Electric Soup

Well, I also like to refer to computers as boxes of water, so don't worry about the title of this post. Hopefully it will become clearer after you read this and after we have discussed Media Studies, McLuhan et al, etc.

As noted in the preceding post, we've covered the Liberal and Fine Arts in one and a half weeks --not bad! Nah, with a tipping of the proverbial hat to Michael Apple we have uncovered the Liberal and Fine Arts in one and a half weeks. Once uncovered, these grand edifices reveal themselves to be settings or stages for different forms of conversation to take place. But what it the point? In part, as in the Scheherazade story, the aim is to keep the conversation going! In part, as in the life of Socrates, the point is to keep the conversation going because in conversation nothing less than Truth itself is revealed. Uncovering just begins the process.

The Scheherazade story may be doubly important to us because it concerns storytelling as well as keeping a conversation going. I'll quote below part of the Wikipedia entry on the story for those unfamiliar with it:

"The frame tale goes that every day Shahryar (Persian: شهريار or "king") would marry a new virgin, and every day he would send yesterday's wife to be beheaded. This was done in anger, having found out that his first wife was betraying him. He had killed three thousand such women by the time he was introduced to Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter.

In Sir Richard F. Burton's translation of The Nights, Shahrazad was described in this way:

"[Shahrazad] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred."

Against her father's protestations, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the King. Once in the King's chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, Dinazade, who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The King lay awake and listened with awe as Scheherazade told her first story. The night whiled away, and Scheherazade stopped in the middle of the story. The King asked her to finish, but Scheherazade said there was not time, as dawn was breaking. So, the King spared her life for one day to finish the story the next night. So the next night, Scheherazade finished the story, and then began a second, even more exciting tale which she again stopped halfway through, at dawn. So the King again spared her life for one day to finish the second story.

And so the King kept Scheherazade alive day by day, as he eagerly anticipated the finishing of last night's story. At the end of one thousand and one nights, and one thousand stories, Scheherazade told the King that she had no more tales to tell him. During these one thousand and one nights, the King had fallen in love with Scheherazade, and had had three sons with her. So, having been made a wiser and kinder man by Scheherazade and her tales, he spared her life, and made her his Queen."

One possible moral to the Scheherazade story is that as long as people are talking, as long as the conversation is going forward, no physical violence is taking place. This would apply directly, for example, to diplomacy but it also has more subtle forms: as long as people are talking (whether its about what's for lunch or what the boundaries should be) there is no war. Or, in the then-trendy parlance of child-raising advice, when my kids were toddlers the oft-repeated mantra was "use your words." :) Perhaps one could speculate as well that on the purely plus or positive side, conversation may also be an ounce of prevention in relation to the ills of violence.

Macomber would I think have had a lot of wonderful things to say about the Scheherazade story, since it combines conversation, a focus on life itself, and eros. Speakin' again of Dr. M., one of my favorite passages in Plato's Symposium occurs right at the beginning of the dialogue. It recounts a conversation between Socrates and Aristodemus, and concerns the overarching value and importance of just keeping the conversation going; everything else will just takes its rightful place:


"He [Aristodemus] said that he met Socrates fresh from the bath and sandalled; and as the sight of the sandals was unusual [Socrates was known for bare-footedness], he asked him whither he was going that he had been converted into such a beau:-

To a banquet at Agathon's, he replied, whose invitation to his sacrifice of victory I refused yesterday, fearing a crowd, but promising that I would come to-day instead; and so I have put on my finery, because he is such a fine man. What say you to going with me unasked?

I will do as you bid me, I replied.

Follow then, he said, and let us demolish the proverb: "To the feasts of inferior men the good unbidden go"; instead of which our proverb will run:- "To the feasts of the good the good unbidden go"; and this alteration may be supported by the authority of Homer himself, who not only demolishes but literally outrages the proverb. For, after picturing Agamemnon as the most valiant of men, he makes Menelaus, who is but a fainthearted warrior, come unbidden to the banquet of Agamemnon, who is feasting and offering sacrifices, not the better to the worse, but the worse to the better.

I rather fear, Socrates, said Aristodemus, lest this may still be my case; and that, like Menelaus in Homer, I shall be the inferior person, who "To the feasts of the wise unbidden goes". But I shall say that I was bidden of you, and then you will have to make an excuse.

Two going together, he [Socrates] replied, in Homeric fashion, one or other of them may invent an excuse by the way.

This was the style of their conversation as they went along. Socrates dropped behind in a fit of abstraction, and desired Aristodemus, who was waiting, to go on before him. When he reached the house of Agathon he found the doors wide open, and a comical thing happened. A servant coming out met him, and led him at once into the banqueting-hall in which the guests were reclining, for the banquet was about to begin. Welcome, Aristodemus, said Agathon, as soon as he appeared-you are just in time to sup with us; if you come on any other matter put it off, and make one of us, as I was looking for you yesterday and meant to have asked you, if I could have found you."

The key line for me is "Two going together, one or other of them may invent an excuse by the way." In my read or interpretation Socrates is pointing out that the conversation itself is what matters, not the party, so everything will turn out fine if they just proceed together, talking and walking. One will invent an excuse as to what they'll say about Aristodemus arriving uninvited, but whether or not the excuse will be granted doesn't really matter either. Turning around and walking back to town together would be just fine, too. Kind of puts it all in perspective for me.

So, arguably, thus far in our class we've uncovered the importance of conversation. Now the task is just to keep the conversation going, keeping the conversational campfire burning by adding to it. The other purposes of college? We'll invent an excuse for those :)

We'll have a chance to review and discuss the lists we created of the 'elements' or 'ingredients' of a good conversation. So we'll continue our conversation about conversation just a bit in this way.

I'll also introduce or reiterate the whammy alignment of conversation, media, and electricity. They are all in-between, in-the-middle, connection-powered, and ontologically difficult to pin-down so to speak. We tend to see 'things' not the connections between things. Yet what is more important to us than relationships? Why is it that it seems difficult for us to stay focused on what really matters, even when its obvious?

Well, there are various stories to tell that might account for this. We could tell a story about our culture's objectve notion of truth, for example (and note that objective has the word object embedded in it) so we are already predisposed to see objects or things rather than the relationships between or among things. I mentioned this in regard to Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in which she includes an uncanny exercise in which drawing everything but the object itself (in other words drawing all of the spatial relationships around and within an object results, voila, in a drawing of an object. I also mentioned this in relation to Thich Nhat Hahn's zen exercise of noting that literally everything is present in a piece of paper other than paper itself. It's all in the relationships.

There are exceptions to our focus on objects rather than relationshps --the green or ecology movement, for example, calls attention to relationships, but here too we have to consider how much resistance and marginalization occurs in regard to such movements.

So I want us to consider and talk about a collection of 'in-the-middles' entities including conversation, media, and electricity --and how these all tend to be seen as non-entities (and thereby marginalized).

Here are a few slides I used in class to try to convey the importance of in-betweens:



I also want us to talk about the Fine Arts in particular the aesthetic way of knowing as perhaps situated in-between spirituality and intellect, in the realm of emotion mainly, and about the conversation with the self and others that constitutes Art being in some ways focused on emotion. Art connects us to ourselves, to others, to humanity, to the beauty of life. We sometimes say that Art moves us, and this is an emotional term that may refer more precisely to moving us into relationship (again with ourselves, with others -- i.e., we now in some ways know Hugh and Mark Everett and something about ourselves possibly as well from having viewed the Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives story). So Art may be aligned in particularly strong ways with the other in-betweens. This perhaps calls for a sound bite: Art is electric, baby! If electric, then it is also the glue that holds stories --and/or any form of artwork-- together. What would the Parallel Worlds story have been without the father-son relationship and its inevitable emotional resonance? For me it probably wouldn't have 'held together' as a story, at least not nearly as well as it did. I mean the concepts and so forth are interesting in themselves, but the holding power of the story for me was in the relationship line.

AND I have located this fantastic video of an MIT professor talking about electricity as a glue --"which holds the world together" (well okay, along with gravity in some cases :) By the way this MIT prof is having a great conversation with nature, and he lets us in on it. Also, BTW and/or FYI, in regard to my including science stuff in DMA, this is itself indicative of the interconnected, relationship-based age we live in.

Yours is the first generation to practice interconnectivity. Please keep talking on the internet. Please keep producing and posting content on the internet. (Don't do any of these things while driving, though). Your concrete experience may help provide a basis one day for greater, and much needed, attention to be paid to the relationship, interconnections, and other in-betweens.