Video, Cogito Ergo Sum

I’m a big fan of this week’s two-part season finale of House. Many others felt it was a retread of story ideas, but I disagree. It beautifully brought together the threads of House’s dependence on both vicodin and solving cases, Huddy, and his dark, closed-off nature. But more than that, it was a poetic depiction of the power and physiological importance of storytelling. Not bad for a prime-time drama.

ALL SPOILERS

The season shot into high gear when Kutner committed suicide four episodes ago. It was a complete surprise, unless you had read that Kal Penn had been offered a job in the Obama White House and wanted to go.

Then, at the end of “Saviors” House is playing “Georgia on My Mind” on the piano at home, when he looks up at sees Amber—Cutthroat Bitch, aka Wilson’s dead girlfriend—leaning on his piano.

It picks up in “A House Divided” with Amber sitting in House’s bedroom, having a conversation with him. He thinks he’s hallucinating because he hasn’t slept through the night since Kutner’s death.

Amber becomes his hallucinatory shadow, following and talking to him everywhere. He knows that she’s his projected subconscious and he starts to get comfortable talking to her/himself: “How do we get Foreman to sign off on this.” She verbalizes the things that House always “sees” subconsciously. It’s a fascinating dramatization of how the brain functions: it stores fact, data, in its banks—simplified, let’s say in the left brain—and then the right brain processes the facts into thoughts, ideas, and then actions. Anne Dudek is fabulously creepy, capturing all the subtle, cloaked darkness in House’s subconscious. She positively purrs when she says “To us. For figuring out MS.”

House knows that hallucinating to this degree is dangerous and he finally admits it to Wilson. He needs to diagnose it himself: infection, sleep apnea, schizophrenia or another mental illness, or vicodin poisoning.

In “Under My Skin” he tries an insulin coma to detox, thinking that if he detoxes then Amber will be gone. When he comes out of the coma, she’s still there. He then tries a more traditional detox, asking Cuddy to help. She does, and after a long, successful night, House kisses her and then they explode into a long-pent up passion.

The twist, in “Both Sides Now,” that is slowly revealed, is that Cuddy was a hallucination too. All day he thinks he is holding her lipstick that she left the night before, but small clues start to connect in his head, and he’s finally able to see that he’s been holding a pill bottle all day. It’s an elegant, visual device. Cuddy had actually walked out on him the day before because he insulted her baby.

What I like about the story is it illustrates how important storytelling is to the human condition. The brain is this amazing entity, with at least 2 at distinct hemispheres, and various levels of perception. Our thoughts are only whole when our consciousness–—whatever that is–-constructs a story that combines all the functions and impressions into a narrative. No wonder film, novels, and tv are so important to us: we recognize in them the narrative that is part of our own brain function.

Like voluntary and involuntary muscle function, there are narratives our brains construct as part of daily functioning, and there are stories we tell ourselves from a deeper psychological level. House told a story to himself that Cuddy cares about him enough to come to his call for help, leaving her child for the night, and then have sex with him. But that is not what happen. And that significant break from reality is what finally propels him to a psychiatric facility.


I have only had one hallucination my entire life. I was a kid, maybe 6 years old. I was in my bed, and I woke up and saw spiders all over my covers, and at the foot of my bed, our Christmas tin soldier from the lawn (maybe 3 feet tall) was walking back and forth, guarding the bed. I am 100% certain that I was awake—-it was not a dream. I laid there very still, because I didn’t want the spiders to come under the covers. I closed my eyes several times, and they were all still there. Finally, when I opened them, they were gone. Clearly I was disturbed about something, manifested by my arachnophobia, and I longed to be made safe. The incident never repeated, but it remains a deeply vivid memory.

Now daydreaming—that’s a whole other ball game.

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 Mapeel     5/13/2009     television   

Unconditional Surrender: May 8, 1945

It’s the anniversary of “Victory in Europe,” the day after the remnants of Hitler’s army in the person of Grand Admiral Doenitz signed an unconditional surrender to the Allies.

A defined enemy. A defined victory. Concepts that now seem lost to the ages.

The day has little cultural resonance, as the generations who witnessed this singular moment in history are slowing going into the west.

But one of the day’s witnesses is back in current conversation: Winston Churchill. In response to a question from ABC Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper, President Obama cited a statement attributed to Churchill, “we don’t torture.” Tapper has followed that up with a very full post looking at conflicting indications of what Churchill’s actual torture policy was.

Churchill scholar Richard Langworth: "While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation is unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured by British interrogators during World War II.”

On the other hand, Carlo D’Este, author of Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1894-1945, writes that while "Churchill was ruthless in prosecuting the Second World War with strategic bombing of German cities...there is nothing in his behaviour or character to suggest that he would have condoned water boarding or other means of torture."

So we don’t know the precise means. But we know the precise end result. The Germans capitulated, and the fighting stopped. There is so little parallel to our world today. We are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it feels like it will never end.

Churchill’s impromptu speech on the balcony:

“God bless you all. This is your victory! It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the enemy, have in any way weakened the independent resolve of the British nation. God bless you.”

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 Mapeel     5/08/2009     current events   

Poetry in Oils

It so happened, in this month of poetry, that I bought a new painting for my living room, and I thought, painting is poetry captured in oils.

Surprise, surprise, this is not a new idea.

Ut pictura poesis “as is painting, so is poetry” Horace

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech
Simonides

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen
daVinci

Owning a piece of art for your home is one of life’s quieter joys. It’s something that Terry Teachout has written about frequently and with eloquence: the purchase of a piece, receiving it into the home, finding “the spot” for it, taking literal time to sit enjoy it. Teachout has several artists that he had the desire for and then found the means to purchase. For me, it is just one, the New York, now Westport-based artist David Barton.

I am friends with David, by my desire to collect his work is on a completely different plane from that personal bond. I fell in love with his painting years ago. He has several series, but it’s his architectural paintings that I am drawn to and have collected: a house from Booth Bay, Maine; a detail from St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans; a sun-drenched country front door; and the new piece, a Soho corner. (This jpeg of the piece does not do it justice in the slightest.)

I love the interesting color palette, and the precision of line. I love the stylized sensibility and the mastery of place. I love the sheer talent expressed. The paintings are silent, but it’s no accident that the language of art buying centers around a piece “speaking” to you or not. And that language, for me, is poetry, not prose.

“The Relations between Poetry and Painting”

This is the title of a lecture Wallace Stevens gave at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951. For such a sexy title it’s a pretty dry lecture. But one good point is that there is a cosmic sense of the poetic that gets equally channeled to painting and to words.

More specifically, Poets have been inspired by great paintings: W.H Auden “Musee des Beaux Arts”; John Berryman “Winter Landscape”; William Carlos Williams “Peasant Wedding.” (This site matches up pictures of the paintings with the poems).

And there is at least one very famous reverse: the William Carlos Williams poem “The Great Figure” inspired Charles Demuth to paint "The Figure 5 in Gold."


Among the rain
And lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city


And so I will soon have the poetry of a Soho cast iron building in my living room with a startling blue sky (that sadly echoes how blue the sky was the morning of 9/11). It will be like having a window to downtown from the Upper West Side.

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 Mapeel     4/26/2009     national poetry month   

National Poetry Month: A Shadow of Chris Thomas

Poetry has a poignant power to capture the shadows of lives. Chris Thomas, the pen name of one of my great college loves. We had an intensity that was painful on every level. We tried to get together for real many times, but the stars never aligned for us. One of the last times we met was a year after my father died. He later sent me a printed page from a small journal with this poem he had written. He is a cognitive scientist (working for the likes of IBM, Lucent, etc.) who at one time published fairly frequently. I hear Chris is on his second marriage. I hope he has found happiness.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death, and I recently came across Chris's poem while cleaning through my mother’s house.

A Daughter’s Question—
One Year After Her Father’s Death

I’ve seen you stealing sleep
From tired old women on the train.
I’ve looked down and
seen you pour out my sleeves,
raining from my fingers.

It’s so like you—gone for 6 weeks,
leaving me in lengthening solitude,
only to feel you, there in my bed,
and the quake of morning.
Why are you here?

I set the table for four not three.
Something I feed you keeps you alive
and I fear of self-inspection.
A birthday passes without you,
Yet somewhere you dress for church on Sunday.

A passage from some obscure Irish novel
with no source attributed
is scrawled on my bathroom wall.
But I live alone, that’s what bothers me.
You’re everywhere I bring you.

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 Mapeel     4/16/2009     national poetry month, poetry   

A Poetic Journey: First Stop, Intro to Francis Thompson

April is the cruelest month, the sweetest month, and, since 1996, a month dedicated to poetry by the Academy of American Poets.

Their goals for National Poetry Month, from the website’s FAQ:
* Highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
* Introduce more Americans to the pleasures of reading poetry
* Bring poets and poetry to the public in immediate and innovative ways
* Make poetry a more important part of the school curriculum
* Increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
* Encourage increased publication, distribution, and sales of poetry books
* Increase public and private philanthropic support for poets and poetry

In that spirit, I’m going to focus my tiny spot of the blogosphere on a poetic journey, (more partial to English than to American poetry). Where do we find it? What does bring to our lives?

Each year there is an official poster. This year it is particularly inspired in thought and execution by Paul Sahre.

“Do I dare disturb the universe”—-one of the all-time great lines--written in the steamed bathroom mirror. Does the poet dare? Does Prufrock dare? Do we readers dare? You will not look at your own fogged mirror the same way as you did yesterday. That’s an accomplishment for both Sahre and Academy.

Uttering the words “dare” and “poetry” in the same breath feels at first blush silly. Skydiving is something you dare to do, but poetry?

And yet controlling the language to expose the beguiling hints and flashes of the complexity of human emotion and thought is a dangerous activity. When it goes wrong, it’s a mess. When it goes right, its illumination can be as painful as it is helpful.

Poetry That Crosses Our Path

For a New Yorker, one way was the Poetry in Motion series on the subway. You could look up and see a snatch of Whitman or Yeats or Dickinson. I was a fan, but I think the program has been cut in the budget nightmares.

Then there are the poems we stumble across in the strangest places.

The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.

I came upon this quotation in an Avengers episode! "Silent Dust," from the black & white Mrs. Peel era. Mrs. Peel is in a pub getting information from a suspect, who is a rose grower.


What I love about this is that it’s not a very famous quotation. It’s from “To Daisy” by Francis Thompson (whom Mrs. Peel does identify in the episode.) Roger Marshall is the sole writer of the episode, and so we know who planted it. That’s what writers get to do to whatever they get their hands on. Newspaper/magazine titles, book titles, movie/tv dialogue-—they plant pieces of poetry for others to stumble upon and discover. After noticing that little bit of poetry in the episode for years, I decided to look into Francis Thompson.

And lo and behold, there is no more fitting figure to discover during National Poetry Month than this Victorian English ascetic poet, a fascinating, sad man who developed an opium addiction after reading De Quincey’s Confession of an Opium Eater at the impressionable age of 18. (It was given to him by his mother who died shortly afterward. It seems he was doomed.) Thompson left behind tantalizing work, including a brilliant, feverish essay on Shelley, one of cricket’s great poems, and an overly anthologized “Catholic” poem. And to top it off, he’s also on the suspect list for the real Jack the Ripper. My NPM exploration of Francis Thompson is here.

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 Mapeel     4/13/2009     national poetry month   

Happy Easter and National Poetry Month

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter"

(hat tip, those Atlantic Monthly guys, Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat)

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 Mapeel     4/12/2009     national poetry month   

ER and the Johns: Readers Face the Ends of Their Eras

Two communities of readers are experiencing the end of an era this first quarter of 2009: the literary followers of Johns Updike and Cheever, and the tv fans of Michael Crichton’s ER. Each community was brought together in a shared passion in large cultural numbers in a way that we won’t see again. For ER, at its height, that meant an average of 32 million people a week.

I see our two groups of readers as completely equal. In a long, impassioned piece in the NYTimes magazine in 1995, then NYTimes Book editor Charles McGrath declared “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” years before The Sopranos and The Wire. He was reacting to the second generation of serialized prime-time dramas, like NYPD Blue and ER.

“Watching television is in many ways a private, solitary activity -- almost like reading. But watching television is also what we do as a nation; millions and millions of us tune in together, at the same time, to the same shows. Television is something, maybe the only thing, that all of us have in common. . . . When I went back to work the next day I had something to talk about -- how Andy was doing, whether Doc Greene and his wife would get back together -- and I felt connected.”

McGrath also extols the quality and writerly beauty of dialogue on these A-list shows, and the interesting literary backgrounds of the writers and producers behind them.

And that’s why it struck me as fitting, if you will, that ER is leaving the air in the shadow of the attention to the death of John Updike and the ensuing attention to John Cheever.

The Words-on Paper-Guys
John Updike died in January. The poignant posthumous publication of his poems in the New Yorker and his review of Blake Bailey’s Cheever biography are a special coda to his body of work. The March publication of the life of Cheever, one of the concentric circles in the literary universe in which Updike was a sun, broadened and underscored the cultural attention paid to the passing of John the Younger.


They were our adept chroniclers of the postwar suburbs with enormous abilities to capture LIFE between men and women with exceptional, frightening, unblinking, honed attention. But as important as their talent, they believed—with all the import of that word—in what Cheever called the “invincibility of literature,” and they understood the role of professional men of letters. That’s part of what their fans were attracted to.

Their postwar readers saw their own drab lives in the pages of “The Enormous Radio” and Rabbit, Run transformed by the power of art into something worth knowing, worth contemplating. The Johns’ writing deeply enriched the lives of their readers, and maybe helped to dispel some of the fog we all live in. The readers in turn felt a part of a literary community, not as easily in the days before the Internet, but just as certain. The emotional connection to their work was deep and spanned generations. Who is today’s equivalent of these literary icons?

The TV Drama as Novel
The watchers of ER will be gathering on Thursday to read the last episode in a 15-year long story about doctors in an emergency room in Chicago. Few series have the power to stay for so long. The list is a familiar one: Bonanza, 14 seasons; Dallas, 13 seasons; Hawaii 5-0 and NYPD Blue, 12; Cheers and MASH, 11.

We ER readers read and embraced ER’s groundbreaking semiotics as enthusiastically as the first readers of Joyce’s Ulysses did.

Diane Werts captures the power of ER in a piece in Newsday:

“Much of what ER pioneered has become so commonplace, we don't appreciate the show's pacesetting. We take for granted walk-and-talk, intensity editing, continuous sets, widescreen framing, point-of-view shooting, time-shift storytelling with interwoven flashbacks, ambient sound and moody montage.

“But all in one place? With heart-rending characters often delivering a topical wallop?"

The technical side was balanced with first-rate acting, and deeply engaging characters of Benton, and Carter, and Greene.

Charles McGrath:
“A small episode in last season's finale, involving an end-stage AIDS patient, his mother and his lover, and their letting him go, can't have taken up more than a few minutes of air time; yet in its brevity and directness, and in the honesty of its details, it was a more affecting evocation of the AIDS crisis than Jonathan Demme's overblown "Philadelphia," say. Its power came from the fact that this little moment happened in the middle of a lot of other moments -- almost as in life. Similarly, a brief, silent stretch at the end of the botched-delivery episode [“Love’s Labors Lost”], when Dr. Greene, exhausted, fighting tears, rides the El home in a cold winter dawn, achieved a remarkably understated eloquence. The show has a knack for dramatizing private moments -- for sneaking up on them when both we and the characters are most worn down and vulnerable.

“But the real reason for E.R.'s success, I think, is that it recognizes that such private moments are so few and so hasty.”

There is nothing more inherently frightening than an emergency room. We all know fiction from reality, especially where our own life and death is concerned. But storytelling is one way that we confront our fears, and the stories of ER where often cathartic because they rang so true to life. They allowed us to look at the most frightening, painful side of the human condition from the safety of our living rooms.

I did stop watching after Mark Greene died. Unlike Cheers, where I made the transfer from Diane to Rebecca, I never got into the new characters. I followed Carter and Abby for a while, and then drifted away.

But like many old readers, I’ve been following these last episodes before the series finale. Alan Sepinwall, as usual, has given the returning flock a place to connect. Reading these comments is the strongest testimonial to the power of this series.

Epilogue
ER and the works of the Johns are, by their nature, accessible to the ages. And each has a discernible and important legacy.

What’s different, what will not be repeated, is the broad cultural reach of these pieces of art, as art and entertainment continue to be more personalized, more niche.

Diane Werts again, speaking of being an ER viewer for its entire run:

“We were all in it together then. As we might be when it ends. It won't happen again.”

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 Mapeel     4/01/2009     current events, literature, television