Into Great Silence

 Though a few years late to the party, I recently watched Into Great Silence, a documentary on the Carthusian monks of Grande-Chartreuse in France. A bit of background:

In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready. Gröning, sans crew or artificial lighting, lived in the monks’ quarters for six months—filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions. This transcendent, closely observed film seeks to embody a monastery, rather than simply depict one—it has no score, no voiceover and no archival footage.

At over two hours long, it requires a bit of concentration and stamina. I’ve always been fascinated by monasticism, and this film felt like the best introduction to the subject I could have asked for.

What was most engaging was the way the film stripped away the external mystery of monastic and eremetic life, thus giving the viewer a glimpse of the sense of interior mystery that pervades the life of the monks.

I think that most people who watch this film are like me in the sense that they perceive monastic life as shrouded in layers of mystery. Embracing the isolated, ascetic lifestyle the Carthusians practice is essentially a rejection of everything that we in modern Western society accept as defining characteristics of life. Combined with the fact that monks of this sort are largely invisible to us by virtue of their isolation, the Carthusians feel inscrutable. I felt surprise at the presence of bottled water in one monk’s cell, and at the intrusion of other modern, manufactured goods. My incomplete understanding of monasticism led me to apply my own bias and prejudices; that is, my mental picture of monasticism was more caricature than photograph. One of the films great successes was humanizing the Carthusians. Despite the separation their chosen path creates between us, the film reminded me that these are, fundamentally, men like me. They perform chores, they read, they joke with each other and play in the snow: the result being that the depth of the cultural gulf that divides us is bridged by our basic humanity.

Dispersing bits of the external mystery, though instructive, didn’t exactly lead to understanding. But this, to me, is the most beautiful aspect of the film. By removing the blinding cloth of ignorance from my eyes, I was able to glimpse what is truly noble about their devotion. It is trough the simplicity of their lives that they are able to pursue the most complex subject of all: the mystery of God.

Wherein a single bottle stands as an indictment of the marketing industry.

In an earlier post, I mentioned my fascination with bottles of spirits. They represent, I said, possibility. But they also represent history; each bottle is an artifact, its contents distilled to a state nearing purity, then as it ages, it reabsorbs complexity and depth from everything it touches (typically wood, but once the Angels take their share, perhaps also the Hand of God).

I’m not the first person to romanticize (or anthropomorphize) spirits. Enjoying spirits, though, is a sensory experience. Color, smell, taste, texture: these are all integral parts of truly understanding (and enjoying) the complexity of a spirit. For me, the visual experience starts before I pour. What does the label tell me about the contents? Are there unique characteristics of the bottle? I have a soft spot for hand-detailing on a bottle, so things like handwritten batch numbers offer me a way to create a greater sense of intimacy with the spirit. Each detail helps me to connect with the producer’s vision and understand the place it occupies in my life.

One of the best examples of packaging that enhances my enjoyment of a spirit comes from Amaro Nonino. For a bit of background, I’ll direct you to this fairly thorough write up of another drinker’s experience with the spirit. This Italian liqueur is soft and gentle on the tongue, with a light sweetness that avoids being cloying or syrupy and a bitterness that is very well balanced. It isn’t the sort of spirit that requires an experienced palette to appreciate, as the bitterness is far from overwhelming, but it possesses a subtle complexity that rewards careful examination.

I think this packaging succeeds where much of modern marketing fails (despite its best desperate attempts): it creates an emotional experience. Products are sold to us by way of a discussion on benefits to our lives; they try to tell us why we should connect with the product by telling us what they can do for us. (Cellphone ads are typically the worst culprit, with very few rising beyond being a glorified list of features.) This has the result of commodifying the products. At best, we can enjoy them for their convenience, but it’s hard to argue that they truly enrich our lives in any way.

For me, Amaro Nonino succeeds not just by creating a rich and conceptually consistent experience; what makes it so engaging is that they show me the product’s value rather than tell me. Typically, spirits are sold simply in their bottle. While not unheard of, the presence of an external box says something about what’s inside. Sometimes they are drab and uninspiring, like the “gift sets” of spirits + glass you might see in your local grocery store during the Holidays. Others are an opportunity for the producer to enrich the buyer’s experience, as with the lovely tins that sometimes accompany Fernet Branca, or, in our case, the delicately wrought box and booklet accompanying Amaro Nonino. There’s a certain erotic sensibility to the experience: what is seen on the outside tantalizes and hints at what is hidden beneath the folds.

I think what comes through most in the design of the packaging, from the lovely printing on the bottle’s label to the outer box to the tastefully designed booklet, is that the producer’s really care about this product. That’s not to say that this is the only way to show that. But every element of the experience of Amaro Nonino is a celebration of the time, effort and love that went into it’s production. They don’t tell me how great it is, they show me.

While I started writing this post as a way of highlighting what I think is a really great product, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about how marketing functions. Why do some companies just get it right, as does Nonino, while so many others whose marketing budgets probably equal much more than this distillery makes in a year just churn out vapid, soulless paeans to profit? This is all speculation, and it’s probably a logical stretch, but I’m reminded of the concept of facial recognition. Even vaguely similar representations of a face, whether it is two dots and a line drawn on a page or random marks on a tree in a similar configuration, we can quickly and almost without thought recognize a face. I think we also possess a very refined sense, which is why close representations of humanity, such as certain digital renderings or sculptures, are often so unnerving. We can sense the lack of humanity in the features.

In some way, a product bears the imprint of its maker, and in more than just the logo. Just as we are capable of recognizing a fake when it comes to faces, we are innately possessed of the ability to spot a fake when it comes to emotion, which is why even the most carefully crafted marketing messages leave us emptier for their existence. It’s not that we aren’t connecting with the emotional message marketers are sending; it’s that the medium is inherently devoid of emotion. I think I need a drink.

How is the internet changing how we think?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I think. In particular, about how my reading habits effect how I think. Over the last six months, I’ve become enamored of my RSS reader. Assembling a collection of sites to read is like having a digital library; and in keeping with the medium, it reflects the impermanent and shifting nature of the internet.

One thing that has been surprising is the way using an RSS reader has expanded my reading. The obvious fact is that having a convenient way to track every update to every site I read makes it easier to spot posts that interest me. Initially, I worried that this would result in a form of internet tunnel vision. While I’m reading more content, I’m also missing many of the useful aspects of visiting a site: links to other articles, interesting design, reader comments, etc. To some extent that has been the case. But what has also happened is that I have developed a deeper connection with the writers and websites that I follow.

So deeper connections, deeper thinking, right? Maybe not. Of the hundreds of articles/posts that I read each day, I often find that I can recall few. There are some topics, like health care reform, on which I have regularly read the analysis of several smart, well-informed writers; but I couldn’t tell you much about the actual plan. I’ve read hundreds of blog posts on cocktail recipes, obscure spirits, or any number of topics, and they all drift past my mind like snowflakes. They twinkle in the air, but disappear when I try to grasp them.

Am I just not as mentally sharp as I used to feel? Or, do I just not pay close enough attention to the things I’m reading? Maybe it’s neither. Nicholas Carr has some observations on the topic (though the whole article is worth reading):

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

I’m fascinated by the thought that the internet isn’t just changing the way we communicate, it’s fundamentally altering the way we process information. Further on in his article, Carr talks about the malleability of the brain, how it can reprogram itself and update its “circuitry” over time. This makes perfect sense to me. The fundamental quality of the body is change. Every part of us is constantly shifting as cells move, die and regenerate. If I think about the strength and totality of the mental changes that I’ve experienced over the years, it seems entirely consistent that my mind is literally different.

Carr’s article, written in 2008, is titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This past Saturday, a similar article was published by Gary Marshall, this one with the title “Is the internet making us stupid?” The latter lacks the depth, both in its wisdom and its research, of the former, but it has some points worth noting. There seems to be a deep pessimism in discussions about the way the internet is changing our minds. As Carr observes, history is replete with examples of apocalyptic predictions about emerging technology. But as Marshall says, “technology isn’t good or bad; it just is.” That’s a bit facile, but nonetheless instructive. While the internet might be shifting the way we process information, it’s also changing the way we use it. It’s not that we no longer read or write, as is often speculated, it’s that we don’t read or write the way that we used to.

There is certainly much to be skeptical about in modern communication. I am still struggling to understand how my own reading habits have changed and what that means to me. In the end, the way we use the internet is our own decision; while many of us struggle with how it has changed our thought processes, it remains to be seen how that will play out in the long term.

There’s one other idea that interests me in Marshall’s article. He talks about the reasons we find skipping from link to link without pausing for the sort of lengthy analysis that traditionally accompanies research. Studies have suggested that fast thinking, flitting from idea to idea as we often do with links on the web, triggers the release of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that is associated with pleasure. Quoting Dr. Gary Small of UCLA:

“[W]hat many of us do on our PCs isn't multitasking. It's something rather different, which he calls Partial Continuous Attention.

"With Partial Continuous Attention or PCA you're scanning the environment, looking for new bits of information that might tweak your dopamine reward system and be more exciting [than what you're doing]," he says.”

That sounds about right. But I’m not sure that the internet is to blame. The vastness of its content and the speed and ease with which we can access it certainly contribute to this phenomenon, but I think this sort of searching is more fundamental to our minds, something that must be overcome regardless of the technology we use. Maybe awareness of the issue is the first step. As use of the internet continues to grow more pervasive, we will continue to evaluate the role it plays in our lives. And, I think, we will find ways to manage its dangers. Nothing stays novel forever, nor should it. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa brilliantly wrote the following:

In its essence life is monotonous. Happiness therefore depends on a reasonably thorough adaptation to life’s monotony. By making ourselves monotonous, we make ourselves equal to life. Thus we live to the full. And living to the full is to be happy.

Unhealthy, illogical souls laugh—uneasily, deep down—at bourgeois happiness, at the monotonous life of the bourgeois man who obeys a daily routine . . . . . . , and at his wife who spends her time keeping the house tidy, is consumed by the minutiae of caring for the children, and talks about neighbors and acquaintances. That’s what happiness is, however. It seems, at first glance, that new things are what give pleasure to the mind; but there aren’t many new things, and each one is new only once. Our sensibility, furthermore, is limited, and it doesn’t vibrate indefinitely. Too many new things will eventually get tiresome, since our sensibility can’t keep up with all the stimulations it receives.

To resign oneself to monotony is to experience everything as forever new. The bourgeois’s vision of life is the scientific vision, since everything is indeed always new, and before this day this day never existed.

He, of course, would say none of this. Were he capable of saying it, he wouldn’t be capable of being happy. My observations only make him smile; and it’s his smile that brings me, in all their detail, the considerations I’m writing down, for future generations to ponder.

Indeed.

Thoughts on poetry

I’ve always had an uncertain relationship with poetry. Reading poetry has never been very appealing to me. I occasionally catch a spark of interest in a certain poet, but even so, I just find reading poetry to be a bit of a slog. But for all my difficulty reading it, I find myself continually drawn to write poetry.

As a reader, I am drawn to the labyrinthine turns of fiction. Fiction is the intersection of the voyeuristic and the vicarious, a place where I can both observe and experience, where I can look in on one world while living in another. The author maps the environment, but I choose which streets I walk down when I overlay my own experience.

As a writer, poetry represents an odd set of contradictions. It is structured and ephemeral, meandering and focused, strict and inconsistent. That is, it is like my mind. Writing poetry is like a conversation with myself; I am permitted ambiguity and uncertainty because the unsaid is understood. I don’t need to flesh out narrative details with words; every gap, skip or stutter is balanced by an emotional and spiritual foundation that exists inside of me.

That, I think, is what makes poetry so powerful (perhaps an odd thing for someone who doesn’t read poetry to say). Even tightly wound poetry leaves sufficient room for the reader to slip through. I can impose my own narrative because I can see myself in the structure of the poem.

Andrew Sullivan highlights an article about poetry and sadness. “Poetry has that strange way of reflecting every sad inch of you,” writes Michael Berger. I think the post leans too heavily on how poetry helps us deal with sadness at the expense of its ability to express pure joy. But still, he has a great point. Poetry reflects the nuances of our emotions in a unique way, and I think that is because it reflects the nuances of our minds. Our thoughts aren’t always structured in the same way, nor are they subject to the hobgoblin of consistency. Thoughts swell and flex, burst and collapse in on themselves, they sprint and heave. For all their unpredictability, thoughts possess an internal consistency that gives them purpose; they exist, and that alone is sufficient.

Video games and self-assessment

There is an interesting post by Douglas Haddow of pblks.com about a Japanese arcade game called “Cho Chabudai Gaeshi.”

“In Cho Chabudai Gaeshi, a new arcade game from Taito, the player has one very simple task: to flip over a chabudai, a short-legged round table. In Japan, the act of table flipping, or “chabudai gaeshi” is a common expression of anger among old-fashioned, middle-aged men. Cho Chabudai Gaeshi is specifically aimed at balding fathers who are perpetually infuriated with their disobedient and noisy families, but too timid to actually upend their real-world chabudais. What’s so interesting about Cho Chabudai Gaeshi is how mundane the gameplay is: The father sits at the table, pounding on it with his hands as his obnoxious children ignore him until finally, he flips it over and sends everything flying into the air, collecting points for every item destroyed in the wake of his moderately-violent outburst.”

What grabs me is his analysis of what this means for gaming in general:

“While it seems like a novelty, the workaday content of the game is a profound innovation that alters the very nature of gaming. Of course it’s fun and entertaining, but it could also be used as a form of domestic catharsis, a way to express one’s anger in an isolated virtual world before returning home from a tough day at work.”

Connecting with a game is all about immersion. Some games, like World of Warcraft, create immersion through huge, detailed worlds, places where players can roam and interact with a relative approximation of reality. Others, like Mass Effect 2 (to use a current example), focus on character development, foregoing the sense of freedom through exploration in favor of creating a deeper connection between the player and his/her on-screen analog.

In terms of gameplay, and, obviously, scope, these three games are pretty far apart. But to me, Cho Chabudai Gaesh feels more like a “micro-RPG” than a profound innovation. Instead of connecting with the player through a complex system that embeds them in the game world, Cho Chabudai Gaesh addresses players in a more direct and personal manner: it draws upon existing social mores to use the player’s own identity as the moral backdrop.

There’s one more point that Mr. Haddow raises that I want to discuss. He says:

"Right now there’s a surplus of games where you can run around brutally murdering people, but 99% of these are completely fantastic and in no way pertain to the player’s actual experience. I can see a whole new genre blossoming out of Cho Chabudai Gaeshi – games where you get to destroy your office printer, push people in a crowded subway, throw things at your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse and so on. An alternate digital dimension allowing for constant emotional micro-management.”

I agree that there is a surplus of games that typically don’t raise real issues for gamers to explore. But I don’t think that is a fault of genre, so much as it is a fault of game design. For example, let’s look at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This massively successful game was, for me, generally enjoyable to play in a mindless sort of way. Fun, but forgettable. One mission stands out, though. As an undercover operative, your character joins a terrorist organization as they are launching an assault on a crowded airport. To stay in their favor, you are forced to take part in the attack. Essentially, you are faced with the prospect of killing civilians as “collateral damage” in favor of accomplishing larger political goals.

I found this deeply disturbing. The prospect of killing innocents shocked me out of my suspension of disbelief, reminding me quite clearly that I was suddenly playing a game populated by digital people who could come to no real harm as a result of my decisions. Even so, I still couldn’t do it. I fired into walls above shops or into windows overlooking the runway. The context of the act was significant enough to force me to make a moral decisions rather than take the game as simply what it was; a game.

That is, I think, what video games need to grow as an art form: enough emotional weight to make players think seriously about their actions. There are many games that try to build gameplay systems that hinge upon “moral” choices. “Do I steal this treasure or return it to the rightful owner? Do I kill the bandits, or turn them over to the authorities?” These tend to be the sorts of decisions that games give us, a sort of morality-light that doesn’t challenge the player’s assumptions about the world they inhabit.

So what does that have to do with “emotional micro-management?” I don’t think that the best way for games to help us cope with our frustrations is for them to be proxies of the situations we face. Games that pertain to my experience aren’t necessarily better equipped to challenge me; they’re just primal fantasy. I might find entertainment in a game that allows me to shove virtual commuters, but I’m not dealing with my emotions on much more than a superficial level.

In the end, I want games to be fun. That’s why I play them. But using games as a stand-in for the real problems I might be facing isn’t productive, it’s just mindless. What games can offer is a chance to examine the universality of our moral values. Game developers have the power to build worlds that challenge me to assess the reasoning behind my decisions, not just act blindly. I think games that help me understand myself would be a wonderful thing. My point isn’t to say that these “micro-RPGs” are bad, or that there isn’t a place for mindless entertainment; it’s to examine what it is about games that lets us express anger or frustration or any other emotion, and to understand how that can teach me something about myself.

On Blogging

I have a hard time thinking of myself as a “blogger.” I think that, at some point, one must question whether another voice in the screaming multitudes is a helpful addition to the dialogue. What is unique about my perspective? Can I contribute more than reposting my favorite link of the day?

I’m not sure I have the answers to those questions just yet. But for me, the biggest inspirations have been the bloggers who use their vehicle as a means to explore ideas in unique ways. Specifically, I’d like to pay a debt of intellectual gratitude to the recently-ended Click Opera, the smart and fascinating notebook of Momus (otherwise known as Nick Currie).

I came to his work several years ago through this article in Wired. Since that time, I have been a regular follower of his blog. While I haven’t always shared his interests, I’ve always been impressed with the range of topics he engages, the depth of his insight and the magnitude of his creative prolificacy.

As much as I love his writing, I am not interested in trying to write click opera v2. I’d guess that he isn’t very interested in that either. But I have learned a lot from his writing, and many of my interests have been shaped by his discussions.

What I learned most clearly from his work is that negotiating the currents of modernity requires a curious soul and a passionate heart. The democratizing power of the internet means that I can share ideas with people around the world who I will never even know have followed my work; I can stretch the tendrils of my mind through countless sites and videos and songs and communities, flitting in and out of lives whose content I can scarcely imagine; and I can build a home in this most temporary of spaces. It’s not a very new concept anymore, but I still think it’s pretty cool.

I’ll probably never have the chance to meet Momus outside the confines of my laptop. I’ll probably never even exchange words with him inside those confines. But despite that distance, it somehow feels right to send off his wonderful blog by saying “thanks, friend.”

On Bitters

I am a spirits and cocktail enthusiast. I don’t consider myself an expert in either of these fields; for all the cocktails I’ve made, I still have to look at the recipes each time I make the drinks. As someone who has always struggled to be much of a chef, cocktails represent the culinary road less traveled, as it were. But mixing spirits has an inherent romance for me; while I might not grow excited at the thought of making the perfect batch of scrambled eggs, the pursuit of the perfect gin and tonic is enthralling.

Exploring spirits has allowed me to exercise a number of my interests, from culinary to historical all the way to joy of collecting. There’s a wonderful mystery to bottles, from the details of the label to the color of the liquid through the glass. I derive as much pleasure from examining my collection and planning my next purchase as I do from the drinks themselves. (Ok, maybe not as much, but quite a bit nonetheless.) The spread of bottles, in all different colors and sizes, represents possibility; my collection of spirits isn’t just an inert set of raw materials, it’s a living, breathing ecosystem that swells and recedes as my tastes and interests shift.

For all the fascination that aged scotch or armagnac might bring, I find bitters to be the most engaging part of my collection. Though they share this background with the major spirit types, for me bitters have retained more of their medicinal history. I might not actually see a bottle of bitters as a cure-all, but the potent aromas, vivid colors and power to change the flavor of even the most intense liquors with just a few drops all point to their transformative power.

Maybe it’s their often complex recipes that lend bitters their “liquidity” of flavor. One drop marks a subtle shift in aromatic profile; two or three can meld the flavors in a cocktail in a truly unique way; four or more and you are a very bold drinker. (However, a healthy dose of Angostura in a glass of club soda is a unique pleasure.)

Even the shape of the bottles, though practical, lends to their alchemical presence. The standard 750ml spirits bottle is a powerful symbol. It stands proud and assertive, ready to spill forth its contents in waves of varying-hued nectar. But the diminutive bitters bottle possesses all the power and mystery of its big brother, it’s merely condensed to a size commensurate with its use. Pulling powerful flavors from such small packages seems somehow counterintuitive, but it’s that inexplicable quality that defines bitters for me.

When I began exploring cocktails, bitters were the most inscrutable of the products I encountered. It took quite a bit of experimentation to understand their effect, and even now I feel I’ve only touched the beginnings of their application. Fortunately, I’m not alone in my fascination. The world of bitters has grown immensely in recent years, with the familiar Angostura and Peychaud’s finding complement in dozens of flavors from producers around the world. Cocktail Kingdom has a wonderful selection of bitters, many of which I have ordered for myself. And for the more adventurous amongst you, recipes for homemade bitters abound on the internet.

I hope others find the same joy in bitters that I do. Just don't be surprised if the only thing they cure is your itch for a new hobby.