Zibaldone

Giacomo Leopardi

John Stuart Mill was a prodigy who had learned Greek by the time he was three. Another less known prodigy was the l9th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Leopardi was the author of Zibaldone, which Tim Parks in his review essay  (“The Greatest Intellectual Diary of Italian Literature,"The New York Review of Books, 10/10/13) describes as being “considered the greatest intellectual diary of Italian literature, its breadth and depth of thought often compared to the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.” As Park relates, Leopardi was the son of “a minor aristocrat" who compensated for his reverse midas touch by collecting "25,000 books (in a part of the world where books were hard to come by) and set his firstborn son to reading them.” Talk about parental baggage! Young Giacomo was literally forced to become a polyglot. However the library for all its breadth also comprised enough finitude to be mastered. Rather than courting oblivion like say Borges’ "The Library of Babel", Leopardi grew up in the shadow of another metaphoric tower, a proto-Palazzo Enciclopedico, made up in that day of the accumulated classics of mankind. Now the project of collecting all the great books and making them into the core curriculum for a prodigy, would be an impossibility. There’s just too much information. However, even if Leopardi’s project were doable at that moment in the timeline of western culture, Parks waxes eloquently on the limitations—of knowledge itself—that Leopardi was forced to succumb to when he says: “Studying was the one thing he knew how to do, but the knowledge so gained only revealed to him that knowledge does not help us to live; on the contrary it corrodes those happy errors, or illusions as he came to call them, that give life meaning, shifting energy to the mental and rational and away from the physical and instinctive, where in complicity with illusion, happiness lies.” The question then is, is knowledge inversely proportional to happiness? Further does the increased information which even average men are forced to absorb today, place them that much further from the prospect of finding unselfconscious joy?

The Digital Faust

Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough to Last"

In an article in Foreign Affairs (“The Rise of Big Data, May/June 2013), Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger make the following comment, “In the third century B.C. the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world to give every person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria’s entire collection—an estimated 1200 exabytes’ worth, If this information were placed on CD’s and they were stacked up, the CD’s would form five separate piles that would all reach to the moon.” There is a famous Twilight Zone, “Time Enough to Last," where Burgess Meredith plays the role of a man who just wants to be left alone with all his books. He gets his wish. The problem is that he is nearly blind and as he is about to sate his desire, his glasses crack. Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger describe the advent of a condition which is a little like the effect global warming has had on weather and the environment. Shrinkage of polar ice caps have unleashed huge amounts of water which affect sea levels and inevitably in a kind of domino effect air and water currents (like El Nino), ultimately resulting in many of the explosive, tornadoes, tsunamis and severe tropical storms from Katrina to the recent debacle created by Sandy. In a short period of time the information explosion created primarily by digitalization, the internet and most importantly by what Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger term “datafication,” (in their words “a far broader activity: taking all aspects of life and turning them into data. Google’s augmented reality-glasses datafy the gaze. Twitter datafies stray thoughts. LinkedIn datafies professional networks.”) has reached tsunami levels. It’s as if we are drowning in information, with only soothsayers aka search engines like Google, who themselves are driven by mysterious algorithmic forces that few really understand, providing a beam of light. It’s Faust all over again. Mankind has sold its soul in his quest for ultimate knowledge. Will the price for the striving be a form of ignorance in which the brain, like old car radiators, boils over and finally quits? It’s a theme that Jorge Luis Borges developed in his famous story "The Library of Babel." You can know a lot about a little or a little about a lot. But it’s virtually impossible to know a lot about a lot.

Holy Motors

Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, currently playing at Film Forum, is surrealism that is not like Dali or Bunuel or David Lynch. If there’s a Theater of the Absurd, characterized by the work of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet and Pinter in which meaning is turned upside down—in terms of the signifiers of personality and language—then Holy Motors represents the Cinema of the Absurd. However, for a surrealist or absurdist work Holy Motors is oddly linear. The main character Mr. Oscar (an allusion to the Oscars?) is driven around Paris in a white stretch limo by his elegant blond chauffeur Celine (an allusion to Louis-Ferdinand Celine the author of the surreal Journey to the End of the Night?).  In this regard, Holy Motors can also be viewed as a road movie. Mr. Oscar dons varying guises as he fulfills his successsive “rendezvous.” He’s dressed as a crippled beggar, as a superhero whose feats are played out in a series of images that represent an amalgam of an MRI and a video game, and a Christ figure with an erection who kidnaps a top fashion model and dresses her in a burka. In two of his assignations he murders himself, quickly surviving in the form of a double (was the director influenced Dostoevsky’s The Double: A Petersburg Poem or the Borges story based on it, The Other?). In several sequences Carax reverts to more classic drama. In one the punishment Oscar’s daughter, Angele, receives for lying is “to be you, to have to live with yourself.” In another the aged Oscar who has been transformed into a character named Mr. Vorgan apologizes to his niece for giving her the money to attract a man who doesn’t love her, but the emotion conjured up is quickly cut short as Carax’s character gets up from his death bed, pats his niece and his dog, and walks off. The movie ends with Celine returning her stretch to Holy Motors where all the cars talk to each other before being swallowed up by the darkness.

The Immortal

A Borgesian conundrum awaits the reader at the end of Stephen Cave’s opinion piece in last Sunday’s Times Week in Review (“Imagining the Downside of Immortality,” NYT, 8/27/11). “The Immortal” is, in fact, the title of a short story by Borges. Playing off the Starz/BBC series, “Torchwood: Miracle Day,” Cave postulates that the real problem of immortality is not Malthusian, but that immortality would devastate us for other reasons. “Our culture is based on the striving for immortality,” Cave says. “It shapes what we do and what we believe; it has inspired us to found religions, write poems and build cities. If we were all immortal, the motor of civilization would sputter and stop.” At the end of Faust: Part Two, Goethe famously states, “The eternal feminine lures to perfection.” Yet Faust makes his bargain with Mephistopheles, who is an agent of the devil or death. Heidegger would later state that those who were not aware of death lived an inauthentic existence. But, in a way, Cave’s point is more practical and has to do with time-management and ultimately boredom. “Suddenly we would have nothing to do,” he writes about the imagined Armageddon of eternal life, “yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.”

Analog, Digital, Dialogic

Is there such a thing as a digital or analog personality? These days, digitized music is pretty much the norm, unless you’re a purist who favors the kind of unmediated sound that analog provides. There is something facile about the digital personality, whose every move can be categorized by a 0 or a 1, but the facile also comprises a certain element of simplicity. Digital personalities tend to be idiot savants who are capable of great mechanistic feats while at the same time being devoid of what Henry James referred to as “felt life.” Borges once said something to the effect that life is too impoverished not to be immortal, but what does this pithy aphorism really mean? Is the blind Argentinian librarian really a Tiresias, or is the enigmatic meaning, which gives pause, only subterfuge? Analog personalities don’t work as fast, but aren’t they a bit like Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog, slowly but surely unfolding the truth? Many of us have given up film photography for the digital camera. But what has been lost is the sense of process, the steps leading to a conclusion. Too many images are created to occupy any of the old leather-bound albums, with their magical little adhesive corners that kept grandmother’s photos in place. Bridging the gap between the analog and digital worlds is perhaps best encapsulated in the concept of the dialogic, as proposed by the Russian philosopher, Bahktin in his work, The Dialogic Imagination. Here, all literature and utterance is seen to exist in a context (heteroglossia) that creates a continual conversation between the present and the past. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence is a neurotic expression of a similar idea.

The Double

John Grimonprez’s film Double Take is based on a Jorge Luis Borges story, August 25, l983, which in turn is based on Dostoevsky’s The Double. In the Borges story, the narrator, who is 61, dreams himself into a future date when he, or his double, is 84 and on his deathbed. Alfred Hitchcock’s double, Ron Burrage, a waiter who worked at Claridge’s, plays a major role in the film. Double Take is deceptive since it’s not really about Hitchcock, but about the way he walked into the outline of his own image in the famed ‘50s series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The infamous Nixon-Krushchev debate at the American exposition in Moscow, the Bay of Pigs, and the image of a body falling from the World Trade Center, captured like a New Image painting, are also elements in this piece of meta cinema, along with cuts from The Birds, Folgers coffee commercials, which provided the commercial spots for  the Hitchcock TV series, and excerpts from the cold war thriller Topaz. Time and history drive the diegesis. There is l960, the year Borges’s short story takes place, 1963, the year The Birds was released and Kennedy was shot, and l980, the year Hitchcock died. The notion of the alter ego, which survives Hitchcock survives  in the form of the voice of Burrage and Mark Perry, who imitates his voice, is almost as haunting as Tippi Hedren’s recollection of being bitten by the birds that Hitchcock used for his film shoot. “If you meet your double, you should kill him,” Hitchcock is quoted as saying. Double Take is pure Borges. It will never be mistaken for Hitchcock.