Second Workshop #10

For our final meeting, workshop member Erik Palmer blended several pitchers of authentic margaritas, the kind he remembers from his Texas childhood. They formed a frosty backdrop to the rigatoni with pesto & sausage and delicious Spring greens salad that we enjoyed together.

A new workshop member was introduced, Mikko King, the seven-year old son of workshop leader Matthew Stadler. Mikko announced that next Wednesday, when this round of the “using global media” workshop is done, he and Matthew will begin a “manga and anime discussion group,” at which kids and grown-ups will share a meal and conversation about these popular Japanese comic forms. Next week the subject is Buddha, the eight-volume manga biography of that great world leader, written and drawn by Osamu Tezuka (of Astro Boy fame). E-mail Matthew at businessofutopia@gmail.com if you are interested in attending.

The evening was dedicated to conclusions and retrospection, as we looked for some perspective on the full scope of global media that we had discussed over the last ten weeks. Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly,” was offered as a kind of lens to refract this vast landscape into a usable set of images that we could carry with us. The poem can be a kind of compass or map, a pragmatic tool for navigating global media in the future.

The poem explores one of “the more irritating minor ideas of Mr. Homburg during his visits home to Concord, at the edge of things.” Stevens was an American poet writing in the first half of the 20th century. He worked as an insurance executive in Hartford, CT., and we speculated that “Mr. Homburg” was probably one aspect of Stevens’s sense of himself, the hat-wearing “suit” wandering the suburban Connecticut landscape, awash in irritating, minor ideas. The poem deserves to be read in its entirety.

Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

Matthew asked if media let us, as Stevens writes, “live beyond ourselves in air.” If so, is this expansive condition a useful or pleasurable part of our being, or is it fraught with alienation and “affectation?” Is our expanded presence, amplified through the disembodied ghosts of mediation, like being in a kind of “glass aswarm with things going as far as they can?” Scott Wayne Indiana likened this glass to the holo-deck, which he looks forward to enjoying, very much, in the near future.

TJ Norris said that he would keep the line, “a transparency through which swallows weave,” with him as a kind of talisman of a desirable condition, a graceful relationship of the self to the mediated self. Sergio Pastor pointed out that Stevens didn’t settle for just the image of the swallows, but actually let their weaving motion enter the poem. In the eight lines that followed their arrival the language — in particular the cutting and shifting of the images into one another (c.f., “…a moving part of a motion, a discovery/ part of a discovery, a change part of a change…”) — drags the reader into the very action the image has described. Reading Stevens, we enter a transparency through which swallows weave. The poem itself is, then, an elegant, penetrating medium indeed.

Leslie Miller reminded us that Stevens, who is her favorite poet, was a romantic, though not an untroubled one. Enchanted by the beauty and poignancy of nature, he nevertheless could never loft its imagery to mind without also reminding us of the indifference of these things to our needs: “a pensive nature, a mechanical/ and slightly detestable operandum, free/ from man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,/ without his literature and without his gods…”

The class enjoyed Stevens’s ambivalence, there at “the edge of things.” Abi Spring reminded us that the space of that ambivalence had opened in the breach between the body and the beautiful, airy thoughts and images that could depart from the body (expanding and weaving through the transparency of, say, electronic media). The body, anchored to gross matter, remains. We haul its bulk around, trailing an effluence of thoughts and images. Abi directed our attention to the penultimate stanza: “The spirit comes from the body of the world./ Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world/ whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind.”

Abi’s trenchant reminder of our physical place inside bodies was an apt segue into a more general review of the workshop and its set of three broad subjects — interpersonal media (requiring bodies to meet each other in space); material media (in which objects, such as books, can depart from the body and move through the world to find other bodies); and digital media (in which a dematerialized space of electronic information can be accessed by anybody, any where, any time).

The class was rather drunk by this time, and Mikko had fallen asleep in his chair. A meaningful review of the insights we got to over the ten weeks is more easily found by rereading the notes here (in the proceeding nine entries), but a few themes emerged as we sat in the dwindling hours of the evening, enjoying one another’s company inordinately. Most memorably, we returned to the issue of deceit and theatricality. Can media, Scott and others asked, let us share our authentic selves with others? Or do they displace our authentic selves with false, partial, or misleading images?

Remembering the slight distance Wallace Stevens placed between himself (the authoring self) and Mr. Homburg (“the suit”), Luisa argued that media (especially interpersonal media) invite us to don suits of one or another sort, and then enact a partial self, but that this mediated self is nevertheless “genuine.” The enactment of a role (either socially or via material or digital media) is theatrical, yes, but it is also “genuine.”

Her observation led to general calls for “authenticity” in our inhabitation of media, but that was countered by a final plea from Matthew that we forsake the issue of authenticity finally and completely. Our obligation is not to transmit some interior, private sense of self but to inhabit roles and relationships that are defined by the media we engage. We should endeavor to understand these roles and relationships and then inhabit them fully, robustly, with all our heart and mind. Today I am a corporation. Tomorrow, a seminar leader. The next day, a writer from Portland. We enjoy the capacity to enact all these things, no one of them any less authentic than another.

The next using global media workshop takes place in Berlin, Germany, on May 24, 25, and 26. If you or someone you know is interested in attending (or would like the workshop to be offered somewhere else, at another time) please contact Matthew Stadler at usingglobalmedia@gmail.com