The text vortex - “structure and movement”

The digression about theatre in my last posts actually helped to prepare the ground for the next step in my terminology. Rather early on in my blog I (re)discovered Schiller’s concept of (aesthetic) PLAYING in his “Aesthetic Education” as a fundamental part of my reading. It certainly had an impact on the discovery of the dichotomy of playing and acting in my last post. Playing – not acting! – turned out as the fundamental concept to describe a successful theatre experience. Acting is really important, though, in the way directing, set design, lighting et cetera is. We are not supposed to notice it, but there is no good show without professional acting. To describe what HAPPENS WITH US when we are happy in the theatre, though, and why it is such a special experience, PLAYING is the key. Films CAN be a lot like this if the focus is on the playing, and the playing is so very special, as I remember, for example, from Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” or, recently, “My Zoe”. But there also are fictional situations that can only arise on a stage. My most striking experience of this kind was “No Man’s Land” (with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart) where the inconsequential talking revealed this abyss between the thin layer of our communicating and the mute bulk of our physical and mental existence kind of materializing on the stage. (I realize for the first time that the title indicates how successful my reading has been!) But this was certainly not the only incident of this kind – where theatre was just so different. The opportunity to actually WITNESS the playing – or notice its absence! - in an opposed party – the actor – makes it immediately obvious that it is not just I playing with the text but also THE TEXT PLAYING WITH ME.

I must say, I am rather amused with my official coming out as a philosopher. And bewildered because it feels as if I carried more responsibility for the binding character of what I am writing. But this is just a misunderstanding. I have always been sceptical of any kind of systematic philosophy because it means that I have to believe in something – if only in the fact that this kind of “absolute” truth philosophers are trying to establish through their thinking exists. I am not even sure if I believe in this kind of truth or not, but I have found that believing is hugely overrated. It doesn’t matter what I BELIEVE, or just as a point of reference for what I am going to DISCOVER. In my experience there are three kinds of small children – after the age where they cram everything they see into their mouths: the kind that is fascinated with throwing pebbles, the kind that is fascinated with digging holes, and the kind that cannot be bothered. Growing up, for most people, means that they can BEGIN to do a lot of things, like driving a car, drinking alcohol, having sex, making money. In fact, it is the time where we STOP doing most things we used to do – and that used to feel good! - like throwing pebbles, screaming like banshees, running around like mad, riding a swing, going swimming in ice-cold water, crying, running up stairs, picking fights, climbing trees, rescuing earthworms, painting pictures, picking our noses, telling people what we really think, playing, maybe even masturbating … and of course digging holes! The only reason that we still appear faintly human might be that everybody else has stopped as well doing any of these things and being interested in anything else than money, sex, cooking, cars, alcohol, work, interior decoration, and football. And, maybe, that most people maintain a secret reserve of “kid things” they just cannot stop doing. In my case it was DIGGING HOLES. Therefore I became a philosopher “naturally” because this is what philosophers do. Stepping between the neat rows of established truths to dig holes. Once you have got the hang of it, you cannot stop. And – unfortunately! - it implies thinking and writing things other people don’t understand because – even if they are themselves digging – they are seldom down the SAME hole digging for things beneath and in-between politically and otherwise correct truths. Like all philosophers, I am constantly trying to be totally clear and intelligible – and usually fail. It is an occupational hazard.

For a primitive philosopher of this kind there isn’t even a fundamental inhibition from being a constructivist and a realist, an empiricist and an idealist, a rationalist and a phenomenologist at the same time. The only thing you really need is some kind of “toolbox” for making concepts. I usually know WHEN I have found something, but, if it is new, I don’t know yet what it is. And strangely, only when I have a WORD for it, I can begin to find out. “In the beginning there was the word  …”, for me, is the most perceptive thing anyone ever wrote, (apart from: “I know that I know nothing”.) And, while I am busy finding out, my world is growing around me and the digging picking up pace … This is also - I just realize - rather wild and weird for a method. The TEXT VORTEX is my stellar example for it, therefore the lengthy introduction.  

I don’t really remember now, but I think it was a random find. I had developed some idea of what I am doing when I am reading, but WHAT is it that makes me do it? Why does it work so well with a certain kind of text – like “Shakespeare” – and not so well with others, or not at all. Besides, I KNOW – for example right now listening to the Brandenburg concertos played by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields – that there is not just me doing something with the text but an incredibly strong “force field” created by the text, just DRAWING ME IN. So much stronger than – and so different from - anything else that might hold my interest for a while, like a game, a match, other people’s conversation, or even something totally strange and mesmerizing like cats having sex … (they don’t “mate”, they are actually having sex!) I began to call it the “black box”, but this only meant that I would never know anything about what a fictional text is “doing”. The only thing I had established is that it is doing SOMETHING. And there is a corresponding black box inside ME because the biggest part of the emotions, experiences, thoughts, dreams, motivations, and memories I use for my reading stays hidden from me as well. Until I “found” more, my theory about reading would stay unfinished.    

I remembered that somebody had used the metaphor of the VORTEX to describe poetry, but I couldn’t retrieve the quote. I think it stuck because of the necessary COMBINATION of STRUCTURE and MOVEMENT. The idea of an object that only exists because of their working together. I wasn’t even aware until recently that there is an empirical context! Though it is probably a common and frequent occurrence in nature, we only become aware of a vortex when it gets huge and threatening. The vortex as the visible part of a tornado that emerges out of nowhere and sucks up everything that gets in its way. Or the dangerous whirlpool that drags ships under water and grinds them to splinters. It is an amazing metaphor – because of the giant impact of the forces at work and the fundamental difference a vortex creates between the outside world and the totally void and still space on the inside. It sucks us in like NOTHING ELSE and, once inside, the outward world ceases to exist.

(It is the strongest image I can think of for “concentrating” – and that is probably what text and “really reading” is about for me. Just as an activity and a state I want to be in. I cannot bear to be caught in this “half-state” where I am busy but kind of spread out in all directions. Where there is movement everywhere but my “centre” is totally inactive – and which, I imagine, is the state most people are in most of the time. Especially since “we” have stopped doing complicated – or boring but necessary - things with our hands for hours on end and got focused that way. Instead, our attention gets scrambled in chat rooms and on twitter.)  

One of the first dichotomies I created to describe what happens in “Shakespeare” was STRUCTURE AND BEAUTY – where the “and” is as important as any of the terms. Structure as such is nothing. I have always been good at analysing poetry because I liked to detect and describe text structure, but the most important thing I learned from it is that structure ALONE is nothing. Without movement it is dead. It can do nothing – not even in the inanimate world. The interdependence of structure and energy is what physics is dealing with most of the time, and – to be honest – a complete mystery to me … So, I could detect as much structure as I wanted in “Shakespeare”, but I had still to understand BEAUTY.

I think I never understood beauty before I hit on my second favourite quote from “The Lord of the Rings” where Gimli describes his reaction to Galadriel’s gift:

I have looked last on what is fairest (…) Henceforward I will call nothing fair unless it be her gift.

This was a highly subjective moment because the reason I understood is that the same thing had just happened to me. It is the kind of thing that only happens ONCE in a person’s life. I became aware that I had found what I had always been looking for. I think there were a few times in my life where I got excited and thought I might KNOW what I was looking for – therefore I never gave up. But this time I had FOUND what I was looking for. Completely unexpectedly, it was there – just before my eyes!

I put “beauty” in quotation marks here, just once, to indicate that it is a metaphor, but – like every good metaphor – it has a necessary connection to the real thing. The word is just spread out so widely that it mostly stopped meaning anything. One can have a beautiful person, a beautiful necklace, and a beautiful goal, and what not, but everybody probably remembers one of these instances of having been TOUCHED by beauty. It is this EXPERIENCE the metaphor refers to – and, when it happened to me on this occasion, I discovered that beauty is the only ABSOLUTE category I subscribe to. For me there is no absolute goodness, or truth, or moral values, or whatever – probably because I am even more of an empiricist than I thought??? - but I actually FOUND absolute beauty. The experience certainly derived from the unexpected perfection of the “object” I found, but of course I know that this perfection is NOT absolute. It is just that the object matched MY INNER CONCEPTION of what a human being should be like – as to looks but, more importantly, to “content” - to a degree I could never have imagined. Before I had found it, I DIDN’T KNOW what was in ME! - Finding the perfect object happened entirely by chance – as for Gimli who might never have seen Galadriel if he hadn’t gone on that journey. I could never have brought this about on my own – and I like this! It makes the event so much more valuable: to realize that it is just chance that my life hadn’t been in vain. I might have died at the age of forty-five like my father and never seen it. But I didn’t!

The kind of beauty I had hit upon is absolute. Its point is exactly that it doesn’t compare with ANYTHING else. But there is a serious drawback because it only “happens” ONCE. We have found everything we were looking for, everything we ever wished for, in another (human) being, but we cannot “keep” it. Gimli intends to put the golden hairs of Galadriel into some kind of shrine to preserve them forever, but he knows that this is not sufficient. It will help to create a memory of the “real thing”, but, sadly, “memory is not what the heart desires”. Of course memory serves, to a degree, and we would be beggars without it, but the impact of beauty on us will fade. Reading and analysing Sonnet 5 – in what became, I think, my third post – I first understood what POETRY can do so much better than anything else: PERPETUATE a state like this. I think, reading this poem, I really captured the “vortex energy” that holds it together by getting to the bottom of how beauty is able to MOVE us.

BEAUTY in text depends on STRUCTURE – which is basically just what we are motivated to select as we have learned to prefer it. Obviously, there is a basic kind of beauty in structure – which makes us prefer highly structured phenomena and play with them. (Thence the attraction of sudoku, magic cubes and the like.) Therefore it is the AESTHETIC CATEGORY that comes to mind first, but not the only one. The way “beauty” happened to me is probably rather exotic, and I used it as an example to show how a TEXT VORTEX works just because this was how I discovered it. There are lots of other aesthetic categories, other kinds of “movement” - like horror, action, or story - that have little connection with beauty, or none at all. Having a conversation with Claudia recently about our motivations for reading alerted me to the fact that my own conception is much too narrow and subjective. For a valid theory, a potentially unlimited amount of aesthetic categories would have to be included. But, looking into the text vortex, I find that STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENT might do the trick. There certainly is structure and the potential to “move” us in every kind of (fictional) text but only WHEN WE ENGAGE the vortex appears “out of nowhere”.

I realize that the way I use MOVEMENT as a concept is rather cheeky because I am trying to bring its literal meaning – as in physical movement – and its metaphoric content – as in being moved emotionally – back together into one concept. But this might be exactly the point of movement as an AESTHETIC term, as we can be moved in several ways at the same time. And different kinds of movement are playing into each other. For example, being moved by beauty – in actors, scenery, voices and so on - usually makes me more amenable to notice and enjoy other content.

Mostly, the aesthetic experience is so complex that I don’t know WHAT triggered it. For example, seeing “The Crucible” again on Digital Theatre last year just confirmed my first impression about it that was one of pure aesthetical joy because it is the most perfect and perceptive and “emotionally complete” production of a play I have ever seen. Above all, I just enjoyed the COMPLETENESS of the aesthetic experience. EVERYTHING I could have wished for WAS THERE – and too complex to analyse. (Feeling shitty for days after I had seen it might just have been because of the realization that it was over – and something like this was unlikely to happen again.) Or like, just now, seeing “Coriolanus” with Tom Hiddleston, where the production of the play was so brilliant and convincing that I suddenly liked and understood a text I find indigestible every time I am trying to read it. So, I suppose, the multiple indigestible bits were just swallowed up by all the good? Most of the time, the “movement” is just so big that I get swept away without getting to know a lot about it. But, even though I rarely know WHAT is happening, I always know WHEN. And this is in fact my best empirical proof for the existence of a vortex.

In extreme cases this might even be AFTER I have read it. This happens frequently with films, on my way home from the cinema, when it suddenly hits me what it was I have seen. My most striking example for these dynamics was “Mother” – where I didn’t enjoy anything about the film and sat through it bored, even disgusted, until, right at the end, this giant metaphor came crashing down on me. A kind of “crash” I have learned to appreciate! – There obviously is a different “vortex energy” or “structure” for different kinds of fiction. Something like this is very unlikely to happen with a novel because I wouldn’t read through hundreds of pages being bored and disgusted - though the “pull” of the story might be strong enough to drag me through. But mostly I drop out of aesthetically unsatisfactory prose. STORY – or, more precisely in this context: text elements we are used to create stories from! - is probably the primary “vortex energy engine” in most kinds of fiction, the one that always works. Way back in this blog I discovered to my amusement that I constantly try to “skip” story and proceed directly to the “juicy” human stuff I am shooting for. And how this sometimes makes my reading downright ridiculous. Treating story as secondary might even be what often leads to these “delays” in really reading. Recently listening to “The Other People” read by Richard Armitage, it happened after about two hours. As it is often the case for me with crime stories, I get overwhelmed by puzzling and irrelevant detail and fail to see the wood for all the trees – and this means I usually don’t read them. But then the aesthetic atmosphere created through the intimacy of the voice suddenly sucked me in. Only then did I begin to enjoy the story!

In the theatre, a delayed experience like this is not possible. There must be SOMETHING I want to engage with from the beginning. Otherwise I become immediately aware that this is not a place where I want to be. Seeing Ralph Fiennes in “Antony and Cleopatra”, I knew after a few minutes that I shouldn’t have been getting on that plane. And the beginning of “Uncle Vanya” didn’t become a disaster only because I knew half of the actors and trusted them. (It STILL was a disagreeable quarter of an hour!) The aesthetic experience may build up slowly – as it did in “No Man’s Land” where I didn’t understand from the beginning what it might be about. But there must have been SOMETHING there from the beginning – which I identified as the PLAYING. It was obvious that both actors really ENJOYED being there and doing this. There is a PERSONAL dimension which I totally like but which also makes it so precarious. Only when I can see that they are playing – and confident! - I am feeling safe and happy myself, and ready to engage and be moved. Then we are ALL ready for the ride …