VISUAL
EXPERIENCES
Television is all
things to all people, and to Matthew Duggan, who was more interested in reading
than in viewing, it suggested a mode of external dreaming which, like the
internal mode, obeyed its own laws in autocratic defiance of the dreamer. Sometimes television was pleasant, sometimes
tolerable, at other times ghastly - just like dreams. Matthew hated dreams, particularly the
ghastly ones, and he wasn't all that keen on
television either. Nevertheless, he was
capable of watching it, from time to time, and would occasionally express an
opinion as to its moral worth or propaganda value to those of his friends who
had invited him over for the evening, and in whose house or flat was to be
found a television, to which they were almost certain to succumb at some point
in the conversation.
As the guest of regular film-goers, one evening, he was kind
enough to opine that, in spite of his not having visited a cinema for several
years, cinema was morally superior to television, if only to the extent that
one sat as a component of an audience and thereby approximated more closely to the
collectivized spiritual condition of Heaven in the future Beyond. Television, by contrast, was mostly an
individual affair, like dreams, and could thus be said to stem, in a manner of
speaking, from the Diabolic Alpha.
"Yes, I suppose there may be some truth in that
claim," Dick Kelly murmured, smiling faintly, "though I must confess
to never having considered the moral implications of such media before, being a
person who sees in cinema an opportunity of keeping up-to-date with the latest
films, preferably, of course, the best ones." He smiled afresh, this time quite openly, and
added: "But I dare say you'd put a different interpretation on 'the best'
than myself."
Duggan blushed and gently nodded in confirmation of that
possibility.
"Incidentally, what films did you see at the cinema in the
past?" asked Karen Gill, who was sitting next to her fiancé in front of
the television.
"Oh, not very many," Duggan evasively replied, having
forgotten most of them by now anyway.
Unfortunately, personal circumstances had prevented him from going to
the cinema ever since he was a relatively carefree suburban youth, though he
had never been a particularly regular film-goer even then. His main interest had always centred on
books, especially philosophical, literary, and historical ones, and he
considered this fact a consequence of intellectual sophistication. There was something inherently superior, as
far as he was concerned, about reading to viewing. The latter involved appearances and primarily
appealed to the eyes, whereas the former appealed, in its concern with
essences, to the intellect, and simply harnessed the eyes to this service. Its chief disadvantage resided in the fact
that, ordinarily, one read as an individual in private rather than as a member of
a group in public. Only teachers,
schoolchildren, lecturers, and priests regularly had the privilege of communal
reading, an activity which could be morally associated with communal praying -
not that Matthew Duggan went in for much praying these days, whether communally
or individually! However, he managed to
recall, for Karen's benefit, that Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Death in
"What makes you say that?" a faintly amused Dick Kelly
asked.
"Oh, an acknowledgement of the tendency, I suppose, for
educational and/or propaganda controls to be tightened-up and systematically
enforced with every fresh advance in human evolution," Duggan calmly
replied. "The 20th century is
really a transitional age in between bourgeois humanism and proletarian
transcendentalism, a kind of compromise age of bourgeois/proletarian
transcendental humanism or humanistic transcendentalism - at any rate,
certainly in the West."
"Perhaps you're right," Dick Kelly conceded. "Right, I mean, about television. Speaking personally, I'd have nothing to lose
from the introduction of a law which made the ownership or renting of a
television compulsory; though that is no guarantee that it would be watched, is
it?"
Duggan shrugged his shoulders as if to say 'maybe one day things
will be different in that respect', then said: "Most people in possession
of a television would be inclined to use it, even if not throughout the greater
part of each evening, every day."
"Yes, that must be so," Karen agreed in loyalty to
female common sense. "One would
have to be insane to have a television and not make use of it, particularly in
view of the licence fee! We use ours
virtually every evening, and this in spite of the fact that we always go to the
cinema at the weekend. We're visual
crazy."
"Which is better, I suppose, than being audio crazy and
thus dependent on the radio or stereo for hours on-end," Duggan remarked,
drawing on his painful experience of years of exposure to music-crazy
neighbours. "Though some films are
quite noisy, I'll concede." As he knew full-well from the almost equally painful experience of
years of exposure to television-crazy neighbours. "Nevertheless, films constitute an
improvement on theatre to the extent that their actors aren't tangible
presences on a stage but ... intangible absences on a screen," he resumed
thoughtfully. "One might define
cinema as spiritualized theatre, and the same would of course apply to
television when used as a medium for conveying films of one kind or
another. Being more heterogeneous than
cinema, however, television could also be defined as spiritualized opera at
those times when operatic performances were being transmitted. It could even be defined as spiritualized
sport when transmitting some football or cricket or other sports
competition. It's certainly much more
multifaceted than cinema, which has taken over, in my opinion, from the
theatre. It signifies a kind of
convergence to omega on the level of audio-visual activity, since a
multi-purpose medium."
Dick Kelly smiled in gratification for the privilege of being
the recipient of so much apparently esoteric, albeit highly speculative,
information, and said: "'Omega' presumably being the goal of evolution in
transcendent spirit?"
"That's right," Duggan confirmed, not without a shade
of embarrassment for having been obliged to assert his well-known authority in
matters evolutionary! "Omega will
be the ultimate manifestation of the supra-atomic, the ultimate transcendence, once all separate transcendences from whichever parts of the
Universe have merged into one another in their convergence towards total
unity. It will be the ultimate absolute,
in complete contrast to the primal absolute ... of the millions of governing or
central stars in the Universe - approximately one to each galaxy."
"Gosh, how complex!" Karen
exclaimed, succumbing to a rosy blush.
"I'm always lost when people start transcending Christian
terminology."
"My humble apologies," Duggan rejoined. "But Christian terminology would be
inadequate for defining such subtleties, because it's based on a sort of
microcosmic/galactic partiality which favours a distinction between the Creator
and the Holy Spirit, not, as would be objectively nearer the mark, between the
plurality of the Alpha Absolutes, i.e. Creators, and the future unity of the
Omega Absolute, i.e. the Holy Spirit.
The latter is approximately appropriate, but the former simply lays
stress on one Creator, a fact which
hardly does justice to the millions of other Creators, one to each galaxy,
which are polytheistically and therefore pluralistically outside the bounds of
alpha monotheism and its Judaic origins.... Not that theology admits of a
connection between the figurative and the literal, or between the central star
of any particular galaxy and the deity - namely the Creator, Jehovah, or
whatever - which I believe to have been extrapolated from it as a psychological
content of the unconscious mind.
Religion, in that old theological sense, and science, as applying to the
Cosmos, can't be fully reconciled, unlike religion and science in the
futuristic transcendental sense, when artificial means will be found to support
and sustain human brains in the interests of their spiritual evolution towards
transcendence. For the Christian mind,
however, the Creator is no mere abstraction and unconscious content but a real,
live entity out there in space, even if his Creator, namely the Father, is not
quite commensurate with Jehovah, the Judaic Creator, but, rather, pertains to a
less extreme alpha which probably stands to Jehovah as television to
cinema."
Karen Gill conceded to the relative truth of this statement and
inquired whether, in that case, not believing in God, meaning Jehovah and/or
the Father, was tantamount to not believing in the existence of stars?
"By no means," Duggan straightaway replied. "For one outgrows the Creator as one's
psyche evolves away from the unconscious, in which such theological
abstractions exist, and further into the superconscious - the realm of true
spirit. Whether or not one believes in
the existence of the Creator will depend on the psychological constitution of
one's psyche, and is therefore an individual matter. I, for one, don't believe in Him, but that
doesn't mean to say that I refuse to recognize the existence of the stars in
our galaxy. The literal roots of
evolution, from which our planet and all of its life forms have sprung, most
certainly exist. But that doesn't imply
that the Creator need also exist, least of all in space, since figurative
abstractions, whether Judaic and primal or Christian and worldly, apply to the
unconscious mind and will only exist in that mind - assuming one's
psyche is still largely dominated by the unconscious and one is accordingly
prepared to recognize such abstractions.
Mine isn't, which is why I don't believe in the
Creator. Consequently, for me, He
doesn't exist."
"All very profound," Dick Kelly opined, taking care
not to omit a timely smile. "Simple
souls like Karen and me would never be able to work that kind of thing out for
ourselves. Nor do we always respond to
such enlightenment in the most positive way, partly because we often fail to
grasp it. What you said earlier,
concerning the spiritualized nature of cinema and television, certainly made
sense to me, however, and has thrown new light on my relationship to those
media and assessment of them in terms of how they fit into an overall
evolutionary development in the arts.
Clearly, if television is a kind of multi-purpose medium and cinema a
step beyond theatre, then neither could be assumed to lead to anything
else."
Matthew Duggan pondered a moment, anxious not to allow himself
to be rushed into a superficial response, and then said: "Yes, that may be
so; though video, being a more evolved development, combines the theatrical
exclusivity of cinema with the privacy of television, thereby enabling the
film-enthusiast to purchase and/or rent whichever video recordings he may fancy
and replay them as often as he likes.
Thus, in the case of film videos, the exclusivity of cinema is brought
into the home, albeit at a greater cost, if purchased new, than would be that
of viewing films in public. Whether or
not video will supplant cinema in the future, as Christianity supplanted
Judaism, it is arguably more related to television than to cinema and will
doubtless co-exist with the former, as Son to Father, for some time to come -
albeit more as an individual medium predominantly stemming from theatre than as
a collectivistic medium for the convergence of disparate arts and activities,
from politics to sport."
It seemed that Dick Kelly was satisfied by this argument, for he
smiled and ventured no verbal comment.
His girlfriend, however, was wondering where that potent mind-expanding
drug LSD would fit it, since she had gleaned from one of Duggan's previous
visits that synthetic hallucinogens like LSD had a part to play in the future,
and wondered whether it didn't stem from cinema or television as a kind of internal
mode of visual or, rather, visionary experience germane to a higher stage of
evolution? She put this conjecture to
Duggan, who appeared to have overlooked the relationship between LSD and other
forms of visual media in his conversation this evening.
"In point of fact, LSD trips stem from a different visual
tradition," he confidently affirmed, "the tradition, namely, of fine
art. Not as an alternative kind of fine
art however, since fine art is ever a man-made thing, but as the successor to
such art conceived in its highest guise - namely, as holography. The trip, which of course is what recourse to
LSD implies, is really the antithesis of the dream, or internal visionary
experience of the unconscious. In
contrast, LSD activates the superconscious or, rather, puts the unconscious to
sleep, and this results in the highest kind of
internal visionary experience which, unlike the lowest kind, i.e. dreams, will
be static and seemingly translucent. As
dreams precede art, so trips will succeed it, being the main spiritual
preoccupation of the first of the two life forms in the post-human millennium,
namely the supermen, whose brains will be artificially supported and sustained
in collectivized contexts - the overall situation being antithetical, in evolutionary
terms, to that which preceded the human in the collectivized lifestyles of apes
in trees. So trips, while having more in
common with holograms than with films or television programmes, will exist on
an altogether superior plane than fine art, and as the antithetical equivalent
of sleep dreams. When we abandon the
conscious for the subconscious ... we dream.
Conversely, when we abandon the unconscious for the superconscious ...
we trip. We abandon the former with the
aid of sleep. In the transcendental
future, we shall abandon the latter with the aid of LSD, or some such
hallucinogenic stimulus. Evolution
proceeds from the natural to the supernatural via the artificial."
"And presumably does so via the artificial media of cinema
and television," Dick Kelly remarked, to show that he was still following
the discussion, "in which, by watching films, it's almost as though one
were dreaming awake."
This time is was Duggan's turn to smile, since that was
precisely what television, not to mention cinema, suggested to him, as already
noted. "To be sure," he
rejoined, "and we might just as readily contend that, in contemplating
holograms, it will be almost as though we were tripping asleep, by which is
meant tripping externally. Just as films
suggest external dreaming, so will holograms suggest external tripping." And,
with that said, he relapsed into the satisfied silence of one who has spoken
his fill, while Dick Kelly and Karen Gill both smilingly turned towards their
television and resigned themselves to a period of
external dreaming - I mean, viewing!
