BoldUlysses.com

i was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
when the water filled every hole.
and thousands upon thousands made an ocean,
making islands where no island should go

Emily sent me a mix cd as an (early) birthday gift. I love it. She included loads of excellent music from Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Yann Tiersen, Craig Armstrong, The Flaming Lips, Psapp and more. It’s been on constant rotation since it came in the mail yesterday afternoon. She even included a collection of mini-essays written about each song, detailing what they mean to her and why she included them. I frequently do this with the mix cds I send out, and it was lovely to receive in kind.

She also included “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab for Cutie. I was never much into Death Cab; when they were hot a couple of years ago in the indie scene I lumped them into the whole emo movement that I wanted nothing to do with and wrote them off. I’ve since softened my opinion, and the song certainly makes a strong case for giving them a more thorough listen. It’s an eight-minute slow-building crescendo, extracting a powerful wall of sound from a simple combination of chords. There’s almost a liquidity to it in the way it rolls and builds like a giant wave near the end. It’s a song to lose oneself in.

Driving to the gym earlier this afternoon, the song played on the stereo. I drove in front of the Baptist Hospital to the lyrics at the beginning of the entry. The last line of the stanza caught me, “Making islands where no island should go.” I thought about the song’s obvious references to the Atlantic Ocean and from there to the legend of Atlantis, the mythical island that was situated somewhere off the western shore of Europe, in the middle of the ocean. According to legend the island was completely destroyed, sinking beneath the water due to a massive earthquake or some other cataclysmic event, probably of supernatural origin.

But that’s all incidental, really. The word my mind snagged on was the word should. It’s a small word, and commonly used, but it implies so much. In the context of the song it suggested to me that there are places islands should go, and places they should not go. In other words, there’s an “ought” pinned to that line in the song–there’s a way things ought to be (islands and other landmasses in certain places), and a way things ought not to be. It seemed all very natural until I realized how foreign the concept of “ought” is in my academic thought. Sure, it’s something we use without reservation in daily life–unless we were perfectly content with our present circumstances we would never aspire to a way we think things ought to be. The hurdle comes when we press the issue and think about what the application of this little concept implies about our worldviews.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a strong disconnect between what fascinates me intellectually and the principles by which I live. I love to see possibilities. I love works of art that take an idea or an emotion and communicate it effectively, no matter the means. I love films which “paint outside the lines,” as it were, that mess with my mind and my emotions. Films that shake me up (in a good way) are those that have an unconventional streak in them. They resonate with me and I keep returning to them in order to mine them for anecdotes and examples. Taking a walk in the neighborhood on a sunny afternoon, I look up to see the way the light cascades through the leaves on a tree, and my eye immediately traces the negative spaces, the quivering polygons of blue between the leaves’ edges. When I reflect on the way I approach things from a more artistic, academic angle, I’m forced to conclude that I don’t close myself from any means of expression. The new, the as-yet unexperienced is the creative, the avant-garde. Kindred minds create these things.

But they create them by ignoring the oughts, the principles by which I’m grounded and by which I live my day-to-day. I can see why they do. The oughts are exclusive: There’s one way things ought to be to the exclusion of others. There’s a best way; there are very real hierarchies in terms of life directions and ways of relating to others. Viewed in a certain light, the oughts can be the antithesis of creativity–elitist, locked-in.

But no matter how much I consciously shun them in my artistic life, I can’t escape the oughts in my worldview. And what’s more, I wouldn’t want to. The oughts imply purpose. Returning to the song quote, if there’s a place where “no island should go,” someone decided it should not go there. It ought not to go there. But how did the ought come about? If I go by my artistic standards there’s no answer. The ought is a foreign concept; there’s no objective “best” way to communicate something. What works well in one situation may work poorly in another; what speaks to you may be mute to me. If I say, “Renoir should have expressed himself using messy splotches of color and amorphous shapes like de Kooning,” it makes no sense. It’s gibberish, like playing utterly random notes, poorly, on a musical instrument.

I can’t pull the oughts down out of thin air; if I truly peel back the layers I’m forced to conclude Someone must have created the Best Way. Someone must have decided that the continents should be in their places, the oceans and seas and lakes in theirs and the red-winged blackbird should have his red and black feathers. In my academic life, with my fascination with creativity, I align myself to my own standard, my own local vertical, if you will. But in my larger life an objective standard, a way things ought to be takes precedence. It’s a Global Vertical.

The author who sparked this train of thought in me, C.S. Lewis, illustrated it best in the opening scene of his science fiction novel Perelandra. Lewis, the narrator, has his first encounter with a being, in this case the archon of Mars, whose entire noncorporeal being lives in reference to another dimension:

What I saw was simply a very faint rod or pillar of light. […] It certainly had very little power of illuminating its surroundings. So far, all is plain sailing. But it had two other characteristics which are less easy to grasp. One was its colour. […] The other was its angle. It was not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal–the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal.

I think our own innate need for a global vertical is why we’re so strongly attracted to certain mythologies, those that paraphrase the way things really are. I think about Tolkien’s mythology in particular, and how from the first time I read The Hobbit and then proceeded to read the rest of the books and watch the films, I was struck with the deliberateness of not just Tolkien’s writing, but his characters. There’s a sense of overwhelming purpose behind the actions of every personality, a singular way things ought to be that each of them is striving for, and in the process each knows his specific part.

Take, for example, the situation with Gandalf and the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm. From a local vertical, utilitarian standpoint, he didn’t have to fight the Balrog, and it would have been more sensible, from a certain point of view, for him not to. But he was meant to fight the creature, and he did. It was one of the purposes for which he was created and sent to Middle Earth. Gandalf lived his life by the overarching principles that permeated the world; he lived by reference to the Global Vertical.

And we recognize those things. We’re drawn to them because in our own overlapping turn we feel that’s the way it ought to be here in the real world. But we flail around, creating our own microcosms of worldviews that loopback on themselves because they have nothing to reference but themselves. And we despair.

What a line in a song can do…

As usual in penning a post, my reach has exceeded my grasp, so I will off to bed with me.