Sarah Palin as Mad Hatter

In a recent Slate article Dahlia Lithwick argues that far from being the cause of her downfall, the media actually was Sarah Palin's greatest strength: in their efforts to create coherent arguments, they were constantly challenged to make sense of her seemingly nonsensical pronouncements. This was nowhere more evident in her resignation speech. In the course of Dahlia's argument she compares Sarah Palin to the Mad Hatter.

I find it interesting that people often describe Sarah Palin as a Mad Hatter because of her incoherent arguments. The interesting thing is that in Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter is an amusing and entertaining character. (If there is any doubt, look who's playing him in the upcoming movie version). We are amused by the fictional character in part because there is some wit displayed at the tea party, but I think it's also because the Mad Hatter is so out of the ordinary. Our political system, for good or for bad, tends to value the ordinary: people who stick to the scripts, use the same talking points, and give the sense of order and coherence. No party has made more formidable use of the ordinary than the GOP. In contrast, Palin often did none of this, and so just like the Mad Hatter, people found the unusualness entertaining. It also enabled her to voice opinions that were just false or unjustified in a way that some supporters probably wish they could. And she could always pass the fault on to the media. So, if there is any mystery about Sarah Palin's popularity, it seems wise to look to Alice. Although, when it comes to the idea of Palin actually governing something, one feels that Alice was probably right, "I think you might do something better with the time . . ." It seems that Palin finally agrees.

Bach and Emotion

Today there is no question that Johann Sebastian Bach has become a part of our classical canon: his works are regularly performed, most people can probably recognize the vocal lines of his most famous chorales, and probably everyone who collects classical music recordings has a CD of Bach laying around, or at least a few MP3s that they play from time to time.

Despite the fact that nearly everyone can recognize Bach’s name, I still think that his reputation hasn’t completely emerged from the onslaught of Romanticism. Romantic music, by which I mean the classical music that appeared from roughly the time of Beethoven to the early twentieth century, has forever changed the landscape of the way that we listen to music, and what we expect from it. In a previous blog post, I remembered being in a master class for the piano in which no one except me even liked playing Bach on the piano. Everyone wanted to express the passion of Beethoven, or impress everyone else with the fast piano techniques required to play Chopin, Rachmaninoff, or Scriabin, and thought of Bach’s music as a boring collection of technical exercises. Although I think everyone in that class was wrong – they were expressing a far too limited conception of what Bach is about – it underscored for me the fact that Bach is often misunderstood, and often for quite specific reasons. The truth is that while there are plenty of opportunities for expressing emotion in Bach’s music, the way that you express it is very different from the way emotion is expressed in Romantic music.

Specifying these differences is actually not an easy exercise, but I want to take a few minutes today to explore this. I think the most fruitful place to begin talking about Bach is through the thing that he was most famous for in his day: his organ skills. Although he was modest in his conception of his own abilities – he famously once said that anyone could be as good an organist as he was with enough hard work¹ – the truth is that there were very few people who could match his skills in a time when playing the organ was taken very seriously. Legend has it that the one time when he had scheduled a competitive organ recital, at the behest of others, he so terrified his competitor, that the poor man ran away rather than face a musical dual with Bach.²

Now, it takes a unique skill set to play an organ at Bach’s level. In some ways organs can be forgiving when compared to other instruments. Unlike a piano, you can strike a key in a variety of different ways in order to get the same tonal effect, you can hold notes indefinitely if you’re feeling lazy, and you don’t have to worry about using the tips of your fingers to control dynamics. But on a number of parameters an organ can be absolutely unforgiving. If your rhythms are not perfect, the sound you will produce will become a dreadful mess, and if you hold a wrong note, it will produce a screeching sound that even a cat in heat couldn’t match. Compare this to the vocal music of Palestrina or Monteverdi: in this music you actually could sing a wrong note or mess up a rhythm and still sound reasonably OK; all you would have to do is wobble your pitch slightly or change the dynamics. But you have far less opportunity to do this with an organ fugue. Hence, a composer for an organ has to put extra care into the construction of chords, and pay particular attention to the way the different rhythms interact.

Bach’s polyphonic music seems to me to be a natural outgrowth of an organ’s demands. Two of the key characteristics of his works are the interestingly complex rhythmic structures, and the way all the harmonies often fit together perfectly. Compare this to Romantic music: although it is true that a performance of a symphony has to have nearly perfect synchronization, and most people can recognize when a wrong note is played, nevertheless, by varying the tonal qualities, it seems to me that Romantic music is far less demanding harmonically. And when we turn to later music with 13th chords and 15th chords, it seems clear that we are more willing to accept dissonances for their own sake. To be sure, there are lots of dissonances in Bach, and he has chords that can rival some of the most complex chords in Stravinsky, but in general they occur less frequently, in part, I imagine, because they would not sound as good on Bach’s main instrument. I think that Berg wrote some of the most beautiful music out there, but just try playing it on an organ with all the stops out, and you have a mess.

Discussing the organ leads me to one of the most crucial questions in Bach interpretation: the independence of his voice lines. Instructors frequently observe that it is important to keep Bach’s voices separate in a way that is very different from the music of subsequent eras. As it is normally described, this requires pianists to think “horizontally” rather than “vertically”: to pay more attention to how each voice develops independently rather than to emphasize the chordal structures. The best interpreters such as Rosalyn Tureck have inventive techniques to achieve this end. Forcing a pianist who is used to playing Chopin and Beethoven to do this will be a painful enterprise, and it is not at all obvious initially where the emotion is going to come in. Unlike music from other eras Bach doesn’t let you express emotion by simply playing louder and faster.

While there is a lot of truth to saying that one should play Bach horizontally rather than vertically, this independence can often be taken too far. It is worth remembering, that perhaps more than any other composer, Bach could keep two opposing forces in perfect balance: although he writes individual parts that are independent, and have profound vocal qualities of their own, he is always acutely aware of the collective effect he is producing with all the voices. I take this to be one of the most fruitful products of his time on the organ, and it appears throughout the music he wrote for other instruments. Anyone who has played even a smattering of Bach’s keyboard works can recognize this, because in almost all of his works there are moments when the voices come together and produce a collective sound that is very different from what one would expected from the individual melodic lines alone. Consider the effect of the entrance of the second voice in the second Invention, or the wonderful counterpoint that occur in bars 10-12 of the First Invention. My favorite moments of these effects are in bar 17 in the first Fugue of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Something Rosalyn Tureck brings out to great effect in her recording), and the haunting melody in the 17th bar and following of the last Fugue of that work (a moment Barenboim plays exceptionally well). This last work provides particular testimony to Bach’s ability to think in two directions at once: he almost miraculously pulls out a lyrical melody from what is ostensibly a 12-tone theme worthy of Schoenberg. If we turn to his choral works these moments are even more dramatic and obvious: consider the magnificent rhythms from the middle Coro of Aus der Teifen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir (BWV 131).

All this is to say that the best interpreters of Bach can keep the voices independent while acknowledging these moments of sublime beauty. Of course, there is a range of possible interpretations in any given work. For piano works, I tend to like the balance that Rosalyn Tureck achieves in the piano works rather than the remarkable independence that Gould can achieve. In vocal works, I’ve come to like the emphasis on the individual voices found in Rifkin and some of Fisher-Diskau’s recordings, if only because most recordings sound too monotonic.

I think this contrast between independent and collective action lies at the heart of what I find most powerful about Bach’s work. There are many composers who can manage to carry you through a broad range of emotional responses in the half hour that you give them. Some of our most beloved composers fall in this category: Beethoven was a masters of this in his piano and orchestral works, Schumann in his piano works, and composers such as Verdi and Puccini in their vocal works can write music that can put a tear in the eyes of the most stoic of listeners (especially if they are played well). But although it is a fool-hearted task to try to rank composers of this caliber, I would venture to say that except for the sphere of string quartets, and especially the late quartets of Beethoven, few of these composers can match Bach at his most powerful. Although I’m sure reasonable people will disagree with me on this, one of the reasons I think this is that at those climactic moments in Bach you can feel that intensity not only in the collective effect, but simultaneously in a different way in the conversational interactions between each individual voice. And in fact, the emotional quality comes less from the individual dynamics of the individual musicians, and more from the abstract relations between the members and their relations to the overall monophonic effects. The clarity of the architectonics of the work emphasizes the emotional power.

It is worth making a side note on string quartets, since it does seem peculiar that they form an exception to the generalizations above. Actually, I think that there is a lot of similarity between some of Bach’s music such as works in the Art of the Fugue, and the best string quartets, such as the late quartets of Beethoven. To be sure, there are important differences between these two composers, but in the music of both, there are moments when each respective master does a fantastic job of both producing complicated collective musical effects while still giving each voice independence. I suggest that the uniform quality of the sound of a string quartet, in which all the sound is produced by prolonged contact with strings, finds a parallel in the uniformity of sound of a Baroque organ, in which all the sound is produced by prolonged sound from pipes. The effect in both of these cases is to force a composer to devote more attention to counterpoint and collective harmonies. This also underscores the persuasiveness of Albert Schweitzer’s observation that Bach learned a lot about the melody of vocal lines from the Italian masters of the violin.³

The twin impulses of Bach to let each line sing with its own voice, while producing large-scale effects may ultimately explain why those students in my piano master class did not like Bach. Bach does express intense emotion, but you can’t produce it without first mastering the architectonic structure that forms the basis of the pieces, for that very structure serves as a tool for emotional expression. Consequently, it takes a lot of work in order to get to the point of being able to express emotion in Bach: a performer can’t simply rely on the easy way of expressing emotional intensity, by simply playing faster and louder. The emotion comes from within the structure of the music itself.

Footnotes

1. ^ Forkel Johann Nikolaus, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work, translated by Charles Sanford Terry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. pp. 45ff.

2. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, J.S. Bach, translated by Ernest Newman in 2 Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.v. I. p. 153)

3. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, J.S. Bach, translated by Ernest Newman in 2 Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. v. I pp. 196-198. Schweitzer infers this, but it seems reasonable.

Listening to Ancient Philosophy

Often I hear the distinction between "doing philosophy" and "reading philosophy." This contrast is spelled out in a variety of different ways by different people. Many people want to contrast philosophy proper with some more nebulous activity such as the history of ideas: whereas the former is an enterprise for creating new ideas and new modes of thinking, the latter is supposedly the activity of just collecting the outmoded ideas that have led us to the place we stand in history. As the language in the preceding sentence should make clear, there is often a criticism embedded in this classification from practitioners of the philosophy side of the division. However, anyone who holds to this division will probably also recognize that there is not a firm dividing line between the two sides. In order to come up with new ideas we inevitably have to think through the views of our predecessors, and whenever we try to understand a past philosophical conception we inevitably incorporate some aspects of our own views into the interpretation.

Since I work on ancient philosophy, I often find myself at a strange intersection between these two camps. On the one hand, as a classicist I'm supposed to work to understand the views of philosophers who lived 2000 years ago as correctly as possible. In order to do this I end up spending hours reading "outmoded" conceptions of philosophy, trying to use my knowledge of ancient languages and the milieu of that time period in order to provide a reading of a philosopher that minimizes the influence of my own philosophical views. On the other hand, unlike a classicist, I am supposed to engage in a dialectic with these philosophers and challenge and criticize their views in order to come up with novel philosophical observations. It is apparent that this leaves me in a dangerous and difficult situation: the more successful that I am in one side of this endeavor the less successful I am likely to be on the other. For instance, a wonderful piece of insight may come from deliberately misreading a passage in Aristotle in a way that makes it inconsistent with everything else in the corpus. In this case, the classicist points out the discrepancy and argues that my interpretation cannot possibly be right. In another case I may develop a consistent reading of a word's use throughout the Platonic corpus, and consequently write 50 pages of interpretation that is so bland and uninteresting, that the philosopher thinks it is a colossal waste of time.

In this respect doing historical philosophy contains a divide that may be even more significant than the divide between the so-called "analytic" and "continental" philosophies of the Twentieth Century: at least in the case of that latter divide, everyone agreed that the activity being practiced was philosophy, even if each respective camp thought the other camp was doing things badly. In historical philosophy it is the very category of philosophy that is up for grabs. Like the apikoros* in the joke who loses because he was so successful (Ted Cohen, "Jokes," p. 68), the historical philosopher also can lose in the same way. It becomes incumbent on an ancient philosophy student to show that what she's doing is a worthwhile endeavor.

I happen to think ancient philosophy is a worthwhile endeavor, which is why I study the subject. I think a great deal of this worth comes from the very tension I have been describing. For I think that philosophy, at least when it is practiced well, should be both an active and passive endeavor, and just as important as it is to speak coherently about a topic, it is just as important to be able to listen and understand views that you don't necessarily agree with. Ancient philosophy, by forcing its practitioners to do a little of both of these activities, becomes a very good way to achieve this balance.

Already I may be walking into dangerous territory by making these assertions. Although presumably very few philosophers would argue that it isn't important to listen to other people's viewpoints, there is a tendency for philosophers to become strong advocates for their own viewpoints, and to ridicule people whose views differ. Thus a group of Davidsonian scholars at one school might have inside jokes about how wrong Anscombian philosophers are at another, and vice versa, and followers of Nussbaum may be ridiculed in introductory philosophy courses at one school, just as Kripke's possible world semantics might be ridiculed at another. 

Now, there is some benefit from this distribution of philosophical schools and camps: since schools tend to attract and produce philosophers with similar philosophical commitments, it means that the positive consequences of these philosophical commitments can be explored deeper and more effectively at these institutions. If you want to study McDowell's writings, you shouldn't go to a school that thinks his work is hogwash. This compartmentalization of philosophy into schools has the further interesting consequence that when practitioners of different schools meet at conferences, the debate can be carried out in a rich and powerful way. In these respects philosophy tends to be analogous to free-market capitalism, and has similar advantages: a diverse range of philosophical positions are explored, views get developed quickly because of the increased competition, and a wide range of positions and schools are available.

Yet, as I began to discuss above, there is a cost for all of this: different schools often listen to their competition less than they should, and philosophical gains in one school are often overlooked, and consequently fail to be adopted by other schools. Philosophy becomes less of a progressive enterprise like science, and more of a diverse collection of bickering schools, like one might have found in the so-called Pre-Socratic period. There is no reason that philosophy should aspire to become a science with dogmas and canonical modes of thought (as some might characterize Scholastic philosophy), but at the same time, I think it should be a collaborative enterprise in which different schools provide benefits to one another. I guess, my ideal philosophical landscape is more like free-market socialism than laissez-faire capitalism.

Anyway, if you can understand my perspective, and see the value in listening to the beliefs of people with very different philosophical views, then ancient philosophy, and in particular, ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and its heirs becomes a very interesting case to study. By reading these works you encounter views that were held 2000 years ago, before the advent of modern science, before the development of market theories, and before we learned many important facts about the world around us. For these reasons, the practitioners of ancient philosophy necessarily had very different views from those we hold today. However, the rigor with which ancient Greek and Roman philosophical beliefs were argued, and the fact that contemporary philosophy can find its roots in these styles of argument, make them particularly amenable to the styles of philosophical engagement that we use today. All of these features mean that if one wants to develop really good abilities at understanding how other philosophers think, studying ancient Greek and Roman philosophy becomes a wonderful way of doing this.

Of course, these listening skills are not necessarily inherent in ancient philosophical texts, and it is really easy to read an ancient philosopher's writings without developing this kind of understanding. One can encounter this kind of superficial understanding in any philosophical writer that merely seeks to apply ancient beliefs to modern contexts or to apply modern approaches to ancient contexts. Some really great philosophers participate from time to time in this sort of "applied philosophy," sometimes with rich philosophical benefit. Although what he writes is interesting, I think we find these sorts of distortions when Heidegger reads ancient philosophy, or when Hegel attempts to write the history of philosophy. Of course, such distortions are not confined merely to the "continental" camps, and Quine appears to do the same thing when he reads Aristotle's syllogistic, or Van der Waerden when he reads Archimedes (Unlike some, I think creative mathematicians deserve the title of "philosophers"), and there are many more contemporary examples that I will pass over for the moment.

My problem with many of these interpretations of ancient texts is not with the usefulness of the theories that they develop, but with the further claim that these extensions and applications of ancient philosophy somehow track the meaning of ancient texts, and show a genuine understanding of the views of those ancient authors. It is in this claim that I see an inability to really listen to the ancient philosophers in question. Perhaps, I'm guilty of some degree of lack of comprehension of the more modern authors I cite in the last paragraph, but I think that in each of these cases an ancient philosopher is in a unique position to track these distortions. Unlike more contemporary philosophers, a good ancient philosophy student is always aware that there is an ineliminable historical-linguistic element at play whenever we comment on an ancient text. We are aware of this because we all had to spend years studying ancient Greek and Latin, and whenever we go astray from ordinary Greek, there are classicists waiting in the wings of the theater to call us back to task. Further, the existence of the classicist side of the division means that textual proficiency is prized, and if someone brings forward an interpretation of Aristotle, there is often someone in the audience who can cite the Greek text from memory that contradicts it, often by page and line number. This means that a good practitioner of ancient philosophy does not have the luxury of ignoring the nuances of language, or the details of a text. We have to listen.

Do you need to study ancient philosophy to develop this ability to listen? Of course not. Anyone who works very closely with a philosophical text or author can develop this ability. Anyone who reads the works of any other philosopher, or finds herself in a debate with another philosopher, or even in a debate with herself, should realize that she has to hone her ability to balance listening to the views of others with actively developing her own. What ancient philosophy does more than other enterprises is bring the contrast between listening and talking to the very forefront of the philosophical enterprise. 

And this is a point that is worth underscoring: learning to do ancient philosophy well is no different from learning to do philosophy well. And it is for this reason that ancient philosophy should never be blindly relegated to some historical fringe of the discipline of philosophy that merely collects the outmoded ideas of the past. Philosophy, just as Aristotle himself described the task on several occasions, is an active dialogue with the philosophers of the past. And as in any dialogue with another, there is an ethical imperative to try to understand the views of one's opponents as correctly, and in as philosophically rich a way, as you possibly can.

* * *

*OK, here's the joke from Ted Cohen's book:

Once a perverse young Jewish man in a small village in Poland enjoyed his role as apikoros. But after some time annoying his fellow villagers, he decided he needed to expand his talents, and so he took himself off to study with the man he had heard of as "the great apikoros of Warsaw." After arriving in Warsaw he found the man in question and followed him around for many days, observing what he did. Then he approached the man, saying, "I don't see that you are such a great apikoros. You observe the holidays, you attend shul, you keep a kosher house. I am already a better apikoros than you."

"Oh?" inquired the older man, "what do you do?"

The young man replied proudly, "I sneak treif into the butcher shop, I rearrange the pages of the siddur, I re-roll the Torah scrolls so that the wrong portions are read. Things like that."

"I see," said the older man. "Let me tell you: I'm an apikoros; you're a goy."

12/20/08 Beach Party

For a while I was putting up selections from my dinner parties, and sort of stopped. However, some of my best dinner parties have been held over the past year, so I'm starting to add them again.

In December, to celebrate the darkest evening of the year I had a dinner party at my place, which included fish and a swim in the building pool. Hence, it was a beach party held at a most surprising time of the year. The menu was mostly French, since my previous dinner parties were Spanish and Italian. Many of the recipes came from Alain Ducasse's cookbooks.  Here was the menu

1. Canapés: Simple eggplant spread or mustard on what I think is the best French bread in Chicago: the bread at Fox & Obel. 

2. Quiche au fromage et épinard: I usually strive to always serve something different at my dinner parties, but this quiche is one of the standards of my repertoire, and I usually put on a little show removing the quiche from a pan.  

3. Pavé de loup au endives cuites et crues, sucs de loup aux truffes: the main course of the night, a recipe adapted from one of Alain Ducasse's classic dishes. It is hard to go wrong with black truffles, sea bass, and endives. For the recipe I used a Chilean sea bass. The fish was actually not cooking properly, so I made a bed from the vegetables, and then covered the fish in broth, and cooked it for an extra ten minutes. The resulting fish was absolutely perfect. I even surprised myself.  

4. Foie Gras au Cognac: My original intention was to make a rather elaborate recipe from Alain Ducasse: Petit pâté choud de colvert de Sologne et foie gras en pithiviers, sauce rouennaise. But by the time we finished the fish and quiche, every one was pretty full, so my improvisation of searing the Foie Gras in a pan, and then covering it in Cognac, was just right.

5. Petits pots de thé au jasmin: custard infused with Jasmine tea. Another recipe from Alain Ducasse.

6. Une surprise: the late Frank LaCatena discovered a marvelous creation by combining enough eggs to feed an army with cream and fresh basil. One scoop is all you need! 

Eating good French food on a cold snowy day in Chicago after swimming in a pool. It's a combination difficult to beat!

 

Close Encounters of the Automobile Kind

This week I was riding along Michigan Avenue in Chicago on my blue Miyata bicycle. It was a beautiful day, and as I passed a bicycle shop I noted the, "Gas sucks. Ride a bike," sign, I was happy to think that I was getting green points for doing something that I enjoy anyway. As I approached the intersection with 13th street, a car traveling in the other direction -- which had stopped at the intersection stop line -- suddenly bolted forward and made a left-hand turn into my lane, and instead of passing through the intersection, the vehicle suddenly stopped, blocking my entire lane. I tried to brake but did not have the time to respond and ended up plowing into the automobile wedging my front tire underneath the rear car tire, and going head first over my handlebars and onto the trunk. Fortunately, by the time I hit the car I managed to slow enough that I didn't even get bruised, but I still managed to destroy the fork on my bicycle, and scratch up the car a bit with my handlebars. I was mad, since it is illegal to make a sudden turn into traffic when a bicycle is approaching, for this very reason. To quote the Illinois Rules of the Road:

"When a motorist is turning left and there is a bicyclist entering the intersection from the opposite direction, the driver should wait for the bicyclist to pass before making the turn. Also, if a motorist is sharing the left turn lane with a bicyclist, stay behind them until they have safely completed their turn."

I probably would have lost my cool with the driver, but I then looked at the vehicle I hit, and it was a Chicago police car! Yes, a police car without sirens or anything suddenly pulled into my lane. The officers were first a little angry at what happened, as if I had deliberately run into them. But it probably dawned on them fairly quickly what had happened, and one of the officers became quite apologetic, explaining that they had to stop since a pedestrian had just stepped onto the crosswalk. They both then became very conscientious about whether I was alright, and spent some time looking after me, which I appreciated. I also appreciated that there was a bike shop right there at the scene of the accident that was able to replace my fork in about an hour.

But this underscores something that many people already know: bikers rarely get the privileges that the "Rules of the Road" are supposed to afford us. When a bicycle is on the road, it is a vehicle just like any other vehicle, and it has all the rights and privileges of a car. This means that if you are driving a car and there is a bicycle in the middle of your lane slowing you down: that bicycle has the right of way, and although most bicyclists will pull toward the side of the road to let you pass, a driver has no right to demand it. But I can't count the number of times that a car has honked at me, or intentionally passed me as closely as possible as if to punish me, or yelled at me as if I shouldn't be on the road. And I am someone who actually uses hand-signals, and tries to yield to automobiles whenever possible. The assumptions many drivers in Chicago make seems to be entirely based on relative size: autos, just like SUVs seem to announce to the world "I'm bigger than you, so get out of my way." The problem for cyclists is sometimes you just can't.

Ironically, a few days before hitting the police car I was outlining some basic rules of politeness. I reproduce the sections pertaining to bicycles and cars, since they seem pertinent to this entry.

When biking on a major road, a cyclist generally stays as far as possible to the right-hand side of the road. However, there are specific circumstances when a biker will not do this, and automobile drivers should recognize these circumstances.

(1) For instance, when there is a line of parked cars on the right-hand side of the road, the cyclist will generally bike three to five feet from the line of cars. Rest assured, this is for good purpose, and there is no need to honk for the biker to get over. The problem is that it is often difficult to tell when a car is occupied or not, and if an occupant decides to disembark from the vehicle, a door will open. This door, although perhaps posing less danger to an automobile, can pose a significant danger to a cyclist, and bikers have been killed both by having to suddenly sway into traffic, and by actually slamming into that opened piece of metal and glass at 30-40 miles an hour. Please respect the cyclist's space.

(2) If a biker is going to make a left-hand turn, whatever happens, the cyclist will have to cut across the lane, and should signal to do so. I realize that letting a cyclist cross your lane may sometimes be inconvenient, but it is far more inconvenient if you deliberately prevent the cyclist from doing so. Not only will the cyclist possibly be injured or killed, but in such case the authorities may prevent you from getting to your destination for a very long time.

(3) Finally, a cyclist will often get into the middle of the road before stopping at a red traffic light when there is a right-turn lane. This is because in many states automobiles can make right-hand turns before a red light. The cyclist is being polite and lawful by allowing the cars to do so. Again, if you harass a biker for doing this, you may end up suffering the next time you need to make a right-hand turn.

Ingmar Bergman's Persona

This past week I've had the chance to watch Persona for the first time. It's an amazing movie, and probably one of the greatest movies of the past century. Ingmar Bergman said it was one of the two movies in which he pushed the genre as far as he could (the other being Cries and Whispers (Swedish "Viskningar och rop" [See the Wikipedia article with the citation from Jerry Vermilye), and it can be startling the first time that one sees it. But even if one doesn't get it the first few times, one has to marvel at the details. There is the cinematography: the lighting in the scene when Elisabet is falling asleep, the wonderful blend of light and shadow in the scene when Elisabet comes to Alma's room, the powerful shots of Fårö island. There is the music: haunting at times (Elisabet falling asleep), percussive at others (the music after the scene with the broken glass), and omitted at other moments. There is the aesthetic coherence of the work: the way that photographs, old film clips, and textures merge into a single work. The acting: how the actresses manage to mingle sanity and hysterics, the way they interact with one another, and the way words -- such as in the scene when Alma describes sex on the beach -- can be a powerful way of conveying emotion. And finally, there are moments where Bergman's shows unusual brilliance as a director: the way he can turn a photograph into a movie, the way he can created a single ambiguous face from the two actress' faces, and the way he orchestrates the scene(s) when Alma discusses Elisabet's child. Finally, there is a feature of the movie that really appeals to me: the fact that Bergman incorporates enough detail and ambiguity that the film hovers just beyond comprehension. Unlike a director who spells out every detail for his audience, Bergman is intentionally creating a mystery.

Even a mystery, however, is capable of some degree of interpretation, and hence I'd like to present some thoughts on the film tonight. It is important to recognize, however, that any interpretation of the film is going to fail to capture the full meaning and force of the work. This goes far beyond the normal caveat for the medium. I think Bergman is using themes creatively, and organically, combining them in interesting ways, and hence it isn't the job of an interpretation to fully explain the film, but rather to provide insight into the work that can be used as a stepping-stone for further exploration and interpretation. Also, I would urge anyone reading this post to see the movie before you read what follows. Part of what Bergman is working with is shock and bewilderment, and so I think it is useful to experience it. The first time I watched the film I wasn't even sure I was watching the right film at the beginning!

So with these caveats in mind, I think I am partial to the interpretation that at some level all the female characters within the film are the very same person. This might be suggested by the title, since a "persona" was originally an ancient Greek theatrical mask, and it so happened in Greek drama that the same actor wore different masks, and in a similar fashion the character at the heart of Persona may be merely expressed in multiple masks. The unity of Alma (played by actress Bibi Andersson) and Elisabet's (played by Liv Ullmann) personalities is underscored by the merging of the two actresses' faces towards the end of the work, and the way that Alma can know things about Elisabet's character that no one could possibly know under the circumstances. Also, there is the way that Elisabet is present but does not respond when Alma is making love to Elisabet's husband; or the fact that both Alma and Elisabet deal with similar issues, such as pregnancy and its results (I think that it is fairly clear that the boy in the beginning fits into both their stories). Other pieces of evidence are the end of the movie: we see Elisabet packing up a suitcase, we see Alma closing up the summer house, but we don't see Alma packing or Elisabet closing up the summer house, and only one person clearly leaves the island.

Further, with the addition of the Doctor at the outset one has the makings of a fairly persuasive Freudian tripartite psyche. In this interpretation, Alma is the Ego, Elisabet the Id, and the Doctor the Super-Ego. At first this may seem unlikely, but there is a lot detail at least pushing in this direction. Like our unconscious, Elisabet does not speak. She just experiences emotions, and reacts. There are two possible exceptions to this: first, when Alma is drunk at the table and apparently incapable of separating herself from Elisabet, and secondly, and more importantly when Alma starts to throw boiling water at Elisabet. In this latter case the words that are spoken are less thought-out content, and more some sort of primal reflex to danger (and importantly not necessarily coming from Elisabet, but from somewhere else). And the Doctor is an interesting force overseeing the relationship between Alma and Elisabet. At the outset, it is the doctor who hears Alma's fears and who is Alma's authority figure, and the Doctor is the one who gives permission for Elisabet to carry out her desires -- a permission that is spoken of almost as a punishment. Further she mediates between Alma and Elisabet, and it is when Elisabet writes a note to the Doctor (or is it Alma? It is ambiguous: note how it is difficult to see how many pages the note has, as if Alma is looking at the same note in a manifold of different ways), revealing everything Alma has been saying from a dominant viewpoint, that the movie comes to a climax. As if one part of the psyche is "telling on" the other. Finally, the vampire theme can also fit into this interpretation, since one might see the final arm biting episode as a decision on Alma's part to accept the drives and impulses of the Id. This approach also opens the door to seeing the movie as an exploration of mental illness, and the classical move of the ego to fail to accept the Id. It is possible that the movie even goes further, and is specifically dealing with a kind of schizophrenia, although this is perhaps going too far. Sometimes the difference between sanity and insanity is only a matter of degree.

The interpretation I've outlined makes sense of a lot of the film, but it omits a lot as well. Clearly the film also has something to say about the doctor-patient relationship and the phenomenon of transference. And, there are other layers. For instance, there is the vampire theme that occurs again and again throughout. Obviously, saying the Id is a vampire preying on the ego makes some sense, but the drama pushes this to such limits that it clearly goes beyond the Freudian paradigm. And if the Freudian interpretation makes sense, the paradigm is clearly warped by making the three parts of the soul three different people with different personalities, hopes and fears. There are also the sexual tones between Elisabet and Alma that requires some explanation.

And finally, the tripartite soul interpretation tells nothing about the self-conscious film-making that occurs This adds further depth to the film throughout: the fact that it begins with early 20th Century films, that pictures, television, and radio all have prominent roles within the story, that Bergman repeatedly underscores that it is a movie by showing the film reel, and that we sometimes even get to see the people filming the story.

I tend to be an anti-reductionist, so I don't want to see this movie as reduced to an exploration of a particular psychological paradigm. If that is all the movie was, then it would not be nearly so interesting. Rather the film involves all these interpretations: the tripartite soul, the doctor-patient relationship and transference, the vampire theme, a summer on an island, a relationship between two people, and all the extra ambiguity Bergman has packed into the film. It is the multitude of meanings, the exquisite detail of location and human interaction, and the way that all the components grow into one another like an organic whole that makes this movie the remarkable creation that it is.