EVERY REVELATION, STILL A SECRET

All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Here we run into a dilemma, for what is truth and what is illusion? John Briggs, paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, has described truth as "the freedom of letting things reveal themselves as they are-- but... when anything is revealed, other things are concealed."-- DREAMS OF ISIS (1995), Normandi Ellis, p. 266.

These two quotes both appeared in separate sections of the Ellis book, which is that author's personal account of her experiences with examining Egyptian concepts of spirituality and/or occultism. It's an interesting book, and I've read a considerable number of similar accounts from dubious biographies like the Don Juan chronicles and theoretical studies like those of Colin Wilson. While I've had occasion to believe in the reality of certain so-called "psychic" events, I hold no firm opinion one way or the other on subjects like soul transmigration or the existence of archaic gods, even on something akin to the "astral plane." I suspect that much of my interest in the occult stems from my desire to know, as much as any individual can, the outward limits of the imagination. I have a dim memory of a Percy Shelley reminiscence, in which he claimed that in his youthful years he read a lot of mystical literature because he was seeking "metaphors for poetry." However, I haven't troubled to look for that particular quote.

As for the quotes above, I knew Bachelard by reputation but have not yet read POETICS OF SPACE or any other work by him. I have read a little Heidegger, though not enough to have any notion as to what he may've said that author John Briggs paraphrased, or the context Briggs had in mind when he made the comment in his book FIRE IN THE CRUCIBLE. Still, Briggs' purported ideas on aesthetics might prove interesting to my ongoing project. Bachelard's evaluations of science might draw some intriguing comparisons with the works of Whitehead on that subject.

Though about thirty years separate the quotes of Bachelard and Briggs, they seem to complement each other not a little in speaking of the difficulties of communication. Reading both quotes out of context naturally means that I don't know what general argument either writer was making, but I can respond to what the quotes suggest in themselves.

Starting with Bachelard, it's fascinating that he asserts that all one can communicate is something subjective, something that is explicitly not objective in nature, and that, even that "subjective something" is not the actual secret of the person transmitting it, but an "orientation" toward that secret. The opposition bears a structural similarity with Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal. I would guess that when Bachelard says that the implied "we" cannot "tell the secret objectively," he's at least partly agreeing with the materialist idea that subjectively speaking every man is an island, and that every such island harbors secrets that cannot be communicated as such to any others. Yet Bachelard is perhaps more hopeful than the materialists in saying that though subjective secrets of a private mind cannot be communicated-- possibly because they stem from so many intertwined, personal factors-- "we" can communicate orientations, as one presumes, for example, Socrates did to Plato. Last month I touched on similar limitations with regard to literary experience, under the heading of "intersubjectivity:"

But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities. -- THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1.

Of course, I don't know if Bachelard is using the word "secret" with any special connotation in mind, but for the present I view it as general subjectivity. "Orientation" would be the part of an individual's secret subjectivity that can be transmitted to others, though always with the likelihood of misprision of some kind, like, say, Plato recording those aspects of Socrates' philosophy that resonated best with Plato himself.

Now Briggs' quote sounds a little more pessimistic, a little more "one step forward, two steps back." Briggs doesn't confine himself to communications between human beings; for him, even "things" can reveal themselves-- and conceal themselves, too. I assume that "things" would include all phenomena, from human beings to all aspects of the environment in which humans live. Shamanistic accounts, such as those on which Carlos Castaneda probably based his books, would allow for human beings to receive communications from birds or insects or even stones. 

However, in the folklore we have on such subjects, such communicates reveal, but they don't also conceal. So I tend to think Briggs is, in the final analysis, still talking about human communication, just like Bachelard. 

How does one reveal and conceal at the same time? In OEDIPUS TYRANNUS the Delphic Oracle reveals what is destined to happen to Oedipus. But the Oracle conceals the relevant info that he is not related to the two people Oedipus thinks are his natural parents. Revealing that, of course, would spoil the story, which depends upon a reaction to limited knowledge.

 In the world of intersubjectivity, too, Reader A can feel that this or that work by Author B feels revelatory. But of course, Author B is only revealing what is important to him, and in communicating one thing he may conceal a hundred others, both from himself and from others. Percy Shelley's incantatory poetry reveals his superabundant talent for versification. But nothing in the poetry will reveal many other aspects of Shelley, aspects that might distract from his poetry. In a somewhat more intentional concealment, Karl Marx enthralled countless believers into a sincere belief in his myth of the proletariat, but he omitted anything that might hinder that revelation.  And often there's no intent to conceal. If one chooses to follow one philosophy, it will always remain concealed as to what another path might have revealed.

And possibly the greatest concealment is that I have found both quotes to have revelatory content, though since I haven't read them in context, I might be "concealing" some or all of their "real" meanings.

TAKING STOCK OF 2021

Once again I take keys in hands (in place of Charlie Brown's "pencil in hand" whenever he would write his "pencil-pal") and look back at the things I wrote on this blog and its companions.

Some of the essays I liked best included:

MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION, in which I examined some of the works I already analyzed for their mythic content and showed how the myth-concerns of those works also played seamlessly into their passion for sexploitative content.

DEATHBLOW AND DEATHMATCH-- Though I formulated my concept of the combative mode near the start of this blog, guided largely by some salient if brief remarks by both Kant and Frye, this essay is the first time I attempted to codify how the combative mode is expressed through popular story-tropes. The essay immediately afterward, QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2, further elaborates the tropes in terms of the "vector terminology" I borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead.

LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE was a new attempt to summarize my NUM theory and to relate it to the history of literature as articulated by Aristotle and misinterpreted by people who misread Aristotle.

PROBLEMS VS CONUNDRUMS represents my effort to find a more elegant way to restate some of my earlier formulations regarding what I called "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning."

KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT focuses upon finding new terminology with which to analyze the *quanta* through which the two vertical potentialities are expressed in fiction, with the "idea" being the quanta through which mythopoeic thought is expressed, while the "concept" is the quanta through which didactic thought is expressed.

And in December, starting with STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: ENTER PRIMES, EXIT COES, I devoted numerous posts that month to "an anatomy of the crossover," a subject that's interested me for years, though only in the previous year of 2020 did I conceive of terms, "stature" and "charisma", for the different operations of Prime and Sub characters/presences. I anticipate writing more on this topic in 2022, though I confess I may be reaching a point where my system is about as all-embracing as it can get.

Most of the mythcomics I analyzed were works I'd read at least once before, though a few items, like Ernie Colon's THE MEDUSA CHAIN, proved more rigorous than I'd perceived in the initial reading. I don't think I encountered any new-to-me works in 2021 that I liked as much as my 2020 discovery of NISEKOI, although ELFEN LIED and THE SONS OF EL TOPO probably rate as my foremost discoveries for last year.

My favorite movie/TV reviews of 2021 included:

NAKED KILLER (1992)

The BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode "To Reign in Hell," which may inspire me to make a full examination of all three seasons of the teleseries within year 2022.

Perennial old favorite FIEND WITHOUT A FACE.

The two-season NISEKOI teleseries.

GODZILLA VS. KONG, because I'd been waiting for fifty-something years to see the titans of Japan and the U.S. to square off in a city-smashing donnybrook.

The first two Tobey Maguire Spideys, here and here, which certainly helped me out when it came to consider NO WAY HOME.

The two Keaton Bat-flicks, here and here.

"WAXWORKS," which at present reigns as the first true "monster mashup."

THE TRIUMPH OF HERCULES, my favorite Italian peplum.

The fourth episode of BEWITCHED, which finally put into perspective for me why this often mediocre show had such strong resonance for many though not all TV viewers.

And one of the best adventure-serials of that form's glory days, THE SPIDER'S WEB.

Naturally, a lot of my movie/TV viewing for the year was driven by cogitating about what movies I wanted to cross-reference on THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, which has been going since June. I have not yet made more than a couple of attempts to cross-promote the blog, so not surprisingly OPERA doesn't get much attention, though still a little more than my other two "junk-drawer" blogs. For the time being I'm still committed to OPERA, though. In my mind at least, OPERA builds on Northrop Frye's comment that the critic, like the natural scientist, tries to examine all phenomena, going on the theory that a "total coherence" exists between all of the relevant subject matter. In the hands of ideological critics, this was often a means of deriding, say, even the best BATMAN productions by having a big laugh at how stupid the TV show was (or seemed to be). I'm aware that even old-time fans aren't ever going to be deeply invested in the analysis of a creaky old serial like JUNGLE DRUMS OF AFRICA. But there's a sense in which understanding anything-- be it a genre or a physical phenomenon-- requires that the analyst must see everything, good, bad and mediocre, as comprising facets of Shelley's "dome of many colored glass," doing everything possible to stain that monotonous white radiance of Eternity.

DISCOURSES WITH DEAD MEN

At the beginning of last year's THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, I said:

From the beginnings of this blog I've maintained that a narrative's "mythicity" inheres in its ability to focus on *symbolic discourse;* which is another name for the author's use of narrative to explore the way his (or her) symbolic representations interact with one another.

It occurred to me that I ought to refine this a little. While the statement by itself is not incorrect, it neglects one of the author's main reasons for "exploring the way his (or her) symbolic representations interact with one another," and that is for the purpose of communicating to persons other than him/herself.

For commercial writers, it goes without saying that the main purpose of writing any sort of narrative is to make money. Robert Heinlein famously boiled down the author's purpose by saying, "Let's not kid ourselves; we're fighting for [our readers'] beer money." This brass-tacks statement isn't all that well exemplified by Heinlein himself, since he established himself from his earlier works as a writer primarily invested in one type of fiction, whose works always followed his personal conception of ethics. Indeed, Heinlein's career seems almost "artsy" next to the practiced cynicism of the genuine formula-writer, who may toil under a number of pseudonyms, writing whatever the market will bear at a given time, be it hard-boiled crime or ladies' Gothics.

At the other end of the spectrum. we find a smattering of works produced by authors who had no expectations of circulating them to a general public. at most showing them to selected acquaintances. Shelley's play PROMETHEUS UNBOUND is a "closet drama" in that it was never meant to be performed on stage, though of course it did see book publication. Franz Kafka published very little of his writing in his lifetime, and ostensibly told friend Max Brod to destroy his works after Kafka passed-- which Brod chose not to do. Shelley and Kafka may have desired acclaim at one time or another, but patently both wrote certain works that were more about pleasing themselves.

So any artistic narrative always has this dual potential: it can be produced for a wide audience, or for the author alone. Psychic mediums notwithstanding, artistic narrative-- which term here subsumes also music and the visual arts-- is almost the only way that artists can keep "talking" with people long after the artists themselves are dead. To some extent non-fictional narrative shares some of the power of the arts, but artistic narrative seems to hold much more power to remain relevant to audiences born long after the narrative was originated.

Though my writings on "discourse" go back at least to 2008, I began writing about the topic more frequently in essays like QUANTUM THEORY because I found that the word had applications beyond what I call "the mythopoeic potentiality." Though I have generally focused on the ways in which "super-functional" elements in a narrative interact, I've also come to the recent conclusion that one cannot escape the use of elements that are more purely functional, if only for purposes of contrast. I alluded to this aspect of narrative most recently in GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 4, stating that characters who are "simple" rather than "complex" can provide an audience with much-needed diversion. Indeed, one may observe similar phenomena in real-time discourse. What speaker, having delivered a monologue on something of Great Import, does not seek to "lighten the mood" with a joke or two?

I'll note in conclusion that some of the most interesting literary discourses to have taken place came about because an audience wanted more of something that a given author never meant to pursue. If (a) an author decides to do a "one-off," after which (b) the audience says, "We want more," and (c) the author complies by giving them more, then--

Who then is in control of the discourse?