Reality Hunger

For more than ten years, Don has wanted to make a movie showing the seductive, even insidious, effects of letting media take over our lives. We recently discovered the French thinker Baudrillard, who said we live “sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real.” People now are more interested in the reflected life they watch on screens, in Facebook, in movies and on television. We are losing the ability to relate to the world and to each other except through a secondhand cultural life dispensed to us by the media. In this world we find ourselves agreeing with one or another political position, clinging to the ideas of one or another culture hero or celebrity, at the mercy of streaming ads for fashions, travel, technology and theories about economics, health and education.

But the self-evident world beneath the context of meaning and references provided by our profane culture is still there. A ground of being more luminous, more magical and powerful than any indirect experience of it exists. The architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander believes people see reality in terms of Cartesian mechanics, assuming everything is a machine. “With the onset of the 20^th-century mechanistic world-picture, clear understanding about value went out of the world,” he writes. In this world, we see each other’s significance as objects, not the shining reality of each other. In this world, as Alexander says, “nothing matters.”

I just read The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, a prolific author, seen as “one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.” Despite his narrative gifts, the book demonstrated conclusively that “nothing matters”! It seemed to me that Chabon took a bunch of cards with items on them and threw them randomly into the text. One of his characters speaks for him, saying “I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head of this proof of the uselessness of Albert Vetch’s art, of all art and energy and human life in general.” Most of my book club agreed that they were wholly uninterested in reading the work of a person with this view on life! I see this view in many modern writers and feel sad for them.

The answer is in attention. Baudrillard retreated into silent witness to the self-evidence of the world, paradoxically using photography. In his view, the silent, still photograph can sometimes give us a sense of what the world is like in our absence, unobstructed by the layers of significance we lay upon images. Alexander posits a “ground” of reality. For Alexander, “value is the measure of the degree of connectedness a given place, or thing, or event, has with the ground.” He sought methods of determining value, finding it a definite and fundamental part of the universe. For him, “art is not merely pleasant or interesting. It has an importance that goes to the very core of the cosmology.” In the new view of the world Alexander promotes, everything matters.

We are seeing people’s hunger for value, and the real ground beneath us in many different places: in the provenance movement in which people want to know exactly where their food is coming from and how it was handled; in the popularity of bluegrass music people make themselves; in the Occupy movement in which people are trying to bring the economy back down to human scale and find new relations to each other; and in the fact that so many young people support Ron Paul, “strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy.” [David Sirota, Salon, November 28, 2011.]

Don and I are working on a movie called Nothing in a Rectangle Is True which deals with these issues. You can experience it on a Facebook page [ironically enough!] in which our characters interact, questioning the hold the object-oriented dominant culture has over us. http://www.facebook.com/nothinginarectangleistrue

My project, So Are You To My Thoughts, is also undertaken squarely in loving attention to particular fictional times and places, to the growth of my protagonists, Line, Marty and Paul. Born into a wholistic mono-culture steeped in value, which sustains them in their search for individuality and diversity, I hope to see them become full and bountiful grownups. We are all fractals for the expanding universe. I write in the attempt to come face to face with the ground of being.