is at best an abstract concept unable to ever be fully engaged because it’s simply too much. Life is about carefully measured anesthesia, circumvention, and framing.

“Thrill seekers” and “adrenaline junkies” boast about toying with death. And that’s all they do – toy with it. They approach it only when conditions are on their terms and the odds are in their favor. Steps are rehearsed and/or tested. Hunters and bull-fighters brag about facing unpredictable odds, but not too unpredictable. Never without knowing they have the upper hand just in case the unthinkable happens. They taunt dangerous animals and challenge them at their own game. But if they become “too” unpredictable and aggressive,” they shoot them. This, they call “sport.”

To digress a moment, someone still has to explain to me the “fairness” (the “sport?”) in camping in the wilderness with all the comforts of home, lying in wait behind an artificial blind, waiting for an animal to appear off in the distance, then shooting it dead with a high-power rifle equipped with a high-powered scope. Oh, “but we waited two whole days, and we had to hike five miles to get here.” And then to feel like “the mighty Weekend Warrior” facing the wild is undoubtedly the most egregious hypocrisy I’ve ever witnessed. They study “percentages” and “odds” published monthly in Hunter’s Digest. “Oh, but 80% get away” (including terribly wounded animals) is not just irrelevant but simply exposes the problem of extremely poor (amateur) marksmanship on top of it all. – The experience of truly fair “odds” and “percentages,” of being on equal ground (facing imminent death with a bear or lion) – in other words, real sport – in completely out of the question.

It’s no wonder so many shoot themselves and each other. But again, it’s all about bragging rights and “manhood” in “measured/monitored” increments. As for “feeling” the experience, it’s about maximizing good ones, minimizing others, then archiving the good like a trophy to replay over and over again.

To remove the middle-ground between I and Thou, this and that, hunter and predator without a safety net, would erase the distance between subject and object, space and time, and contextualizing the whole thing in our favor. – This, by the way, is what humans always do. In nature’s eyes we’re just another species temporarily roaming the earth, possibly soon to be extinct – and nature doesn’t care one way or another. But of course we see it differently. We’re going to fool nature and exist forever.

To bring this whole thing down to ground level and closer to “the everyday,” the media and politics also have something to say about the mind’s transcendental bias to “arranging” the world. It doesn’t earn the status of something “real” until it’s on a screen. We live in little rooms of the electric media. To travel, said Marshall McLuhan, is the same as going to a movie or reading a book.. The nation’s roads and bridges can go to hell, but it’s not happening if we see images of new roads and bridges. There’s no danger of Pacific salmon going extinct if thousands are swimming upstream in a news report. There’s no racism if we see a black boy eating lunch with a white girl. Through fiber optics and computer wizardry we present reality anew by means of stored (and doctored) information.

War happens on a screen now (clean, safe, filtered, noise-reduced), as well as the moving of consumer goods. It’s easier and cheaper to deliver the image of the thing instead of the thing itself, which is what we now do. Whole businesses (shell companies) are run in office buildings that don’t exist. Fat-free diets are now the reality of weight loss; clothes “make the man,”; the aesthetics of minimalist art tell us that “less is more”; jewelry is money and money is wealth; recycling removes the guilt of reckless pollution; companies adhere to “intellectual property”; companies own shipwrecked boats by means “tele-possession” and “tele-presence” (underwater cameras offer proof of title); and (last but not least) the Communion wafer embodies the flesh of Christ. – Such are the habits of abstraction which now replace reality. This is also why cooking shows and sportswear do so well. People on diets let cooking shows offer foods in lieu of eating chocolate. Seventy percent of all the running shoes sold are bought by people who don’t jog.

The guy walking down the street wearing designer clothes, holding a diet soda, owning a sports car, playing golf, wearing logos on his hat, and living in a nice house reads like a neon sign. It says everything about him. Most of all that he’s mastered the art of escape. He lets everything do the talking (experiencing) for him. His is a world of symbols and signs. He simply lives off the fringe benefit of secondary meanings. He’s safely protected behind the screen of vicarious participation.

Again, this is not a new postmodern phenomenon. Visitors of the American frontier, like Alexis de Tocqueville, and Horatio Alger, saw the new citizen arrivals possessed with a talent for ingratiating themselves to the softening of the frontier, mostly to anything that would grant them a fast boon. They wanted to disappear into the balm and amber of instant wealth. Not “street urchins rising from rags to riches by dint of their hard work and noble character,” but desperate people waiting around for the quick deal, the rigged price, the sure bet, the safe monopoly. They schooled themselves in the arts of servility and escape.

Tocqueville called it the “courtier spirit” (always accommodating, willing to distort the truth for an opportunity, loyal to power, willing to strike poses, makes “connections” instead of friends, willing to tell tall tales and lies). “As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.” – So much for the James Fenimore Cooper version of pioneers as intrepid seekers of a higher truth, clean hard work and Christian values.

The habits of abstraction therefore come from seeds planted long, long ago. Today is just the result of it having been played out many times and compounded over and over again. Today, we feel virtually nothing anymore (while feel more of nothing). We’ve made an art of letting machines, alter egos, media, and hyperbole do experiences for us. – And so, where does that leave us? Who/What are we as thinking/feeling beings in this postmodern moment?

Recently the very real dangers of artificial intelligence (“AI”) have made the news, of computers making decisions for us and presenting realities that don’t exist. Perhaps AI is the culmination of this very dilemma which has lasted so long in the American psyche – a chicken coming home to roost. Perhaps we’re being forced to look in the mirror and take another look at our skills of avoidance and displaced experience. It’s about time we did. Otherwise, AI poses a real danger of becoming a monster, civilization’s very first alter ego off its own, who tells us who we are and what to do.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

BEING 74

It feels like living on a precipice – at 74. The same precipice that visited 73 but wider, nearer, and steeper. More and more of my generation are dying off, one soul at a time. The toll is announced almost daily now, heroes and rock stars who defined us. It’s like they’re just lining up single-file to jump into the abyss. Paul Simon, having recently experienced hearing loss for the first time, even made the comment, “our generation is over.”

Elan vital needs a jump start. My body is slowing down and feeling the effects of tightness and less mobility while it senses the world getting younger, more pliant, and energized. I see myself as I was 50 years ago, but a spectrum of new physical sensations, some of which are almost embarrassing, encase that fantasy like a window frame. I wrap it all up with self-mocking humor. I’m taking a back-row seat to life’s proceedings, watching the very same sturm und drang kicked up by “us hippies” by new tsunamis of narcissism and hormones. There are differences, but the similarities win out.

But I’m still resisting a “bucket list.” In fact, I carry an “anti-bucket list” of things I seriously do not want to do before I kick off. This movement, by the way, is gaining momentum. I have absolutely no appetite for things I’ve never done; otherwise, I would have done them. I simply don’t understand the intrigue or compulsion. On rare occasions, I do “think” about camping again. But even camping has changed, thanks to “the times” – crowds, fees, restrictions, noise, congestion, new rules, cameras, stupid people – all of which kill it before it even becomes an urge.

Just the other day I watched a group of rowdy teenagers (on television) having commandeered a rock cliff at Lake Powell where they were jumping into the waters below, making as much racket as they could. I could only imagine that, with liquid courage, they were also smearing the rocks with graffiti and the campsite with garbage. From that alone I could just imagine having driven all that way, expecting to enjoy the serenity of that beautiful park, only to be met by a gaggle of screaming, partying, beer-swilling teens (whose parents should be shot). It crystallized in my mind what has happened to the Rockies almost everywhere, even as far up as 12,000 ft. elevation. Again, I retreat, my thoughts scatter, I wax nostalgic. I admit to being spoiled from knowing how it once was, before half the people inhabiting the planet today weren’t even alive. But I’m right on target when it comes to the changes which have forced the mountains (and wildlife) to suffer so. I feel those stressors and it pains me.

I’ve written about aging in earlier entries, but I’m doing it again because it’s morphing exponentially. Thankfully, psyche lags behind soma. The body must constantly remind the brain to keep up. Sometimes it doesn’t listen, and sometimes it gets away with it. Other times not. Exercise is not just a privilege and a joy but a necessity. Unrelated to this, there’s something that eludes both psyche and soma – the radar of meanings. That is, what “normal” is and what “denial” is.

We so want to believe we’re just as able-bodied, agile, flexible, and adaptable, that nothing’s changed. It takes another person’s honesty to tell us it has. The whole idea of aptitude has new conditions and boundaries. I think back on earlier times when I’d watch “old” people trying to act younger than they were, and I have to say, it was embarrassing to watch. Suddenly my focus shifts and “OMG,” have I become that old man?” Do I embarrass people? Should I embarrass myself? Time to doff the colored glasses and look straight in the mirror.

Finding the answer to that is extra difficult when living alone. Having only a faceless, abstract, and silent public to reflect off of leaves nothing but uncertainty. What exactly is “normal” at 74? I don’t know. An analogy would be like living on a desert island, alone for months, then jumping into a crowd in the desperate need to find perspective. Suddenly, the pressures of style are pitted against one’s private habits (like collecting shells and talking to fish). The $80 haircut and new electric car meet the man with laxed hygiene, no haircut, and the 23-year-old car. Even the language is different; slogans and techno-jargon require an interpreter. – Or, maybe I’m hearing a new language but just don’t allow it into my brain. A loss of synapses? A stubborn rejection of noise which now passes for “normal?” Who knows and who cares? – Back in the day my grandfather simply took out his hearing aid.

Shopping is germaine to this. After passing the tabloids reporting the death of yet another rock star, I spend more time in the isles, reading labels, doing inventories of what I’m forgetting to buy. Meanwhile, young people whisk by, grabbing things without looking, always in a hurry. Will they regret their recklessness, or is it reckless for them? I have no appetite for lingering in such spaces, so I pay and go home. I have to say that noise, public odors, and banter are not unlike teenagers pissing on the rocks at Lake Powell. Flannery O’Connor said “I don’t want to be lonely, but people only make me lonelier.” Touche. On top of that oxymoron, public places leave an odour, like breathing recycled air on a crowded airplane.

I usually come away from shopping just a little disappointed with myself. I’m unbearably kind and polite to people. Too much so. There’s a limit to kindness, despite popular opinion. It’s overrated and too often exploited. It’s as if I step out of myself and become an alter ego. I ingratiate myself to the smallest human gestures, nod approvingly, apologize profusely, smile constantly. The “alter” wants to keep things simple, unattached, without strings, consequences, repercussions, and lawsuits. People are nice while they’re not. It’s like negotiating a labyrinth of masks and smiles as phony as my own.

I remember people exactly like this growing up, overbearingly nice, and now I wonder if they knew something I didn’t. I have no room for negative karma and neither did they, apparently. Perhaps they always sensed trouble waiting around the corner. Some of them paid for it too by way of terrible ulcers (swallowing their feelings). We’d both agree that “people” present too many behaviors to grapple with when your own are in the way. Unpredictability and caprice are symptoms I reserve for my own “alter.” It’s a “party of one” with its own peccadilloes.

Whilst grappling with these mini-melodramas, other things are going on. Habits and routines are getting honed down to simpler and fewer tasks. I don’t resist or even regret it because it feels oddly fitting. Years ago I wouldn’t feel settled until I did five unrelated things simultaneously and completed them all. Now, “settled” faces a scrutiny of new meanings – like a cushy chair, coffee, and a book. Beyond that the day takes care of itself. In the early days I “took care of business.” Today, “business” means “anxiety.” Young people take prescription drugs just to stay in sync with anxiety. Meanwhile, here sits a textbook hedonist, seeker of small pleasures, easy access and convenience. I avoid the first sign of an approaching stressor. It alerts me to something not being done right. It’s one thing “retiring” individuals are acutely aware of. Again, boundaries have shifted like tectonic plates.

The same applies to food and diet. Long ago I indulged in a range of foods from decadent to reasonably healthy. Today, I’m vegan and stick to what most (young) people earmark as extremely boring and repetitive. I confess!! but never tire of it. – From my point of view, it’s simply ironic that the healthiest foods just happen to be the cheapest (nonperishable) foods of all. You’ll never convince young (and many old) people of this. But ever since 1978, when I turned vegetarian, it’s baffled me how much money is spent on the very foods that cause heart disease, obesity, and cancer. It still baffles me. And we need not even mention the unconscionable animal cruelty which still goes on to support those dietary habits. It’s just another kind of hypocrisy I have difficulty with. We claim to be humane and caring but turn a blind eye when “factory farms” are mentioned — because everyone wants his Jimmy Dean in the morning.

On a different subject: As a writer, I keep a pulse going for romantic fantasies. One of which is envisioning myself living in the Sorbonne and Latin Quarter during the fin de siecle, along with others living “garreted” lifestyles. It’s a humble fantasy, just something with which to frame a small room, including “the drawer” for which I write. I recall Lewis Lapham’s famous article Balzac’s Garret, written in 1996:

As a poor and unpublished writer in Paris in the early 1820s, Honore de Balzac lived in a meager garret under a roof of broken tiles near the cemetery of Pere Lachaise. The landlord provided nothing other than a table, a bed, and a chair, and so Balzac, who was fond of luxury, dressed the room in words. On a stained and empty wall he inscribed the notice ‘Rosewood paneling with commode’; on the opposite wall, equally bare, ‘Gobelin tapestry with Venetian mirror’; and in the place of honor over the cold fireplace, ‘Picture by Raphael.’ Twenty years later, having become both famous and rich, Balzac filled his several apartments and townhouses with the literal-minded proofs of his once impoverished hypothesis….

I’ve never dressed up my home in this manner. But I have with the faces of heroes who ceremoniously fill the room. Thankfully, I’ve never had to “climb the wall of ambition… achieve the status of a commodity.” My appetite for ambition and status is equivalent to my appetite for liver, pork, and oysters. Both induce emetic results. But the romance of living in austere and meager digs, writing with little to distract me, nothing to need but pen and paper. not only brings in the faces of Calliope, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, and Euterpe, but just the right ambiance to solicit them all. It fits a temperament which happens to be mine.

While most today seem to need clutter and noise in their lives just to stay occupied, there’s something seductive about a blank piece of paper, a pen, lamp, and an empty table. It’s a portal into an invitation, a window into another universe. Anything’s possible. At that magic moment the heart and soul open like a lotus, ready to divulge an enormous backlog of feelings, observances, impressions, thoughts, lots of grist and bile.

Put another way, I try to envision an Edward Hooper painting – simple, austere, honest, straight lines and soft colors. Nothing clutters the table, there’s just the writing material and a small lamp, nothing on walls, old Shaker furniture, plain drapes, and morning light cutting through the air in perpendicular lines to keep the picture balanced. Hopper and Balzac are my bookends.

And then there are the animals (again), wild, domestic, tame, outside my window. Each is it’s own Disney character, always part of the conversation. They don’t always respond, but invitations are open-ended. Sometimes it’s a “tea party.” This is the real family which needs no further comment. Suffice it to say, they “finish out” what is so lacking elsewhere.

“We write to taste life twice,” wrote Anais Nin. I suppose this is why writing becomes more of a full-time obsession as we age, at least for some of us. We relive in order to self-correct and repair. There’s a poem by T.L. Pierson:

— Of all the things one says and does, I look back on what never was. Then think of all that life could be, If I could capture what I see. —

Being 74 isn’t about “capturing” anymore, and I don’t think at all about what “could have been but wasn’t” (it takes me back to bucket lists again). But I do ponder what “never was” and was never meant to be. It’s more a process of eliminating all the debris and nonsense of the past in order to see what’s present. An even better poem, perhaps:

Heard melodies are sweet, but the unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. (Keats).

Next year (if there is one) my 75^th year will no doubt foster similar impressions, thoughts, and another entry, albeit with changes in intensity, barometric pressure, and focus. It’s just beginning to get interesting.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt