A Meta-Island or a Meta-Lake?
Is this a meta-island? Or a meta-lake? Can nature be self reflective? Look down these photos from Taal Volcano in Taal Lake in the Philipines to see: “An island within a lake within an island within a lake within an island within the ocean.” And we can add one more island, as the earth is often called an island. We often compare space to water with metaphoric language like “The earth floats through space.” Couldn’t we also call the solar system an island? Could interstellar star dust be called a lake? What about a galaxy floating in dark matter? How far out could we zoom?
Are all these lakes in islands in lakes examples of mise en abyme? The phrase coined by Andre Gide literally means “into the abyss,” and describes the work within the work, for example, the play within the play in Hamlet. It certainly seems like you could zoom forever in or out of the abyss in this sequence. Can’t we find a puddle on the littlest island? Isn’t there a rock in the puddle? Isn’t there a drop of water on the rock? Isn’t there a fleck of dust on the drop? Isn’t there a cluster of molecules on the fleck?
(Check out Google Maps. Photos from Organic Green Roots’ Facebook page.)
Sorry, Bus: Meta-Graffiti
This piece of graffiti is metagraffiti because it is self-referential: “I am sorry bus 4 writ[ing] here.” (Not sure about that last word, actually.) Why would someone write this? Consider for a moment what this self-reflective scrawl might mean.
(Photo by Omar Rodriguez-Rodriguez.)
Hisstory Repleats Herself: James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
One of the most metafictional books: a story about a story that is repeated endlessly, the one story that is all stories at once, the cyclical story of the rise and fall of humanity.
Joyce essentially invented his own mishmash of languages, making the book notoriously difficult to read, but if you drink several glasses of Irish whiskey, smoke a few bowls and squint a lot the book becomes more readable . . . even funny! You should think of the novel as a great collection of puns.
Here is the first line: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Joyce packs in meaning by using puns and allusions (which are themselves a kind of pun). On a cursory count I find at least fourteen. “Past,” for example, is the preposition as in “the river flows past the church.” It also refers to the past, a central theme of the work. It can also be a homonym for the past tense of the verb “to pass”: passed. A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake by William York Tindall explains some of the allusions: ”‘Riverrun,’ the first word is the central word of the book; for Anna Livia’s Liffey, the feminine creative principle, is the river of time and life. The Liffey flows past the church of Adam and Eve (reversed here to imply temptation, fall, and renewal) and into Dublin Bay, where . . . it circulates up to Howth, the northern extremity of the bay. ‘Eve and Adam’s’ unites Dublin with Eden and one time with another” (Tindall 30).
The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City: Diego Rivera’s Meta-Mural
In 1931, Diego Rivera (actually Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez — whew, what a name!) painted The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City at the San Francisco Art Institute. The mural is a meta-mural because it is a mural about murals and because it represents its creators in the act of creating the fresco itself.
A Meta-Mural on Clarion Alley: Lo Llevas por Dentro by Jet Martinez
Clarion Alley in the Mission District of San Francisco used to be a shady street where junkies would shoot up. In October 1992, a volunteer collective of residents organized the Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) to bring art and color to the alley. The murals of Balmy Alley, which are focused on Central American struggle, inspired the project, but the murals of Clarion Alley are generally more playful and cartoon-like, although they deal with serious social issues as well (“What I Know is What I Owe,” says one mural and another, now painted over, challenged the “Demonocracy” of the United States). Many murals explore the rich culture of the Mission, especially, of course, the predominate Latino culture.
One mural, called El Misísimo Diablo, said, “The life of any street art is short,” but begged visitors to respect the murals. This very same devil has, alas, been painted over and recently many of the best murals in Clarion Alley have been covered over by sloppy graffiti. For many years, graffiti artists respected the paintings, yet a wave of tagging has wiped out many works of art. Still, one of my favorites has survived, a meta-painting, or we should say a meta-mural: Lo Llevas por Dentro by Jet Martinez.
Watchmen: A Metacomic
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is a metacomic in several ways. First of all, the book challenges our understanding of comics because it includes sections of straight text between every colorful chapter: excerpts from an autobiography, a police file, an article from an Ornithological journal, an editorial from a right-wing magazine, pages from a scrapbook, business correspondence, and so on. Watchmen is, in fact, a postmodern compendium of texts, yet it is still principally a comic (or a graphic novel if you prefer).
The Magic Word: Words Have Power
“Words are not magical,” one professor said, waving her hand to indicate the empty space in the center of the ring of chairs. “When I say ‘table,’ no table appears.”
In her attempts to steer us away from the metaphysical and romantic views of language and ground literary theory and discussion in the relatively more scientific and pragmatic language of structuralism, she inadvertently convinced me that words were magical. For a table did appear.
Halfway: A Meta-Painting by Tofu St. John
Halfway by Tofu St. John is a meta-painting because it is a painting about painting. The picture is a self-portrait of the painter doing what a painter does. However, the figure is not holding an artist’s brush, as you might expect, but a decorator’s roller. Painting a wall with a solid color – in this case sky blue — is not usually considered artistic, so this piece creates a tension between painting as art and painting as decoration.
The artist (or decorator) in the picture, with one hand casually tucked into his pocket, has covered up about half of a white stucco wall from the bottom up, reminding us of the title of the piece: Halfway. The work also marks the halfway point in Tofu’s project, whose aim is to produce one 4″ by 4″ painting everyday in 2011. Many of the pictures in the series refer to historical events that happened on that day, current events, personal events, or holidays; in this case, the work was painted on July 2nd, the 183rd day, the middle of the year.
Understanding is Making Up Stories about Chaos
(From my upcoming book Narrative Madness, edited by Katie Fox. Look for it on a Kindle, iPad or Amazon near you.)
We, as language users, constantly name ourselves, others, settings, actions, and events in an order that makes sense to us, ignoring the rest of the universe. We may not always use Don Quixote’s romantic language or share his chivalric plot line, but he is only doing what all of us do: trying to make sense of the noise and confusion of life.
The Artificial “I”
(From my upcoming book Narrative Madness, edited by Katie Fox. Look for it soon on an iPad, Kindle or Amazon near you!)
All names are fictions, including the one that is closest to myself, that intimate name of names, my name for myself. For even the precious word “I” — which rises like a monolith above our heads, promising singularity and unity — is an invented word, rather than a natural concept.
“I” is not a person. “I” is a letter. “I” is a word. Letters and words carry with them traces of their history in the shapes of the letters, tracks that lead back in time. Our letter comes from the Egyptian pictogram of an arm with a hand, which stood for the long A-sound, later incorporated in the proto-Semitic language because their word for arm started with that sound (as ours does), which we can read to mean that “I” is that one that uses the arm to do things; I is the one who acts.
A derivation of the letter can be found in most Semitic alphabets. The letter Yud – Yodh, Yod, Ye or Jodh – can be found as the tenth letter in most Semitic alphabets, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Persian and Arabic. In Hebrew, two Yuds in a row represent Adonai, a name of God. Mystical significance is attached to the name because it is formed by the smallest letter. So no matter how small I am, I still have mystical power. The Phoenicians wrote the symbol diagonally, like a backwards drunken F. The Greeks righted the symbol and turned it into a solid, stable Doric column, the symbol we recognize today. The Greek letter is used in the English expression, “not one iota,” from a clause in the New Testament: “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law” (Mathew 5:18), so “i” has been associated with exactness. (Information gleaned from Wikipedia).
