The Ghost of Seriality
“We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”
---Emerson, Experience
I’ve forgotten everything. I don’t want to remember. And what would our life be now together? I’ve done with him, I’ve done. I’ve done with them all. I don’t care to look upon my house and my goods. I don’t care to see anything at all.”
---Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.53
I don’t watch as much television or as many movies as either Cim or Margaret. And though I try, I don’t read as many texts (of any description) either. I suppose I’m slower in all respects, preferring dilations, detours, and recursions to completions of any sort. I have, for example, been thinking a lot about the film Dark City lately, but I’m not yet willing to finish the process by thinking what I am thinking.
Likewise, I’ve been taking my time with the interrelated ideas of stranger intimacy and seriality. Yesterday, for example, I took the ideas to lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant not far from campus. Since my meals at home are far too healthy to support my now faded self-image as the reckless experimentalist, I daringly ordered the barbecue pork, which they serve very salty, and a pot of unsweetened hot tea.
I had been reading Chekov and Dostoevsky earlier in the day (it’s all related – though I might not get to it here), and that left me feeling slightly Russian as I poured tea from the ivory colored pot into a delicate, cream colored cup. My luncheon companion was Bakhtin's early essay, "Toward a Philosophy of the Act."
Throughout the café, tiny glass vases sat on tabletops of faux black marble, each filled with freshly cut flowers. The place is called “Camdi,” and it is a family restaurant, run by Vietnamese immigrants, where everything there is done by hand. Mother and father cook in the back over an array of enormous woks braided by shooting jets of flame, while father and daughter run the register and serve the customers who arrange themselves out front among the 13 available tables. As I looked around the restaurant, I wondered if such “family meals” weren’t a reduced, more acceptable form of stranger intimacy.
Life near a college campus is tough for businesses. Directly across the street from Camdi is a much larger Chinese restaurant, and next door is a cheap steak house. A bar and grille stands two doors down and an upscale Italian fusion restaurant stands on the corner. Competition for the dining dollar is fierce, and the father and daughter glanced up from time to time while clearing tables and looked at the steady stream of potential customers passing by outside. Who were they? Where else were they going?
Although it’s tough on small business owners looking for customers, life near a college campus is great for people-watching. Camdi is favored by crankish professors, blue collar workers, political idealists, and campus intellectuals (the types who bring Bakhtin for lunch). At the table immediately ahead of mine sat two academics, a sunburned guy in khakis and a polo shirt, and a gray-haired shakra hippie with full beard and faded jeans.
"So this strips the iron out of the water?" the college yogi asked.
His close-cropped companion answered in a low voice, his back to me so I couldn’t hear.
"And that binds with the phosphorous?" the yogi followed up in reply.
The sunburned guy grew animated. And after a few moments, the yogi said: "The microcosm's you're working with were well-aerated?" He listened to the clean-cut guy say something about the amount of sulfur being discharged into the lake, and then he jiggled a mound of quarters in his hand and excused himself to make a quick phone call.
I wondered who doesn’t carry a cell phone these days, and tried to remember the location of the nearest pay phone. I had no idea where one might be, and I wondered if this were some kind of set up. If this were a spy novel, we would cut to a scene of the yogi calling his handlers and arranging an accident for the clean-cut informant.
“He knows about the sulfur,” he’d say on the cell phone he’d had all along once he was out of sight.
“Yeah, I can keep him for maybe another hour. But any longer than that, and he’ll get suspicious.”
Lunches are never that exciting, though. And nothing of the sort happened (though I checked the papers this morning, just to be sure).
"They have great vegetarian dishes here," the yogi said, just before exiting. The clean-cut companion opened his menu and began slowly reading through his choices.
I took that as my cue to turn my attention to Bakhtin.
While reading Bakhtin, I realized that if I were seriously grappling with the issue, I would want to consider serials (television, movies, periodicals) phenomenologically. They present themselves to readers/viewers as on-going events and ask us to incorporate ourselves into their on-goingness.
This is different from the way we experience, say, a short story. Of course there is a sense in which it is an on-going event as well. We move from word to word. But we experience the short story or the single film in light of its having-been-completed. That's how we organize it.
Neither is a serial experienced in the same way as a novel. No sane person reads Moby Dick or War and Peace in a single sitting (though it wouldn’t altogether surprise me to learn Cim or Margaret has done so). But what is read in multiple sittings presents itself as a totality, an a-temporal work which we must experience unfolding across time.
Serials are experienced differently inasmuch as they include their own fragmentation in the presentation and achievement of their unity. They bring their readers and viewers into them as on-going events. This is how they exist, not simply how they are understood. It is as if a serial is a performance, not a Being.
I suspect this is where we can find a connection with serial killers. They perform their being by destroying and thus confirming the object-like being of their victims. A serial killer is the only subject in a world of objects that mistakenly believe they hold the status of co-subjectivity with him. Through a perverse displacement, serial killers reenact the Western division between culture and life, the scene in which our efforts are objectified and the on-going events through which we create, experience, and act. (And this suggests something about the pervasive theme of the serial-killer-as-artist.) Only the serial killer acts in his world of objects-that-think-they-act.
I would say the serial killer's achievement is his insistence on this fundamental divorce between art and life, the refusal to make one answerable to and interpenetrated by the other. This may be one reason culture is attracted to the theme of the serial killer. If he can be reincorporated through an act of the imagination, perhaps art can find its way back to life by restoring the serial killer to an answerability he emphatically denies.
How does all of this connect with stranger intimacy? I’m not sure. But I wonder if there is any other kind of intimacy. How many times do we find strangers waiting for us in our own homes, sometimes even in our own mirror?
One of the most despairing lines in American letters about love and marriage is Emerson’s observation in “Experience” that “two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire” (Essays and Lectures, 488).
These are strong, dark words from America’s smiling philosopher.
Emerson is suggesting, or maybe he’s saying outright, that what drives us apart is more powerful than what joins us together.
But the man had earned such insights. When he wrote these lines, his heart was broken.
I count “Experience” as Emerson’s most compelling essay. And at its core lies what Emerson calls “this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest . . .” (Essays and Letters, 473). If I felt ready to tackle Dark City, or related films like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think this is where I would start, with the transient and slippery quality of even those things we hold most dear.
The sad truth is: we hold nothing at all. (This was the nightmare explored by Hume in philosophy when he tied identity to the stability of memory and then destroyed that stability.) All we can do is clutch after our phantoms.
“Experience” was written after the death of Emerson’s son, Waldo, and its great concern is whether we can manage to connect with reality, whether we can ourselves manage to become Real. What grieves Emerson even more than the fact that he has lost his child is that grief itself won’t last. It is as if neither the presence nor the absence of the loved one can be firmly grasped. Neither life nor death seems entirely real. “Our life is not so much threatened as our perception” Emerson writes. “Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place” (Essays and Lectures, 471).
We don’t know our place, because we cannot manage to enter the very moment before us. Instead, we spend our time in plans and habits and memories. We are already strangers in our own home, and somehow we miss the fact that we aren’t connecting with the world or the people in our lives. “Souls never touch their objects,” Emerson says. “An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. . . . I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature” (473).
How many nights have I sat reading a dead man’s grief for his dead son? What intimacies are stranger?
Emerson’s treatment of the death of his son recalls Dostoevsky’s approach to the theme of a child’s death in The Brothers Karamazov. In the second book of that novel, Dostoevsky recounts the visit of the elder Karamazov and his three sons, along with some other characters, to the cell of Father Zossima, a church elder renowned for his sanctity and wisdom. At one point, Zossima goes out to a crowd of peasants who have gathered to see him. One of them is a woman who has buried her son. She shares her story with Father Zossima in the following astonishing passage:
“It’s my little son I’m grieving for, Father. He was three years old—three years all but three months. For my little boy, Father, I’m in anguish, for my little boy. He was the last one left. We had four, my Nikita and I, and now we’ve no children, our dear ones have all gone. I buried the first three without grieving overmuch, and now I have buried the last. I can’t forget him. He seems always standing before me. He never leaves me. He has withered my heart. I look at his little clothes, his little shirt, his little boots, and I wail. I lay out all that is left of him, all his little things. I look at them and wail. I say to Nikita, my husband, let me go on a pilgrimage, master. He is a driver. We’re not poor people, Father, not poor; he drives our own horse. It’s all our own, the horse and the carriage. And what good is it all to us now? My Nikita has begun drinking while I am away. He’s sure to. It used to be so before. As soon as I turn my back he gives way to it. But now I don’t think about him. It’s three months since I left home. I’ve forgotten him. I’ve forgotten everything. I don’t want to remember. And what would our life be now together? I’ve done with him, I’ve done. I’ve done with them all. I don’t care to look upon my house and my goods. I don’t care to see anything at all.”
---The Brothers Karamazov, “Peasant Women Who Have Faith,” p.53
I think this passage suggests something of the sorrow Emerson must have suffered upon losing his son. Dostoevsky’s grieving mother has confronted the ‘evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest,’ and the life she most believed in has been revealed as unreal.
“I can’t forget him,” the mother tells Zossima. But, of course, the tragedy is that she can forget him. She has buried three other children “without grieving overmuch,” and it is as if she wants this grief to teach her something. She wants it to matter. She lacks Emerson’s philosophy, so the grieving mother does the only thing she can imagine. Rather than lose the dream of her last child, rather than let grief too slip through her hands, she refuses her husband and her home. She denies the reality of the world itself. On some fundamental level, the woman will follow her last child into death rather than live in a world where children can slip away and leave the world unchanged.
Like Dostoevsky’s grieving mother, Emerson suggests our history and our prospects are likewise illusory. And with this assertion, he doesn’t set out to deny the world but, rather, to heal the broken places in his life and in ours. Unlike Dostoevsky’s mother, he resists the temptation to follow his son into death. He instead works at letting go of the future that, with Waldo’s passing, would never happen. Although Emerson does not name his lost son in his essay, he does say:
“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. . . . Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. . . . It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.”
“Experience,” 478-9
To become real, Emerson says, we must find a way to respect this hour, this place, these companions and conditions. To hope for more or remember better is to postpone our lives. To fail to see the infinite in the ordinary and the compromised is to stalk our lives like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
