Consciousness Explained?!

Mkay, now I'm reading Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett. Just started, but so far it seems promising.

Of Timeless Ways

I'm about half way through Timeless Way of Building and mostly enjoying it. I always appreciate approachable philosophic writing that attempts to bring forward complete systems of thought to critique human existence.

So far, I've enjoyed most Alexander's ideas about rhythm and process being prime in understanding life in general and how to help generate it. A space is made up of all the different routines that take place in it, and it is life generating or destroying dependent on how it affects the routines in that space.

Alexander also drives at an important element in all design or in all "building" as he might say: unity within diversity and diversity within unity. He's hit on the right trail about good design being interwoven with this principle, it is a way to give a set of things a similar and cohesive quality without ever making them the same.

As much as I'm enjoying it, I have some critiques as well. His impressions of rural European and gypsy life are inundated with a deep mixture of idealism and rose-tinted nostalgia. I have nothing in particular against Europeans and gypsies, but I hardly fancy that life in Europe is or ever was so free of things like war, displeasure and ennui as he seems to think. I mean, Europe invented ennui as far as I understand. Perhaps I digress, but I think though the impressions he calls up certainly sound like wonderful places to see, tour or even live, I know that they are not all completely free of darkness.

As an artist, I very much appreciate hand-crafted things, and the personality inherent in artwork versus mass-produced products, but I hardly think modernization and modern architecture are wholly to blame for a thinning of the human spirit. These things themselves emerge from forces within the human consciousness and from the pursuit of human life. Economic efficiency and productivity as, say, within the housing market all begin with human motivations of wanting to advance humanity, even if it's just wanting to advance oneself.

Alexander claims that the timeless way is egoless, one must step out of the way of the creation. I think this is true in a sense, but not because of the way Alexander seems to be phrasing it. Michelangelo famously discussed freeing his statues from the stone that imprisoned them, and my favorite director Miyazaki writes of coming to a point in creating a film at which the film begins to make him. Yet, they are masters and true artists, and their work is deeply marked with their intention and focus. I do not think the timeless way must be an egoless way in the strictest of interpretations, but simply a natural and compelling way. It is the point at which the thought in the creator's mind passes from "I will make a great X," to "I must work with my utmost skill to make the greatest X that I can." This removes pressure from making a great piece of art to doing great work, which is a process, as Alexander discusses, that gives way to good things.

I look forward to finishing it soon and having much more in-depth points.

I almost forgot. I rather like his book structure. It feels very natural, almost "timeless." Mostly, though, as a reader I enjoy the ability to go back and forth between reading the broad strokes the italicized portions create to examining the detail in the explanatory paragraphs. I feel more like I'm exploring a landscape or a space with this approach than simply reading a book. Or, perhaps I should say, he's giving the conceptualization a kind of multi-dimensionality or a scalability that gives it a more approachable presentation.

A Little Thought On Stories

I recently purchased the book Directing the Story by Francis Glebas, who did storyboard work for a number of Disney productions including Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas and more. It's fascinating to read as Glebas presents the inner thoughts of the Disney story process. The mantra is that the director directs the story and through it, the audience's emotions with the goal of bringing about an emotionally satisfying ending. Glebas continually makes reference to the audience being "lost" in the story, if the film is well put together and the crew has done its job correctly.

Even more, though, a certain idea he presents caught my eye:

Many books that I have found on filmmaking say that we willingly suspend our disbelief when we watch a movie. There is no "willing suspension of disbelief."

Let's say I go to a movie. I buy a ticket—check. Buy popcorn—check. Find a seat—check. Willingly suspend my disbelief—what? I cannot remember ever going into a movie theater and willingly suspending my disbelief. I don't even know how. Belief is automatic. As long as the structure presents a filmic world that is seamless and doesn't break the spell by calling attention to itself, we get sucked into the world of the story.

While the nature of belief is worthy of its own long investigation, I think Glebas has a significant insight into the way we watch movies or read books. Why are we ever affected emotionally by fiction? Some works have deeper impacts on us than others, with impacts varying from passing glee or sorrow to a rich catharsis. But, the fact remains that they affect us.

In essence, I think Glebas is right, we don't "willingly suspend our disbelief" to watch or read stories, instead, we are all too ready to believe.

We believe because good stories are cast as little worlds or realities with their own rules and regulations, their own visual and narrative designs, a crystal rock whose intricacies refract and split the sunlight into infinite tiny beads of color that slide and dance as you tilt it.

Also, I'm beginning to wonder if the emotional impact of stories might not have something to do with my thoughts about the nature of perception as the most significant and basic act of the human being. There is obviously a perceptual difference between watching a movie about an explorer and being an explorer, but if these both document similar events, then we get to experience some small part of being an explorer when we watch the movie.

This may be messy, but basically stories/films/novels, allow us to experience the thoughts and emotions of being someone different. By being privy to the events in a character's life or the events of a plot arch, we become confidants of the narrative itself, like gazing through the intricacies of the crystal and take away the experience and insight into something that is at once smaller and larger than us.

P.S. - I recently checked out Timeless Way of Building, and plan to work through that in the next couple of weeks. Perhaps we'll have some good discussion out of it, your last post piqued my interest in it.

A General Theory of Love

I finished The Timeless Way of Building, and I'm currently reading A General Theory of Love, which seems promising.

I don't suppose you've read it?

The Final Word

Well, I think I probably enjoyed the book more than you did. But, Joseph Campbell is a name that I remember from childhood being associated with the original Star Wars (a defining interest in my youth) and, thus, with cool things. So, I'm glad I've finally thoroughly read one of his most famous manuscripts.

As to your critiques about lack of analysis, I wonder if it's just not as we've talked about before: the subject matter is very large, very general, and, thus, difficult to do specific and deep rigorous analyzing. I suppose one of my critiques is that the book does not have enough examples of mythology. No doubt trends and similarities can be found in the mythologies of different peoples from different places, but it seems one would have to compile a large number of myths to substantiate that. Campbell has a number, but I can't but have the feeling that the similarities ought to be more apparent than the examples he provides. But, that also requires getting past the extensive red tape of worthy translations to make valuable comparisons.

Also, I often had the sense that Campbell's thoughts are all only partially mature. While I agree with some of his claims, he seems to carry a grudge against the Christianity in the West at the time. The portion I read of Bill Moyer's interview with Campbell The Power of Myth showed a deeper and more fundamental understanding of myth, as well as a greater maturity about life. His claims and notions still were very broad, none too specific, but they had a more focused spirit, if you will. No doubt, much of this came with time, but it seemed to make a better crafted understanding, not one that seemed so loose.

You touched on this, and Campbell touches on this in the last chapter of the book, but one of the most fascinating issues about myth now is its modern predicament. What is its place in our culture? What does it mean to you and me, to your kids? It feels like we need new stories of mythology, new myths to guide us adapted to the modern framework. If they are stories to help show us our places in society and in the world, clearly views of the individual, society and the world have changed significantly in the past several thousand years, and that's where the tension comes in. It's like new wine in old wine bags, or misshapen gears trying to work together. There's a tension and a confusion about it all.

With that in mind, I think film has become the dominant storytelling medium of our society, and I think the best candidates for new mythologies come from that art form. There's always been something grand and substantial about films, especially played in movie theaters, like temples they enshrine the images of heroes and heroines whose perfect images are displayed in sizes larger than human life. In film, time moves in reflection of the plot, a single guiding line about one action or story, it is not burdened with the incarnational aspects of life (i.e. eating, sleeping, paying bills, using the restroom, bathing, working, relaxing; granted, I believe some of the best films and film characters do show and do these, but I'll not get too deep into that), rather, their lives flow in reference to a specific purpose or task. Music accompanies their journeys, and situations turn out fantastically perfect. All of this, of course, has been harmed by the ubiquitous nature of digital media and screens. So, now, you can watch the quest, but it's on your tv or computer monitor, much less monumental than the experience of seeing it in the cinema. Yet, still, I think it's the closest thing we've got to what our ancestors have.

Thus, in the end, pipe in hand, I've enjoyed this book and I'd like to read more of Campbell's work, especially the larger collections/compendiums of myths (The Masks of God series).

Thanks for reading!

Dunno

Well, I finished reading the book a month or so ago, and I suppose I could go back and review the last chapters and try to say something about them, but I don't think I will. I don't really care at the moment.

While I find some pieces of the book interesting and helpful, as a whole I find it kind of disappointing. I think this has a lot to do with the style of the book: There's a lot of meandering and poking into myths and dream stories, which produces some nice, lyrical paragraphs, but there's not a lot of wrapping up or analysis ... at least none that sticks with me as useful or viable. I don't feel like it's significantly changed the way I think about the world. Maybe, though, that has to do with how much time and thought I've put into the book. Maybe I'm expecting the analysis to be done for me, when this book presents itself as sort of loosely-bound, and expects me to do the analysis myself. Or maybe I can find a few interesting questions elicited by the book, and let those ends dangle for future investigation.

I think that for me, the most interesting questions that the book asks are about meaning-making. I think we agree with Campbell's implication that stories are important to people, and that the things we tell stories about must somehow be tied into human nature, because the same themes keep popping up in stories all around the world. We can also probably agree that these stories are somehow related to big, abstract things like our societal values and subconscious desires.

But what happens if these worldview-grounding stories lose their credibility? What happens if they come to be perceived as uninteresting, or even as false? Will human nature demand that other stories take their place? Will we lose a sense of what things mean? Will we find some way to understand stories as both true and false, demystifying it while still preserving its power?

For help, I should probably read that last section again before I return my month-overdue, out-of-renewals book. But even if I do, I figure this is my last post on HWTF.

Farewell, book!

Virgin Emanations

While Campbell has spent much of the first half of the book describing the process of the hero's quest in mythology, the second portion, so far, has hashed out some of the more fascinating universal elements of mythology to me. Namely, in the first chapter "Emanations" of the second section of the book "The Cosmogonic Cycle" Campbell's analysis of myth has moved from the individuals of mythology to the structure of the whole.

Campbell begins the section with a discussion about the psychological nature of mythology, again relating myth to modern psychoanalysis, because of the connection he sees between dream imagery and mythology. The Universal Round especially embodies, to Campbell, the structure of life dreaming and waking, back and forth eternally. So go the cycles of mythological stories, the universe arises from chaos/void, assumes orderly and beautiful life, reaches a zenith, slides into dissolution, extinguishes into void, long silence, then begin again, to infinity.

This repetitious structure is quite beautiful in a strange and tragic way, but also very bizarre to me. When watching movies or reading books, I watch closely for two different underlying attitudes. One is an attitude in which the story takes itself seriously (i.e. it believes in fairies and knights and dragons and evil emperors), the second thinks of its characters and settings as vehicles for communication, with only a thin layer of effort to pump life and thought into its constituent parts. This, for me, is a major difference between good and bad narrative art. The best artists are the ones who believe in their work, who give their characters weight and thought and emotion and reality.

Hayao Miyazaki, my favorite filmmaker and an excellent narrative artist, portrays characters with striking reality. But, their reality is not in their looks, but in their actions and attitude. His films show characters constantly in the full-swing of life: they run, they dig, they climb, they cook, they eat, they tire, they sleep, they wake up and start all over. Even when they have internal conflicts, the films never belabor this, but exhibit their struggles by their responses and their interests. It is the old adage of filmmakers and dramatists, "Show, don't tell!" And, honestly, it is completely true. Showing a man have difficulty in deciding on which entree to order is MUCH, MUCH better than telling the audience that he's indecisive. While the telling may be a short hand to communicate information, showing gives a forceful impression of how a character moves and feels. It gives him the ring of truth.

This thought about hard versus psychological readings of stories keeps ringing in the background of my head. Campbell implicitly includes religions in his examples of mythology, but often repeats the problems of interpreting any of these collective stories as historically accurate; he sees them as stories we measure our lives against, as vessels to communicate values and truth. Yet, if the best narrative art is that which is believed in its telling, where the characters have a reality to them, where do belief and story meet? If it is not to be simply as a dry, pedantic blue-print for life, nor a codified encyclopedic set of historical realities, where does it fall in the middle?

To that extent, perhaps it burns somewhere between the two, in a dark forest. We catch but a whisper of its light the tree and snow, but only catch up to have it vanish before we arrive.

Most theists I know are not deeply concentrated on life-long searches for undeniable evidence for the existence of God, or for historical and geological evidence to uphold claims about the history of the world and who died and who rose. But, that is not to say they are wrong, it is to say that perhaps we simply lose our focus on what's most central. For it seems to me the central concerns of religion are spiritual formation, communal peace, justice and joy-filled life, not historical reality. So, where again is the meeting place of life and story, life and mythology?

From NASA's Godard Space Flight Center

"The illustration maps the magnetic field lines emanating from the sun and their interactions superimposed on an extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory on October 20, 2010. "

Other thoughts from these chapters: the neo-Platonist in me likes the idea of creation as a vast emanation of a grand, central being. The sculpture in Plate XX of "Tangaroa, Producing Gods and Men" is quite striking. The image of beings contorting from the essential fabric of the universe (which is the skin and organs of the great creator him/herself) is a beautiful notion of creation. It reminds me of John.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

This panentheistic notion of the world's conception inside of God himself is an eloquent rendering of life, and a great way for giving an uplifting and hopeful image of a universe that can be at once beautiful and ferocious (God as Creator and Destoyer... of self?).

Virgin births: I'm not sure that I feel deeply struck by this. Campbell abstracts in this section, as you can see below.

In the Hindu myth, she is the female figure through whom the Self begot all creatures. More abstractly still, she is the lure that moved the Self-brooding Absolute to the act of creation.

This seems a projection of procreation. Let us move forward.