Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Diderik Humble jr. had just finished his letter to the editor of TRU Times, complaining that his mentor and benefactor in spe Darwin P. Johnson had been misinterpellated as Darwin P. Erlandsen, “a wholly different animal altogether,” in Humble’s own words. “Darwin will not take lightly on this mistake on your part, and may be persuaded to take legal precautions to have such gross misrepresentation rectified,” Humble had written, well aware of Johnson’s generosity to his friends.

Only last week Humble had to ask his sickly mother, stored away, as she was, in a barn somewhere in the Middle Kingdom, to extend him a small grant, “for a new coat,” as he put it. It was dire times for Humble, even though he had succumbed to the call to join the new corporation. For one, he had been unable to have his interjection on the debate on Solyaris. I was bending paper clips, rolling cigarettes ferociously, trying to know something about the movie, all the while Diderik repeated the same phrases, “Allow me to interject,” and “Not to be presumptious or facetious in any way, but,” and so on. I asked him to write his ideas down, if he could find the time in between composing his Compleat Theory of the World and Everything Else (Vol. I). Last night I received this note in my post box:


Curious the way Tristero placed those two post horns on the wall in Tarkovsky’s Solyaris. Wonder if those horns are there in the new American version?


I had already passed my remarks on the movie to the TRU Times, and, not having seen “the new American version,” saw no reason to post an addendum. Instead, I sent him an text message, inviting him out for a cup of tea at The Spectre of Kabool.

It was a seedy joint, crammed with the usual racket of hypocrites, do-gooders and other bleeding heart liberals. We found a table in the darkest corner of the bar, where only the occasional prostitute would pop by, thinking we might just be some potential paying customers. When she saw us, she would invariably turn on her heels, displaying a somewhat repulséd look.

When Diderik finally arrived, he was not alone. Sinsemilla, his estanged wife, came stumbling through the door, holding on to the sleeve of his jacket, behind his ghostly apparition, like some shadow of a metaphor.

“Stop it now, Sinsemilla. I said you could come with,” Diderik started.

“What is she doing here,” I said, staring directly at Diderik.

“She wouldn’t be left alone.”

“I thought you said you’d killed her. Killed her good.”

“I thought I had. But I hadn’t. Or so it seems.”

Sinsemilla needed to use the restroom, and Diderik had to come along. He couldn’t leave her alone. He’d brought a thick brown envelope to the bar, and left in on the table while he was escorting Sinsemilla. I looked at it thoroughly, considering whether it could be some primordial version of the manuscript he’d been working on. I glanced around furtively, and quickly slid the envelope into my lap.

Diderik Humble jr.'s thesis

Laertes in his «Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers» notes that «When somebody asked Heraclit to decree some rules, she showed no interest because the government of the city was already bad. Instead, she went to the temple and played dices with children. Finally she withdrew from the world , and lived in the mountains feeding on grasses and plants. However, having fallen in this way into dropsy she came down to town and asked the doctors in a riddle if they could make a drought out of rainy weather. When they did not understand she buried herself in a cow-stall, expecting that the dropsy would be evaporated by the heat of the manure; but even so she failed to effect anything, and ended her life at the age of sixty».


I managed to slip the manuscript back into the envelope and slide it back onto the table just in time for Diderik not to notice. I think. He pushed his body over the floor, dragging his ghost behind him like some metaphoric shadow.

“Stop it now, Sinsemilla. I said you could come with,” Diderik said.

Monday, November 24, 2003

What is I fighting for?

I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the

Why is the walrus such a bore?

I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the

What am I but a metaphor?

I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the

The Future is a Genre
(and therefore iterable)

On Solyaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem).

Notes
Kris is a psychologist charged with considering the possible conclusion of the Solaris space project. Before departing he meets Berton, who was ejected from the mission after reporting on all sorts of queer visions while on a mission to rescue a fellow cosmonaut who had been lost on the planet. Berton has some insight, hardly communicable to someone with "the mind of an accountant," as he claims Kris has. He urges Kris not to recommend bombarding the Solaris -- it would not be a moral thing to do, Berton claims.

Here are two summaries from http://www.imdb.com/:

Summary by Dan Ellis:
> The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to
> host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret.
> After the mysterious demise of one of the three scientists on the base,
> the main character is sent out to replace him. He finds the station
> run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also
> encounters his wife who has been dead for seven years, he begins to
> appreciate the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.

Summary by Philip Brubaker:
> This film probes man's thoughts and conscience, as it follows a
> psychologist who is sent to a space station situated over the mysterious
> Solaris Ocean. The two other scientists there tell the psychologist of
> strange occurrences in the station, and the Ocean's eerie ability to
> materialize their thoughts. After being in the station for a while, the
> psychologist finds himself becoming very attached to it's alternate
> reality...

After a short while at the station, Kris meets an apparition of his late wife, who had committed suicide after he left her. She is very much flesh and blood. They watch a film from his childhood that he had brought with from earth. In the film, there are images of Kris' mother in a fur coat.


In KRIS' cabin: KHARI watching herself in a mirror.

KHARI
I don't even know my own self. Who am I? As soon as I close my eyes I can't recall what my face looks like. Can you?

KRIS
What?

KHARI
Do you know who you are?

KRIS
Yes, all humans do.

KHARI
Ah... (pause) That woman in the fur coat, she hated me.

KRIS
That's your imagination. That woman died long ago, before we even met.

KHARI
I remember her very clearly. What makes you deny it? I tell you I do remember. I came over for tea, and she told me to leave the house. So I left at once, I remember it very well. And what happened after that?

KRIS
After that I went away and that was the last time we ever saw each other.

KHARI
Where did you go?

KRIS
To another city.

KHARI
Why?

KRIS
I was transferred.

KHARI
But why didn't you take me with you?

KRIS
It was you who refused to come.

KHARI
Ah... Yes, now I remember.


The issue of "Khari"'s true identity is further complicated as the head scientist of the station, Dr. Sartorius, demonstrate that she does not have blood in her veins, and that can not be killed. He is propagating bombarding the planet, as that must be the source of the cosmonauts' delusions. Kris, who originally championed the same solution to the problem of Solaris, now has second thoughts. Nothing Sartorius says can alter the fact the he loves his wife.

Dr. Snaut, the third cosmonaut on the station, has invited his colleague to his birthday party, to be held in the library, the only space in the station without windows. It is decorated with all sorts of contraptions of European High Culture. Kris brings Khari to the festivities, which Dr. Sartorius does not approve of. Dr. Snaut recommends Kris not to worry about the bookkeeping of science, but rather to delve in texts that will provide understanding, such as Don Quixote. He opens the book in front of Kris and Khari, and quotes from Sancos Pancha's Ode to Sleep:


Senor, I know only one thing, and this is when I... (pause) and that is when I sleep I know no sadness, no fear, no hope, no blessing, no work. Praise be the gentle sleep's creator. That currency [...] has only one defect for it lacks too much of death.


Dr. Sartorius reminds Kris that he is a scientist, and that that entails certain obligatory relations to objects of observation:


In the library.

DR. SARTORIUS
At least I know why I'm here. I am here to work. Nature created man so that he might gain knowledge. (Slams his hand holding his glasses in the table so the glasses fall out of their frame. Continues calmly.) In his ceaseless march to truth man is condemned to knowledge. The rest is of no consequence. (pause) If you will permit me to inquire about a colleague, exactly what are you doing on Solaris?

KRIS
What a question.

DR. SARTORIUS
It can't be your work that brought you here. Except for your trust with your ex-spouse absolutely nothing here seems to interest you. Your time is spent in bed discussing scientific ideals. And I'm supposed to appreciate the great job you're doing. I fear you've lost contact with reality. If you ask me you're plain lazy.

KRIS
Oh, stop it.


This scene is followed by a confrontation between Dr. Sartorius and Khari and the exchange of some harsh words:


KHARI
I'm not finished. I'm a woman! Treat me with consideration.

DR. SARTORIUS
Woman? How can you say that? You're not even a human being. Try to understand that, if in some way you are capable of understanding. KHARI is dead. She doesn't exist. As for you, you're only a reproduction, a mechanical repetition of the form, a copy from a matrix.

KHARI
Yes. Perhaps, yes. But I... I have become a human being. I can feel just as deeply as any of you, and I feel pain.


Notions

  • How we imagine the future is structured by the genre of future (cf. software companies' etc. scenarios of "the future", Sid Meyer's Civilization prominently; the dependecy of Luc Besson's Fifth Element on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner etc.).

  • We know what we're coming from by not where we're going. (Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.)

  • On teaching Aristotle's Ars Poetica: In some elementary textbooks it is the claimed that we can imagine all sorts of odd curves in a drama (i.e., that the drama doesn't have to be structured as exposition, increasing tension, crisis, decreasing tension, climax/catastrophe, but that the order may be different or some other such change). In other words, these books are inventing Aristotle. But what's the purpose of the curve? It is as if these textbooks assume (with Boileu) that it was a prescriptive tool?