photo – towards point omega – rlw
This book is a meditation held together by the flow of time; time says that one thing must come after another, we do not will this, it is. We can will to erect things, language, to look as though we have arrested the flow but it is a writers’ or readers’ willing suspension of disbelief that allows it to be.
DeLillo has arranged a Haiku-like narrative on America’s preoccupation with 9/11 and has set this constellation of thoughts next to, and intermixed with, the process of making art today; the act of erotic attraction; and what it looks and feels like to loose the one relationship in life that gives one reason for participating, being, in this flow of time.
This is how he makes art:
“I had him babbling in unsequential edits, one year shading into another, or Jerry soundless, clowning, he is knocked-kneed and bucktoothed, bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion, the old flawed footage, the disturbed signals, random noise on the soundtrack, streaky patterns on the screen. He inserts drumsticks in his nostrils, he sticks the hand mike in his mouth. I added intervals of modern music to the track, rows of tones, the sound of certain re-echoing drone. There was an element of austere drama in the music, it placed Jerry outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God. I tormented myself over the running time, settling finally on a freakish forty-seven-minute movie that was screened at a couple of documentary festivals. It could have been four hours, six hours. It wore me down, I became Jerry’s frenzied double, eyeballs popping out of my head.”We learn one character, the artist, Jim Finley, telling the story, an artist in America putting his entire being into developing art projects of unusual makeup and uncertain destiny. We experience through him, the film maker, the owner of Deadbeat Films. This is his design for his next project:
“No plush armchair with warm lighting and books on a shelf in the background. Just a man and a wall. The man stands there and relates the complete experience, everything that comes to mind, personalities, theories, details, feelings. You’re the man. There’s no offscreen voice asking questions. There’s no interspersed combat footage or comments from others, on camera or off …. Who you are, what you believe. Other thinkers, writers, artists, nobody’s done a film like this, nothing planned, nothing rehearsed, no elaborate setup, no conclusions in advance, this is completely sort of barefaced, uncut.”The main object of this project is the fleshing out of the character who was hired by the Pentagon to give the Iraq war, at the time it was being waged, “ words and meanings. Words they hadn’t used, new ways of thinking and seeing.” One imagines this man, Richard Elster, this intellectual, in the midst of the Pentagon strategists obsessed with “priorities, statistics, evaluations and rationalities“, to be in an ecclesiastical position. We do not know his effect on the analytical warriors, only that he performed his services for two years, which, just based on duration, leads me to think that he made some contribution to the equation. Elster wanted a Haiku war, “a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things.” Thus he attempts to change their perceptions to cut through the abstractions and see “nothing beyond what it is”. Elster wanted a war because: “A great power has to act. We were struck hard. We need to retake the future. The force of the will, the sheer visceral need. We can’t let others shape our world, our minds. All they have are old dead despotic traditions. We have a living history…”
In the midst of making his next art film project, basically an interview, to capture, Elster the intellectual lobbyist, in the aftermath of his war conjugations, Elster’s daughter, who has come to visit her father at the remote house in the California desert disappears after having lived with the two for a short period of time. She vanishes one afternoon and leaves Elster in a world absent of relationships and meaning. His daughter is his only close human attachment and her disappearance is a symbol of his ultimate detachment from all things human. He is left “alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware…”
In some respects it is the same consequence for the artist, he had developed an erotic attachment to the daughter based on imaginations he had for her for the short time she was with them – she did not reciprocate interest, she simply allowed him to use her as an object. Finely takes to her given that she spent thirty minutes ( an adequate amount of time to register validation of interest per Finely) viewing his Psycho film. Urges lead him on to eventual voyeurism, standing in the hall looking at her in bed, wondering if he should approach her. She sees him standing there and turns in bed away from his gaze.
Finally, this book, this meditation is about human beings, their nature, their essence, what makes them complex, having a range of refractions, with no clear idea of which surfaces are real and which are abstractions, calls into question the nature of abstractions. Are they, the abstractions, not as real as the sense data we get from he real world? Blood, rain, wolves, arms, twelve, pi squared, maps, words, metaphors, myths. “Human perception is a saga of created realities”. And DeLillo goes beyond understanding being, he posits that humans ultimately want to go back to being inanimate, to undo the millions of years of evolution: “Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen … Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have beings. Unless there’s some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone.”
What a rush.
DeLillo inserts, one at the beginning and one at the end, two curious pieces in the book, both of which are called Anonymity. He uses these narratives to introduce the film Psycho and to explore some of its images and psychology that he thinks important and further that he uses in his film projects. We feel that his use of juxtaposition allows a seamless exploration of the dark and a maniacal edge to the American psyche and how this cultural development is exported to the world through film. It further illustrates the absence of anything close to a meaningful relationship. We see the influence of technology, introversion, divorce, science and egotism that literally shatters the human bond that naturally exists between animals developed on the earth.
We see an America displaying its cold analytical nature, especially through film exported around the globe, that the rest of the world reacts to with anger, opposition and passion. We are successful in blowing up other cultures civility and protocols with the ease and precision of our self-appointed role. DeLillo’s use of juxtaposition forms a new category in literary sub-structure.
rlw – June 2014
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Zero-K/Don-DeLillo/9781501135392
West Pacific Review 