Статті в журналах з теми "Aristotle’s Illusion"

The sixteenth century inherited three discourses on melancholy: the medical, philosophical, and religious ones. While the first presented it as a mental illness linked to a disorder of the humours, the second, with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Problem XXX, saw it as a sign of creative genius, and the third reminded us that it was, according to Saint Jerome’s expression, the balneum diaboli; it allowed Satan to take possession of the patient’s mind, causing him to hallucinate. So how can we distinguish the melancholy of the genius from the pathology of the same name, especially when the latter is associated with the devil? The devil’s ability to create illusory worlds on the border between dream and reality coincides with Renaissance artists’works populated by ghosts, monsters, witches and demons. Could not these scenes, presented both as manifestations of the devil and projections of the hallucinated mind, be linked to the figure of the melancholic artist?

An unrecognised copy (1665) in Kant’s private library of Michael Piccart’s Isagoge (1605), an introduction to the system of Aristotelian philosophy together with Kant’s own remarks on this author (Refl 4160, AA 17, p. 439) can be established as an original source for the Kantian ‘ideosphere’. First, I point out contexts and consequences of Piccart’s Altdorfian Aristotelianism, in contrast to the Königsbergian Aristotelianism (emphasised by Tonelli’s research). To further check the quality of Piccart as a source of Kant’s, a conceptual case-study is elaborated with Kant’s critical distinction between analytics as a “logic of truth” (KrV, B 85) and dialectics as a “logic of illusion” (KrV, B 86). Hereby, dialectics is understood as part of an Aristotelian division of logic in analytics, dialectics and sophistics (Königsberg/Rabe versus Altdorf/Piccart). As will be shown by the paradigmatic case of the famous Königsbergian proponent of Aristotelianism, Paul Rabe, Kant cannot have received the suggestion for his own critical distinction from Rabe’s Cursus Philosophicus. Instead, Piccart refers to a passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which suggests the very distinction between an analytic philosopher who searches for scientific truth and dialecticians and sophists. For different reasons, they do not claim any scientific seriousness.

This article deals with the question of how the Jewish Aristotelians, followers of Maimonides, combined the exclusive status of the Song of Songs with the no­tion of the falsity of poetry. According to Aristotle’s Arabic commentators, poet­ics is part of the logical organon. The poetic syllogisms are based on deliberately false premises and rules of inference, and thus poetic discourse is the lowest in the hierarchy of the logical corpus. At the same time, the following Talmudic maxim is known: “If all Scripture is holy, then the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies”. Thus, Jewish theologians, having assimilated the Arab Aristotelian approach to poetics, were faced with a difficult task: how to explain the supreme status of the Song of Songs in the biblical canon if this book is written in the lan­guage of lies? In the works of medieval Jewish theologians we do not find a clearly formulated solution to this problem, which may be due to the fact that the Song of Songs was often associated with an undisclosed esoteric theme. This article will describe the range of views of medieval Jewish thinkers on the role of poetic speech in the Song of Songs and provide an overview of researchers’ attempts to formulate a solution to the above problem. An analysis of a number of texts by medieval Jewish commentators will offer a response not found in the research literature to the question of combining the high status of the Song of Songs with the deliberate falsity of poetic discourse. According to our reading of Moshe Ibn-Tibbon’s commentary on the Song of Songs, the false language of poetry helps to avoid the illusion of comprehension where positively formulated knowledge is impossible.

It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists.This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotle's Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.

Scientists agree that Aristotle in his Parva Naturalia was the first to report a visual illusion known as the motion aftereffect (MAE). But there is less consensus as to who was the first to report the direction of the MAE. According to some, Aristotle only described the phenomenon without saying anything about its direction. Others have defended the position that Aristotle did report a direction, but the wrong one. Therefore, it has been suggested that Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura was the first to report the correct direction of the MAE. In this paper it is shown why and how it can be inferred that Aristotle did not write about the direction of the MAE, only about its occurrence. It is also argued that it is indeed likely that Lucretius was the first person to report the direction of the MAE. However, this is not as obvious as it might appear at first sight.

AbstractThis article examines the nature of Robert Grosseteste's commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics with particular reference to his “conclusions” (conclusiones). It is argued (using book 1, chapter 2, of the commentary as a case study) that the simple demonstrative appearance of the commentary, which is very much the result of the 64 conclusions, is in part an illusion. Thus, the exposition in the commentary is not simply based on the strict principles of the Posterior Analytics and on the proof-procedures of Euclidean geometry; rather the commentary is a complicated mixture of different elements of twelfth-century texts and the scholarship of Grosseteste's day.

This article tries to describe the conceptual evolution of the concept of citizenship. Following the history of the word, it defines the succeeding meanings of this idea from Aristotle to Marx. It argues that this history shows that the concept is inherent in the republican tradition, which affirms that man's freedom is an illusion without the institution of the State. The modern concept, in particular, brings together the ideas of the Rule ofLaw and Popular Sovereignty and demonstrates that they are conceptually undividable. This, it is concluded, means that opposing "liberal" and "republican" concepts of citizenship is a contradiction in terms.

The Irish Astronomical Tract is a 14th–15th century Gaelic document, based mainly on a Latin translation of the eighth-century Jewish astronomer Messahala. It contains a passage about the sun illusion—the apparent enlargement of celestial bodies when near the horizon compared to higher in the sky. This passage occurs in a chapter concerned with proving that the Earth is a globe rather than flat. Here the author denies that the change in size is caused by a change in the sun’s distance, and instead ascribes it (incorrectly) to magnification by atmospheric vapours, likening it to the bending of light when looking from air to water or through glass spectacles. This section does not occur in the Latin version of Messahala. The Irish author may have based the vapour account on Aristotle, Ptolemy or Cleomedes, or on later authors that relied on them. He seems to have been unaware of alternative perceptual explanations. The refraction explanation persists today in folk science.

AbstractIn recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.

The principles of the physical patterns of self-organization are numerous, different upon various levels of the scale of complexity (subatomic, molecular, geological, astrophysical). The integrated pattern of the changes going on in a living body indicates an integrated nature of its principle - whatever it might happen to be. Aristotle called this kind of principle „psycho", H . Driesch called it „entelecheia", sociobiolo- gists believe that D N A is the right name for it. The fundamental problem consists in seeing - not just deciding a priori - if the empirical data do require - in a living organism - a single, integrating agency. If such a requirement originates in an illusion, the whole problem is fictitious. If this requirement is well founded, then we must to search for such an agent.

Although the tension between the real and the illusion based upon it are at the heart of the theatrical experience, in the final years of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first, many theatres in Europe and the United States became particularly interested in calling attention to the real in their work. Although Hans-Thies Lehmann in his Postmodern Theatre (2006) devotes a few pages to this phenomenon, as one type of postmodern experimentation, what he designates as “the irruption of the real” he considers only one among many types of postmodern experimentation. I will argue, on the contrary, that it constitutes a major shift in the practical and phenomenological world of theatre, and a turning away from mimesis, which has been at the heart of the theatre ever since Aristotle. English version by Leslie Damasceno.

This article continues the dispute about the application of quantitative methods in regard to international relations. In 2019, two groups of scholars published their critical reviews of my article “Statistic Against History”: 1) «Towards “Second Great Debate” in Russian IR» (by Denis Degterev); 2) «International Relations, Science without Method?” (by Igor Istomin, Andrey Baykov, Konstantin Khudoley). This paper consistently analyses the opponents's views and puts forward some counterarguments. The author emphasizes that natural sciences deal with long-term, relatively steady phenomena and processes, which are objective and mainly of repetitive character. This enables us to identify regular patterns in their structure, behaviour, development and changes. By contrast, in the sphere of arts it is extremely important to achieve agreement on basic concepts and ideas or, in other words, scientific convention. It is impossible to use here mathematical symbols or figures to describe the concepts in the sphere which is closely connected with historical context and systems of values, which changes with the time and depends on different variables. The objects of humanities are completely determined by such factors as society, historical context as well as the stance of the author on the issue. Any attempt to change even one of these may well lead to distortion of the meaning of a concept and thus will ruin the mathematical equation underlying it. These factors do not exist regardless of humans, so it is impossible to dismiss Aristotle's logic. Hence, any attempts of such an approach (through using quantitative methods) lead to methodological problems and even often to methodological nonsense.

Abstract The main objective of the following text is to focus on and exemplify the basic axioms of theories of happiness that come from historical and philosophical tradition and are still, at least in some cases, relevant nowadays. As philosophers claim, the longing for happiness is a naturally human desire that has taken various forms in their thinking: happiness was connected with beatitude (Aristotle), with self-preservation (Spinoza), social helpfulness (Hume), living in the present moment without expostulations or false illusions (Comte-Sponville), and others. The desire for happiness means the main aim of a human life drives particular life goals and the values of individuals. Concepts of happiness have accrued in diachronic and synchronic cross-sections. The Aristotelian/Spinozan conception or Kantian, modern and postmodern traditions formed in a diachronic cross-section. Those that accrued in a synchronic cross-section segregated themselves on the basis of an individual’s spiritual and bodily aspect. Spiritual happiness (spiritual bliss, and inner equilibrium, ataraxis) was preferred by the eudaimonic (ευδαιμονία) tradition (Democritus, Socrates, Aristotle, Hellenism, French materialism and others); bodily pleasures were accentuated by the hedonistic traditions (Lipovetsky, Bauman, Keller). Some conceptions examined the problem of happiness through the optics of society and the individual, stressing general goodness and helpfulness (Plato, Aristotle, Kant); or personal goodness, pleasure and benefit – the contemporary hedonistic concepts (Lipovetsky, Maffesoli, Comte-Sponville) All these conceptions of happiness are united by the common desire of people to live happily; however, their means and ways to reach such a goal are different.

The author aims in this article is to highlight a significant moment in the history of the reception of Shakespeare in modern Greek theatre. The article outlines the main developments in the perception of Shakespeare's work in Greece from the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War, and examines Karolos Koun's early experiments in Shakespearean production. Koun's initiatives were diametrically opposed to local theatre traditions, which emphasized psychological or historical realism and pictorial or spectacular illusion. The use of non-realistic stage conventions such as masks and simple, abstract and allusive settings, flamboyant costumes, stylized acting, and the fact that all roles were played by young boys demonstrate the significance of Koun's contribution to a modernist Shakespeare in Greece, culminating in his Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1967. Antonis Glytzouris is Associate Professor in the School of Drama at the Aristotle University Thessaloniki, and is author of Stage Direction in Greece: the Rise and Consolidation of the Stage Director in Modern Greek Theatre (Herakleio: Crete University Press, 2011), among other publications.

The current research examines the elements of Idealism and Realism in Arthur Miller’splay Death of a Salesman. Miller’s play is opted through purposive sampling technique. Primary source, a Play, Death of a Salesman, and secondary sources, such as dissertations, articles, thesis, and newspapers are used as an instrument for data collection. Plato's Idealism and the realism of Aristotle are used as a framework for the present work. Idealism is revealed through the analysis of the hero, Willy Loman's Character. The protagonist misunderstands American Dream, he is a dreamer salesman. He wants to become a successful businessman, but he fails. Willy lives in illusions,while the real world is absolutely different. He is the echo of postmodern American society. Realism is an important theory identified in Miller's play, Death of a Salesman. Charley is a practical character in the play, his approach is rational, practical and realistic towards life.

AbstractPhilosophy in the period immediately after Aristotle is sometimes thought to be marked by the decline of natural philosophy and philosophical disinterest in contemporary achievements in the sciences. But in one area at least, the early third century B.C.E. was a time of productive interaction between such disparate fields as epistemology, physics and geometry. Debates between the sceptics and the dogmatic philosophical schools focus on epistemological problems about the possibility of self-evident appearances, but there is evidence from Euclid's day of a quite different response. The sceptical challenge provoked the development of theories explaining error formation, showing how illusions can be studied systematically and are subject to prediction. Such theories do not legitimate claims about the nature of the underlying entities perceived, but provide justification for forming expectations about future perceptions. While it overtly focuses on purely geometrical considerations, the Euclidean model of optics nonetheless provides support for certain views about the nature of vision and the physics of light. Moreover, by offering a model in which the image received is not thought to be a perspicuous mirroring of the object seen, Euclid may have helped promote a view of perception as something reconstructed from information received, not as a mere form transferred into the eye. The ancient sceptic may indeed have fulfilled his promise to promote inquiry by focusing attention on problems that escape the attention of a hasty theorist.

Straipsnyje aptariama graikiškojo filosofavimo genezė, t. y. nagrinėjamos pirmojo filosofijos teiginio susiklostymo prielaidos ir tų prielaidų numanoma teiginio prasmė. Filosofijos istorijoje nusistovėjusios pirmųjų filosofų teiginių interpretacijos kilmė siejama su Aristotelio filosofija. Teigiama, kad Aristotelis graikiškąjį filosofavimą jau visiškai įkurdina rašte. Iš rašto pozicijų Aristotelis žvelgia ir į pirmųjų filosofų ištaras, todėl suvokia jas vien kaip rašto (teorinio mąstymo) elementus. Straipsnyje daroma prielaida, kad filosofavimas prasidėjo ne kaip raštas, o kaip su žmogaus veikla susijęs tradicinis kalbėjimas. Filosofavimo kaip konstruktyvios kalbėjimo atmainos specifiką lėmė antikoje susiklosčiusi refleksijos situacija, kuri siejama su septynių išminčių imperatyvu ‘Pažink save!’ Parodoma, kad šis imperatyvas steigia skirtį tarp logo ir kosmo, kurią antikos išminčius išgyvena kaip sinkretinio gyvenimo vidujybės netektį. Straipsnio autorius interpretuoja filosofavimą kaip kalbėjimą ir veikimą, kuriais antikos išminčius siekia susigrąžinti ikirefleksinę būseną. Teigiama, kad sinkretinių mąstymo įgūdžių nepraradęs antikos išminčius savąjį filosofavimą linkęs aiškinti kaip pritapimo prie kosmo būdą. Kadangi refleksija įkurdina žmogų teorinio mąstymo erdvėje, tai pritapimo prie kosmo veiksmas tegalimas mąstymo plotmėje, todėl filosofavimą steigianti skirtis tarp logo ir kosmo besiplėtojančiame filosofavime nuaidi skirtimis kosme. Tačiau pirmieji išminčiai dar tikisi pilnatviško pritapimo prie kosmo ir tokio pritapimo regimybę jie dar pelno kosmo kaip grožio išgyvenimu, kurį Platonas ir Aristotelis sieja su nuostaba. Pirmoji kanonizuotoji filosofijos ištara interpretuojama kaip estetinį pritapimą prie kosmo referuojantis poetinis bylojimas.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: raštas, priežastis, refleksija, kosmas, pritapimas, archė, grožis, tiesa, būtis.On the Nature (of Philosophy)Skirmantas Jankauskas SummaryThe paper deals with the genesis of Greek philosophy. The circumstances of the appearance of the first utterance in Greek philosophy and their impact upon its meaning are revealed. The traditional interpretation of the first utterances in the early Greek philosophy is attributed to Aristotle. The latter is said to have transferred Greek philosophizing totally into writing and subsequently to treat the first utterances as elements of writing. In the article, the suggestion is put forward that philosophizing did not begin as a writing but rather as a talking activity immersed in human activity in general. The specificity of philosophizing as constructive talking is related to the situation of reflection, caused by the imperative of the Seven Sages, namely by the imperative ‘Know thyself!”. It is shown here that the imperative introduces the difference between logos and cosmos, which is experienced by a Greek Sage as a loss of sincretic life. Philosophizing is then introduced as an activity of talking, provoked by the will to reestablish the original sincretic state. The author argues that because of syncretist skills, this activity is treated by early Greek philosophers as a way of partaking in cosmos. As reflection conveys a philosopher into the realm of theoretical thinking, partaking in cosmos is possible only as a way of thinking. Consequently, the difference between logos and cosmos in philosophizing resolves itself in the differences of cosmos. Nevertheless, the first philosophers still retained some hope for complete partaking in cosmos, and they gained the illusion of such a partaking by aesthetic experience of cosmos, which was attributed by Plato and Aristotle to wondering. Consequently, the first utterance of Greek philosophy is interpreted in this article as a kind of poetic discourse that refers to the activity of aesthetic partaking in cosmos.Keywords: writing, reason, reflection, cosmos, partaking, arche, the beautiful, truth, being.

Karya ini mengadaptasi folklor “Ande-Ande Lumut” sebagai ide dasar penciptaannya. Folklor ini dituangkan dalam pementasan teater berjudul “Kemuning”. Folklor “Ande-Ande Lumut” merupakan turunan dari cerita Panji yang menceritakan pengembaraan Raden Panji mencari Putri Candrakirana. Cerita Panji tidak hanya dikenal di Indonesia, tetapi dikenal hingga Asia Tenggara dan Jepang. Perkembangan teori adaptasi begitu pesat, apapun kini bisa dijadikan obyek adaptasi, puisi, novel, drama panggung, lukisan, tarian, dan video games. “Kemuning” ini dikemas dengan konsep pemanggungan teater epik Brecht. Hal ini merupakan suatu upaya mencari bentuk baru (pembacaan) dalam cerita “Ande-Ande Lumut”. Teater Epik menolak salah satu unsur utama dari drama Aristotelesyang telah dikembangkan dengan metode Stanislavsky, yaitu harus adanya empati (rasa ikut mengalami) dalam sebuah pementasan. Menurut Brecht proses ini telah menyebabkan suatu akibat yang mestinya dihindari, karena mengakibatkan sikap pasif dalam diri penonton. Maka ia membuat teori tentang menghancurkan ilusi, cara interupsi, dan tetap mengontrol emosi. Brecht identik dengan tema-tema sosial dalam karyanya. khususnya tema yang mengangkat nasib orang kecil yang harus menderita karena kebijakan penguasa. Biasanya kisahnya seputar persoalan buruh dan majikan. Pementasan “Kemuning” ini mengangkat kehidupan para pelacur yang masih identik dengan hal-hal negatif. Padahal mereka dibutuhkan dalam masyarakat. Tapi kadang kala mereka menjadi kambing hitam yang harus selalu disalahkan. Secara tersirat pementasan ini bertujuan memperjuangkan kehidupan para pelacur. Penonton diajak melihat sudut pandang yang lain tentang kehidupan pelacur yang selama ini dianggap buruk oleh masyarakat. Menurut Brecht teater yang baik dan yang dituntut dalam jaman moderen adalah teateryang dapat menggugah aktifi tas berfi kir yang kritis pada diri penonton. Maka pentas ini diharapkan mendorong para penikmat seni untuk melahirkan penafsiran yang penuh dengan kesadaran terhadap lingkungan sosial dan bisamenimbulkan suatu gerakan atau perubahan pada masyarakat.Kata kunci: Folklor, Ande-Ande Lumut, Adaptasi, dan Teater Epik BrechtABSTRACTAnde-Ande Lumut: The Adaptation of Folklore to the Epic Theater of Brecht. This theatrical work is adaptedfrom a popular folklore entitled Ande-Ande Lumut that is as a basic idea of its work. This folklore is performed in theatricalperformance entitled Kemuning. Ande-Ande Lumut is a story derived from the story of Panji which tells us about PrincePanji’s journey to look for Princess Candrakirana. This story is not only popular in Indonesia but also in South East Asiaand Japan. The adaptation theory is developing well; everything can be used as an adaptation object, poems, novels, dramas, paintings, dances, and video games. Kemuning is performed by the performing concept of Brecht’s epic theater. However, this is an effort to fi nd out the new form of reading in Ande-Ande Lumut story. The epic theater against one of the main elements in Aristotle’s drama that has been developed by Stanislavsky’s method; there should be an empathy in every aspect of performance. According to Brecht, this process has caused an effect which should be avoided because it brings audience’s passive attitude. Therefore, he tried to make a theory of destroying the illusion, of interrupting method, and of controlling emotion. Brecht’s identical works focus on the social themes, especially on the themes that show the poor people who are suffering from the authority’s policy. The common problems between the master and its worker are refl ected on hisstory. The Kemuning performance has tried to show the prostitutes’ life that is closed to any negative things. In fact, they are still being needed by the society. Unfortunately, sometimes they become the source of scapegoats to any troubles and are always blamed to. Implicitly, this performance is aimed to fi ght for the prostitutes’ life. The audience is invited to see the other points of view about their life that are often regarded as negative by the people. Moreover, Brecht said that a good and demanded theater in this modern era is a theater that can arouse the audience’s critical thinking activities. Therefore, this performance is supposed to be able to motivate the arts lovers in producing a critical analysis to any social awareness and in creating a new movement to any signifi cant changes in society.Keywords: Folklore, Ande-Ande Lumut, Adaptation, and Brecht’ Epic Theater

In order to be spoken, a tragic monologue which is the quintessence of any great tragedy, always required quite a special moment amidst action, approximately described as ‘stop-time’, ‘falling-out-of-time’ or ‘time-within-time’. This abruption of natural time-durance, formation of some strange lacuna in its usually monolith and constant flow, along with the strengthening of the emotional effect of such dramatic meditation by portraying it against the most depressing, uncomfortable or disastrous convulsions in the world around which seems to literally fall apart and leave the man to his own — was rarely regarded from the outside of dramatic art as a serious philosophical conception, a keystone event to present human self-awareness. Indeed, Plato already compared thinking (as a process) to the inner speech of soul communicating with itself (and thus knowing, noticing itself), and again, the same Plato suggested that to reach the real essence of things (which is the inborn aim of thinking), a human being must find itself on the breaking edge of existence where the material world is cast aside and the other world of godly truths starts to shine through — as it happens to the soldier Er in one of myths quoted in ‘Republic’, who seemingly fell in battle but as he lay neither dead nor alive his soul went to other planes to witness the divine order and then bring the knowledge of it back to people as Er resurrected. But the connection between the matrix of central elements in such enlightening tales (‘catastrophe of usual being’ — ‘transgression to some medium plane’ — ‘learning some all-changing truth there’ — ‘coming back to the world and oneself to speak the learnt to the people’), was never considered akin to that of the core elements of tragic climax. After Plato, Aristotle developed the idea that to think seriously we need a special time free of all else that storms our everyday lives — yet designing the laws of tragedy in ‘Poetics’, he didn’t ever let this intellectual transcendence counter the dramatic strives of actions and passions of its heroes (as well as the forth movement) although it was only one step away to admit their likelihood. The latter Christianity defiled tragedy as the way only to despair, and more to that, a theatrical illusion leading conscience astray. Only modern European thinkers from Pascal to Nietzsche and existentialists (with the significant help from outstanding authors like Shakespeare) brought back the notion of tragic to philosophical bloom again and re-presented the tragedy as one of the highest and most complicated arts devoted to human self-cognizance.

J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is appalled to learn that his lover is a victim of incest in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s definitive, yet subversive film Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Similarly, Ethan Mars (Pascale Langdale), the hero of the electronic game Heavy Rain (David Cage, 2010), is equally devastated to find his child has been abducted. One a cinema classic of the detective genre, the other a sophisticated electronic game: both ground-breaking, both compelling, but delivered in contrasting media. So, what do Chinatown and Heavy Rain have in common from the writer’s point of view? Can the writer of games learn from the legacy of film storytelling yet find alternative rules for new media? This article attempts to answer these questions making reference to the two works above to illuminate the gap between games writing and traditional screenwriting scholarship.Western commercial cinema has evolved to place story centrally and Chinatown is an example of a story’s potential as film art and entertainment concurrently. Media convention derives from the lessons of previous relatable art forms such as pictorial art, literature and architecture in the case of film; board games and centuries of physical gaming in the case of games design. Therefore, the invention of new media such as online and electronic gaming relies, in part, on the rules of film. However, game play has reassessed screenwriting and its applicability to this new media rendering many of these rules redundant. If Marshall McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message” is correct, then despite the reliance of one medium on the traditions of its predecessor, gaming is simply not cinema. This article considers writing for games as axiomatically unconventional and calls for radical reinventions of storytelling within the new media.In order to investigate games writing, I will first revisit some of the rules of cinematic construction as inherited from an original Aristotelian source (Cleary). These rules require: a single focussed protagonist driving the plot; a consistent story form with narrative drive or story engine; the writer to avoid the repeated dramatic beat and; a reassessment of thematic concerns for the new technology. We should also investigate game-centric terminology such as “immersion” and “agency” to see how electronic gaming as an essentially postmodern phenomenon reciprocates, yet contrasts to, its cinematic predecessor (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Must the maker of games subscribe to the filmmaker’s toolbox when the field is so very different? In order to answer this question, I will consider some concepts unique to games technology, firstly, the enduring debate known as ludology versus narratology. Gaming rhetoric since the late 1990s has questioned the efficacy of the traditional film narrative when adapted to game play. Players are still divided between the narratologists’ view, which holds that story within games is inevitable and the ludologists’ opinion, which suggests that traditional narrative has no place within the spatially orientated freedom of game play. Originally espousing the benefits of ludology, Janet H Murray argues that the essential formalism of gaming separates it from narrative, which Aarseth describes as representing “'colonialist' intrusions” on game play (46). Mimetic aspects inherited from narrative principles should remain incidental rather than forming an overarching hegemony within the game (Murray, "Last Word"). In this way, the ludologists suggest that game development has been undermined by the persistence of the narrative debate and Murray describes game studies as a “multi-dimensional, open-ended puzzle” worth solving on its own terms (indeed, cinema of attractions compelled viewers for thirty years before narrative cinema became dominant in the early twentieth century.Gaming history has proved this argument overblown and Murray herself questions the validity of this spurious debate within game play. She now includes the disclaimer that, ironically, most ludologists are trained in narratology and thus debate a “phantom of their own creation” (Murray, "Last Word"). This implies a contemporary opposition to ludology’s original meaning and impacts upon screenwriting principles in game making. Two further key concepts, which divide the medium of game entirely from the art of cinema are “immersion” and “agency” (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Murray likens immersion to the physical sensation of being “submerged in water” pointing out that players enjoy the psychologically immersive phenomenon of delving into an undiscovered reality (Murray, Hamlet 98). Although distinct from the passive experience of cinema viewing, this immersion is like the experience of leaving the ordinary world and diving into the special world as Christopher Vogler’s screenwriting theory suggests. The cinema audience is encouraged to immerse themselves in the new world of Gittes’s Chinatown from the comfort of their familiar one. Similarly, the light-hearted world of the summer home contrasts Heavy Rain’s decent into urban, neo-noir corruption. Contrary to its cinematic cousin, the immediacy and subjectivity of the new media experience is more tangible and controllable, which renders immersion in games more significant and brings us to the next gaming concept, agency.To describe agency, Murray uses the complex metaphor of participatory dance, with its predetermined structures, “social formulas” and limited opportunities to change the overall “plot” of the dance: “The slender story is designed to unfold in the same way no matter what individual audience members may do to join the fun” (Hamlet 126-27). In electronic gaming, time-honoured gaming traditions from chess and board games serve as worthy predecessors. In this way, sophisticated permutations of outcome based on the player’s choice create agency, which is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, Hamlet 126). Bearing this in mind, when narrative enters game play, a world of possibility opens up (Murray, Hamlet).So where do the old rules of cinema apply within gaming and where is the maker of games able to find alternatives based on their understanding of agency and immersion? McLuhan’s unconventional scholarship leads the way, by pointing out the alternativity of the newer media. I consider that the rules of cinematic construction are also often disregarded by the casual viewer/player, but of utmost importance to the professional screenwriter.Amongst these rules is the screenwriting convention of having a single protagonist. This is a being fuelled with desire and a clear, visually rendered, actively negotiated goal. This principle persists in cinema according to Aristotle’s precepts (Cleary). The protagonist is a single entity making decisions and taking actions, even if that entity is a collection of individuals acting as one (Dethridge). The exploits of this main character (facing an opposing force of antagonism) determine the path of the story and for that reason a clear, single-minded narrative line is echoed in a single story form (McKee). For example, the baffling depth of meaning in Chinatown still emanates from protagonist J.J. Gittes’s central determination: to solve the crime suggested by the Los Angeles water shortage. The audience’s ability to identify and empathise with Gittes is paramount when he discovers the awful perversion his love interest, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), has been subjected to. However, the world of Chinatown remains intriguing as a string of corruption is revealed though a detective plot fuelled by our hero’s steadfast need to know the truth. In this way, a single protagonist’s desire line creates a solid story form. Conversely, in computer games (and despite the insistence of Draconian screenwriting lecturers who insist on replicating cinematic rules) the effect of a multiple protagonist plot still allows for the essential immersion in an imaginative world. In Heavy Rain, for example, the search for clues through the eyes of several related characters including a hapless father, a hangdog, ageing detective and a hyper-athletic single mother still allows for immersion. The player/interactor’s actions still create agency even as they change avatars from scene to scene. The player also negotiates for mastery of their character’s actions in order to investigate their situation, facts and world. However, each time the player switches their character allegiance, they revert to square one of their potential identification with that character. Indeed, in Heavy Rain, the player keenly aware of the chilling effect generated by the father losing his child in a busy shopping mall, but then another avatar steps forward, then another and the player must learn about new and unfamiliar characters on a scene-by-scene basis. The accumulative identification with a hero like Chinatown’s Gittes, begins with an admiration for his streetwise charm, then strengthens through his unfolding disillusionment and is cemented with Polanski’s brilliant invention: the death of Evelyn Mulwray replete with its politico-sexual implications (Polanski). However, does this mean cinematic identification is superior to game play’s immersion and agency? McLuhan might argue it is not and that the question is meaningless given that the “message” of games is axiomatically different. Traditional screenwriting scholarship therefore falters in the new medium. Further, Heavy Rain’s multi-protagonist miasma conforms to a new breed of structure: the mosaic plot, which according to Murray mirrors the internet’s click and drag mentality. In this sense, a kaleidoscopic world opens in pockets of revelation before the player. This satisfies the interactor in a postmodernist sense: an essential equality of incoming information in random, nonlinear connections. Indeed electronic games of this nature are a triumph of postmodernism and of ludology’s influence on the narratologist’s perspective. Although a story form including clues and detection still drives the narrative, the mosaic realisation of character and situation (which in a film’s plot might seem meandering and nonsensical) is given life by the agency and immersion provided by gaming (Truby).Back in traditional screenwriting principles, there is still the need for a consistent and singular story form providing a constant narrative drive (McKee). As mentioned, this arises from the protagonist’s need. For example a revenge plot relies on the hero’s need for vengeance; a revelation plot like Chinatown hinges on detection. However, first time screenwriting students’ tendency to visualise a story based unconsciously on films they have previously seen (as a bricolage of character moments arranged loosely around a collection of received ideas) tends to undermine the potential effectiveness of their story form. This lack of singularity in filmic writing indicates a misunderstanding of story logic. This propensity in young screenwriters derives from a belief that if the rendered filmic experience means something to them, it will necessarily mean something to an audience. Not so: an abandoned story drive or replaced central character diminishes the audience’s enjoyment and even destroys suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the story becomes bland and confusing. On investigation, it appears the young screenwriter does not realise that they are playing out an idea in their head, which is essentially a bricolage in the postmodern sense. Although this might lead to some titillating visual displays it fails to engage the audience as the result of their participation in an emotional continuum (Hayward). In contradistinction to film, games thrive on such irregularities in story, assuming radically different effects. For example, in cinema, the emotional response of a mass audience is a major draw card: if the filmic story is an accumulation of cause and effect responses, which steadily drive the stakes up until resolution, then it is the emotional “cathexis” as by-product of conflict that the audience resonates with (Freud 75; Chekhov). Does this transfer to games? Do notions such as feeling and empathy actually figure in game play at all? Or is this simply an activity rewarding the interactor with agency in lieu of deeper, emotive experiences? This final question could be perceived as anti-gaming sentiment given that games such as Heavy Rain suggest just such an emotional by-product. Indeed, the mechanics of gaming have the ability to push the stakes even higher than their cinematic counterparts, creating more complex emotionality in the player. In this way, the intentional psychological malaise of Heavy Rain solicits even greater emotion from players due to their inherent act of will. Where cinema renders the audience emotional by virtue of its passivity, no such claim is possible in the game. For example, where in Chinatown, Gittes tortures his lover by repeatedly slapping her, in Heavy Rain the character must actively perform torture on themself in order to solve the mystery. Further, the potential for engagement is extended given there are fourteen possible endings to Heavy Rain. In this way, although the film viewer’s emotional response is tempered by guessing the singular outcome, the multiple endings of this electronic game prevent such prescience (films can have multiple endings, but game mechanics lend the new media more readily to this function, therefore, game books with dice-rolling options are a stronger precedent then cinema).Also effective for the construction of cinema is Aristotle’s warning that the repetition of story and expositional information without rising stakes or any qualification of meaning creates a sense of “dramatic stall” for the audience (Aristotle). This is known as a repeated dramatic story beat and it is the stumbling block of many first time screenwriters. The screenplay should be an inventive effort to overcome escalating obstacles and an accumulative cause and effect chain on the part of the protagonist (Truby). The modern screenwriter for film needs to recognise any repeated beat in their early drafting and delete or alter the repetitive material. What then are the implications of repeated dramatic beats for the game writer? The game form known as “first person shooter” (FPS) depends on the appearance of an eternally regenerating (indeed re-spawning) enemy. In an apocalyptic zombie shooter game, for example, many hordes of zombies die unequivocally without threatening the interactor’s intrigue. Presumably, the antagonists are not intended to pose intellectual opposition for the gamer. Rather, the putrefying zombies present themselves for the gamer’s pugilistic satisfaction, again and again. For the game, therefore, the repeated beat is a distinct advantage. They may come harder and faster, but they are still zombies to be dispatched and the stakes have not necessarily risen. Who cares if this is a succession of repeated beats? It is just good clean fun, right? This is where the ludologists hold sway: to impose principles such as non-repeated beats and rising stakes on the emergence of a world based on pure game play offers no consequence for the FPS game. Nevertheless, the problem is exacerbated in “role play games” (RPG) of which Heavy Rain is an example. Admittedly, the gamer derives effective horror as our hero negotiates his way amongst a sea of disassociated shoppers searching for his lost child. The very fact of gamer agency should abnegate the problem, but does not, it merely heightens the sense of existential hopelessness: turning face after face not finding the child he is searching for is a devastating experience exacerbated by active agency (as opposed to the accepting passivity of cinema spectatorship). The rising panic in the game and the repetition of the faces of impassive shoppers also supports the player’s ongoing disorientation. The iconic appearance of the gruff clown handing out balloons further heightens the panic the gamer/protagonist experiences here. These are examples of repeated beats, yet effective due to player agency. The shoppers only persist until the gamer masters the situation and is able to locate the missing child. Thus, it is the capacity of the gamer to circumvent such repetition, which actually propels the game forward. If the gamer is adept, they will overcome the situation easily; if they are inexperienced, the repetition will continue. So, why apply traditional narrative constrictions on game play within a narrative game?Another crucial aspect of story is theme, which in the young writer reflects a postmodernist fetishisation of plot over story. In fact, theme is one of the first concepts to be ignored when a film student puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) when designing their game. In this way, the themes students choose to ignore resurface despite their lack of conscious application of them. They write plot, and plot in abundance (imperative for the modern writer (Truby)), which the mosaic structure of games accommodates for seamlessly. However, plot is causative and postmodern interpretations do not necessarily require the work of art to “say” anything beyond the “message” trapped in the clichés of their chosen genre (McLuhan). In concentrating on plot, therefore, the young writer says what they are unaware they are saying. At its most innocuous level this creates cliché. At its worst, it erases history and celebrates an attitude of unexamined ignorance toward the written material (Hayward). In extreme cases, student writers of both media support fascism, celebrate female masochism, justify rape (with or without awareness), or create nihilistic and derivative art, which sensationalises violence to a degree not possible within film technology. This is ironic given that postmodernism is defined, in part, by a canny reaction to modernist generation of meaning and cynicism toward the technology of violence. In all this postmodernism, that illusive chestnut known as “originality” (a questionable imperative still haunting the conventional screenplay despite the postmodernist declamation that there is no such thing) should also be considered. Although the game writer can learn from the lessons of the screenwriter, the problems of game structure and expression are unique to the new medium and therefore alternative to film. Adhering to traditional understandings of screenwriting in games is counterproductive to the development of the form and demands new assessment. If gaming students are liberated from narratologist impositions of cinematic story structures, will this result in better or more thoughtful games? Further to the ludologists’ original protestation against the ““colonialist” intrusions” of narrative on game play, film writing must recede where appropriate (Aarseth). Then again, if a ludologist approach to game creation renders the student writer free of filmic dogma, why do they impose the same stories repetitively? What gain comes from ignoring the Aristotelian traditions of storytelling–especially as derived from screen culture? I suggest that storytelling, to echo McLuhan’s statement, must necessarily change with the new medium: the differences are illuminating. The younger, nonlinear form embodies the player as protagonist and therefore should not need to impose the single protagonist regime from film. Story engine has been replaced by player agency and game mechanics, which also allows for inventive usage of the repeated beat. Indeed, postmodern and ludological concerns embedded within mosaic plots almost entirely replace the need for any consistency of story form while still subverting the expectations of modernism? Genre rules are partly reinvented by the form and therefore genre conventions in gaming are still in their infancy. Indeed, the very amorality of nihilistic game designers opens a space for burgeoning post-postmodernist concerns regarding ethics and faith within art. In any case, the game designer may choose the lessons of film writing’s modernist legacy if story is to be effective within the new medium. However, as meaning derives from traditional form, it might be wiser to allow the new medium its own reinvention of writing rules. Given Heavy Rain’s considerable contribution to detective genre in game play by virtue of its applying story within new media, I anticipate further developments that might build on Chinatown’s legacy in the future of gaming, but on the game play’s own terms.ReferencesAarseth, Espen. Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. Aristotle. Poetics. Australia: Penguin Classics, 1997.Chekhov, Michael. Lessons for the Professional Actor. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985.Chinatown. Roman Polanski. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Cleary, Stephen. “'What Would Aristotle Do?' Ancient Wisdom for Modern Screenwriters.” Stephen Cleary Lecture Series, 1 May 2011. Melbourne, Vic.: Victorian College of the Arts.Dethridge, Lisa. Writing Your Screenplay. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2003.Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Middlesex: Pelican, 1984. 65-97.Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2006.Heavy Rain. David Cage. Quantic Dream, 2010.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. UK: Methuen, 1999. McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994. 1-18.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster / Free Press, 1997.Murray, Janet H. “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies.” Keynote Address. DiGRA, Vancouver, 17 June 2005.Polanski, Roman, dir. DVD Commentary. Chinatown. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. London: Boxtree, 1996.

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.

The word “prosthetic” has its origins as a mathematical term. According to scholar Brandon W. Hawk, Plato uses the words prosthesis and prostithenai in Phaedo to mean "addition, add to, to place", and Aristotle uses it in a similar, algebraic sense in the Metaphysics. Later, as the word appears in classical Latin, it is used as a grammatical and rhetorical term, in the sense of a letter or syllable that is added on to a word, usually the addition of a syllable to the beginning of a word, hence pro-thesis (Hawk). This is the sense of the word that was “inherited … by early modern humanists”, says Hawk, but when it appears in Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words: Or, a General Dictionary (1706), we can see how, with advances in technology, it changes from a grammatical/linguistic term into a medical term. What was once word is now made flesh:Prosthesis, a Grammatical Figure, when a Letter or Syllable is added to the beginning of a Word, as Gnatus for natus, tetuli for tuli, &c. In Surgery, Prosthesis is taken for that which fills up what is wanting, as is to beseen in fistulous and hollow Ulcers, filled up with Flesh by that Art: Also themaking of artificial Legs and Arms, when the natural ones are lost.Hawk also points to P. Dionis in Course Chirurg (a 1710 textbook detailing the art of chirurgy, or surgery, as it’s known now), who uses the word to denote one type of surgical operation; that is, prosthesis becomes not a word, but an act that “adds what is deficient”, an act that repairs loss, that “fills up what is wanting”, that fills up what is “hollow”, that “fills up with flesh”. R. Brookes, in his Introduction to Physic and Surgery (1754), is the first to define prosthesis as both an act and also as a separate, material object; it is “an operation by which some instrument is added to supply the Defect of a Part which is wanting, either naturally or accidentally”. It is not until the twentieth century (1900, to be exact), though, that the word begins to refer solely to a device or object that is added on to somehow “supply the defect”, or fill up what which is “wanting”. So etymologically we move from the writer creating a new literary device, to the scientist/doctor acting in order to fix something, then back to the device again, this time as tangible object that fills a gap where there is lack and loss (Hawk).This is how we most often see the word, and so we have the notion of prosthetic used in this medicalised sense, as an "instrument", in relation to people with missing or disfunctional limbs. Having a prosthetic arm or leg in an ableist society instantly marks one as "missing" something, or being "disabled". Wheelchairs and other prosthetic accoutrements also serve as a metonymic shorthand for disability (an example of this might be how, on reserved parking spots in North America, the image on the sign is that of a person in a wheelchair). In the case of deaf people, who are also thought of as "disabled", but whose supposed disability is invisible, hearing aids and cochlear implants (CIs) serve as this kind of visible marker.* Like artificial limbs and wheelchairs, these "instruments" (they are actually called “hearing instruments” by audiologists) are sometimes added on to the purportedly “lacking” body. They are objects that “restore function to” the disabled deaf ear. As such, these devices, like wheelchairs and bionic arms, also serve as a shorthand in American culture, especially in film and visual media, where this kind of obvious, material symbolism is very helpful in efficiently driving narrative along. David L. Mitchell and Sharon T. Snyder call this kind of disability shorthand "narrative prosthesis". In their 2001 book of the same name, they demonstrate that disability and the markers of disability, far from being neglected or omitted (as has been claimed by critics like Sarah Ruiz-Grossman), actually appear in literature and film to the point where they are astonishingly pervasive. Unlike other identities who are vastly underrepresented, Mitchell and Snyder note, images of disability are almost constantly circulated in print and visual media (this is clearly demonstrated in older film studies such as John Schuchman's Hollywood Speaks and Martin Norden's Cinema of Isolation, as well). The reason that this happens, Mitchell and Snyder say, is because almost all narrative is structured around the idea of a flaw in the natural order, the resolution of that flaw, and the restoration of order. This flaw, they show, is more often than not represented by a disabled character or symbol. Disability, then, is a "crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality and analytical insight" (49). And, in the end, all narrative is thus dependent upon some type of disability used as a prosthetic, which serves not only to “fill in” lack, but also to restore and reinforce normalcy. They also state that concepts of, and characters with, disability are therefore used in literature and film primarily as “opportunist metaphorical device(s)” (205). Hearing aids and CIs are great examples of "opportunist" devices used on television and in movies, mostly as props or “add-ons” in visual narratives. This "adding on" is done, more often than not, to the detriment of providing a well rounded narrative about the lived experience of deaf people who use such devices on a daily basis. There are countless examples of this in American television shows and films (in an upward trend since 2000), including many police and crime dramas where a cochlear implant device-as-clue stands in for the dead victim’s identity (Kincheloe "Do Androids"). We see it in movies, most notably in 2018’s A Quiet Place, in which a CI is weaponized and used to defeat the alien monster/Other (as opposed to the deaf heroine doing it by herself) (Kincheloe "Tired Tropes"). In 2019's Toy Story 4, there is a non-signing child who we know is deaf because they wear a CI. In the 2019 animated Netflix series, Undone, the main character wears a CI, and it serves as one of several markers (for her and the viewer) of her possible psychological breakdown.It seems fairly obvious that literal prostheses such as hearing aids and CI devices are used as a form of media shorthand to connote hearing ideas of “deafness”. It also might seem obvious that, as props that reinforce mainstream, ableist narratives, they are there to tell us that, in the end, despite the aesthetic nervousness that disability produces, "things will be okay". It's "fixable". These are prosthetics that are easily identified and easily discussed, debated, and questioned.What is perhaps not so obvious, however, is that American Sign Language (ASL), is also used in media as a narrative prosthetic. Lennard Davis' discussion of Erving Goffman’s idea of “stigma” in Enforcing Normalcy supports the notion that sign language, like hearing aids, is a marker. When seen by the hearing, non-signing observer, sign language "stigmatizes" the signing deaf person (48). In this sense, ASL is, like a hearing aid, a tangible "sign" of deaf identity. I would then argue that ASL is, like hearing aids and CIs, used as a "narrative prosthesis" signifying deafness and disability; its insertion allows ableist narratives to be satisfyingly resolved. Even though ASL is not a static physical device, but a living language and an integral part of deaf lived experience, it is casually employed almost everywhere in media today as a cheap prop, and as such, serves narrative purposes that are not in the best interest of realistic deaf representation. Consider this example: On 13 April 2012, Sir Paul McCartney arranged for a special event at his daughter Stella McCartney’s ivy-covered store in West Hollywood. Stars and friends like Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, Quincy Jones, and Reese Witherspoon sipped cucumber margaritas and nibbled on a spread of vegetarian Mexican appetizers. Afterwards, McCartney took them all to a tent set up on the patio out back, where he proudly introduced a new video, directed by himself. This was the world premiere of the video for "My Valentine", a song from his latest (some might say oddly titled) album, Kisses from the Bottom, a song he had originally written for and sung to new wife Nancy Shevell, at their 2011 wedding.The video is very simply shot in black and white, against a plain grey backdrop. As it begins, the camera fades in on actor Natalie Portman, who is seated, wearing a black dress. She stares at the viewer intently, but with no expression. As McCartney’s voiced-over vocal begins, “What if it rained/We didn’t care…”, she suddenly starts to mouth the words, and using sign language. The lens backs up to a medium shot of her, then closes back in on a tight close up of just her hands signing “my valentine” on her chest. There is then a quick cut to actor Johnny Depp, who is sitting in a similar position, in front of a grey backdrop, staring directly at the camera, also with no expression. There is a fade back to Portman’s face, then to her body, a close up of her signing the word “appear”, and then a cut back to Depp. Now he starts signing. Unlike Portman, he does not mouth the words, but stares ahead, with no facial movement. There is then a series of jump cuts, back and forth, between shots of the two actors’ faces, eyes, mouths, hands. For the solo bridge, there is a closeup on Depp’s hands playing guitar – a cut to Portman’s face, looking down – then to her face with eyes closed as she listens. here is some more signing, we see Depp’s impassive face staring at us again, and then, at the end, the video fades out on Portman’s still figure, still gazing at us as well.McCartney told reporters that Stella had been the one to come up with the idea for using sign language in the video. According to the ASL sign language coach on the shoot, Bill Pugin, the choice to include it wasn’t that far-fetched: “Paul always has an interpreter on a riser with a spot for his concerts and Stella loves sign language, apparently” ("The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp"). Perhaps she made the suggestion because the second stanza contains the words “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…” Regardless, McCartney advised her father to “ring Natalie up and just ask her if she will sign to your song”. Later realizing he wanted another person signing in the video, Paul McCartney asked Johnny Depp to join in, which he did. When asked why he chose those two actors, McCartney said, “Well, they’re just nice people, some friends from way back and they were just very kind to do it”. A week later, they all got together with cinematographer Wally Pfister, who filmed Inception and The Dark Knight, behind the camera. According to the official press release about the video, posted on McCartney’s website, the two actors then "translate[d] the lyrics of the song into sign language – each giving distinctly different performances, making ... compelling viewing" ("Paul McCartney Directs His Own"). The response to the video was quite positive; it immediately went viral on YouTube (the original posting of it got over 15 million views). The album made it to number five on the Billboard charts, with the single reaching number twenty. The album won a 2013 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal album, and the video Best Music Film (“Live Kisses”). McCartney chose to sing that particular song from the album on the award show itself, and four years later, he featured both the song and video as part of his 31 city tour, the 2017 One on One concert, in which he made four million dollars a city. All told the video has served McCartney quite well.But…For whom the sign language? And why? The video is not meant for deaf eyes. When viewed through a deaf lens, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “compelling”; it isn’t even comprehensible. It is so bad, in fact, that the video, though signed, is also captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. To the untrained, “hearing” eye, the signing seems to be providing a “deaf translation” of what is being sung. But it is in fact a pantomime. The actors are quite literally “going through the motions”. One egregious example of this is how, at the end of the video, when Depp thinks he’s signing “valentine”. it looks like he's saying “fuck-heart” (several media sources politely reported that he’d signed “enemy”). Whatever he did, it’s not a sign. In response to criticism of his signing, Depp said nonchalantly, “Apparently, instead of ‘love' I might have said, ‘murder'” ("Johnny Depp Says"). That wasn’t the only point of confusion, though: the way Portman signs “then she appears” was misunderstood by some viewers to be the sign for “tampon”. She actually signed it correctly, but media sources from MTV.com, to the Washington Post, “signsplained” that she had just gotten a bit confused between ASL and BSL signs (even though the BSL for “appears” bears no resemblance to what she did, and the ASL for tampon, while using the same classifier, is also signed quite differently). Part of the problem, according to sign coach Pugin, was that he and Depp “had about fifteen minutes to work on the song. I signed the song for hours sitting on an apple box under the camera for Johnny to be able to peripherally see me for each take. I was his “human cue card”. Johnny’s signing turned out to be more theatrical and ‘abbreviated’ because of the time issue” ("The Guy Who Taught").Portman, perhaps taking more time to rehearse, does a better job, but “theatrical and abbreviated” indeed; the signing was just not good, despite Pugin's coaching. But to hearing eyes, it looks fine; it looks beautiful, it looks poignant and somehow mysterious. It looks the way sign language is “supposed” to look.Remember, the McCartney website claimed that the actors were “translating” the lyrics. Technically speaking, “translation” would mean that the sense of the words to the song were being rendered, fluently, from one language (English) into another (SL), for an audience receptive to the second language. In order to “translate”, the translator needs to be fluent in both of the languages involved. To be clear, what Depp and Portman were doing was not translation. They are hearing people, not fluent in sign language, acting like signers (something that happens with dismaying regularity in the entertainment industry). Depp, to his credit, knew he wasn’t “translating”, in fact, he said "I was only copying what the guy showed me”. “But”, he says, "it was a gas – sign language is apparently very interpretive. It's all kind of different" (italics mine) ("Johnny Depp Passes the Buck"). Other than maybe being an embellishment on that one line, “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…”, the sentiments of McCartney’s song have absolutely nothing to do with ASL or deaf people. And he didn’t purposefully place sign language in his video as a way to get his lyrics across to a deaf audience. He’s a musician; it is fairly certain that the thought of appealing to a deaf audience never entered his or his daughter’s mind. It is much more likely that he made the decision to use sign language because of its cool factor; its emo “novelty”. In other words, McCartney used sign language as a prop – as a way to make his song “different”, more “touching”, more emotionally appealing. Sign adds a je ne sais quoi, a little “something”, to the song. The video is a hearing person’s fantasy of what a signing person looks like, what sign language is, and what it does. McCartney used that fantasy, and the sentimentality that it evokes, to sell the song. And it worked. This attitude toward sign language, demonstrated by the careless editing of the video, Depp’s flippant remarks, and the overall attitude that if it’s wrong it’s no big deal, is one that is pervasive throughout the entertainment and advertising industries and indeed throughout American culture in the U.S. That is, there is this notion that sign language is “a gas”. It’s just a “different” thing. Not only is it “different”, but it is also a “thing”, a prop, a little exotic spice you throw into the pot. It is, in other words, a "narrative prosthesis", an "add-on". Once you see this, it becomes glaringly apparent that ASL is not viewed in mainstream American culture as the language of a group of people, but instead is widely used and commodified as a product. The most obvious form of commodification is in the thousands of ASL products, from Precious Moment figurines, to Baby Signing videos, to the ubiquitous “I LOVE YOU” sign seen on everything from coffee mugs to tee shirts, to Nike posters with “Just Do It” in fingerspelling. But the area in which the language is most often commodified (and perhaps most insidiously so) is in the entertainment industry, in visual media, where it is used by writers, directors and actors, not to present an accurate portrait of lived deaf experience and language, but to do what Paul McCartney did, that is, to insert it just to create a “different”, unique, mysterious, exotic, heartwarming spectacle. Far too often, this commodification of the language results in weirdly distorted representations of what deaf people and their language actually are. You can see this everywhere: ASL is a prominent narrative add-on in blockbuster films like the aforementioned A Quiet Place; it is used in the Oscar winning The Shape of Water, and in Wonderstruck, and Baby Driver as well; it is used in the indie horror film Hush; it is used in a lot of films with apes (the Planet of the Apes series and Rampage are two examples); it is displayed on television, mostly in police dramas, in various CSI programs, and in series like The Walking Dead and Castle Rock; it is used in commercials to hawk everything from Pepsi to hotel chains to jewelry to Hormel lunchmeat to fast food (Burger King, Chik Fil A); it is used and commented on in interpreted concerts and music videos and football halftime shows; it is used (often misused) in PSAs for hurricanes and police stops; it is used in social media, from vlogs to cochlear implant activation videos. You can find ASL seemingly everywhere; it is being inserted more and more into the cultural mainstream, but is not appearing as a language. It is used, nine times out of ten, as a decorative ornament, a narrative prop. When Davis discusses the hearing perception of ASL as a marker or visible stigma, he points out that the usual hearing response to observing such stigma is a combination of a Freudian attraction/repulsion (the dominant response being negative). Many times this repulsion results from the appeal to pathos, as in the commercials that show the poor isolated deaf person with the nice hearing person who is signing to them so that they can now be part of the world. The hearing viewer might think to themselves "oh, thank God I'm not deaf!"Davis notes that, in the end, it is not the signer who is the disabled one in this scenario (aside from the fact that many times a signing person is not in fact deaf). The hearing, non signing observer is actually the one “disabled” by their own reaction to the signing “other”. Not only that, but the rhetorical situation itself becomes “disabled”: there is discomfort – wariness of language – laughter – compulsive nervous talking – awkwardness – a desire to get rid of the object. This is a learned response. People habituated, Davis says, do not respond this way (12-13). While people might think that the hearing audience is becoming more and more habituated because ASL is everywhere, the problem is that people are being incorrectly habituated. More often than not, sign language, when enfolded into narratives about hearing people in hearing situations, is put into service as a prop that can mitigate such awkward moments of possible tension and conflict; it is a prosthetic that "fills the gap", allowing an interaction between hearing and deaf people that almost always allows for a positive, "happy" resolution, a return to "normalcy", the very purpose of the "narrative prosthetic" as posited by Mitchell and Snyder. Once we see how ASL is being employed in media mostly as a narrative prosthesis, we can, as Mitchell and Snyder suggest we do (what I hope this essay begins to do), and that is, to begin to “undo the quick repair of disability in mainstream representations and beliefs; to try to make the prosthesis show; to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion” (8). In other words, if we can scrutinize the shorthand, and dig deeper, seeing the prosthetic for what it is, all of this seemingly exploitative commodification of ASL will be a good thing. Maybe, in “habituating” people correctly, in widening both hearing people’s exposure to ASL and their understanding of its actual role in deaf lived experience, signing will become less of a prosthetic, an object of fetishistic fascination. Maybe hearing people, as they become used to seeing signing people in real signing situations, will be less likely to walk up to deaf people they don’t know and say things like: “Oh, your language is SO beautiful”, or say, “I know sign!” (then fingerspelling the alphabet with agonising slowness and inaccuracy while the deaf person nods politely). However, if the use of ASL as a prosthetic in popular culture and visual media continues to go on unexamined and unquestioned, it will just continue to trivialise a living, breathing language. This trivialisation can in turn continue to reduce the lived experiences of deaf people to a sort of caricature, further reinforcing the negative representations of deaf people in America that are already in place, stereotypes that we have been trying to escape for over 200 years. Note* The word "deaf" is used in this article to denote the entire range of individuals with various hearing losses and language preferences, including Deaf persons and hard of hearing persons, etc. For more on these distinctions please refer to the website entry on this published by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD).ReferencesDavis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy. New York: Verso, 1995."The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman Sign Language." Intimate Excellent: The Fountain Theater Blog. 18 Mar. 2012. <https://intimateexcellent.com/2012/04/18/the-guy-who-taught-johnny-depp-and-natalie-portman-sign-language-in-mccartney-video/>.Fitzgerald, Roisin. "Johnny Depp Says Sign Language Mishap Isn't His Fault." HiddenHearing Blog 14 Apr. 2012. <https://hiddenhearingireland.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/johnny-depp-says-sign-language-mishap-isnt-his-fault/>.Hawk, Brandon W. “Prosthesis: From Grammar to Medicine in the Earliest History of the Word.” Disability Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2018).McCartney, Paul. "My Valentine." YouTube 13 Apr. 2012.McGinnis, Sara. "Johnny Depp Passes the Buck on Sign Language Snafu." sheknows.com 10 May 2012. <https://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/959949/johnny-depp-passes-the-buck-on-sign-language-snafu/>.Miller, Julie. "Paul McCartney on Directing Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman." Vanity Fair 14 Apr. 2012. <https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/04/paul-mccartney-johnny-depp-natalie-portman-my-valentine-music-video-gwyneth-paltrow>.Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. 2000.Norden, Martin. F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in Movies. Rutgers UP: 1994."Paul McCartney Directs His Own My Valentine Video." paulmccartney.com 14 Apr. 2012. <https://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/news/paul-mccartney-directs-his-own-my-valentine-videos-featuring-natalie-portman-and>.Ruiz-Grossman, Sarah. "Disability Representation Is Seriously Lacking in Television and the Movies: Report." Huffington Post 27 Mar. 2019. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disability-representation-movies-tv_n_5c9a7b85e4b07c88662cabe7>.Schuchman, J.S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. U Illinois P, 1999.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 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