IS "FACTINESS" LIKE "TRUTHINESS"?

http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2012/01/12/director-oliver-stone-on-history-and-america-jim-morrison-ron-paul/#sthash.X9eoDNHq.dpbs

In the end (which might come rather soon) I may have a list of various histories of the world, the planet and the galaxy — each labeled with its entirely coherent bias, even though they flatly contradict each other and accumulate “facts” and “evidence” in quite different ways from different points of view.  This persistent difference is why the University of Chicago teaches students to announce their “method” at the beginning of an essay.  

Richard B. Spencer, whom I described as a white supremacist who defends the Nazi salute, is described in Wikipedia thus:

Wikipedia:  “Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American white nationalist, known for promoting white supremacist views.  He is president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think-tank, and Washington Summit Publishers, an independent publishing firm. Spencer has stated that he rejects the description of white supremacist, and describes himself as an identitarian.  Spencer and others have said that he created the term "alt-right", a term he considers a movement about white identity.”  He lives in Whitefish, which is on the west side of the Rockies.  I don’t go over there.

(Although Montana is looking white at the moment -- a cold front coming through -- the only truly white continent is Antarctica.  Unfortunately it has no country or indigenous people.  The Americas are normally earth-colored, as are its true people.)

Spencer holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago while my MA from the University of Chicago is in Religious Studies.  It’s important for each of us to claim our “method” because we come out in very different places.  For instance, the Identitarian movement is in Europe.  Spencer has enormous attachment to Europe, though he doesn’t live there.

Wikipedia:  “The Identitarian movement is a pan-European socio-political movement that started in France in 2002 as a far-right youth movement deriving from the French Nouvelle Droite Génération Identitaire. Initially the youth wing of the anti-immigrant, far-right Bloc Identitaire, it has taken on its own identity and is largely classified as a separate entity altogether with the intent of spreading across Europe. The Identitarian movement advocates rights for members of specific European ethnocultural groups.”

Now I’ll stop picking on Spencer, whose problems are self-evident, and turn to Oliver Stone, whose newsreel version of history during my lifetime (1939 to the present) is streaming on Netflix.  There are ten episodes and I’m up to #4.  There was no warning about the presence of dead bodies.  

For those who are easily disturbed, Stone offers this alternative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9lNWM7lIOo  The cats in my household enjoyed it, but cats are natural triumphalists.  They’re also naturally suspicious.  There’s a lot of banter about “facts” and truth, but seeing is believing and that’s the principle of this photoshopped video.

I’m also watching Year Six of “Game of Thrones” which is sometimes a little hard to distinguish from Stone’s series, especially since they both happen in Europe except for parts in Asia.  (Eurasia is one landmass, but Japan is separated.)  I’m comforted by this essay on Aeon  (“Why Schools Should Not Teach General Critical-Thinking Skills” by Carl Hendrick) which argues that critical thinking/analysis is always dependent for success on its point of view, its context.  His example is that air traffic controllers are not exceptionally good at other tasks requiring intelligence.  

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-schools-should-not-teach-general-critical-thinking-skills?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c24f629288-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-c24f629288-68600437

Isn't it true that the point of view for fiction has got to be different than the point of view of historical fact?  (Don’t ask Wikipedia, since they get all confused about it.  No one author per entry means no single point of view.)

Steve Pressfield, on his blog, stevenpressfield.org, which is meant to explain how to be a famous writer so you don’t have to write blogs, advises today “Don’t Be Afraid to Make Sh*t Up.”  Trump already knew that.  (I don’t know why Steve can’t spell shit.  The rest of us can.)

“What does that mean for you and me as we begin the novel that’s based on our real life?  It means  Don’t hesitate to go beyond the truth.  Identify its essence, in your character-in-the-story and in the story itself.  Then heighten that truth.  Make it pop, so that we the readers feel it and get it.  Make the internal external.”  (Formatting changed.)

I don’t know how well that works out for Pressfield, but it works great for Trump and probably works for the Clintons as well.  My problem is that in spite of piles and piles of facts, I can't settle on one way they they add up.  The problem might be in my method.

My file cabinets are full of archived letters, photos, media clippings, and other evidence, which I try to use to explain my life — even life in general.  Nothing has had as much impact on me as the newsreel clips that Oliver Stone has assembled into what he admits is a revisionist history.  I’m sympathetic.  When my grade school (Vernon in Portland, OR) turned out en masse to cheer when MacArthur made a victory parade out of being fired by Truman, I was there and I was on MacArthur’s side.

But I have to admit that I blinked when it turned out Eisenhower was as fond of his jeep driver as he was of Mamie.  It helped to know that when he was home, he and Mamie slept in a double bed.  The Trumans had twin beds, not that I blame Bess. (The contemporary point of view is that sex explains everything.)

Don’t blame me if I get confused about all this stuff.  The next episode in Stone’s history includes JFK and most people seem to agree that his life and death are unresolvable, even when you know about all the sex.  (How does a person with a notoriously bad back have so much sex?)

When neurology research suggests that identity is an assembled and varying phenomenon, much affected by context, sometimes needing to be reconciled between one side of the brain and the other, often chimerical if not kaleidoscopic, I know what they mean and I agree.  Why else would people insist that I change my attitude if it were not possible?  And yet, my abiding attempt is to “stay put,” to remain anchored as close to reality as I can get, unless the evidence persuades me otherwise.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

OUR METHODS DEMAND BASICS

U of Chicago Div School

“What’s your method?” was always the first question at U of C Div School.  The idea was to establish a stream of precedents that were already known, so as to impose limits and a sort of spine, a line of thought.  In the best of worlds, that strategy would yield an essay that was coherent and intelligible.  Of course, if you chose a method no one liked or understood, you were doomed.

This morning on Aeon.com I ran into a new question:  “Then what?”  In Div School terms, this is teleology.  It depends on what your goal might be.  

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=feca0f6557-Daily_newsletter_weekend_edition_16th_January_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-feca0f6557-68600437  

Lewis Dartnell

What happens after the accepted methods of our civilization — like exploiting fossil fuel and centering everything on profit — are exhausted, no longer apply?  What methods will save us?  When one is on territory unknown (terra incognita) the question becomes even sharper but the methods benefit from being fuzzy, wandering, and mixed.  This Aeon piece was derived from a blog based on “The Knowledge”, a book or series of books or nested blogs that seem to have their source in a man named Lewis Dartnell.  He’s handsome, young, and smart enough to star in a BBC series and my only question is “why isn’t he?”  The title, of course, is from the knowledge of London streets a taxi driver must have to pass a certifying test; it’s a “where are we going” question.

But here’s where I’m really hooked.  It’s a subject I met in seminary: the wilderness in the city.  Most of my classmates thought of it in terms of people: savage mental pygmies, I guess.  But like many others I’ve always been easily seduced by what some call “ruin porn.”  That is, abandoned industries and housing that are being reclaimed by the “natural” world.  http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ruin-photography/  This link should take you to examples of how transient anthro-construction can be.  We’re used to seeing Aztec pyramids and Asian mega-statues overwhelmed by jungle, but now we’ve added catastrophic evacuations (Chernobyl) and resource-exhausted communities (abandoned mining towns in the West).  It's not hard to imagine the U of C quads as ruins.

In fact, strictly speaking, my own buildings qualify, since two of them were temporary knock-ups used during the rebuild of Swift Dam, one a shop and the other the caretaker’s shack.  Nature and time are dismantling them, as well as this modest house built in the Thirties with an add-on bathroom and garage.  But my earliest and most vivid images are from the trail in Macleay Park in Portland where my family went to hike in the Forties and Fifties.  It was a WPA project with a lot of stonework, including a little bathroom which became a sin center and then was burned and buried, though the stone walls and arched entrances remain.  Our teenaged babysitter hanged himself nearby, in an earlier wave of alienation among young men.  Our movie horizons are full of post-apocalypse landscapes. 

Macleay Park

A periodical related to this complex, called “Ernest Journal” ,(http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk) guides this line of thought with optimism:  how would we rebuild?  Actual practical information.  How to make glass.  How to make breakfast.  How to survive an asteroid strike.  I have a friend who’s a bit of a survivalist — he just survived major cancer surgery and is restored to his health of years earlier — which means being a bit of a pack rat.  The secret here is knowing which rat to pack, and that means a grasp on basic technologies like electricity wiring, water piping, and gardening.  

Here in Montana where the grid is thin and weather gets cold (it’s generally already very windy at any temperature) one learns quite a bit about dust physics, insulation, smoke management, cooking over fires (the coals, not the flames) and other dynamics.  The traces of earlier civilizations — drag marks of travois, bits of metal or glass beads on the hill tops where bodies were left for the sun to take back, pictographs on stone — are either durable or gone.  They are not likely to be smothered by vines but the boulders are embroidered by vivid lichens, plant extremophiles.

In England which is wet and sitting on what once seemed an inexhaustible mountain of coal, the industrial revolution got a good headstart on a lot of forces that have ended now: colonies, factories, railroads. ships — all of which led to a demographic shift, an influx of people not accustomed to industrial life, a demographic apocalypse that will be the irresistible force that changes immovable Britain.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about molten metal and even a bit about ceramic kilns   In Oregon there were always glass-casters nearby.  They liked to build their studios near the beach for the sake of the cool breezes, the same as we used to prefer casting bronze in the winter, during weather just like this: snow on the ground and zero temps.  With the big fans going, the furnace and the protective gear were bearable.  Technology at this primitive level does not depend upon instruments, except maybe a pyrometer until you learn to tell temp by the color of the molten metal.  It’s a matter of human senses and internalized knowledge that comes from experience.  Less dramatic is woodwork or pouring concrete, or maybe animal husbandry which adds the dimensions of empathy and persuasion.  These are “methods.”

Sci-fi loves this sort of thing, and so do the paleoarcheologists who try to imagine the steps between the last hominid and the first modern human.  Of course, there is no “step”, no “break”, but a series of small developments that folded back on each other, became culturally contagious, used the environment instead of just surviving it.  Some of those uses were glass, stone and metal.  These survive even humans and the pre-ag aeons are named for them.  (Aren’t we the Glass Age, if you count silicon and sky scrapers?  I’ve never forgotten photos of an experimental house built only from scavenged car windshields.)  And now we turn to gravity energy in the tides, solar energy on the roof, volcanic energy in Iceland, and microbial energy in our sewage lagoon.  Clearly, energy is where you find it.

The biological energy we have not mastered — maybe I should say supported — is human beings.  What a waste for people to be drowning in the Mediterranean, starving in Syria, dying of exposure in the streets of American metropolises.  Why can’t we figure out how to address this gradual apocalypse?  This erosion of life?  What if our goal was not to restore the world as we know it, but to find a new way to be in the world.  This is not the first time the question has been asked. It’s teleological. 

Darnell embracing a Martian friend

Here’s Dartnell speaking:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbbvf-GkJcA

EMBRACING THE OCTOPUS

Recently I’ve accumulated a little stash of quotes about identity, consciousness, reality, and our drive to understand what goes on in minds.  Some will be quite disconcerted by these suggestions and others will sigh with recognition.

This is a quote from Timothy J. O’Neill who posts on “Medium” which is an author venue, something like “Blogger.”  It’s a pretty good summary of a breakthrough in how we understand identity that might be summed up by the phrase, “Compose yourself.”  This comes from considering the atypical minds of persons around us.  It will offend those who define human thought as unified, consciously intelligent, produced by learning and interaction with a physical environment, demonstrated by language, and demanded by culture.

Doctor: “Our minds shape every aspect of our reality and, in turn, every aspect of our reality has the potential to influence and shape our minds. And not just our minds, but our brains, our material physiology. But the brain even has the amazing capacity to somehow alter itself. Neuroscience has proven your thoughts can physically restructure the organic matter of your brain. It’s as if a hologram could turn around and start tinkering with the projector producing it in order to change the color or clarity of its own image. Think about that for a moment, and then open yourself up to the idea that the power of past events to shape your present identity PALES in comparison to the power of your present thoughts. So what do you really want to focus on now?”

Another more radical effort to understand minds that are not necessarily human (aside from aliens in outer space) comes from the study of octopuses.  As it happens, there’s recently been a flurry of thought about octopuses because of the release of the complete genome that has taken several years to complete at the U of Chicago.  It appears that our brain are more like the the brain of an octopus than we might guess, but also radically different: the brain of an octopus is partly in its tentacles, whose suckers are both able to taste and to feel.

This article by Sy Montgomery in Orion magazine is called “Deep Intellect.”   https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/   It’s an attempt to understand an octopus from the outside, actively interacting with several, but also noting the information we have about them.  Octopus eyes are seemingly just like ours in terms of anatomy, but what do their nerves in their retinas pick up?  And what do their main brain configure the information?  They are sensitive enough to mimic other animals or just a piece of coral, but is that conscious thinking? There’s a wide variation in temperament from one animal to the next. 

This is from a piece in New Scientist.  “THERE is no denying the reality of consciousness. For most of us, it is so self-evident that it requires no explanation. Your conscious self is the owner of your private reality, and your actions stem from conscious choice.

However, the more that is discovered about consciousness, the less obvious its role appears to be. For example, measurements of brain activity reveal that muscles and brain areas prepare for an action, such as a reaching out for an object, before we are even aware of our intention to make that movement. As noted by the psychologist Jeffrey Grey and others, consciousness simply occurs too late to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it.”

How much of ourselves is the result of our body structure?  (What a relief it would be to those who suffer from extremely painful avascular necrosis, bone death, to manage a body with no bones!  But how does one de-centralize a brain trapped in a skull?)  How do people become “unhinged?”

How much is learned?  How much is voluntary?  The answers are radically different depending on the method used to define and sort the problem.  This is one of the central issues of the U of Chicago Divinity School, because it is so relevant to comparative religion.  The confrontive, dominating, logic-dependent practice of Christian theology, its method, is a key element in the Pauline version of Catholicism.  Many have pointed out it is quite different from Jesus’ message of tolerance.

Using consciousness-altering drugs has not taught us much about method, though it IS one, but their exploration of inner space has certainly confirmed that the molecular alternatives in cell tissues can profoundly alter the way we see the world.  We already knew that from experience as far back as pre-hominids, but we’ve changed the way we think ABOUT them.  In this age of control some see using them as stepping away from the intolerable burden of being oneself in a world that despises who you are, and others who locate themselves by controlling whomever is different, and becoming lethal.

The octopus is a pluralistic animal in the sense that each tentacle has its own perceptions and decisions.  If a tentacle is severed and then offered a fish that its original task would have beem to convey to its mouth, it will try to convey the fish to where it thinks the mouth should be.  In our pluralistic policy we call democracy, many tentacles have been separated from the central mouth.  It’s an interesting and possibly useful metaphor.

The other startling thing octopuses do is cram themselves into impossibly small spaces.  Consider this quote from a paper in “Synapse,” (Volume 69, Issue 8, August 2015).  Unless you have the vocabulary, you will find it hard going, but the point of it is that what seems to be as personal as withdrawal to their room, like an octopus looking for a defensible space, can be associated with certain brain molecules, and might be predictive of trouble.

“Adolescent social isolation (SI) results in numerous behavioral alterations associated with increased risk of alcoholism. Notably, many of these changes involve the basolateral amygdala (BLA), including increased alcohol seeking. The BLA sends a strong glutamatergic projection to the nucleus accumbens and activation of this pathway potentiates reward-seeking behavior. Dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE) exert powerful excitatory and inhibitory effects on BLA activity and chronic stress can disrupt the excitation-inhibition balance maintained by these catecholamines.” 

Some people will deduce that technical chemical diagnosis should be applied to all “withdrawn” adolescents and Big Pharma will set about inventing a med that affects BLA activity.  Others will try to eliminate all stress, assuming that emotional “gliding” is healthy.  They try to create a “no-trouble bubble.” A few will want to sit down and talk.  And nowadays, with the fortification of genealogy, some will want to investigate the ancestral stories of the individual to look for patterns.  For a person who has been convincingly told that any disclosure will result in punishment amounting to death, this is nearly impossible.

We keep seeing stories about teens being held in solitary confinement, framing the adolescent in terms of radical social isolation, his own head trip which can end in suicide. [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html]

But some will think about what a supporting social setting will do and what kind of tribe would welcome and understand the individual.  One could call it “embracing the octopus.”  To get an idea what that might be like, try the Orion article.

AN OUTLINE OF BASIC ACTING CLASS AS TAUGHT BY ALVINA KRAUSE

David Press has sent two documents from the bibliography at the end of his doctoral thesis about Alvina Krause’s teaching methods.  I’m typing them into the blog called “Krausenotes.blogspot.com”  but I’m doing it a bit at a time.  They'll appear as individual posts on this blog, but as a continuous document on the other one, so it's easier to download.  This is the course as I took it in 1958-59 and is evidently an account written out by AK for the use of John Van Meter who was taking on the teaching of the course.   (The illustrations are from Google Images and have no relation to the text.) 

People who have taken the course will recognize her “Socratic method” of asking questions, then answering them herself!  She’d get into a kind of soft-voice rhythm that was almost hypnotic -- then stop, pace, turn sharply, and demand attention -- sometimes by doing something unexpected, like striking something -- or someone.  “Now why did I do that?”

OUTLINE OF YEAR-LONG BASIC ACTING COURSE AS TAUGHT BY ALVINA KRAUSE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY IN THE 1960-61 ACADEMIC YEAR.

FALL QUARTER:

Not AK, but a good actress

Includes orientation to Acting and Theatre, the training of the actor’s senses, a study of the nature of Responses in human beings; training in observation, training in concentration, training in improvisation.  The class work is offered in conjunction with lab periods in which students work on voices and movement, discuss plays they have read outside of class.  All of the work of the course is intended to supplement reading on and about the theatre which students have previously done or are currently doing or will do.  Discussion with other students in the lounge and over coffee is expeced to further develop ideas which are brought forth in class.  The student keeps a journal, the daily entries of which record his awareness and give him a means of holding conferences with his instructor.

I. ORIENTATION

Beginning acting is devoted to a study of the actor and his instrument, which is himself -- his senses, intellect, emotions, talent and its development, and a consideration of whether they should be used in the theatre.  There are two subsequent courses: Analysis and Performance, which centers on the written play, and Styles, which concerns the actor and style in acting.

Actors must develop objectivity about his work, must know why he is good or bad, must be able to repeat night after night what he does, so as to give the audience its money’s worth.  Acting is an art; it is not an accident.

It is sad at 18, 19, 20 to discover you are not what you want to be -- an actor.  It’s tragic at 40, 45, 50 to wake up to the realization that you’re in a profession you never belonged in; then you may not go back.  But it’s not tragic to find out now.  Nothing you learn now will be harmful or wasted.  It can be used in any profession or in life.

People say acting cannot be taught.  I agree.  I merely set forth principles.  I criticize.  I lead you.  In the last analysis you must be self-teachers.

Theatre is not one art: it is a conglomerate art that turns what the playwright has said on the page into something more meaningful than life itself, whether it makes the audience laugh, cry, or think.  Your goal is to illuminate the life, not to show off or get rich.  It is to create art.  All of the intuition in the world is not enough; what you know, do, must be put into meaningful form which illuminates, communicates, says something.  It isn’t enough for theatre to be exciting, it has to mean something.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2014/may/20/michael-gambon-interview-by-michael-billington-video

Theatre is a great profession, a great art; it requires greatness of the people in it.  Everyone can read; but can you make a word say something else besides, say, “dirty”?  Acting isn’t speaking a line or moving as directed.  It is much more.

The difficulty in acting is that the actor is his own instrument; he acts with all he is.  You have to look into your souls.  You act with all that you are:  all you have experienced, sensed, read, come to know up to this instant.  When Antigone says:  “I am the last of my line” on her final exit, what do you have in you that will illuminate this line?  When Lady Macbeth says:  “Will these hands ne’er be clean?”  what is in you to show us a woman who can never look at her hands again?  Look for what you have in you that indicates you have or will have the capacity to play Macbeth.  Theatre involves a development of all you are.  What you are can be added to that you can interpret life.  Participate in the world: don’t shut your senses up too much.

There is no one single method of acting or teaching acting, as far as I can see.  We have all been seeking THE Method; some think they have found it.  I hope we keep seeking.  What you learn here you will adapt to your own uses; challenge these ideas until you can accept them or discard them.  It isn’t enough to talk about acting, to know it -- you must be able to do it.

A performance onstage is not life.  It is an insult to an audience to ask it to believe this.  A performance is scenery, lights, illusion which are intended to make an audience laugh, think cry.  You don’t live a part, you give an audience an illusion of life.  Our job is to make the illusion believable.  A performance is never complete until it is before an audience.  The audience reaction is a part of the performance.  Acting is a communicative experience.  Acting is not done for the joy of the actor, but is done for the audience.  We believe or reject what we see onstage according to the degree that the illusion approaches a likeness to life.  Actors must learn to be lifelike.

Drama lies not in words but in the pauses between words when something is happening to you; it lies in what we do to each other.  What is drama?  It is what makes you smile when you don’t mean to.  Acting is responding, is reacting to a stimulus or stimuli.  Part of a response maybe be words, but how much can words say?  Some experiences are too deep for words, or too sudden.  Melodrama is words and actions without motivation; motivation lies in the responses to stimuli which, in turn, touch off words.  We response to a smell, a sound; the stimulus has to come first and then echoes our particular response.  Responses onstage are not memorized things, but are freshly experienced each time the stimulus comes.

Acting is creating the behavior patterns of an individual in given situations -- the playwright’s situations.  Behavior patterns come out in response to stimuli about you.  Behavior patterns are total things.  No two people respond to stimuli in the same way; how you respond is you.  Has everyone felt jealousy?  Well, have you felt Othello’s jealousy?  Let’s hope not; he killed his dear wife.  Many good actors and actresses draw from stored-up memories, impressions.  The words on the page touch off something in hearing, tasting, smelling.  You create out of what you have seen, heard, imagined, tasted, known.  To create Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands, start with something you know.  Shakespeare will give you more things to build on.  The process of using memories, if well done, is unconscious.  Directors can’t give you the truth great acting must have.  Aspire to be great.

If the stimulus is real (i.e. if you respond to the right things in the stage situation with your senses and make the appropriate associations out of what you know about your character and about life) the emotion you want will follow automatically.  You don’t create emotion -- it follows by itself on the heels of the stimulus.

First quarter is devoted to training senses, storing up impressions.  Cleopatra’s jewel box is a tawdry thing supplied by props.  But you have to touch it as it it were the real thing.