Escher's Ascending Descending:
Master of Illusions
Prisoners of a closed universe from which there is no escape, Escherr's monks climb an ever upward, ever downward staircase. No matter how many steps they take, their trance-like, persistent tread will only return them to the point where they had begun.
As is often the case with the dream-work of an artist such as Escher, the familiar is suffused with a playful element of indeterminacy. His technique verges on the surreal when, for example, he draws a hand that draws a hand that appears to be drawing itself…Or, when he repeats the outline of a reptile until it suddenly comes to life, slithers briskly to the edge of the page, and prepares to join us in our world.
In both cases, the subjects of the illustrations threaten to become uncontrollable extensions of what was only moments ago a hollow outline in pen and ink. Dreams derive both their beauty and their terror from such madness.
Many who confront Escher’s Ascending, Descending wonder whether to take it seriously at all. A hodgepodge building inhabits a desolate plain; a miraculous staircase turns upon itself like a mobius strip, spiraling simultaneously upward and downward beneath an airless sky. The only characters in this scene–a handful of obsessive monks–move blindly and zombie-like in their implacable determination to get somewhere. Anywhere.
They remind us of the machines of Chaplin’s Modern Times. They also remind us of a stream of determined ants who continue their compulsive functions despite the obstacle that a malicious child has placed in their path.
From the perspective of an interpreter of the fine arts, Escher’s drawing is a metaphor for the civilizations that human beings have made and presently inhabit.
It represents Our world. Not an illusion.
As an architectural chronology, humanity has emerged from a paleolithic basement, from whence it passed through a Mesopotamian arch. We trace the repetitive steps as they circle through the centuries. Join them now, shoulder to shoulder: up a Persian ceremonial staircase, past Doric columns which support Arabic horseshoe arches, then beneath the sculpted aegis of a medieval parapet. Finally we enter a Romanesque cella, lit by skylights fit to illuminate a Roman bath. Just ahead lies a void of steps--always the same steps. Waiting.
Here they are–here WE are–marching round and round in an effort to add another story to the edifice of human culture. You and I: characters tramping round and round–but never forward--on a repetitive journey into the future.
We now read this work as a metaphor for the absurd cavalcade of human achievement. It collapses human goals and struggles into a narrow frame. As if in fast forward through the centuries, the cumulative triumphs of human culture--the superficial variety of its architectures--resolve themselves into a claustrophobic, pointless spiral.
Are we moderns as clueless as these persistent monks? Are we as blind as they are to some gravitational force that resides at the core of our collective life? Blind to our compulsion to repeat, as well as blind to the fact that our our imaginary "progress" is little more a constricting circularity?
Witness a humanity that is reduced to the mechanical, to the thoughtless, and to the reflexive that is at once the source of our self-deprecating humor, but also the source of our most nightmarish visions of ourselves. For no matter how rapidly our con-specifics might build to the heavens, each of their creations is held fast to the same foundation. But this foundation is not a bridge to the new.
It serves instead as an axle for an apparently purposeless, unconscious rotation.
It is, at its most extreme, a sphincter of stone.
“Welcome,” the artist seems to say, “to history.”
What might have been, and what shall be
Point to one end.
Cultural Gridlock
Someone once said: "Read one newspaper…and you’ve read them all."
And truly, there is either a comforting or appalling sameness about human history on earth. Change the names, dates and locales of the headlines of the past and they proclaim but one truth: we moderns know more “things” than did our ancestors; but we are no wiser. We are certainly no better behaved.
Consider:
An ancient psycho-political drama continues to mesmerize the world, just as it did in the days of imperial Rome, Athens, or Babylon. Its persistence reminds us of humanity’s inescapable need for misinformation, group think, jingoism, and the perpetuation of the Other against which to marshal its resources and resolve.
When the Soviet/US Cold-War wound down, many Americans imagined that they would enjoy an intermission, perhaps even receive a peace dividend. They did not know that imperialistic military adventures had long been permanent features of our foreign policy--not aberrations. They did not understand that the scenery and props for past campaigns were only being rearranged--only being relocated. Not rolled up. Not put away.
In the meantime, small yet painful conflicts served as continuo for an eagerly anticipated "new" main event: Six decades of Cuban strangulation; new castes of oligarchic dictators installed with the assistance of the CIA, endless efforts to ensure American hegemony via regime change shenanigans around the world.
Soon enough, America launched its War on Terror, oblivious of that fact that every "Effect" (Twin Towers) has a "Cause." Completely unaware that every accusative index finger pointed at the "Other" is attached to a hand whose remaining three fingers point directly back to the accuser.
Willful denial required equally willful delusion. As a justification for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, America's leaders "discovered" the existence of phantom WMD's. They also discovered "yellow cake", certified by Secretary of State Colin Powell's lies before the United Nations. These lies were uncritically repeated by both the media and the Congress, and provided a core justification for what was to become a 20 year, $6,000,000,000,000 failure: a failure that brutalized American culture, and more important, brutalized the world.
Here at home, the rapid unraveling of American freedoms began apace: automatic renewals of AUMF; unwarranted Presidential usurpation of congressional power; the ill-advised creation of an intrusive Homeland Security bureaucracy--the tentacles of which now reach into formerly sacrosanct realms of each individual American life.
What will the future bring? Coming Attractions now include a renewal of the profitable Cold War with Russia, and the so called "pivot" to the East--a stagger really--with China cast as the main threat to "freedom and democracy" or to the "rule of law."
Unfortunately, many of our fellow citizens are relieved that such an exciting moment has arrived. Many are thrilled to yet again to enjoy the armchair satisfaction of taking a stand against Evil. Others are overjoyed to have new opportunities to enrich themselves--and to proclaim America's exceptional greatness to an increasingly disbelieving world. The expenditures required to launch these errors will be astronomical, and will again be charged to the people. These expenditures will be readily approved by a servile Congress--including, alas, its so-called progressive wing. And Citizens United, by legitimizing congressional bribery, will ensure perpetuation of the pattern far into the future
II: Lonely Are the Brave
Each generation a new cast of human actors queues boisterously at the banks of the river Lethe to be baptized, and then to quaff the muddied waters. Under the spell of forgetfulness they wade out yet again into the purling, reddish current: press forward enthusiastically to commence their own rudderless drift into war.
Old men and women who should know better, and who should warn against this madness, have themselves forgotten the lessons–if ever they learned them. And because they lack the ability or inclination to criticize or to persuade, younger generations continue to be inducted into American culture’s maddeningly destructive enterprises.
Naturally, propagandists still ply their hallowed trade, this time spinning electronic variations on field tested themes. The black arts of the lie and the half-truth have migrated from the chiseled walls of Persepolis and Thebes to the pixel-land of the smart phone and low relief. The hieroglyph of the corporate controlled news hour is writ so large that millions around the world can now absorb the same official disinformation.
The most blatant forms of censorship are today practiced only by the clumsiest breed of tyrant. In most democracies, censorship has not become extinct. It has merely gone underground. The brutish implements of an old fashioned mind control have given way to a sleek, and more insidious form of information deprivation. A government decree is no longer necessary: invisible profit pressures and political pressure conspire to restrict the range and depth of opinion as effectively as once did the clanking of chains or the creaking of dungeon doors.
Quite often now, information is deliberately withheld or canceled outright. If it appears it is often turned into a one-sided hit piece wherein depth and historical context are de-privileged. The ubiquitous omission of the context behind the news eviscerates its value. It disarms its audience by stifling indeterminacy, and by replacing authentic debate with pre-approved text from the wire services, or from the Military Industrial Complex.
The field of the debate gradually narrows as the unanswered pronouncements of government “experts” becomes more and more established as truth. A once broad index of political opinions atrophies--canceled. Inevitably, these at last find themselves beyond the imploding pale of legitimate discussion.
So it is that masses of otherwise literate citizens imagine that they think for themselves. But as Bakunin noted, most “only slavishly repeat by rote, with slight modifications, the thoughts and aims of the other conformists which they imperceptibly absorb.” They parrot “prejudices elaborated in past centuries, all of which they find ready to take over their lives at birth.”
As Lionel Tiger observed: “Literacy itself was an extremely destabilizing...Writing was about control; it was about codifying methods of behavior and so on. And now this has become augmented drastically, given the spread of literacy since the industrial revolution…Literacy provides leverage for an unprecedented intrusion into formerly intimate and well integrated societies…And obviously, finally, the electronic impact of radio and television, records and satellites, and so on makes it possible to market ideologies even more coercively and has added an entirely new and more terrifying dimension to the process."
Or Robert Trivers: “With the advent of language in the human lineage, the possibilities for deception and self deception were greatly enlarged. If language permits the communication of much more detailed and extensive information–concerning, for example, events distant in space and time–then it both permits and encourages the communication of much more detailed and extensive misinformation. A portion of the brain devoted to verbal functions must become specialized for the manufacture and maintenance of falsehoods. This will require biased perceptions, biased memory, and biased logic; and these processes are ideally kept unconscious.”
The manifestations of these phenomena are not hard to detect. In our more settled or “stabilized” civilizations candidates continue to push and shove each other to occupy national or party mythologies, knowing full well that in political life success often depends upon one’s obedience to cultural memes and taboos.
Doubtless, these are hypertrophized hominid variations on a more ancient pursuit of power and possession. It may be that from dinosaur to man, behaviors like these have been the recombinant boundaries of every earthly creature’s survival map. So it is that the journey of homo sapiens on this planet seems to be a case of arrested development, punctuated by traumatic episodes which indicate an inability to break through the membrane of an ancient behavioral envelope.
History deceives us. For while it records what seems to be a variety of “dramatic” changes (revolutions), a troubling number of these are underlain by a paucity of new or paradigm shattering ideas. There may be no reason to expect much more than that from ourselves, ultimately. There may be little reason to believe that humankind’s powers of self-correction and self-reflection can attain to a depth beyond a thin veneer.
So it is that humanity’s experience with political systems is marked by an obsequious servility to custom and tradition. Rare are the far-ranging revolutionary programs that actually prepare us for a major break with the past. And those milestone events which once promised to do so, perhaps like the American, Russian or French revolutions, [or the Arab Spring] quickly lose their original fire and lapse into the familiar, terrible fossils that litter the strata of our various national histories.
In each we may witness the creation of new privileged classes, the swift revival of tyranny in the name of freedom, the sudden and shocking return of imperialist ambition, and finally the erosion of the very rights that the bold reforms were meant originally to create de-novo, or to restore.
It is sobering to imagine that the history of post neolithic civilization sketches a roulette-like pattern. Which suggests to us that the process of history may not be a matter of freely made human choice at all; but may instead be held in thrall by deep-seated creaturely commandments that may be detected, as we are detecting them now, but not written to. As such, their Read-Only operations would parallel those instinctual and phylogenetic commandments that so obviously drive less complex forms of organic life.
The stillness of old growth forests where giant cedar and fir have bested multitudes of deciduous varieties in the push for light is one whispered variation on this menu-driven theme. Another is the almost comic frenzy of a pond water droplet, wherein hordes of one-celled creatures battle each other in their heroic attempts to surround food vacuoles.
But the ubiquity of this struggle between the haves and have-nots seems to be little more than an organismic variation on colder physical laws more ancient than life itself. One instance is the natural flow of solutions from greater to lesser areas of density. Another is the erosion of mountains by the forces of weather and gravity. Waterborne sediments speed down the steeper slopes, then sift and settle at the margins of still, archaic seas.
That which is high is brought low; that which is low is, in time, lifted up. The earth has seen at least eight mountain ranges greater in size and extent than today’s gigantic Himalayas. Soaring five miles into the sky at the edge of drifting continents, each range towered at the roof of the world for a few hundred million years, and then vanished utterly. All that remains is the massive erosional record that can now be read in uplifted sedimentary strata. Layer upon layer, mile upon thickened mile–the sediments piled up into enormous synclines which were themselves uplifted and worn away again and yet again. Today’s Rockies are built with but a recycled fraction of their dust.
The earth has also seen at least as many eternal empires, great societies, or thousand year Reichs.
Human history is so short; and so deceiving. A sped-up version of this aeons old procession of uplift and displacement shows us a planet in constant turmoil. Its surface is not placid but more like the bubbling upheavals of a sulphurous volcanic lake. But the shortness of the human life span deceives us: Instead of perpetual flux, perpetual recurrence, we see in the granitic stillness of mountains, or in the frozen perdurability of massy glaciers evidence of permanence, not change. A phenomenon that climate change is unraveling as I write these words.
We have the same mistaken view about states as well. The ceaseless human struggle for power and control must look very strange from a Sirian perspective. Voltaire’s twenty mile high giants would inhabit a much more leisurely time scale, and so would see our lives in an almost ridiculous fast forward. Our great wars and revolutions–the stuff of so many Romantic novels–would appear to be little more than the frenzied movements of microscopic organisms: comic repetition compulsions.
Arms flailing like cilia, endless waves of soldiers would leap generation after generation into the cellular breach opened up by the assaults of nearly identical organisms on the opposing side. National boundaries would advance and recede like sped-up Pleistocene glaciers, and multitudes of young men would lay down their lives, not really sure just why they were doing so, but convinced by the master molecule–both within the state and within themselves– that it was the necessary thing to do.
So to the paradox: despite the manifold variations and contortions of the past, human history seems to be a gridlock. Nation after nation– like species after species– rises up only to receive, in its own appointed time, an absurdly customized coup-de-grace. But while the poor trilobite is blameless, we can look back to watch in horror as each human civilization scripts, directs and then ultimately stumbles into the grim machinery of its own peculiar tragedy.
We thought we were cured. We moderns thought we had surpassed the folly of the old world. After all, "democracies" were more widespread than ever before. But to everyone’s amazement it turned out that these "democracies" could behave as brutally or as stupidly as tyrannies ever did. Even worse, those who were supposed to be in charge in these new egalitarian Edens–the people– most often had no real power to control.
Human astronauts could hit golf balls on the moon, but their fellows back on earth were still not secure.
The terrors that once sapped the optimism of the ancients were not overcome. They had merely acquired “snazzy,” modern referents. New incurable plagues replaced the old ones, and bogeymen peopled new nightmares as scarily as ever they did for the medieval serf. Satan, the old adversary against whom this variety of humans used to arm themselves, had not died; he’d become an anti-vaxer, a socialist, an Arab, a free-thinker, a Trumper, a blogger. The witch who used to steal our children became the "fascist", the skeptic, the communist, the fake news creator, the "right winger" or the humanistic educator. The terrible genie hid not in a lamp, but in an essay, or in a contrarian point of view. And though people no longer feared polio, they often succumbed to an atrophy of purpose, or to a paralysis of will.
In most places on earth, official slavery–of the clanking chain, cracking-whip variety–had been abolished. Yet millions in so-called “free” citizens had become wage slaves, laboring un-enthusiastically at tasks that had little meaning, and which brought only paper-thin satisfaction. The porticoed plantations of the ante-bellum South or Roman latifundia had metastasized into air-conditioned towers in the sky. And while swarms of corporate and financial patricians dined high atop a diminishing supply of earth’s precious resources, countless mothers in the canyons far below handed their children over to strangers and joined their husbands in the windswept urban fields. Just to make ends meet.
Today, right now, we moderns marvel at the pyramids of Giza, unable to believe that so many could have labored so long, and apparently so willingly, for so few. But new pyramids are still being built by the blood and wealth of the children of the ancient fellaheen. Gigantic abandoned airfields at Da Nang, colossal sums squandered on aircraft carriers, ballooning Pentagon budgets, flaming Kuwaiti oilfields, mountains of plastic waste piled up on beaches. These will become tomorrow’s Pharaonic and statistical ruins.
Future generations of students will marvel that so many American wage earners of the twentieth century could have labored so long and spent so willingly for so little real, lasting benefit to themselves. Historians will note that the modern peasant may have put aside the plow and donned a suit, but the corvee owed to the seigneurs of finance and military appropriation was still collected every month.
Slavery was not only physical. While a tiny handful of scientific pioneers red-efined an ancient mythopoetic Fate by probing the secrets of the atom or DNA, most of earth’s people continued to surrender to pre-scientific myths about gods, devils and sites of eternal pain or bliss. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owed to science, they still tried–like Escher’s blindered monks, perhaps–to live by systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself.
Beliefs like these continued to govern their perceptions of themselves, their destiny, their limits and their goals. They overlapped many areas of life, and often medievalized modern debates with quaint simplicity. Here they obstructed progress in education; there they checked movements toward greater personal freedom; over there they disarmed the people by encouraging uncritical acceptance of authority.
At their worst, their ultimate and divisive ploy was to reduce the world to a simplistic and terrifying gladiatorial arena. There was but “one” way to heaven, and the faith of the cultural fathers taught that there was but one way to achieve victory.
And so, as in mythological times, gods again chose up sides and lent their full weight and authority to the privileged metaphysical propositions and policies that perpetuated the status quo, and that a mainstream media had lifted beyond critique.
On the positive side, modern humans had made enormous strides in the healing arts. But these achievements were fragile and could instantly be cancelled by another and co-evolving form of progress: the three most murderous wars in human history did not take place back in Assyrian, Egyptian or Roman times, but within the last eighty five years of the twentieth century. By the end of the Second World War, military strategy had progressed from its original aim of destroying hostile armies on the battlefield to liquifying noncombatants in cities miles from a nonexistent front. And now, today, those spiky forests of missiles and bristling warheads are aimed at both the massed hardware and personnel of armies as well as at you and me. At you, baking bread; at you mowing the lawn; at me sitting here now, looking out the window, not hating anyone in particular. Not even, perhaps, aware there is a war.
From the vantage point of the present, “progress” seems to be an ephemeral phenomenon. Is it possible that Caesar, after acclimatizing himself to America’s electric toothbrushes, to its ear pods and to its microwaves, would find himself quite at home nestled amongst our wicked headlines? Perhaps he would ring up Pompey and Crassus for a conference call. Together they might smile at the uncanny familiarity of modern strife, and see in our continued obtuseness and insecurity the same old triggers that the wily have always used to garner power.
Wherever the old dictator turned his gaze, he would recognize that human beings had not progressed at all. Perhaps Caesar’s modern descendants have only entered the age of the polyester toga: the more that things change, the more they remain the same.
The most graphic intimation of the truth of this is found in our popularized science fiction. In these bright new worlds virtually everything has changed; everything, that is, except creaturely behavior. And so even the futuristic becomes anciently familiar. The same old concerns for territory, space and power are now projected into the galaxies–and human creativity strains itself to invent still newer ways to depict and simplify external threats, and still newer ways to kill.
The old art form of the western, of the good guys versus the bad guys, inhabits the core of even the most futuristic of movies. The colt .45 may have been replaced by the ICBM, and the stagecoach may now move into hyper-sonic drive. But the fatal dilemma of the Jurassic swamp haunts even the most modern, re-enforced concrete situation room: No matter how many competitors the armed forces kill, they never completely go away.
The memory of the race runs short, and not even the history books can tell us what we need to know. Since we continue to forget the floor plan, each generation presses anxiously ahead for one more ride through history’s darkened “Haunted House.”
Birth, the price of admission, entitles us to a seat. The car lurches, and we careen forward on jerky rails into a darkening future. Lights flash and sirens whoop. Our necks snap. A gorilla leaps out from a box. A skeleton doffs his hat. Through raucous explosions of light and sound we glimpse the smoky, x-ray profiles of others behind and in front who also shriek in terror at what must pass. But this neck-snappin carnival ride, unlike Babi Yar, unlike the Albigensian Crusade, unlike the killing fields of Cambodia, and unlike the next world war, ends in the sunlight of a safe and secure American suburb at last.
Moving gingerly off the platform, past the lines of those pressing to enter, past the comforting cicada call of the ticking, midsummer sprinklers, we momentarily catch ourselves. We know that it is all a foolish business, and we are slightly embarrassed to confess that we still surrender to thrills we should have outgrown long ago.
A Spider Meditation
The dead are infinitely more numerous and powerful than the living. They govern the immense area of the unconscious, that invisible field that controls the manifestations of intelligence and character.The dead generations impose not only their physical make-up but also their thoughts. They are the only undisputed masters of the living. (LeBon via Moscovici)
Having bought an abandoned, rundown farm house some time ago, I had to spend long summer hours in narrow crawl spaces completing plumbing and wiring tasks. My backside scraping along the dusty, earthen floor, I crab-scuttled beneath joists and corroded pipes that swaled not more than an inch or two above my face.
My hair was filled with earth, and I felt as though I had entered a kind of sacramental graveyard. Not only was I being buried beneath the hot and darksome immensity of the house above me, but littered here and there were the remains of wild cats and innumerable rodents who had found this crypt over the years, and died. And so I would struggle, the dust of bones and rust-crumbly tin cans searing my nostrils as I dragged my repair kit on a rope just behind.
Once on this journey I pushed into a dense thicket of spider web. I shuddered involuntarily as it shrouded my ears and forehead, and I carefully freed my arms to brush it away. But then the same fearful curiosity that compels us to watch horror movies (or slow down to peer through the flashing lights and into the darkened auto accident) made me shine my feeble light into the floorboards overhead. And so it was that I came upon a common enough sight–but one which was for me a startling revelation:
Stock still; mummy-like; their hollowed, dried carcasses poised on brittle legs; the bodies of the ancient spiders formed galleries of spectators who silently watched my “progress.” Rank upon rank, generation upon generation, they sat there frozen in the remains of the web where they had died, some probably forty years in the same place.
I looked closer. Scurrying over and around the ancient husks, bevies of tiny young spiders–replicas of those who had gone before–went nimbly about their tasks. Feeding, hunting, probing, they spun out the tiny programs of their lives surrounded by the collapsed webs and mummies of earlier, identical spider civilizations.
I was struck by the inseparability of the ancient and the modern–and came to the realization that what I was witnessing was a symbolic, if not literal, reincarnation. The old spiders had been reborn into the new, and could now walk around the discarded webs and bodies of their former selves, having preserved intact the life force, the genetic body “menu” of spider-hood while discarding the individual exoskeleton only.
Despite the myriad births and deaths, there was only one generation here; the same generation.
The most useful analogy I can think of to explain this continuity of the generations, the very real projection of the ancient, original self into the future is that of the wave:
Rising to its crest through the centuries, the human wave moves implacably forward, bearing the new generations into the future along its advancing front. But the “mind” that directs its energy remains the same, even though its water molecules are exchanged as it continues its journey through space and time.
The wave moves, but the wave remains the same:
And the dead hand leads the past,
Leads them as children and as air
Onto the blindly tossing tops;
The centuries throw back their hair
And the old men sing from newborn lips…
Time is bearing another son.
(Dylan Thomas)
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