Samuel Beckett wrote of James Joyce: "To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a perhaps an unstatable rule…It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble than either of these, it is a perception of coincidence." Before we can comprehend reality, we must perceive it accurately, we must examine closely.
Upon closer examination, the apparent continuity error in the game of chess between HAL and Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an error, it was simply a bluff made by HAL to gauge the perception of Poole. This truth, although in plain sight, was buried by Kubrick, and would only be discovered by the majority of his audience until many years later. It appears Kubrick, like HAL, was also bluffing. Was it for the same reason HAL bluffed Poole? To gauge the perception of the audience? Sneaky bastard. Joel and Ethan Coen are a couple of sneaky bastards too.
There is nothing wrong with simply appreciating A Serious Man as a dark comedy, or enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey as an epic special effects driven science-fiction film. But the Coen's are, as I said, sneaky bastards. And like Kubrick, they are offering us something much more profound than just a comedy.
In A Serious Man, Lawrence "Larry" Gopnik and Arthur Gopnik are brothers, who both involve themselves with extremely complex and intellectual exercises. One embodies the madness of artistic creation, the other the burden of proof.
The Mentaculus
Arthur is a lonely lumpy soul who spends his time gambling, lurking, and obsessively scribbling into print a work called The Mentaculus, a title that conveys a calculus of mentation. It is his "probability map of the universe", and is written in a language that seemingly only makes sense to Arthur. One quick glance and it looks as though poor Arthur is quite ill, mentally. Yet it reminds me of something else written in a language no one can seemingly understand….
James Joyce, one of the most highly respected artists of the 20th century, spent the last 17 years of his life working on what he called his Work In Progress, which eventually became Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake is a work of literature that makes absolutely no sense to 99% of the people who attempt to read it. The other 1% claim, rather loudly, that it is a work of genius. It would be a whole lot easier for the majority to dismiss this book if it weren't for the fact that so many intelligent and respected people populate the 1% who revere Finnegans Wake. What the hell do they know? What do they see that the rest of us can’t?
It is possible that The Mentaculus is Arthur’s Work In Progress. Unfortunately, Arthur is living in Minnesota in the 1960's, and cannot command the kind of audience that Joyce did. We don't even know if Arthur has ever allowed anyone else to read it. Ironically, he lives with the one person who might make sense of his masterpiece, his brother Larry.
Schröedinger's Cat
Larry is more successful than Arthur, he has a wife and two children, a career, and a solid social identity.
Larry is very intelligent, a Professor of Physics, and spends his time lecturing on the laws and theorems calculated by people even smarter than he, yet he remains the epitome of "those who can, do, those who can't, teach." Larry is shown lecturing on the Schröedingers Cat thought experiment, and it is a good reflection of Larry's life. Larry is both Teacher and Student, Married and Alone, Faithful and Faithless, Found and Lost. It all depends on the observer.
Schröedinger's cat is also a good reflection of the Standard Model of Quantum Physics at the moment, as it remains both Fact and Fiction. The calculations and equations of quantum physicists promise a unified theory of everything, an explanation for the existence of time, space, and the universe that we live and die in. The mathematical equations have promised that matter is composed of certain scientifically observable objects, the most important being the top quark, the bottom quark, the tau neutrino, and the Higgs Boson, So far the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995) and the tau neutrino (2000) have been discovered, just like the calculations have promised. But the Higgs Boson remains the elusive companion of this group, and is still referred to as the Hidden Variable. We can't claim the Standard Model to be fact until this is finally observed.
"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."
Murray Gell-Mann
Arthur and Larry (Art and Law), two very different brothers, are actually both searching for the same thing, the hidden variable to life, but all they have to show for in their search is loneliness and divorce. It is said that it is always darkest before the dawn, and for Arthur and Larry, it's getting pretty dark in Room 23 of the Jolly Roger Motel.
"Arthur, you've got to pull your self together"
"It's all shit Larry. It's all shit."
"Arthur don't use that word."
"It's just fucking shit."
"Arthur."
"Look at all that Hashem has given you. What has he given me? He hasn't given me shit."
"Arthur, what do I have? I live at the Jolly Roger"
"You have a family. You have a job. Hashem hasn't given me shit. He hasn't given me bubkes!"
"It's not fair to blame Hashem, Arthur. Please. Sometimes….please calm down. Sometimes you have to help yourself."
"Hashem hasn't given me shit. Now I can't even play cards."
We have two brothers embracing in the void of an empty swimming pool, lost in a world where Hashem, the divine God they were raised with, has abandoned them.
There is a message next to Arthur, (a sign?), that is painted on the concrete, a message that neither are paying attention to. The audience is most likely not paying attention to it either.
The message is never revealed completely, but commonsense tells us that 3 FT NO DIVING is painted on the concrete as a warning to those who would jump into the shallow pool. Nothing profound. But a knowledge of James Joyce and quantum physics is not a common sense, it is a rather uncommon sense, and in this scene, seen through a lens informed by Joyce and quantum physics, the perception of a very curious coincidence occurs.
James Joyce uses the symbol "Ǝ" in the architecture of Finnegans Wake to represent what the Buddhists call "void" and the Taoists call "wu-hsin" or NO MIND. This NO MIND represents the "class of all possible minds", meaning the aggregation of all possible minds. This mind does and does not exist, like that damn cat, and is best expressed in the paradoxical language of mystics and the mathematical equations of quantum physics. Robert Anton Wilson in his brilliant essays on Joyce equates Joyce's Ǝ with the Hidden Variable of quantum physics.
If we allow ourselves to fill in the missing letters through this lens, this message, written on the edge of a void, might be trying to say:
Ǝ
NO
DIVINE
WHY? Well, we have two brothers embracing each other, one a poor man's James Joyce, the other a poor man's Schröedinger, and both are lamenting their relationship to the divine. The message is both pessimistic (NO DIVINE = NO GOD) as well as optimistic ( Ǝ NO DIVINE = the Hidden Variable, the class of all things Divine is right by you!). The Coen's have planted a message that seemingly embraces both the pinnacles of artistic and mathematical expression, a message buried as deep as the bluff of HAL.
But do the Coen's believe that the message is the pessimistic one or the optimistic one?
There is a clue, another message buried somewhere else in the film, one that is more explicit even though it only appears for a brief second of screen time. If you are paying very close attention, I think the Coen's are very clear as to their answer, because it seems that the elusive companion of the quarks, the Hidden Variable of the Standard Model of quantum physics is as close to Arthur and Larry as the coincidental message painted in black by the side of the pool. It's right there in The Mentaculus.
Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic manwas published in 1962, and possesses an uncanny understanding of the world we live in today. The language has a very modern feel, and is even structured in a modern way. It reads like a newspaper, or more accurately, like a blog, eschewing long chapters for shorter bite sized chunks introduced by microcosmic titles like these:
The Gutenberg Galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within. Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.
McLuhan argues that that the phonetic alphabet and the development of literacy had a profound effect on our sense ratios. It changed the way our brain works. To build his case, he references a paper by Professor John Wilson of the African Institute of London University from 1961 entitled "Film Literacy in Africa". Wilson was using film to teach the native tribal people how to read. A film was prepared to show the proper techniques for removing standing water, Everything in the film was done slowly and deliberately in order to make clear the instruction. When the audience was asked about what they had seen in the film, they replied simply that they had seen a chicken, which baffled the filmmakers because they did not know a chicken was in the film. After carefully reviewing the film the frame by frame, a chicken did in fact appear for about one second of screen time through the righthand bottom part of the screen.
Question: Do you literally mean that when you talked with the audience you came to believe that they had not seen anything else but the chicken?
Wilson: We simply asked them: What did you see in this film?
Question: Not what did you think?
Wilson: No, what did you see?
Question: How many people were in the viewing audience of whom you asked this question?
Wilson: 30-odd.
Question: No one gave you a response other than "We saw the chicken."
Wilson: No, this was the first quick response - "We saw a chicken." Question: They did see a man, too?
Wilson: Well, when we questioned them further they had seen a man, but what was really interesting was that they hadn't made a whole story out of it, and point in fact, we discovered afterwards that they hadn't seen a whole frame - they had inspected the frame for details. Then we fond out from the artist and an eye specialist that a sophisticated audience, an audience that is accustomed to film, focuses a little way in front of the flat screen so that you take in the whole frame. In this sense, again, a picture is a convention. You've got to look at the picture as a whole first, and these people did not do that, not being accustomed to pictures. When presented with the picture they began to inspect it, rather as the scanner of a television camera, and go over it very rapidly. Apparently, that is what the eye unaccustomed to picture does - scans the picture - and they hadn't scanned on one picture before it moved on, in spite of the slow technique of the film.
Of this McLuhan writes: "The key facts are at the end of the passage. Literacy gives people the power to focus a little way in front of an image so that we take in the whole image or picture at a glance. Non-literate people have no such acquired habit and do not look at objects in our way. Rather, they scan objects and images as we do the printed page, segment by segment. Thus they have no detached point of view. They are wholly with the object. They go empathically with it."
McLuhan is saying that the human being not subjected to the demands of literacy is simply not programmed yet. McLuhan argues that in order to do so, the sense ratios of the human brain must be adjusted like the levels of an equalizer on a stereo.
This is demonstrated quite nicely by the Magic Eye 3D picture phenomenon:
Remember, McLuhan writes that "Literacy gives people the power to focus a little way in front of an image so that we take in the whole image or picture at a glance." The Magic Eye requires that the observer focus a little way behind the image in order to see the embedded 3D image. The brain must be adjusted in the opposite manner, an adjustment many people find impossible. I don't think anyone would judge a person to be of less intelligence for not being able to adjust their senses in order to see a 3D image.
READ MARSHALL MCLUHAN.
Immersion in the Gutenberg Galaxy has changed the structure of the human brain and has created a kind of tunnel vision in some that prevents them from experiencing the world in a natural way. I think it helps to explain this:
You can't fault a microscope for not being able to see the rings of Saturn, and you can't fault a telescope for not seeing bacteria. Each instrument is designed to focus in a certain direction. A ultra-literate man in a Gutenberg Galaxy simply cannot see or cannot even hear certain things because of the sense-ratios programmed into the brain.
Now, if you were to walk around this subway station with eyes crossed, in the Magic Eye Galaxy, you might get lost in the beautiful sound of the violin, but you also might walk in front of a train.
READ MARSHALL MCLUHAN
(This large, bold print is only obnoxious to the literate man)
Now, I don't think any of this is breaking news now, and I know most people understand this concept. But remember, McLuhan wrote about this in the early 1960's, and if you claimed to understand McLuhan in the 1960's you were considered either extremely educated or a liar.
History is a Nightmare From Which I am
Trying to Awake James Joyce
In the modern world, the slightly in front focusing technique of literacy is a requirement, necessary hundreds and hundreds of times a day. What kind of strain and stress does this require of the brain? Try to imagine if the slightly behind cross-eyed focus of visualizing the Magic Eye was required hundreds of times a day. Try to imagine the stress and strain of incorporating that into your daily life, and I think it becomes apparent that any permanent reprogramming of the sense-ratios will have a profound effect on the brain.
McLuhan theorizes that this reprogramming of the mind is not only responsible for tunnel vision, he also theorizes it is responsible for certain types of mental illness, specifically schizophrenia. Now, obviously if this was a black and white issue, everyone who learns how to read and watches films would be mentally ill, and this is clearly not the case. But this doesn't mean that McLuhan isn't on to something. I suggest comparing McLuhan's theory with what we know about alcoholism: some people can drink alcohol, some people shouldn't drink a lot of alcohol, and some people shouldn't drink ANY alcohol. Literacy, like alcohol, affects different people in different ways.
When I was about four or five years old, my older sister learned how to read. Now, I had no idea specifically what it was my sister was doing, but I must have recognized that she was receiving a lot of positive attention for doing something I couldn't do, attention that I was jealous of. This became my first obsession, and with the help of a very patient mother who would read Dr. Seuss books out loud so that I could follow along, I effectively programmed my brain and learned how to read. Now, I don't have a crystal clear memory of all the details, but I can still recall the feeling of that "AHA" moment, when the markings on the page became words, and the words on the page became sentences, and my brain locked into the ability to read. It was disorienting and extremely powerful. A switch had been magically switched and a whole new universe emerged out of thin air. This is nicely mirrored in the "AHA" moment of the person staring at the Magic Eye picture for forty-five minutes who suddenly sees the 3D image that had been there all along.
I was considerably younger than most when I learned to read. This distinction gave me all the positive attention that I was looking for. It gave me identity, as I was now considered "gifted", and it gave me an incredible amount of confidence. It also may or may not have been responsible for the emergence of "night terrors".
Everyone knows the image of the frightened child as the boogey man emerges from the closet or the monster under the bed starts to creep. I might have been afraid of these monsters in my room, but I was deathly afraid of falling asleep, of the monsters in my head, in my dreams. My mother has told me of the many nights she was awakened by my screams, and of being unable to wake me up as I climbed the walls of my bedroom. I think about my mother trying to console me, a frightened, suffering child, and not being able to simply because she could not wake me up. Not good. But a pretty good metaphor for Human History in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
I don't know for sure if my obsessive quest to reprogram my brain was responsible for the emergence of my "night terrors", but the two definitely seem connected in some way.
McLuhan was an optimist though, and he was very supportive of the new electronic media that was beginning to change the landscape of the world. In 1961, he predicted that electronic media would reduce the worst symptoms associated with this phonetic dark age within the Gutenberg Galaxy, symptoms best illustrated in the conformity and schizophrenia of Industrial Revolutions and Nazi Germany. McLuhan saw the rigid border lines of kingdom and country becoming vulnerable to an emerging tribalism that was being made possible by electronic media.
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READ MARSHALL MCLUHAN
It is 50 years since The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, and, as I see it, we are living in the future world that Marshall McLuhan foresaw. The World Wide Web has replaced the book, the film, and the television as the most ubiquitous form of media in the world. We literally carry it around with us in our cars, in our pockets, in our schools and in the office. Take a few moments to really grok how many new modes of communication exist, how many new channels of communication it provides, how many new "tribes" are forming. Facebook is only eight years old, and it has already been turned into a movie, an Academy Award nominated movie.
The dominance and monopoly of The Book is dissolving, and today's students are no longer subjected to hours and hours of phonetic instruction. Modes of education have become more "empathic", and are not as invasive. It seems as though the Sensual Revolution is near.
It is important to stress that the World Wide Web is not a Home, or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It is an oven, a global electronic alchemical oven. A digital Tower, and successor to that Tower of old, that multi-national alchemical melting pot known as America. In my opinion, as long as the fires of the Web are burning, we have a fighting chance to improve the conditions of life on this planet.
