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 Venice, and The Devils of Loudun were among the small quantity of films he had formerly ingested and assimilated to his memory.  "Though I shouldn't be surprised if, one day, owning or renting a television, if not regularly visiting the cinema, will be virtually compulsory for everyone," he added as a sarcastic afterthought.

      "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!