Just about everybody has had a powerful, subjective experience -- say, an automobile accident or illness -- and then been crushed by the indifference of their listeners. Usually the listener starts squirming away in just a few seconds, even if they know you quite well.
And yet I persist in using odd, and rather subjective, experiences as the starting points of personal essays. It still seems like a good idea, as long as I move briskly away from the anecdote to seek out the more General.
The oddest such experience of recent days was getting a glimpse into the world underneath a Quartzsite RV dump. The winter sun is low in the desert. It almost glistens off the desert pavement. The air is chilly. The desert seems so clean: no bugs or creepie-crawlies. Perhaps that is what made the experience memorable: first, surprise; and thirdly, the contrast with the world above ground. And 'secondly'? Ahh yes...
It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. You think you see something, but you aren't sure. During that time, the Imagination runs riot. This is the origin of a human's appreciation of so many things: religion, poetry, metaphysics, hope during revolutions, fears about the future consequences of important decisions we are making at the time.
Recall your Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful:
1. Children playing, and sometimes doing nasty little things because they 'fly under the radar screen' of the adult world.
2. The great appeal of gangster movies, gunslinger cowboys, or pirates.
3. The shadowy truth that lurks under the trivial chirpiness of normal, socially acceptable conversation. Important things lie hidden, like the proverbial iceberg.
4. 'The rest of the story' about that used car, after listening to the 'positive thinking' of the salesman.
5. The rest of the story about so many things. The politician yammers endlessly, but what is the real angle? What are they really trying to pull off? Who is pulling the strings behind the scenes?
6. You've just had a great piece of luck, or a great success. What ironic disaster is setting up in the background...right then... to nail you a year later?
I've gradually learned to appreciate classic visual representations of ideas. Creating these opportunities is what a real photographer should do. I got a chance to enjoy a classic image of the Underworld for the first time: the famous scene from the "Creature from the Black Lagoon." The camera was under the water, looking up at a beautiful girl swimming. The commentary track mentioned that the girl was a body double (stand-in) for Julie Adams.
Why they would need a body-double or an anything-double for Julie Adams, I cannot fathom. Perhaps she wasn't a good swimmer.
The camera showed the Creature swimming up to the girl on top, while imitating her swimming stroke, and getting closer...and closer. Remember that they were wearing three-dimensional glasses in the movie theaters at that time.
The last classic image of the Underworld, I can not show you, and wouldn't even if I could. Much of the action of Carol Reed's "The Third Man", a film noir classic, takes place chasing through the underground sewers of Vienna. At the end of the movie, one of the characters is shot in those sewers just before he could escape. His fingers reach up through the sewer grate, wiggling, weakening, like dying worms.
And yet I persist in using odd, and rather subjective, experiences as the starting points of personal essays. It still seems like a good idea, as long as I move briskly away from the anecdote to seek out the more General.
The oddest such experience of recent days was getting a glimpse into the world underneath a Quartzsite RV dump. The winter sun is low in the desert. It almost glistens off the desert pavement. The air is chilly. The desert seems so clean: no bugs or creepie-crawlies. Perhaps that is what made the experience memorable: first, surprise; and thirdly, the contrast with the world above ground. And 'secondly'? Ahh yes...
It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. You think you see something, but you aren't sure. During that time, the Imagination runs riot. This is the origin of a human's appreciation of so many things: religion, poetry, metaphysics, hope during revolutions, fears about the future consequences of important decisions we are making at the time.
Recall your Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful:
"In reality a great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions, as it is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever."The idea of a shadowy netherworld is quite universal. It manifests itself in so many ways:
"A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea."
“Whatever is fitted to excite the ideas of pain and danger, whatever is terrible, is a source of the sublime; that is, it produces the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling."
1. Children playing, and sometimes doing nasty little things because they 'fly under the radar screen' of the adult world.
2. The great appeal of gangster movies, gunslinger cowboys, or pirates.
3. The shadowy truth that lurks under the trivial chirpiness of normal, socially acceptable conversation. Important things lie hidden, like the proverbial iceberg.
4. 'The rest of the story' about that used car, after listening to the 'positive thinking' of the salesman.
5. The rest of the story about so many things. The politician yammers endlessly, but what is the real angle? What are they really trying to pull off? Who is pulling the strings behind the scenes?
6. You've just had a great piece of luck, or a great success. What ironic disaster is setting up in the background...right then... to nail you a year later?
I've gradually learned to appreciate classic visual representations of ideas. Creating these opportunities is what a real photographer should do. I got a chance to enjoy a classic image of the Underworld for the first time: the famous scene from the "Creature from the Black Lagoon." The camera was under the water, looking up at a beautiful girl swimming. The commentary track mentioned that the girl was a body double (stand-in) for Julie Adams.
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| Julie Adams, from IMDB.com |
The camera showed the Creature swimming up to the girl on top, while imitating her swimming stroke, and getting closer...and closer. Remember that they were wearing three-dimensional glasses in the movie theaters at that time.
The last classic image of the Underworld, I can not show you, and wouldn't even if I could. Much of the action of Carol Reed's "The Third Man", a film noir classic, takes place chasing through the underground sewers of Vienna. At the end of the movie, one of the characters is shot in those sewers just before he could escape. His fingers reach up through the sewer grate, wiggling, weakening, like dying worms.
Comments
Here's a good description and I like it because it refers to American literature which i think you will appreciate and it describes the psychological shadow. This is from a book by Robert Bly called "A Little Book on the Human Shadow", p. 63. He explains well how the human shadow is formed largely through culture and then how this shadow reveals itself through literature. This allows it to be palatable (entertaining, removed, safe) at the same time it exposes it and brings it into awareness.
(quote)The literature of the American earth is many thousands of years old, and its rhythms are still rising from the serpents buried in Ohio, from the shells the Yakuts ate of and threw to the side. The literature of the American nation is only two hundred years old. How much of the darkness from under the earth has risen into poems and stories in that time?
All literature, both of the primitive and the modern peoples, can be thought of as creations by the "dark side" to enable it to rise up from earth and join the sunlit consciousness again. Many ancient religions, especially those of the matriarchies, evidently moved so as to bring the dark side up into the personality slowly and steadily. The movement started early in the person's life and, in the Mysteries at least, lasted for twenty to thirty years. Christianity, as many observers have noticed, has acted historically to polarize the "dark personality" and the "light personality." Christian ethics usually involves the suppression of the dark one. As the consequences of this suppression become more severe, century after century, we reach at last the state in which the psyche is split and the two sides cannot find each other. We have "The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The dominant personality in the West tends to be idealistic, compassionate, civilized, orderly, as Dr. Jekyll's, who is caring with his patients; the shadow side is deformed, it moves fast, "like a monkey," is younger than the major personality, has vast sources of energy near it, and no morality at all. It "feels" rage from centuries of suppression.
How did the two persons gets separated? Evidently we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again. Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their members to exile. In general we can say that "the shadow" represents all that is instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in the shadow.
He goes on to say that our culture tends to push sexual desire and the fear of death into the shadow.
Great masters of this are Conrad, the novel Moby Dick. He goes on to talk about William James, one of your favorites, and others. More than I can say here.
Psychology is a bit gap for me, so I can't really respond to your comment in detail.
But yes, I was conflating several things. The common denominator is obscurity, uncertainty, and danger. And how the human imagination gets fired up with these things if it only gets a dim glimpse of them.
On January 28, 2016 at 7:54 AM I said: I must say that you wrote a great comment this time. So many times I either do not understand what you have written or disagree with what I think you have said.
This is another of those many times where I do not understand what you have written.
I'm afraid I initially missed the major point though which you summarized in your response and it is true that the human imagination gets fired up as you say but I suppose I always want to know why.
Ed, one would think an RV blog isn't my proper place given that I live in a stick house and travel less and less as I get older (I mean, traveling with my body. I'm always traveling in my mind.) But KB has a way of observing the world which is very interesting to me and it is this inspiration which keeps me coming back. I suppose it is actually proof of what he is saying...that something relatively obscure (his essays can take some figuring out) fires up the human imagination if one only gets a glimpse of it. That description sums it up for me quite nicely actually.