Archive for the ‘meta’ tag
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).
A Meta-Acrostic Poem
A poem
Crashing into
Rocks and
Ocean,
Sinking slowly
Toward the
Icy
Cold
Poetry
Of
Everyone's
Mind.
by Mark Sadeghian
The Myth of Myths: Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Myth Interrupted”
We know the scene: he begins to tell a story by the fire, mumbling, miming, chanting, swaying, and no one pays attention, but he keeps going and there is something about the quiet insistence of his song as it grows louder that makes the woman, grinding ocher, look up. The men, scraping hides, one by one let the flint fall and find stones to sit on. Others notice the group and gather.
They were not like this before; the story has brought them together. In the warmth of the fire, they lean toward the story-teller, who is one of them and yet an outsider: he has gone away for a long time, he is crippled, or strange. Perhaps he is a woman. He tells them the story of the beginning of the world, the birth of the first people, the coming together of a culture, the origin of language and story-telling — a tale they all know, but only he has “the gift, the right, or the duty to tell it” (Nancy 43).
This scene, which takes place again and again, describes the beginning of human consciousness and speech. It is the story of “humanity being born to itself” (Nancy 45). The origin of myth.
Alas, this scene by the fire never took place, at least not in the way we imagine it. The scene itself is a myth. Jean-Luc Nancy calls it the myth of myths. (And we can call it a meta-myth!)
Abstract Paintings are Meta-Paintings
All abstract paintings are meta-paintings. A meta-painting is a painting about painting. A meta-painting may represent itself, the process of its creation, its materiality, the conventions of art, the gallery where it is hung, the artwork around it, and the place of art and artist in society. Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas does all these things and more, but Velasquez’s painting is a meta-painting because of its subject matter, rather than its form or style. Most other paintings by Velasquez are not meta, but are naturalistic representations. Abstract paintings, in contrast, are inherently meta.
Abstract paintings are meta because they are about themselves. The titles of many abstract paintings show that they are their own subject matter, for example Constructivist Painting No. 8 by Joaquin Torres-Garcia from 1938. The metapainting also emphasizes the process of its creation, namely its construction in the word “Constructivist.” Similarly, Jackson Pollock’s Square Painting refers to paint being poured into a square (the process being what matters most for Pollock). All abstract paintings are meta-paintings.
Message or Madness?: Thomas Pychon’s “The Crying of Lot 49″
Does Pynchon’s novel mean something or am I crazy?
The heroine, Oedipa Maas, has a similar question. A former lover, Pierce Inverarity named her the executor of his considerable estate. Rather than bequeathing her money or property, he has saddled her with a long, legal process that she does not understand. As she is not a lawyer and has had little contact with Inverarity for many years, the naming of her Executor is puzzling. Was Inverarity trying to tell her something, or was it just one of his bizarre whims? Was he playing a practical joke on her, or was he hinting at a secret society?
A Walking Assembly of Man: Many Voices Crying Lot 49
In the metafictional novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Oedipa Maas escapes from a shootout and hostage situation. Among the crowds, journalists, police and searchlights, she spots the mobile unit of her husband’s radio station, KCUF. Wendell “Mucho” Maas, whom she hasn’t seen for some time, is reporting on the event. She walks up to the van, sticks her head through the window, and says, “Hi.” He presses the cough button and smiles, which she thinks is strange since the listeners can’t hear a smile. Her reaction shows that she expects him to consider his audience before her, which he does.
She quietly climbs into the van and he pushes the microphone in her face and mumbles, “You’re on, just be yourself.” Then, more loudly for the mike, he states in his earnest broadcasting voice, “How do you feel about this terrible thing?” Not knowing what to say, she takes a cue from his question and says, “Terrible.” He answers, “Wonderful,” because he knows that this is what his listeners want to hear: how terrible the situation was.
She summarizes the event dispassionately, for how can her husband expect her to “be herself” on the air after such a traumatic experience, especially since he is playing the part of a radio broadcaster rather than a sympathetic husband? At the end he says, “Thank you, Mrs. Edna Mosh.” Something is not quite right. At the border of either insanity or a giant conspiracy, her identity is slipping. After he signs off, she asks, “Edna Mosh?” and he explains that he adjusted her name to allow for the distortion on the rig and tape, saying that it will come out the right way when broadcast.
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Relevance of Metafiction in the Age of Information
We are flooded with narrative, drowning in astronomical numbers of stories from paperbacks, movies, newspapers, television, magazines, fan fictions, computer games, and, most of all, the Internet. How can we cope with these stories? What do we do with them?
Meta-awareness is more important more than ever, if we are to understand our storied universe. Yet how can we know what is real with reality TV on every channel? Most of us are smart enough to know that the presence of a camera always causes people to act differently than they would otherwise. Although reality TV is realer than a sit com, we recognize that it is not as real as a news broadcast.
