Situationism Remembered

 

 

     The nostalgia I feel thinking about Situationism from the perspective of this twenty-first century is unfortunately a function of how these United States and France and much of the world has backslid since the movement’s glory days in 1968.  In America we have just eluded a fascist takeover by an utterly self-interested would-be tyrant.  In the sixties we told each other that Republicans were passé, that big business had learned how to work in concert with government, making the principal danger corporate liberalism.  Many spoke of ‘the post-industrial society,” and believed (as I do yet) that technology has produced a state of affairs in which all reasonable needs could be satisfied with very little work.  Much of the motive of the New Left was not material want as it had been when “Solidarity Forever” described labor as “outcast and starving,”  The Port Huron Statement founding SDS said American youth were “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in universities,” but nonetheless felt alienated.  Yet at the same time Utopia seemed possible.  We little imagined that over fifty years later the ugly specters of overt racism, Nazism, unashamed sexism, and predatory capitalism would re-emerge as strong as ever and that the old working-class anxieties could once more be directed against scapegoats instead of bosses. 

     History has kept grinding on at the usual inexorable pace, but at a moment when all dreams were allowed, many, and among them the Situationists, imagined a modern Abbey of Thélème with its single rule: “Do as thou wouldst.”  The role of Situationists who in the uprisings of May of 1968, in particular their influence in the Atelier Populaire, which produced hundreds of posters and leaflets and gave Situationism very likely the greatest visibility of any artistic movement in social upheaval since the origin of capitalism. 

     Situationism was always a minute coterie, a splinter of a splinter.  The group was sparked by the encounter between avant-garde artistic formations and left-wing politics. [1]  In spite of the writers’ intentions, tendentiously radical literature has had negligible discernable influence on social change [2], yet the Dadaists and Surrealists, for example, felt a warmth (not always returned) toward revolutionary socialism.  In 1946 a Romanian émigré, Isidore Isou, made his place in the Modernist lineage clear when, in Lettrisme’s first public manifestation, he disrupted a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuit, shouting "Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!"  Guy Debord, the central figure of Situationism, joined in 1951, espousing a more radical Marxist position. 

     Through street art the Lettrists spread slogans such as “Never work!”  Debord led demonstrators who in October 1952 interrupted Charlie Chaplin’s press conference for his new film Limelight, and published a leaflet defending their action “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) [3], causing a break with Isou.  In 1957 Debord and others announced the Situationist International.

     A few years later the “Situationist Manifesto” appeared [4] noting “the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. “a lack of satisfaction in our senseless social lives” and calling for a “new human force,” totally rejecting “alienation and oppression” in “the current multiform crisis.”  The Situationist alternative is “a society which authentically ‘reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers’" in which everyone would be freed from work, assuring the “complete liberty to the individual.”  The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.”  “Everyone will become an artist.”

    This utopian economic perspective is the true heart of Situationism, the intoxicating lure of total freedom, yet it manifests symbolically, its own art challenging the rituals of late capitalism, “the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation” and proposing “a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.”

     What such a liberating art would look like is not clear.  From Lettrisme the Situationists inherited a fondness for the abstract, but the left-wing elements of the formation staged a celebrated event when, on Easter Sunday of 1950, during a televised High Mass in Notre Dame Michel Mourre mounted the pulpit in Dominican robes and preached a sermon maintaining that God was dead and that the church was a “running sore on the decomposed body of the West.” [7]  Debord made several films with differing content.  His first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952) includes no images whatsoever.  His second Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959) juxtaposes images of Debord and his associates with scenes from mass culture. 

     Much of Situationist statements focus on social relations more than aesthetics, insisting that pre-revolutionary art must be subversive to be genuine.  Whereas the ruling class seeks to pacify the masses with “spectacle,” which signifies an altogether passive experience which displaces the individuals’ real lived experience.  Though posters and graffiti were surely their most influential media, the specific techniques most identified with Situationism are détournement (diversion) and dérive (drift).

     Détournement seeks to expose and overturn the ruling class’s mind control through, "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself."  Though the device is an old one – the I. W. W. parodies of revival songs is just one example – the most familiar example associated with Situationism is the use of hyper-conventional images from old advertisements and comic strip panels, often from romance titles, with new text. [6]  One might view Abbie Hoffman as a master of the improvisatory détournement, applaud Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (the Yes Men), and ask whether Sacha Baron Cohen is the form’s genius or its commodifier.      

     Debord defined the dérive as the art of wandering through urban space.  “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” [8]  The dérive was an effort to experience one’s environment freshly without the blinders imposed by capitalist culture.

     The Situationist International was always very small, and their concepts would linger in obscure footnotes were it not for the energetic French movement of workers as well as intellectuals in 1968, during which what had been an obscure clique became widely influential.  Debord was perhaps exaggerating, but he had reason to boast that “the disorder that overtook the world in 1968 had its source at a few café tables, where, in 1952, a handful of somewhat strayed young people calling themselves the Letterist International used to drink too much and plan systematic rambles they called dérives.” [9]

    In 1966 the Strasbourg chapter of the French student union, the U. N. E. F., published a manifesto explicitly employing Situationist analysis “On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy.”  In politics, the students condemned the “licensed and impotent” left; in art they declared “art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.”   They point toward the possibility of liberation.  “The only poetry . . . is the creativity released in the making of history, the free invention of each moment and each event: Lautréamont's poésie faite par tous -- the beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammelled desire.”

     Similar ideas swept through French campuses and in the spring of 1968 Situationists dominated the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne and went on to establish The Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which sought to bring workers into the movement for total liberation.  This group lasted only a very short time.  In 1972, reduced to two members, the Situationiste International dissolved itself.  [10]

     The “Situationist Manifesto” sounds something like a Bodhisattva when it says, “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity."  The Situationists remind us that artists can influence history and that no demand is excessive.  Ask for everything.  We deserve it. 

 

 

1.      1. Even the exceptions tend to be not apolitical or centrist, but rather, like Pound, Marinetti, and Céline, to adopt extreme fascist views.

 2.  Reformist writing has sometimes attracted considerable readership.  The best American example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

3. The leaflet called for “the destruction of idols” and accused Chaplin’s admirers of “a unanimous, servile enthusiasm" while calling the actor himself an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune.”

4.      In Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).  The French text is available at https://www.ubu.com/media/text/si/Internationale_situationniste_4.pdf and the English translation I have used by Fabian Thompsett at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html. 

 5.      See Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

 6.      Now that one commonly sees such “turned” images in merchandise like tee shirts and coffee cups, one must ponder whether critics such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek may be correct in arguing that such play with images might reinforce rather than reveal oppression.  It is doubtless significant that the comic panels of Roy Lichtenstein never alter the original text as the Situationists did.

 7.      Mourre, who had, when younger, been a Dominican, in this way recalled the intrusions of the young Blanquistes who interrupted mass in Notre Dame March 22, 1892, shouting “Long live the Republic!  Long live the Commune!  Down with the Church,” as well as when on November 17, 1918, Oberdada Johannes Baader declared that “Christ is a sausage” from the pulpit of the Berlin Cathedral.   The tradition continues with the performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012.

8.      Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958.  Despite the language of “psychogeography,” the procedure sounds rather similar to the recreational strolls people have taken for many  years after using cannabis.

 9.      Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord.

 10.   The work of Situationist artists did not end.  In 1975 Gianfranco Sanguinetti working with Debord published a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy) [57].  Claiming to be written by a major capitalist, the pamphlet made outlandish and satirical claims, such as that the ruling class was in fact responsible for ultra-left violence as part of a strategy to prevent communism.  The text was taken to be genuine, and, when the deception was revealed, Sanguinetti was obliged to flee Italy.

 

 

 

Situationist and situationist-influenced slogans of Paris in May of 1968

 

The collection below is available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm. 

These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), Maurice Brinton’s Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity, 1968), and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).

     This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

 MAY 1968 GRAFFITI

  

In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.

Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”

And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

 

We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

 

We want to live.

 

Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.

 

In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

 

The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.

 

Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

 

No replastering, the structure is rotten.

 

Masochism today takes the form of reformism.

 

Reform my ass.

 

The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.

 

I came, I saw, I was won over.

 

Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

 

Quick!

 

If we only have enough time . . .

 

In any case, no regrets!

 

Already ten days of happiness.

 

At every moment something is happening.

 

Live in the moment.

 

Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .

 

We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.

 

Down with the state.

 

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.  [Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]

 

Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.

 

It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.

 

Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.

 

Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.

 

I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders).  Let the people serve themselves.

 

Abolish class society.

 

Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.

 

We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.

 

“In revolution there are two types of people: those who make it and those who profit from it.” (Napoleon)

 

Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”

 

Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.

Socialism without freedom is a barracks.

 

All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.

 

The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.

 

Politics is in the streets.

 

Barricades close the streets but open the way.

 

Our hope can come only from the hopeless.

 

A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.

 

Never work.

 

People who work get bored when they don’t work.  People who don’t work never get bored.

 

Workers of all countries, enjoy!

 

Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.  My father before me fought for wage increases.  Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.  Yet my whole life has been a drag.  Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

 

The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.

 

By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.

 

Occupy the factories.

 

Power to the workers councils. (an enragé)

 

Power to the enragés councils. (a worker)

 

Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.

 

Labor unions are whorehouses.

 

Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!  [Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]

 

Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

 

Stalinists, your children are with us!

 

Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.  He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.

 

Conflict is the origin of everything.

(Heraclitus)

 

If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.

 

Be cruel.

 

Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.

 

When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?

 

The passion of destruction is a creative joy. (Bakunin)

 

A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.

 

The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.

 

This concerns everyone.

 

We are all German Jews.

 

We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.

 

We are all “undesirables.”

 

We must remain “unadapted.”

 

The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.

 

Under the paving stones, the beach.

 

Concrete breeds apathy.

 

Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.

 

Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.

 

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” (Unamuno)

 

Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.

 

You are hollow.

 

You will end up dying of comfort.

 

Hide yourself, object!

 

No to coat-and-tie revolution.

 

A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.

 

Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.

 

The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.

 

When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.

 

Happiness is a new idea.

 

Live without dead time.

 

Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring

to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.

 

Culture is an inversion of life.

 

Poetry is in the streets.

 

The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.

 

Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.

 

Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.

 

Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.

 

Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.

 

Permanent cultural vibration.

 

We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gatherings with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.

 

Anarchy is me.

 

Revolution, I love you.

 

Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral. (Marxist-Pessimist Youth)

 

Don’t consume Marx, live him.

 

I’m a Groucho Marxist.

 

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.

 

Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!

 

Practice wishful thinking.

 

I declare a permanent state of happiness.

 

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

 

Power to the imagination.

 

Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.

 

Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.

(Breton)

 

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.

 

Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.

 

Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.

 

The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.

 

Here, we spontane.

 

“You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.”  (Nietzsche)

 

Chance must be systematically explored.

 

Alcohol kills. Take LSD.

 

Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.

 

“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”  (Valéry)

 

Life is elsewhere.

 

Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.

 

Form dream committees.

 

Revolution is the active passage from dream to reality.

 

Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment.  (Saint-Just)

 

Arise, ye wretched of the university.

 

Students are jerks.

 

The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.  (enragé women)

 

Professors, you make us grow old.

 

Terminate the university.

 

Rape your Alma Mater.

 

What if we burned the Sorbonne?

 

Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.

 

We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.

 

We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.

 

Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.

 

When examined, answer with questions.

 

Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.

 

Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.

 

The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne.  (telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)

 

Thought that stagnates rots.

 

To call in question the society you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.

 

Take revolution seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.

 

The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.

 

Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.

 

A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.

 

Drive the cop out of your head.

 

Religion is the ultimate con.

 

Neither God nor master.

 

If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

 

Can you believe that some people are still Christians?

 

Down with the toad of Nazareth.

 

How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?

 

We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.

 

I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.

 

The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.

 

Going through the motions kills the emotions.

 

Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials.  (Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)

 

Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.

 

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.  The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.

 

SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.

 

Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable: we need you for the revolution.

 

Embrace your love without dropping your guard.

 

I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

 

I’m coming in the paving stones.

 

Total orgasm.

 

Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

 

Revolutionary women are more beautiful.

 

Gilda, I love you! Down with work!

 

The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.

 

Make love, not war.

 

Whoever speaks of love destroys love.

 

Down with consumer society.

 

The more you consume, the less you live.

 

Commodities are the opium of the people.

 

Burn commodities.

 

You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.

 

See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.

 

Are you a consumer or a participant?

 

To be free in 1968 means to participate.

 

I participate.

You participate.

He participates.

We participate.

They profit.

 

The golden age was the age when gold didn’t reign.

 

“The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.”  (St. Augustine)

 

Happiness is hanging your landlord.

 

Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.

 

The economy is wounded — I hope it dies!

 

How sad to love money.

 

You too can steal.

 

“Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.”  (Ambrose Bierce)

[The definition in Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]

 

Abolish alienation.

 

Obedience begins with consciousness; consciousness begins with disobedience.

 

First, disobey; then write on the walls. 

(Law of 10 May 1968) 

I don’t like to write on walls.

 

Write everywhere.

 

Before writing, learn to think.

 

I don’t know how to write but I would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.

 

I don’t have time to write!!!

 

I have something to say but I don’t know what.

 

Freedom is the right to silence.

 

Long live communication, down with telecommunication.

 

You, my comrade, you whom I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid, suffocated — come, talk to us.

 

Talk to your neighbors.

 

Yell.

 

Create.

 

Look in front of you!!!

 

Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.

 

Revolution is an INITIATIVE.

 

Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.

 

Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.

 

Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.

 

Down with spectacle-commodity society.

 

Down with journalists and those who cater to them.

 

Only the truth is revolutionary.

 

No forbidding allowed.

 

Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.

 

The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.

 

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

 

Free our comrades.

 

Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.

 

Open the windows of your heart.

 

To hell with boundaries.

 

You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.

 

The future will only contain what we put into it now.

Skipping over the Surface of Things

 

     Years ago I noticed the tendency among certain of the young to watch television in a new way, turning from one channel to the next without lingering long on any.  To me even a second-rate show seemed preferable to wandering always, hoping that the next option might offer that appeal so elusive that it never quite arrives.  The phenomenon was recorded in Springsteen’s "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)," though the fifty-seven channels soon became hundreds on cable and satellite, and then, through online devices, all but unlimited.  Originally such skimming over the surface of myriad possibilities was confined to the time one sat down in front of the screen seeking entertainment, but, with the introduction of smartphones – the term was first used in 1995 but such devices did not become commonplace until Apple’s iPhone in 2007 – people could scan one thing after another anywhere and at any time.  And they do, even while shopping or sitting with friends or in a toilet stall.   In a New York subway car, almost every eye gazes into a small hand-held device.  In a crowded elevator, instead of the conventional prim stance (facing the door, looking slightly down, hands clasped in front) many are now roving mentally around the virtual universe held in the palm of the hand. 

     This has surely amounted to an alteration of consciousness.  On the watch for food sources and for possible danger, animals, predators and prey alike, must be constantly attentive and observant.  In prehistoric times, people, like other animals, walked the woods always alert to their surroundings in the interest of survival.  Everyone in the community contributed to hunting and gathering and mutual defense.  Over time with the division of labor, people learned to focus on specific tasks which for a very few high-status individuals were accomplished entirely in the head: speculation, reading, philosophy, and science resulted, with the consequence that the sharp generalized vigilance that had served so well for millennia eroded.  Working from home in the pandemic has made dramatically clear what we already knew: that today a good many workers, and many of the most highly paid among them, do nothing productive in the old sense, but simply manipulate symbols on computer screens.  Instead of seeking significant information in the world immediately surrounding them, people now perform as small cogs in an immense cooperative machinery, contributing to production in a way that is meaningless in isolation.

     Whereas our ancestors walked daily absorbed in their immediate surroundings, reading the immediate data of earth and sky and smells and sounds, people may prosper today without ever knowing the phase of the moon or a single edible plant.  The specialization of work roles diminished the range of human consciousness in many ways, but it also enabled its fabulous expansion in others. When, millennia ago, aristocrats and intellectuals were freed from the necessity of vigilance that had been inescapable in the prehistoric era.  Technology, science, and art developed prodigiously to the extent that, many have ample free time to contemplate what they will.  On billions of Smartphones people choose to occupy their minds and emotions with the rich variety of possibilities of the tiny screen.  While that is all very well and understandable, entertainment being a latter of taste, it remains to inquire about users who are not listening to music or writing letters or performing other specific tasks with their devices, but merely flipping.

     The phenomenon suggests that it not the content that keeps people spellbound, but rather the medium.  I once read, in Scientific American I believe, a study tracing the appeal of the television screen which even to infants draws human attention, to the instinct to focus on any element of the environment which is moving or changing.  Unlike the obvious value of such awareness for early humans, the attractiveness of the scintillating screen is desirable only for advertisers seeking to increase sales. 

     This skipping attention is quite unlike the purposeful cognitive activity involved in problem-solving or the experience of art; it is the very opposite of the solid and steady concentration of meditation.  To me this shallow skipping consciousness is similar to addiction.  Seeking the distinctly human pleasure of playing with the mind, the individual never quite finds it, but is sufficiently motivated only to continue the endless and always unsatisfied quest.  The same derangement of behavior is evident in drug users and the sexually obsessed, not to mention those with a compulsive greed for food or money or power.  In each of these cases the soul  like a hungry ghost grabs after satisfaction but finds only deeper frustration.

    Yet might one find as well in this digital wandering something like the non-attachment in which the Buddha glimpsed the possibility of freedom?  There is no reason that one might not similarly skip across the surface of life, watching each moment with mild but sustained interest as if from a slow river steamer proceeding up the Amazon.  Would the Sixth Patriarch find any reason to favor more functional cognitive churning?   Perhaps the very deepest and most finely pointed concentration, the sort one hears is available to skilled meditators, is identical to the shallowest, and the drifting consciousness is an example of the flow of the Dao.    

What is Literature?

 

 

What follows is an attempt to distill my own theory of literature, portions of which are expressed in dozens of critical essays on individual works.  Doubtless my formulations may preserve traces of the vocabularies of critical schools from New Criticism to Deconstruction, but my own categories have, I think, taken shape a posteriori.   

 

     When I was an undergraduate in the middle sixties in a Midwestern state university, a professor asked his American Literature class to prepare a succinct definition of literature, and the exercise had the desired initial effect. Many of us, like Socrates’ interlocutors, were quite surprised to find that we were less sure of a definition than we had thought. Though many of us were English majors, we had neglected theoretical consideration of the object of our study. Most literary critics took a nearer view, focusing on individual works or authors; with a few exceptions, most notably Northrup Frye, the speculations of philosophers seemed distant from critics’ concerns.  Casebooks for students might include a contribution from a Freudian or Marxist or a hunter after archetypes, but these were understood by most readers as incomplete readings, even if revealing. 

     During the early eighties, my graduate Comparative Literature program might most conveniently be described as Post-Structuralist.  People wrote criticism of criticisms of critics and, in contrast to my earlier experience, rarely descended sufficiently from the airy heights to comment on a specific poem.  It seemed as though the focus had gone in the interval from too close to too distant. 

     While academia may be susceptible to (sometimes salutary) vogues, it is consistently true that every critic operates in certain recurring ways that might be formulated as theoretical assumptions.  Those who claim to have no “theory” are like historians who pretend to an unachievable “objectivity” rather than candidly acknowledging and defending the bases for their judgments.  

     After fifty-five years, I am better prepared to offer an answer to my professor’s question, though I am afraid that the eminent scholar who posed it has departed.  Literature is the symbolic representation of reality, but this description is in itself insufficient, since other writings -- scientific studies, for example -- do the same, and all language is symbolic.  The composer of aesthetic texts explicitly aims to record patterns of consciousness, however, while those who were once called natural philosophers seek to record the phenomena of nature.  The inadequacy of language to represent lived experience and the gap between subjective human experience and some sort of Truth would be defects for other discourses.  However, semantic slippage, imprecision, ambiguity, and reader’s misprision all of which would weaken a laboratory report, become for literature the source of not only beauty, but the only way to capture the play of consciousness in every mind. 

     One of the commonest cliches in criticism is useful to further define literature: good poetry will “delight and instruct,” a goal most identified with Horace, though shared in varying degrees with Aristotle and Boileau and countless others.  As literature is far from alone in these goals, further definition is required. 

     Many things might delight – a good dinner, a sexual experience, or a nap.  Sometimes one derives pleasure from non-literary verbal sources: a pleasing work evaluation, for instance, or a loving letter, yet these are not ordinarily poetry.  

     Unlike the reinforcement of social support signaled by supportive words, the pleasure of art arises from the contemplation of the object in isolation and not from any source outside the page.  People’s minds naturally seek to perceive patterns whether of sound or form or meaning and everyone relishes certain patterns as pure forms without regard for realism or truth.  This is most evident in such genres as instrumental music and abstract painting, but it is present in all reception of art.

     In poetry and, to a lesser extent, in prose, literature employs musical sound patterns based on syllabic stress or vowel quantity or pitch accent, while other devices — among them alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition — fill out the music like the elements of a symphony orchestra.

     Meanwhile, aesthetic texts typically add verbal play resembling riddles and puns and the creation of readers’ expectations which may then be satisfied or not, as well as a rich substratum of allusion and association. All these rhetorical figures are specifically designed to delight and surprise.

     Such symbolic play amuses people.  Surely the most distinctive characteristic of our species is our facility in the manipulation of symbols. A person composing or consuming literature is then to the highest degree realizing human potential in the same way a soaring skylark is enacting a specific bird essence. One derives a certain exhilaration from doing what one does well, what one’s species does well.  Whatever else it may be, reading a poem is glorying in being human to the fullest extent, free from functional ends, enjoying one’s own nature like a happy dog.

     Unlike a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bach fugue, though, poetry virtually always refers to lived experience. Yet words are not capable of a direct reflection of reality. They always mediate and refract or include wish fulfillment or in some way convey no universal and objective vision but rather an individual and personal one. Though for science this imperfect representation would be an obstacle, for art it allows the expression of the irrational, the appetitive, the mysterious, the ambiguous, and the ambivalent. Though most of psychic life occurs in these realms, they are rarely explicit in people’s daily transactions, which are consciously felt by many to be largely rational.

     The fact is that we know nothing beyond our own subjectivity. Thus literature, or rather, art is general, is the closest we can approach to truth. The fact that every individual’s experience differs from every other’s, while it complicates matters considerably, in fact renders the view of literature as a whole more comprehensive, more precise, more accurate than other discourses such as history or science. The artist has no special purchase on truth, though claims of inspiration direct from the gods or muses are common. The reader of a broad variety of texts will, however, find in their combination enlightenment absent from any in isolation. In a process like an increasingly sophisticated triangulation the reader who knows several visions will have a view enriched beyond the one who knows but one.  In this way literature exponentially increases experience, allowing access to visions ancient and modern from the myriad cultures of this teeming planet.

     The genres of literature are universal, though not all occur in every setting, and each has a role. Proverbs preserve the prudential wisdom of the group, made memorable by turn of phrase or figure of speech. Folk stories provide nightly amusement as well as reinforcing (and sometimes questioning) social norms. Epics allow for an encyclopedic inclusion of history, religion, and social codes in the course of a stirring tale. Theater presents stories with characters drawn from myth or from familiar society for the reception of the entire community. Meanwhile, all these forms are used by religion to establish itself as a unique source of guidance and by leaders to consolidate and authenticate power. Lyric poetry typically voices the subjectivity of passionate individuals.

     The criteria of literature may be consciously present in a work’s production or its consumption, but neither is necessary. Many works written with other goals in mind have been appreciated as art: Herodotus, St. John of the Cross, Marx, and Freud, to cite a few random examples. On the other hand scholars have utilized literary texts as a source of data to investigate history, philology, comparative botany, or countless other fields. A witty turn of phrase by a physics professor delivering a scientific paper creates a moment of literature, while a linguist searching Homer for a rare grammatical form may see no poetry at all.

     In making such distinctions the only probative elements are found within the work itself, not in any intention of the creator. Some works are directed primarily at their audience, often with didactic aims. A paraliterary example is advertising which uses all the devices of literature with sales as the sole goal. Other works arise from their makers’ interest in self-expression. Such solipsism is extreme in outsider artists, but is present to one degree or another in all. Some writing is directed at the artifact itself, for instance, for those who espouse art for art’s sake.

     Thus determining value must be grounded in the success of individual works as well as genres in achieving specific goals. One poem may foreground description as in Pope’s “Windsor Forest” while for another psychology assumes greatest importance as in the Spoon River Anthology.  Narrative is central to epic and lapidary craft to Symbolism. Paradise Lost aims to instruct perhaps and Canterbury Tales to entertain, though each, of course, does both. Swinburne does his best to get by on sound while early Bly is all about images.

     In fact nearly every poem is a complex structure of a good many of these considerations, each weighted precisely to the requirements of the specific project. Thus in Hopkins melody will take the lead, with theme following behind, and images in third position.

     Then there is the imponderable element of beauty. One can prescribe symmetry and harmony and yet an asymmetrical and discordant work may prove to have many admirers. Taste may be explained but not proven. One may praise the taste of oysters without persuading a reluctant diner to share your plate, and in the same way, I may think Keats a greater poet than Shelley and make enlightening comments on both, but I will not convince Shelley’s partisans of my preference. 

     The moment of a reader’s reception provides the measure of every work.  An unprepared student may scan the lines of Shakespeare in vain, while a skilled critic may find much fascinating meaning and considerable symbolic imagery in a television game show.  Those works which have been read and reread accumulate significance.  Scriptures such as the Vedas and the Hebrew Testament illustrate this principle, but so, in a different way, does Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.  There is no way to prove the greatness of a poem or a novel, but the critic who has experienced literary beauty can seek to characterize the experience with sufficient clarity to convey to others the source and character of that experience, much as the poet or novelist has sought to do.     

     Literature is sufficiently essential to human life that it is found in every society and likely has been at least since the development of language. People with the most limited material culture invariably possess rich stores of verbal technology, useful for encoding their world, providing entertainment as well as preserving knowledge and constructing avenues of spiritual access, all while sitting around a glowing campfire or perhaps a glowing iPad, passing the time.

Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

Looking Backward (Bellamy)

     A peculiarly American utopian novel in which patriotism and the growth of monopolies are not so much combated by internationalism and organized labor as they are endorsed and extended until there is only one great trust and no capitalist class whatsoever.  And this occurs without violence, by a kind of general consensus.  To Bellamy who concealed his socialism under the name nationalism, the radicals of his day function as operatives of the bosses, since their extremism (which their enemies considered foreign) alienates rather than attracts Americans, retarding the interests of the workers.

     The society Bellamy imagines seems a bit frightening with the total social control of the Industrial Army exerted by technocrats who somehow he imagines would act with no self-interest or partiality.  Nonetheless, he is first-rate when he gets to elaborating on the immense waste in American capitalism and the absurdity of a system in which each person strives to get the better of his fellow citizens.  To me his proposal that every worker, indeed, every individual, receive the same stipend is only reasonable, though for many it would make the whole scheme unacceptable.  Resistance to this particular policy is, however, an instructive illustration of the hold that greed has upon the human ego.  Bellamy’s projection of what life may be in the year 2000 has much to recommend it, even if it is difficult to conceive of an enthusiasm for collective effort and symbolic reward emerging in this country, in spite of the example of the military where such values are indeed strong.  Bellamy’s attacks on “individualism” must have sounded un-American to many, but his ideas were sufficiently acclaimed to spawn a newspaper and several hundred clubs devoted to advancing his vision. 

     Bellamy’s prose is pedestrian when it is not stilted (I do realizer that polite circumlocutions luxuriated in the real conversations of his day), and the novel gets by on the barest excuse for a plot.  One or two images remain with the reader at the end: the stagecoach that figures the old society near the book’s outset and the rose bush representing the transition to the new toward the end. 

     Bellamy does share with many revolutionaries of his day an optimism very rare in our own, a sense that the overwhelming majority of producers over exploiters makes the victory of the masses inevitable once they awaken to their situation.  That tone, which lasted until World War I, smells now like the springtime of the world.  

 

 

The God of Small Things (Roy)

     Arundhati Roy’s first novel is filled with dazzling, poetic, playful, expressive language in a splendidly varied pattern of different characters of various ages.  She is a rhetorician of considerable power, willing to deploy striking metaphors, distortions, repetitions, and substitutions each with at least a plausible significance.  In fact, her chief fault is her exuberance which sometimes leads her to fruitless divigations, overuse of motifs, redundant expressions.  The book has a luxurious texture and often a melody arises from the words even when read silently.  Her verbal play and deep sense of pIace suggest that Roy may be an admirer of James Joyce, though her book, for all the chronological displacement and rapidly shifting point of view, remains far more accessible than even Ulysses.

     The mysterious “double-egg twins” Rahel and Estha are the book’s center.  Their lives are twisted by their family and the local circumstances in their village in Kerala, as well as by the colonial past.  Passive and inward-turning, stigmatized by their parents’ separation, they are vulnerable to mistreatment, and, when in their innocence they seek to capture joy, they find they have violated the “Love Laws” that regulate affection.  

     The sexual scenes at the end provide the reader no relief.  One before and one after the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, they offer little solace.  The desperation of Ammu’s affair, her wretched survival, alone, for a few years, and the monstrous weight of guilt that haunted the sensitive twins, all these overwhelm any chance for redemptive sexuality.  At the book’s conclusion the concrete specificity of the scenes of love-making contrasts with the vast unknowns of Rahel and Estha’s lives since the traumas of their childhood.  It is, of course, the details, the “little things,” that are real, that are dependable, that anchor the ego in the everyday.  Much of the rest is muddled, obscure, or vicious.

     It took twenty years for Roy’s next novel to appear, but she was hardly idle in the meantime.  She is an active campaigner for progressive causes in the US, In India, and in the world.  I cannot recall having heard her misspeak on these topics.

 

 

Redburn (Melville)

     Contrary to some recent critics, I would agree with Melville himself who considered Redburn a piece of hackwork.  He notoriously stressed its rapid composition (two and a half months) saying that he wrote it simply to keep himself in tobacco.   His haste is evident in the padding.  Like a journalist he tosses in diverting anecdotes and the sort of detailed technical information which one finds as well in Moby Dick but without the suggestive metaphorical weight that the later book generally includes.  The book is unified only broadly as a Bildungsroman.  What exactly is the reader to make of Harry Bolton apart from the undeniable homoerotic element he adds before vanishing? 

     Yet Melville’s grander style is always in the background.  The symbolic system is perhaps not fully operative throughout the story though echoes of Biblical texts in particular occur regularly.  His rhetoric is denied the soaring heights of which he was capable, tending at times toward colloquialism.  The book’s themes, too, eschew the complexities and ambiguities in which Melville came to specialize.  The self-satire by the narrator reflecting with amusement on his younger self recurs (though, at times, his comic naivete is unconvincing and the recurring joke of his appearance in his shooting jacket is soon tiresome).

     Redburn is worth reading for what it implies about Melville’s life and about transatlantic crossings in the middle of the nineteenth century.  (I find it staggering to imagine a sailing vessel capable of carrying five hundred steerage passengers.)  It also has hints of the sublimity of which the author was capable.  In itself it is a readable narrative of which a perspicuous contemporary reviewer might have noted that readers might expect greater things to come from this author.  

Dreams

 

I omit references within the text as this is a familiar essay, far from a scholarly one.   My readers will have noticed that I am hardly a nice observer of the distinction, though, and I have decided to append a general list of a few sources unnamed in the body of the piece, many of which are well-known. 

 

     Sir Thomas Browne observes in his excellent essay on dreams “that some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.”  People all dream nightly, and thus may act as gods, creating worlds, or at least as artists, spinners of gossamer fictions with such delicacy that they fall to pieces and vanish after the eyes have opened.  This evidence of the fundamental human need for narrative is reconfirmed daily by everyone’s experience, but there is no more agreement about the best use for these products of the imagination than for their cousins emerging from the more conscious areas of the brain, the short stories in a literary quarterly.

     Perhaps the evanescent quality of dreams (in which way they contrast with the author’s hopes of eternal life on the page at least) has a fortunate aspect.  Though fascinating to the dreamer, laden with significant detail and accompanied by urgent emotion, dreams generally cannot survive retelling.  There is little so boring as someone else’s dream.  Even great writers like Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac cannot sustain reader’s interest in unprocessed records of nighttime fantasies.  Yet dreams have such beguiling appeal to the dreamer that they seem as though they surely must bear consequential information. 

     In Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the rooster Chantecleer, deeply troubled by a dream, groans, fearing, correctly, as it turns out, that his dream of a predator presages an actual attack.  His lady Pertelote reproves him, saying “vanitee in sweven is.”  She offers a physiological explanation, suggesting that dreams arise from overeating, a notion she shares with Winsor McKay whose comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was wholly composed of nightmares occasioned by overindulgence.  A good medieval polemicist, the hen cites the authority of Cato who discounted the significance of dreams. 

     More people over the years have agreed with the rooster than with his consort.  It is certainly the more stimulating and productive position, though heavy dinners late at night may play their own role.   Very many around the world and all through time have like Chanticleer thought dreams contain clues to future events.  The Bible is full of dream interpreters of this sort.    

     In Genesis Joseph no sooner says that interpreting dreams “belongs to God,” then he offers to do the job himself.  He accurately decodes the dreams of his fellow prisoners, with nice symmetry predicting that one will be freed and the other executed.  Neither of the dreams, though, directly portrays the destined outcome; through what Browne had called “symbolicall adaptation” three branches must be read as three days and birds munching bread as birds picking flesh from a corpse.  Thus, while dreams are considered to reveal the future, they do so only indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, after the manner of art. 

     In a depiction of Israel’s utopian future once the nation is properly observant, God promises not only to defeat their military enemies (as well as a plague of locusts), but also that “your old men shall dream dreams,” a promise repeated for Christians in the account of Pentecost.  Yet, in spite of the potential of revelation, it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between God’s voice and a lie.  Jeremiah warns that false prophets may mislead the people declaring, “I have dreamed.”  After all, as Zecharaiah tells, the priests of other deities also offer dream visions.  “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams.”  Islam likewise distinguished between the divinely inspired true dream (al-ru’ya) and the false dream, which may come from the devil, though many dreams are considered meaningless and inconsequential (hulm).

     The need for acute discernment in the interpretation of dreams has led to professional training in the skill by shamans and priests.   In many cultures the very dreaming of significant dreams is a task undertaken by specialists.  Not only have psychedelics (called by some in this context entheogens) been useful for vision-seekers, many cultures use psychotropic drugs specifically for the purpose of achieving more lucid dreams.  For instance, the Chonal people of Oaxaca use Calea ternifolia, called in English dream grass and the Xhosa people use Silene undulata, or African dream root.

     Belief in the predictive value of dreams has withered in modern times, though it like astrology survives in vulgar forms such as the pulp publication 1000 Dreams and what they mean (1944), attributed to Yohanna ibn al Farmouzi, and the Gypsy's Witch Dream Book of Numbers (1972).  The latter, in a sign of the decadence of the genre it shares with some fortune cookies, reduces all dreams to numbers of interest only to gamblers.  

    In recent times the interpretation of dreams has turned from divination to psychology, or, to use the mythic imagery of Freud’s Vergilian epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, from the heavens to the underworld.  Most moderns would assent to Freud’s declaration that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, though the use of dreams in therapeutic practice has declined precipitously along with the rest of the psychoanalytic system, in spite of the quondam assent of Freud’s colleagues such as Jung who maintained, “who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”  Today, of course, a psychiatrist, after having observed the patient’s general demeanor, is likely to be primarily a prescriber of pills, leaving the talk therapy not to psychologists, but to social workers.  The doctor may never hear a patient’s dream.

    The revelation that narrative action in  a literary text has occurred in a dream has been derided as too convenient a convention, yet it has honorably used by writers including Li Gongzuo in "A Lifetime in a Dream," Chaucer whose Book of the Duchess is built around two dreams, and Langland whose Piers Plowman has an even more elaborate dream architecture.  Everyone knows of the sudden appearance of the white rabbit in a waistcoat to Alice in her doze on the riverbank and of Dorothy’s being carried off to Munchkin Country and eventually Oz before each young heroine awakens again to everyday reality.  The device is used in a good many less-remembered works such as Fritz Lang’s 1944 The Woman in the Window in which as in Oz some characters from the waking world appear in dream roles.  I consider the episode of Marge’s Little Lulu outstanding in which Tubby is pleased when he rises from bed (in dream) to find himself with a moustache but before his second awakening into the security of his accustomed world, he finds himself pursued by an outraged mob crying “little boys can’t have moustaches!” 

     Dreams may convey an entire vision, a world-view.  The most celebrated dreamer of this sort is likely Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly and, upon awakening, pondered whether he might not as likely be a butterfly dreaming he was a man as a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly.  (Oddly, Socrates makes exactly the same point in a passage clear and casual if more abstract and less artful.)  Such epistemological questioning of reality seems to express skepticism like that of the Pyrrhonists, but there is no equivalence between the insect and human consciousness.  During the dream Zhang had been “flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased,” whereas upon rising he fell to uneasy self-conscious cogitation.  It is a smaller Fall from grace perhaps to lose the wings of a butterfly than to be exiled from Eden, but the trajectory is similar.  From the wholly involved but free participation in a natural spontaneous life such as we imagine animals to experience we have descended to the neurotic human psyche, prey to guilt, doubt, and self-questioning.

     Liezi describes a dream of the time the Yellow Emperor wore himself out with governing.  He devoted himself to his duties and at the same time indulged in sensual pleasures until, finding that his “ravaged flesh darkened and his dulled senses were stupefied, he concluded that attachment to himself and to the kingdom were both destructive.  He went into retirement, neglecting matters of state and living like an ascetic.  At this point he had a dream of the utopian land of Hua Hsü where people “have no cravings and lusts.” There “all men follow their natural course” and they have never heard of “profit and loss.”  They have thereby gained an extraordinary sensation of liberation, expressing by Liezi as “the ability to ride space as though walking the solid earth.” This same Yellow Emperor was said to appoint officials based on verbal clues in dreams and to him was ascribed a book of dream interpretation. 

     My own dreams seem rarely to rise to the economy and clarity, not to mention the significance, of these dreams, but of course examples from written sources are generally composed or literary dreams.  Even those reported by physicians such as Freud and Jung seem to many critics to be artificially pruned to reinforce the author’s general theories.  I experience neither divine openings nor the terror of nightmares.  Many times I have found myself in a semi-familiar area, a campus or a city neighborhood having extraordinary difficulty making my way to my destination.  I turn a corner and see an unexpected territory yet to be traversed or a make a short cut through a university building only to find it a maze of corridors.  I feel the mildest frustration.  What can be the purpose of such a fantasy?   Having been student or instructor most of my life, I have often found my dream persona unprepared sometimes for attending, sometimes for teaching a class, though again without much anxiety.  “Ah, well,” I would think, “I have three papers due tomorrow, but two can be submitted late and it will be easy to do the third tonight.”   Or I would improvise a lecture I could deliver without the students’ having read any specific text.  The mildness of my dreams is consistent.  I like many have also imagined myself without pants or without clothes in public places, but others seem not to notice.  The unconscious is often conceived as a roaring beast, but mine seems thoroughly domesticated.

     On several occasions, for months at a time, I have set out a notebook on the night table to record my dreams and I have definitely observed that putting this sort of conscious attention on dreams alters them considerably.  They become far easier to recall, more coherent, and more weighty with the meaning I sought.  Probably the Lakota in a sweat lodge will experience what he has been taught and what he has observed in the practice of others.  A Cameroonian educated in France told me that a snake would visit him in the night to advise him.  As a member of the snake clan it was no more than he expected.  Thus I am confident a Freudian or a Jungian would rapidly acquire the knack of dreams congenial to expectations.    

     It may be, in fact, that our deepest sleep represents at once an unerring prediction of the future and a philosophic cue.  Decades ago the Dalai Lama addressed the great American populace through People magazine saying, in what is his most achievable suggestion if not the most lofty, “Sleep is the best meditation.”  The Vedanta Hindu tradition identifies the waking state with the gross body and the sleeping state with the subtle body.  The deeper sleep in which consciousness is eliminated altogether, the non-REM sleep is identified with the absolute.  (In the familiar way of philosophic one-upmanship, some authors include a fourth state as the final one, at once transcending and underlying the other three.)   Thus samadhi, far from being a remote and mysterious state of consciousness, is experienced by everyone nightly.  While such emptiness may be the source and end of everything, and indeed nirvana means “blown out, extinguished” it is nonetheless far less engaging than the dreams that can dominate our attention at one moment and vanish in a moment.  Dreams seem, like much of what we experience, to mean what we wish for them to mean.

 

 

Sources

Browne, “On Dreams;” Genesis 40:8, Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17, Jeremiah 23:25, Zecharaiah 10:2; Gianluca Toro and Benjamin Thomas, foreword by Jonathan Ott, Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens: Salvia divinorum and Other Dream-Enhancing Plants; Carl Jung, Letters; Plato, Theaetetus; Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Lieh-tzu; Huangfu Mi, Records of Emperors and Kings, Mandukya Upanishad.