Moving in Slow Motion
I want to start with three anecdotes, and then move into the more formal part of this presentation. Douglas has asked me to launch our discussion and so with that in mind I have tried to construct some rather broad comments, and to cover just a few of the concerns that have interested me since we last met. They all involve some idea of motion.
Rodin and Motion. Rodin makes his comments in the midst of the invention of motion pictures, in France, in the last part of the nineteenth century. I like his comments not just because they run counter to the common-sense notions of motion pictures and what makes them move. But more than that, Rodin himself is so wonderfully spiritual in his work - witness an entire exhibition in 2002 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on Rodin's bronzes, titled "God's Hands."
The sculptor Paul Gsell questions Rodin about his "Age of Bronze" and "St.John the Baptist." Gsell asks: "I am still left wondering how those great lumps of bronze or stone actually seem to move, how obviously immobile figures appear to act and even to be making pretty strenuous efforts... ."
Rodin answers: "Have you ever looked closely at instantaneous photographs of men in motion? Well then, what have you noticed?"
"That they never seem to be making headway. Generally, they seem to be standing still on one leg, or hopping."
"Exactly! Take my `St. John,' for example. I've shown him with both feet on the ground, whereas an instantaneous photograph taken of a model performing the same movement would most likely show the back foot already raised and moving forward. Or else the reverse - the front foot would not yet be on the ground if the back leg in the photograph were in the same position as in my statue. That is precisely why the model in the photograph would have the bizarre look of a man suddenly struck with paralysis. Which confirms what I was just saying about movement in art. People in photographs suddenly seem frozen in mid-air, despite being caught in full swing: This is because every part of their body is reproduced at exactly the same twentieth or fortieth of a second, so there is no gradual unfolding of a gesture, as there is in art."
Gsell counters: "So, when art interprets movement and finds itself completely at loggerheads with photography, which is an unimpeachable mechanical witness, art obviously distorts the truth."
"No. It is art that tells the truth and photography that lies. For in reality, time does not stand still, and if the artist manages to give the impression that a gesture is being executed over several seconds, their work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image in which time is abruptly suspended."
The End of Nature. An acquaintance, Bill McKibben, who writes about nature, tells the following story. By the way, McKibben is the person who wrote the book about watching television for one month solid, some eighteen hours a day, and what effect that had on him and on his family, on his sense of looking once he ventured outside again. His reaction is in some ways incorporated in his story about taking a group of eight or nine elementary school children from Maine out on a nature walk.
After about thirty minutes on their outing, the students started complaining and wanted to go back home. McKibben wanted to know why. They told him that they were bored. There was nothing to do, they whined, nothing was happening.
McKibben then asked them to sit down on the ground, and to get very still. He then made them look between the leaves of grass. Look, he said, everything is happening. There, hidden in the tufts of grass, all kinds of creatures were moving about. But the students had gotten their nature from the Nature Channel, where movement involved a mongoose doing battle with some monster snake, or four tigers fighting over a game animal. They needed gross examples of action.
Hitchcock's Actors. This third anecdote is about as unscientific as anyone could imagine, since it comes from me. I teach a class on the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Most of the films I show come from the fifties - "Strangers on a Train," "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "North by Northwest," and so on. Many of them are in black and white. They have very little action. The sound is sometimes brittle. While my students gradually come to like these films, especially as final examination time approaches, they all agree that they would bomb today. They lacked any real action - that was their almost universal complaint. They even asked me if people moved more slowly back then, if they walked and talked more slowly. My students had to learn to have patience and to look - steadily and deliberately - for an extended period of time at images. They had to learn to listen more intently.
Now, let me move to the more formal part of my presentation; and naturally I hope to make a connection with my three anecdotes. I begin with two notes of warning. First, there are many things we might discuss this morning. At our last consulta- tion, some three or four years ago, we took up the very pressing and very shocking question: Can childhood survive? (We even tried to define the characteristics of childhood by listing them on the blackboard, to find out if there still was such a thing called childhood.) We had the inclination, no, the luxury to ask that question, without thinking of it as ironic or the slightest bit amusing. Since that time, terrorism and war, a perpetual state of war, has gobbled up our time and placed our imag- inations, as if in some kind of Guantanamo Bay, under arrest. Since we last met, the stock market has plummeted, a number of CEOs have been indicted or jailed for financial indiscretions, ditto certain priests for sexual indiscretions, unemployment rates are up, basic civil rights have been curtailed, the government budget surplus has disappeared, retirement accounts for many have gone up in a cloud of greed. It's war with Iraq, no, with North Korea. It's terrorism every time we turn around: explosions, snipers, suicide bombers. In the midst of all this current tumult and angst, how laughable, how refreshingly innocent, Y2K seems. As the twenty-first century nears the end of its second year, people seem fatigued - even exhausted.
A ray of hope for me: The other day on my Pacifica radio station, I heard that young woman, Julia Butterfly Hill, who took up residence 200 feet above the ground in a giant Sequoia tree to oppose clear-cut logging in the state of Washington. She was telling an audience of college students about her impulse. Look, she said, we can't drink the water, we can't eat the food, we can't swim in a whole lot of the oceans, or eat much of the fish. Bio-tech has even ruined the soybeans. Bush will not do anything about the poor and the homeless, or about logging, she went on, or about our total dependence on fossil fuels. You want change? We have to do it ourselves. There must be a revolution of young people, she charged, who take the reins of power and help to steer the world from a land of aggression to a place of peace. She is young, she can be easily written off; but there she is, at the end of the second year of the twenty-first century, tired but far from being bushed, exhorting her young friends to "read" the world anew. Sitting perfectly still in a tree, she helped start a small movement.
I ask you to imagine just how many tablets of Ritalin have been consumed by youngsters in elementary schools since we last met, designed to keep them sitting still; how many doses of Ecstasy have been ingested, how much alcohol downed, and how many attempts at suicide since our last meeting. How many young people have been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, or some other learning disability. The numbers must be colossal. I don't have the exact figures. Not that it would much matter. I can tell you that since we last met, for the first time in our nation's history, more young black males sit behind prison bars than behind college desks. America has over five million young adult offenders - black and white and Chicano - either in jail, in probation camps, detention centers, or prisons. Add to that list those awaiting sentencing, or those who are out on probation or parole, and the number reaches almost 9 million. The average reading level for those incarcerated young people, whose ages range anywhere from fourteen to 22, is about the fourth grade. The recidivism rate hovers around 70% nationally. (The more education, by the way, the lower the rate.)
I started a literacy program in one of those probation camps; I teach in one of those camps, and let me tell you it is not a pretty picture, and those young people know it. They feel on the whole quite helpless. According to a 2002 Harvard study, completed fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education, which purportedly put an end to "separate but equal," the majority of black youngsters in this country still attend segregated schools. The study found the most severe de facto segregation in schools in New York City.
In this country, prevention is the rule, incarceration is the way. Parents, out of fear, I believe, out of a desperate fear that the world will pass their children by, want their sons and daughters to take up residence behind a screen in kindergarten, if not before (after all, computer technology falls from the top of the line to the bottom of the heap in a matter of a few short months). Reading problems? Put those kids on a computer. Learning disabilities? Our college utilizes some five or six programs to fix the students' problems. Maybe they work. I have not seen any positive results.
Given the state of the world, of this nation, parents can care about their children only in what they perceive as the most protective, safest ways possible. Who can blame them? Parents are on perpetual red alert. Safety, no matter where we locate it - at an airport, at schools, around office buildings, the Pentagon - is defined by the experts through technology: metal detectors, retinal identification, PIN numbers, X-ray photos, magnometers, card keys, scanners, and on and on. Technology saved us in the nineties in the stock market; it certainly can hold those terrorists at bay, and it sure as hell will keep guns and knives out of our schools. I cannot fault parents for reaching for what appears to be the least porous solution to any problem. But I can doubt its efficacy. Like most institutional solutions, at some point they become counterproductive, leading me to wonder if young people do not actually experience a rush of adrenalin entering school these days; if they do not actually thrill to the danger of crossing the threshold, in passing through the metal detector - who will get caught this morning; who will beat the system?
My second warning: I am an historian, an historian of a peculiar land. What interests me, as some of you know, is the strange career that ideas trace over broad swaths of time. I think of myself as an historian of "mental spaces." How does cognition within orality, for instance, differ from that within literacy? This morning, in our consultation about children, about reading, about early reading, I want to take up what at first glance may not seem related to our subject. I think it is absolutely germane. In the context of this weekend's subject, and keeping my three anecdotes in mind, I am interested in looking at the extreme edge of movement, a contemporary brand of movement that technology has whipped into a frenzy, and that the media choose - love - to call excitement.
Let me first say something about the oddity of the word, and why I have settled on it. "Excite" derives from the Latin excitare, to awaken, to call forth, instigate, set in motion. The word has no antecedent in Anglo-Saxon, appearing in English for the first time in the fourteenth century as a decidedly religious term expressed in a grammar of mystical proportions: "The singing of the psalms excites the angels to our help." The angels get sung into being. They wing our way on a melody of our making. From that early use of the word, as a verb, "excite" gets taken over by the scientific revolution and turned into a noun, "excitation," to describe a state of electrical or magnetic alertness (as in phrases like "the air was downright electric," or "excitement is in the air").
Through analogy, the word moves, in the seventeenth century, to physiology. First used by Shakespeare, "excitement" carries overtones of a vibrating, aberrant behavior. It is Hamlet who first utters the word in this new sense, in Act IV, Scene 4 of his play: "A father killed, a mother stained. Excitements of my reason, and my blood."
That line complements (in the sense of completing) his famous "to be or not to be" speech - the soliloquy in which Hamlet tries to decide what it means to be human, what it means to act. Or, perhaps more precisely, how to act. In his madness, or feigned madness, things visit him, events bombard him; he has visitations, perhaps from angels, perhaps from demons. They may be the same - that's his fear. He is frightened, desperately aware of needing to do something, but awkwardly frozen in place. He cannot move, but he is fully ready to move. Hamlet, like a filament in a light bulb, has passed into a state of excitation: to be and not to be at the very same time. He is still, in the dual sense of that word: no movement, quiet - and all movement: "are you still doing that?"
The "to be or not to be" speech, for me, is less an exploration of suicide and more an exquisite rendering of a state of pure potential, where anything (or everything) is continually possible. It's neither action nor inaction, but the sheer tingling excite- ment of being alive - with all of its attendant problems and possibilities, fears and failures - a twinning of the character into Hamlet and Hamlet's self. But that moment in the word's history fades fast. Who can sustain such demanding excitement? By the nineteenth century, physicians use "excitement" to denote a state of abnormal activity, a pathology, in any organ.
In the modern sense, Hamlet is turned on, just as excitement promises to turn us all on. We are not passive agents in the face of it. We invoke it. Does Hamlet like the state of excitement? I do not know. Clearly, he helps to bring it on. He certainly feels alive, so alive, so electrically charged, that he cannot stand it. Contrary to most interpretations that Hamlet feels dead and emasculated, I say he feels too much alive. He lives in that liminal state suspended between being and non-being, alive at an emotional midnight hour. I know that at least some of us in the room have experienced that state, reading a great writer's sentences and having to drop the book, not out of regret or repulsion, but because the pages just take our breath away and we need for the moment to stop.
The soliloquy suggests a Hamlet beside himself, one who stands outside himself talking to his self. Hamlet more than feels. In his immobilized state, he is finding his deepest emotion. I do not say this to make cute etymological distinctions. "Emotion" had not even entered the language when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet; it came as late as 1692, in a book by the political philosopher John Locke, entitled On Education.
It is a curious word, "emotion," distant cousin to excitement. Feelings need proximity; the idea inheres in the word itself ("I'm feeling bad; I'm feeling badly"). But emotions need no such intimacy to set them spinning and churning. I can be touched from great distances. I can be moved without being physically touched. Emotion grows out of an internal motion. Likewise, emotion causes motion, it moves me to action. To be touched carries two meanings; to be moved carries two meanings. None of this can happen without a highly active imagination, a rich, deep, interior life.
Excitement operates differently from emotion. Excitement arrives as both stimulation and emotion - one undifferentiated charge, a loud "wow" - a "rush," young people call it. It comes in such a powerful, massive way, it's difficult for a person, especially a young person, to have any nuanced emotional response. When we are young, emotion requires absolute motion. Learning to stand up, to walk, literally turns into a trip. Slightly later for young people, excitement means going somewhere, some amusement park, for instance, where, because of the rides, parks become perpetual-motion machines.
Again, I am sorry for the long drawn-out prologue. I wanted to show something of the journey that excitement took from its earliest religious incarna tion, to its disturbing enfleshment in the seventeenth century, to all forms of contemporary entertainment - fast action, nastily violent entertainment. These days, judging from popular entertainment, killing, car chases, boat and plane crashes, mayhem and torture are all exciting. Fear Factor, Survivor, Extreme Games -anything is fair game that brings people to the brink, to the clear expectation that something gruesome and bloody just might, with a little luck, fill the totality of whatever screen they happen to be watching - and perhaps spill over into so-called real life. The titillation of disaster (how many times an hour did the Twin Towers collapse the day and evening of September 11, 2001?) - triggers in us an excitation. Of course the Twin Towers and even the White House had already been blown into smithereens long before 9/11 in high-powered films like "Independence Day." "High-powered" is a phrase used to describe a wide range of things: rifles, cars, alcohol, armaments, football teams, espresso, and hot sauce.
In the Middle Ages people invoked excitement - they called it forward, controlled it - by singingthe psalms. Nowadays, we push a button, flip a switch, swallow a pill, inject a needle, to have it pay a visit - and the age of the user seems to matter less and less. The images come flying relentlessly by the hundreds and thousands. The imagination becomes a warehouse for storing, rather than an instrument for conjuring. One has to shake off the rush of stimulated reality. It's hard to return to a world washed clean of special effects. The images linger from the electronic realm, the emotions still stirred, demanding some discharge.
Elsewhere, I have argued for the imagination as the ultimate prophylaxis against the relentlessness of electronic technology. At a certain moment, a young person must put down the mouse and pick up his own judgment. He or she must start thinking. Even with the most sophisticated programs, one must ask, "What do I want to do?" Not "What can the machine accomplish?" but "What do I want?"
I have also argued that the best, most strenuous exercise of the imagination comes through reading. But reading is slow and cumbersome; it lacks the pizzazz of thrill rides, extreme sports and video games. Open a page: everything's flat and utterly still. The words do not move. If anything moves, it's the reader. Just watch kids fidget when they read; they read and rock, like Hassidic Jews praying in shul. Anthropologists call it a psycho-motor response to the written word. Kids love to move; they need to. It's in their bodies that they find the rhythm of prose. After all, the music's called rock'n'roll, hip hop. (The meter of poetry is divided into feet, and those feet derive their names from dance steps.)
But the great, important movement remains out of view, invisible, acted out in the mind's eye, or played out in the mind's living room, rumpus room or gymnasium. The reason so many novels, poems and fairy tales involve pilgrimages, voyages and road trips - from Chaucer to Kerouac - is that movement means that time has passed and elapsed time implies change, emotional change, one of the hardest things to dramatize. We see Huck as a different boy at the end of his drift down the Mississippi - he thinks differently, he feels different. He knows it. He wants more. He cannot get any bigger without lighting out for the territory. Immensity is all. America's the place to grow. It always has been.
Listen to the metaphors we use to capture the nature of thought: I came to this decision, I arrived at this conclusion, let me walk you through this argument. They all circumscribe space. In the Renaissance, people devised mnemonic tricks as memory aids. The favorite one involved making the inside of one's head into a house, dividing it into rooms, and placing objects from a list that one wished to memorize in those rooms. To recall the list, one merely walked through each room and recollected the objects. Three hundred years ago, people played with interior space. They felt so familiar with it they used it as a form of entertainment.
When a thirteen-year-old girl with the code name Genie arrived at the DPSS Office (Department of Social Services) in Monrovia, California, in 1977, she walked with her hands in front of her face. Her father had kept her locked in her room twenty-four hours a day, strapped to her potty seat during the day, and to her bed at night. She had no language; she had no depth perception. Kasper Hauser, too, without language, experienced the world in two dimensions. The world, he said, looked like someone had tossed buckets of colored paint against a wall. Think about diagramming sentences - grammar suspends sentences in space. A distance
separates subject from verb from object. Farther out there, barely visible from where we stand at the subject end of the sentence, waits the lonely, dependent object.
In that space, thoughts move. In that space, ideas work themselves out. That mentalized, interiorized space gets generated in the act of silent reading. "Silent" of course misstates the case, because internalized vocalization excites images in just the way psalms excite angels. Why not think of angels and images as similar: messengers from another world. I set my ideas in motion through excitement.
Excitement gets me going.
Excitement is movement. Movement, motion, emotion requires an excitation. For me, this occurs most powerfully in reading. As a preparation for entertaining an entire range of emotions, young people get their training in stories that they hear out loud, in making them up themselves, in being read to out loud, in reading aloud to themselves, in reading silently, and finally in writing their own stories. Wordsworth's walking, talking ramble with his sister Dorothy in his poem "The Prelude" has the same spatial, mobile, emotional charge as Dante's circular stroll on his way to Paradise. Emerson walks his talk in his famous essay "Walking." One space - interior - maps on to another - exterior.
Against a backdrop of moving pictures, pulsing pixels, and streaming videos, the word "reading" sounds terribly old-fashioned and creaky. The book moves in the way Rodin wants his sculptures to move. We, as readers, make the letters dance. But try to explain that to a youngster. What to do? For it's in reading that I'm convinced young people learn not just to exert some control over their world, but to reshape it, as well. I want to conjure something better, more hopeful, than "The Terminator." I want to imagine something better than terror versus anti-terror. The world is not good guys versus bad guys.
Manufactured, packaged and processed, technologically-driven excitement is corrosive to lived experience. It has helped to eradicate the wonderful possibilities of the everyday and the mundane - the ordinary objects and events of daily life. Now more than ever, we need poets to show us the charge of the quotidian, the everyday, as Richard Wilbur does so magnificently in his poem, "Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World." Wilbur is writing about the sudden explosion of beauty in, of all things, a clothesline with the morning wash flapping in the wind. It is the excitation of love - the sheer thrill of being alive - that interests Wilbur and transforms the most mundane of activities into the most magical of moments:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in
blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;
Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence,
moving
And staying like white water; and now of a
sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks.
From all that it is about to
remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but
laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and
colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and
rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of
thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
Keeping their difficult balance."
The new velocity of narration, story-telling as a triple-X, extreme event, is not only wiping out the everyday, it has kidnapped the world of orality. Young people are sleepwalking -deprived of the regularity of breathing and the phenomenology of seeing which orality so powerfully promotes. Speaking, conversation, storytelling, creep at a petty pace; events repeat themselves, double back on themselves. Events exist and do not exist, they're true and not true -they troop about in a dreamy state. Young people now expect the world to resemble in sight and sound a game of Doom or Sniper; or, perhaps, knowing that it cannot, find this world a pale facsimile compared with the special-effects versions that the media offer. The world and its copy have traded places - the simulation more powerful than the actual.
Excitement has replaced the richness of interior space. Excitement is an internalized thrill ride and works best when the self has been weakened. Coleridge's use of the supernatural demanded, he said, the willing suspension of disbelief; excitement requires no act so deliberate -willingness and suspension both beside the point.
In the past, I have argued that young people, neither oral nor literate, must be taken out of their illiterate limbos and brought back to orality to start all over from the beginning. Now, I believe it's important to pull young people away from their world of virtual movement and bring them back into that interior space where motion and emotion begin their journey. I did not ask, near the beginning of this morning's talk, how many Big Macs, Biggie Fries, and Super-Size Cokes youngsters have gobbled and gulped since we last met. The amount has to be staggering, not just in number, but in calorie counts, as well. How can they not grow fatter and fatter, consuming huge amounts of calories with the impression, the illusion, that they have gone through great activity and movement by watching it happen on the screen. While the
movement may be virtual, the obesity is shockingly real. Is it possible that living in the virtual, electronic world of heavy-duty excitement, creates the illusion that one needs more fuel?
Let us substitute one kind of orality - consuming - for another kind, one where youngsters practice their sense of timing, their sense of humor, where they can learn to love the power of a few words, a quip, a couple of well-turned sentences, an image - where they come face to face with the thrill of language; all this oral activity in anticipation, in preparation, for reading and writing. (It's in that oral state that interior space gets nurtured, before young people come into a fuller and more mature state in literacy.)
This is dangerous stuff, this culture of excitement. It may even have eroded some important elements in adult life. For we seem to have lost the ability to understand or comprehend any more the most aggressive and all-consuming form of action and movement: war itself. It's too remote, too highly technologized, and, for the most part, too clean. We know war best when something goes wrong, and then only for a flash. And only as an adjunct - something called collateral damage. But more than that, I fear, the declaration of war may be just another one of those things, among scores of others, like wild movies, super-fast cars, high octane fuel, that keeps the air electric with excitement.
Books cannot compete with B-52 bombers or the box office. But taking our students, no matter their age, back to a state of orality, to the free and easy, sheer pleasurable dance of words, as Ezra Pound calls it - logopoeia - can open the door to one of the most exciting realms any person can enter. For literacy always begins with orality. What a strange state of affairs, that the perfect, fortified defense against outright attacks of virtual, exciting violence should find its match in the most basic, evanescent, precious, most invisible and, at the same time, most actual stuff - human breath.