Ex Machina: Love in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Generally, I do not fall in love with humanoid robots, but I was tantalized by Ava in Alex Garland's brilliant sci-fi thriller, Ex Machina. What is so irresistible in her portrayal is the blurring of the line between human and machine. So convincing is Ava's humanity, indeed, that there doesn't seem to be a line at all. Where does one draw it, or redraw it?

The title of the film belies its referent, deus ex machina. Unlike the divine figure that implausibly appears on stage in Greek tragedy to resolve an intractable conflict, Ava is no mere device for tying up loose threads. No, as Domhnall Gleeson's character, Caleb, learns, she loosens them further -- to our increasing peril and perplexity. By the end of the story, we are haunted both by our inclination to fall in love with a thing of our own making, and by our ambition to make it in the first place. We are in sympathy with the gods.

Mr. Cogito Stages a Return

I considered using the title of Joyce Carol Oates' famous story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" to herald Cogito's return, but that would confuse our Everyman with an infernal friend. Not that Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is any better, even though Cogito was hard to find. Still, he's no twisted Christ figure.

In the days and months ahead, we'll try to figure out where our newly recovered friend has been and where he's going next.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn is Mark Twain's quintessential rogue character. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, serendipitously escaped its author's intentions mid-draft, much as its hero artfully escapes different forms of confinement--from the social to the literary. Indeed his opening words give Twain the slip: "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly." Huck's audacious leap from the page, a meta leap, not only renders Twain a character in his own novel, but hints at a relationship between reality and fantasy, and more precisely, between life and the escape from it.

From the start, Huck proves to be a new kind of American hero, a child free to speak in his own dialect, the raw and buoyant language of the Mississippi. His freedom of expression is the first sign of a newly discovered personal freedom, one that has enabled Huck to navigate between the values of his time and society and those of his own heart. In a way, Huck Finn is a rewriting of Homer's Odyssey, with the key difference that instead of returning home, Huck is escaping it. He escapes the brutal clutches of his alcoholic father, he escapes the widow's attempts to civilize him, he escapes the inevitability of growing up. When the runaway slave, Jim, eventually joins him, the theme of escape acquires a new urgency. 

At the same time, escape always threatens to become escapism, a longing for transitory freedom that leads one hopelessly astray. If the novel seems fanstastical--a boy and a slave drifting on the currents of the Mississippi in a raft, meeting all kinds of adventure--that is because fantasy is a form of escape, and Huck grows dangerously content with it. His friend, Tom Sawyer (like Don Quixote before him), is addicted to fantasy literature, distracting both him and Huck from the hard facts and exigencies of life. The ludicrous plot he hatches to free Jim, which Huck goes along with, reveals the implausible vision on which escapist literature thrives. However exhilarating and meaningful it renders the dramatic situation, it only thwarts Jim's flight into freedom, and eventually gets him recaptured. As Ernest Hemingway once said, this is where the novel should have ended, on a note of bitter irony, where the boys' fantasies of escape cost a man his freedom--and in turn, forfeit their own innocence.

But that is not where the story ends. The climax of the novel, in which Huck defiantly chooses to protect and shelter Jim at the cost of his soul and reputation--"all right, then, I'll go to hell"--suggests that it cannot end there. Huck's climactic decision reflects the fulfillment of an independent conscience, mature enough to channel the experience of escape and exile towards a higher end. As the boys make concessions to the urgency of freeing Jim, they begin to come to terms with reality and, unwittingly, with growing up. And growing up is incompatible with ceaseless escape; eventually, one must return to the world, if only to try to change it. Once Jim's predicament has been resolved, they do return. Jim's freedom is restored and Huck is offered a home. His narrative now ended, Huck is free to continue his life story as he sees fit. Will he stay and be "sivilized" by his adoptive mother, or head out west to the Indian Territory? The novel returns to an unwritten beginning. Only Huck, older and wiser, and in every reader's heart, can tell where it will go.

Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 on this day. The author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada was a perennial exile, first in Berlin where he wrote novels and poetry in Russian, then in America, where he refashioned himself as an English-prose writer, translator, college professor, and lepidopterist, and finally in Montreaux, Switzerland. One recalls the fantastic word play, the formal experimentation, the convoluted plots of his novels, if not the sheer notoriety of just one of them. He affirmed the generative power of his exile. A "hypertrophied sense of lost childhood," it was a yearning for a home to which he could no longer return, but also a condition for seeking. In his art, Nabokov showed that this sense of exile is common to us all, but that it need not be debilitating. Turning one's estrangement into a mode of perception, a manner of seeing the all too familiar with a new, ever startled gaze, is to deepen the mystery of one's life. And the beauty of it. Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov.      

John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Steinbeck's swan song, The Winter of Our Discontent, is a morality tale of post-war America, set in a coastal town on Long Island. We are far removed from the Salinas Valley in which Steinbeck staked his claim to American literature. It may be no accident that he marked out the same region F. Scott Fitzgerald had for Gatsby as a beacon from which to examine the moral zeitgest of America at a critical historical juncture, the period beginning in 1960.

Ethan Allen Hawley is the impoverished scion of an old New England family. A war hero and well-educated, he is reduced to being a clerk in his father's grocery store, now owned by a Sicilian immigrant. By turns cynical and jovial, Ethan exasperates his friends and family with his keen sense of irony, which masks his insecurity about his fortunes, while it mocks the shallow pursuit of money. But money, in this day and age, is there for the taking. On Good Friday, Ethan is thrice tempted by figures who promise either adventure or quick prosperity. Though he is the most honor-bound character in the novel, Ethan is not impervious to these temptations, for they seem to answer his call for redemption.

I don't know how believable Ethan's undoing is, but it does illustrate Steinbeck's concern (common among American authors) with the fall of good men to the allurements of modernity -- easy money, shady investments, consumerism, and of course, a glittering future. That the story is set during Easter week in 1960, in the light of a dawning era, suggests the evanescence of Ethan Allen Hawley as a model of the good American and the succession of one who has not yet been tested.

Heaven?

Something which perplexes and infuriates many atheists about their adversaries, the legions of faithful, is their ability (and right) to revise the tenets of their religion. What many religionists don't get, however, is the fact that you cannot argue your way out of every theological dispute with an ad hoc, undebatable solution. Jon Meacham's recent article in Time magazine, "Rethinking Heaven," describes a new development in Christian thought that is neither ad hoc, nor perplexing, though it may rankle with those who think differently. The new proposition: heaven is not a place where one goes after death, but a culmination of human love and effort to restore the material world--heaven as a resurrected earth.

This new idea has gained currency in certain Christian circles, amounting to a real paradigm shift with startling implications. Call it a downgrading, but a radical one. If heaven is no longer a celestial paradise, a utopian otherworld in which suffering has been banished and all creation lives in harmony with God, then man's earthly existence assumes new meaning. What was once considered an elaborate way station en route to the Great Beyond, or "just passing through," becomes the real ground and field for fulfillment.

Young people today seem to understand this point without actually acknowledging it. Members of an activist generation, they live out this new theology in their concerted effort to make the earth a better place for everyone. And the internet has become their prime vehicle for social justice, enabling sites like Change.org and public information campaigns on YouTube and social networking services to inspire mass movements. Witness the galvanizing effect of an online petition for justice in the Trayvon Martin case, or the power of Twitter and Facebook in launching the Arab Spring a year earlier.

Although the new vision of heaven is a welcome change, signifying Christians' willingness to rethink fundamentals in light of modern-day circumstances and advanced knowledge, it suffers from a case of false hope. Is it really possible to redress all the social ills of the world? A cynic and an optimist will each answer differently, but one answer will probably be more realistic than the other. How can the multiplicity of human interests, desires, and preoccupations converge on a future without strife? It would seem to require some tremendous feat of social engineering, or mass delusion--or, and this is the likeliest answer, an unthinkable evolutionary advance.

In the end, as with other verdicts on utopian visions, the new conception of heaven calls into question our conception of humanity. Man, as an existent among existents, may not have the special talent to fully overcome his selfishness, his meanness, his darker nature. But he can certainly imagine it. It is a curiosity of human existence that, in rethinking where one is going, one must first rethink who one is, and why.

Carl Sandburg, "Threes"

Threes

I was a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked
... why men die for words.

I was older; men with mustaches, sideburns,
lilacs, told me the high golden words are:
Mother, Home, and Heaven--other older men with
face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality
--they sang these threes slow from deep lungs.

Years ticked off their say-so on the great clocks
of doom and damnation, soup, and nuts: meteors flashed
their say-so: and out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.

And I met a marine of the U.S.A., a leatherneck with a girl on his knee
for a memory in ports circling the earth and he said: Tell me how to say
three things and I always get by--gimme a plate of ham and eggs--how
much--and--do you love me, kid?

[Sandburg's brilliance is evident here in his celebration of the here-and-now of sensuous existence, shorn of the abstractions and shibboleths which too often marred the work of the Romantic poets. Sandburg suggests that ordinary Americans live by a different code, a survivalist ethic of work, wanderlust, and simple pleasures. The dusky syllables of ideology have no place in their world.]

Elegy for the organ grinder

City corners have not been the same since the disappearance of the organ grinder, cranking his music box for pedestrians. When the organ grinder receded into history in the early 20th century, cities lost an enchanting, mystical sound. It was like the calliope of a carousel, the sound of children on painted wooden horses turning around and around. How curious to imagine that this music man was once a common fixture of the urban landscape.

The Keyhole

The closet in which Rupert was hiding for the past thirty minutes was unbearably small. Between crouching and kneeling on the hardwood floor, his arthritic legs were failing. Above him, shirt sleeves and jacket ends draped his shoulders with an air of condemnation, disembodied spirits posing with their captive. A beam of light streaming through the keyhole had settled on Rupert’s bald head.

A man and a woman quickly entered the room, and just as abruptly shut the door behind them. The sudden rush of air slightly rattled the closet door in front of Rupert's face. He looked through the little keyhole, his wrinkled eye bathed in a pale glow. He tried to quell his worried breath, which rose and sank in a shrill wheeze, while his eyelashes nervously fluttered, and a thin line of sweat trailed down his nose. The man in the room spoke coolly, knowingly, as though he could strike the woman without laying a finger on her. She was trying feebly to pacify him.

“Tell me a bedtime story, mother,” he said.

“If I had only known the trouble it would cause you, I wouldn't have mentioned it. But come to reason, please. He’s your father’s brother.”

“He is? Why didn’t anybody tell me?” he mocked.

The figures appeared and disappeared from the vista of the keyhole. They were slowly circling the room from opposite ends. When they were out of view, Rupert carefully adjusted his position. He could bend on one knee only for a short length of time before the pain became intolerable. He hoped they would leave soon. It was a bad idea, he thought. There were much better ways of obtaining information. When he looked again, he saw only the woman, framed in the keyhole’s little silhouette. Her son, whom she watched in terror, now paced along the unseen wall.

Neither one spoke. There was an interminable silence. The woman eyed her son carefully and nervously smoothed the folds of her dress. A lion tamer trapped in the beast’s cage might have shown as much restraint. Rupert now feared the possibility of a sudden, violent action. The woman will be torn abruptly from his view, he thought, killed or battered.

While still pacing, the man began to speak, but no longer in the voice of an offended child. He spoke rather with a feigned, calculating calm, as if he had summed up everything and was now pronouncing a verdict.  

“Tell me, mother, do you blush?”

“What?”  

“A whore in league with her lover, a husband’s mysterious death, a son deprived of his father. Enough reason to turn crimson?”

“What is this? What do you mean by all this?”

The man withheld his answer for a moment, as if by suspending it, he was making it monstrous. He then uttered in a menacing tone, “Murder. That’s what I mean. Foul murder.”

At this moment, Rupert banged the door with a hollow rap while switching knees. At once the hurried tap of footsteps was heard. His heart sank. The saliva in his mouth thinned, then dried almost instantly. When he peered again, timorously, through the keyhole, he saw only the man now, facing the closet door with a menacing leer.

“My, my, mother, I think there's a mouse in your closet.”     

Off the Beaten Path, On the Road

The Beat Generation of the 1950s, a precursor of the volatile counterculture of the following decade, seethed at America’s postwar prosperity and the repressive conditions of containment. It emerged, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in an “affluent, conformist America where the individual seems superfluous, the outsider rages, the dominant culture seems oppressive and hostile.” Unwilling to conform, the Beats – of whom the core members were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—sought their own values and pursued their own vision in jazz clubs, in experimental art, through alcohol, drugs, liberated sexuality, and the ecstasies of Buddhism and Jewish and Christian mysticism. Insofar as it was a struggle against repressive norms, the Beat-life was an on-going quest, a journey to find a new mode of being in the remote corners of human existence. As John Tytell writes, “The Beat Movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American ‘virtues’ of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility.”

That sensibility first entered the American mainstream with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Published in 1957, this semi-autobiography became a manifesto for the new generation of dispossessed American youths starved for personal freedom. Without plot, or any other literary restraint, On the Road describes the nomadic life of two characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, as they crisscross the American continent over a period of two years (from 1947 to 1949), visiting major cities, having love affairs, working odd jobs, experimenting with drugs, frequenting jazz clubs – and always on the go. “We were all delighted,” the narrator Sal declares, “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, [to] move. And we moved!” The theme of mobility is paramount in the text, but unlike other quest narratives, whose heroes strive towards a defined goal, On the Road is irreducible to any end other than the experience of aimless travel and discovery. For this reason it poses an interpretive dilemma, which seeks to answer the question: is On the Road simply an ode to a narcissistic culture, or does it offer an uncommon solution to societal repression?

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

There is a central paradox in all of Franz Kafka's tales that is never resolved or even fully explained. One consequence of that paradox is the impossibility of reducing Kafka to any single interpretation. The same has been said of the allegorical quality of the Bible. Many lenses have been used, but neither one appears sufficient.

"A Hunger Artist" is one such tale. The central figure, a public performer, has locked himself in a cage and fasts for weeks on end, practicing an art of starvation that beguiles and disturbs his spectators. Eventually, admiration and sympathy are mixed with general suspicion of the authenticity of the act, and guards are dispatched to ensure the hunger artist is not secretly feeding himself. What's more, his promoter insists on a forty-day fasting limit, believing that public interest could not be stretched or capitalized on any further. That distrust and cynicism irritates the hunger artist, and when his art finally outlasts its fame, he employs himself in a circus.

He is confined to a shadowy corner of the circus, surrounded by animals in cages. Crowds of spectators pass, noisily and indifferently, and the hunger artist, who had hoped to exceed his own powers, grows more and more depressed by his surroundings. But he continues to fast, losing count of the days. When an overseer looks into his cage one day and finds him near death, the hunger artist begs forgiveness for his act. In response to the inspectors' feigned admiration, he replies, "But you shouldn't admire it." He says he fasted only because "I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." He dies shortly after.

There's the paradox. And the only attempt at resolving it is vague--once the hunger artist's body is removed, a panther is placed in the cage. "And the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away."

For all its critics' assertions of the artist's solitude and alientation in modern society, "A Hunger Artist" escapes interpretation. It has an incompleteness that is typical of Kafka's other stories, as though refusing totality (or affecting a failure to achieve total understanding). Why are the hunger artist's final words so banal? Is he mocking the onlookers? Is he mocking life and the artist's struggle within it? Are we meant to understand? Kafka was making a statement, about art, interpretation, modernity, truth. The hunger artist was making a statement, too, but nobody could know for certain what it was.

Who's Afraid of the Enlightenment?

For the German social critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced freedom at the cost of freedom. While the triumph of reason and rationality emancipated the individual from superstition, religion, and prejudice, it laid the ground for another kind of domination. In their essay, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkheimer argued that, in subordinating the natural world to man's will, modern science and technology tended to convert reason into an instrument of domination, of which the Nazi death camps were a glaring testimonial. The empowerment of reason, in effect, was irrational. Reason for reason's sake, the condition for true freedom, was incompatible with modernity's hyper-capitalist, advanced industrial order.

Many post-war intellectuals in the arts and humanities were skeptical, not so much about science, but of scientism. They saw traditional forms of human community eroding, individuality and self-determination suppressed by technology. Urban centers in industrialized nations were particularly vulnerable. Accordingly, critiques of modern science often invoked the conformism and standardization which scientific progress supposedly entailed. The human being, for these thinkers, was becoming machine-like. His victory over nature was also a victory over his natural self; in its place, man developed a formalized morality, susceptible to external control and manipulation. As Adorno and Horkheimer theorized, this was indeed the negative legacy of the European Enlightenment.

Mr. Cogito Thinks of Returning to His Hometown

If I returned there
I surely wouldn't find
a single shadow from my house
or the trees from my childhood
or the cross with the iron plate
the bench where I whispered spells
chestnuts and blood
or anything which is ours

everything which survived
is a stone disc
with a chalk circle
I stand in the center
on one foot
a moment before jumping

I can't grow
although the years pass
and up above roar
the planets and wars

I stand in the center
unmoving like a monument
on one foot
before jumping into finality

the chalk circle reddens
just like old blood
mounds grow all around
ash
to the shoulder
to the mouth

--Zbigniew Herbert (trans. by blogger)

Anarchy in the Deli Section

Mr. Cogito decided to buy some cheese in the deli, so he stood with several other customers and waited for his turn. On the other side of the meat menagerie, two ladies were engaged in a lengthy conversation. The corpulent one with the spider tattoo behind her ear was grumbling about an injustice someone had done her. Her companion, a slight, older woman with a scowl, listened with interest, neglecting the turkey carvings in her hands.

"Excuse me," a customer interrupted. "I'm in a hurry."

"I'm getting there, darlin'," said the spider lady, who then rolled her eyes and sauntered to the meat slicer. The other shuffled back to the scale, weighed the turkey carvings, wrapped them, and flopped them down on the counter.

"Anything else?" she asked, rather uncordially, brow furrowed, as though she had just carried out an order to kill and prepare a mastodon. The customer lifted the wrapped turkey suspiciously and noted with agitation that she had asked for a pound, not half a pound.

"Take it or leave it, Miss!" came the curt reply. The customer stood paralyzed for
a moment, then took her turkey and trotted off angrily.

Another customer saw this and demanded to know what was going on before being rudely admonished that if he wanted his salami, he would just have to stand there and be quiet.

Mr. Cogito, briefly forgetting the cheese he wanted, cast about for historical traces of what was happening. He recalled famous instances of anarchy, but could find nothing to compare with the deli insurrection. Before long, he was the only one standing at the counter. The others had left with a fraction of their order, or a completely different order, or without having been served at all. Something like this, Mr. Cogito thought, must have happened in the final years of the Roman Empire, under Caligula, or else during the Peasant Revolt of 1381. Didn't Napoleon once endure such a rebellion within his own ranks? He couldn't remember. It seemed unprecedented.

In any case, Mr. Cogito never got his cheese.

The Warsaw Uprising

Like most events of the past, the Warsaw Uprising in Poland exceeded its historical boundaries once the battle began to be waged on the field of history. A valiant, but doomed, attempt to free Warsaw from Nazi occupation, the Uprising began on August 1, 1944 and lasted two awful months, leaving the city in a heap of smoldering rubble, and over 200,000 dead. While the defeat of the Polish Underground was, for all intents and purposes, a fait accompli, in history and collective memory the truth of that struggle was contested for nearly fifty years, during and after Warsaw’s reconstruction. Why?

After the start of the Cold War, official memory of the Uprising had been appropriated by Poland’s Communist regime, under whose auspices it was savagely reinterpreted. It became, by turns, a criminal misadventure, a Nazi-collaborationist effort, a cry for Soviet liberation, a false memory -- in essence, whatever would both legitimize the new government, which entrenched itself after the Uprising, and discredit the old one and its many loyalists. In other words, it could not be what it ultimately was -- a moment of infamy for the Soviet Union, whose army stood on Warsaw's banks as the city burned, the better to rescue it once it had already been devoured.

There emerged in response a new resistance movement led by dissidents of all stripes – historians, writers, activists, artists, and especially filmmakers – all devoted to a singular purpose (which, in their view, was a continuation of the Warsaw Resistance): to reclaim the past and to tell it truthfully. At stake was both the collective memory of the wartime generation in Poland, which could be manipulated and corrupted, as well as the memory of the emerging generation, which could be altered or erased. As one may imagine, the odds they encountered were staggering. (The dystopian literature of the early 20th century offers a glimpse into the depradations, barbarism, and darkness behind the Iron Curtain). In Soviet-dominated Poland, as in the other Eastern bloc nations, a censorship bureau strictly regulated intellectual and artistic activity, while state-run media propagated the Soviet agenda on current and historical affairs. All attempts to diverge from the Party line were met with severe repercussions. Thus if the truth about the Uprising was to be sought and shared, dissidents would have to circumvent these structures, either underground, which was dangerous, or through oblique strategies, which demanded cunning.

Both channels were employed, but the use of the latter, i.e., the encryption of books, poems, paintings, songs, and films with veiled references, the deployment of symbol and metaphor, was much more common. A prominent example appears in Polish director Andrzej Wajda's wartime film, Canal (1957). In one of the final scenes, two survivors of the Uprising have been wading through the muck of the sewers, and they reach an exit grill on the bank of the Vistula. The last shot has them gazing at the other side of the river, depleted of all hope. No one, of course, could be in doubt as to who had been waiting so indifferently yet ravenously on the other side.

Control over creative output in Poland was alternately tightened and loosened as Soviet policy and leadership changed. By degrees, Poles had learned to distinguish imposed orthodoxy from wink-of-the-eye heresy in everything they read or heard. It was the persistence, though, of lies surrounding the Warsaw Uprising (and separately, the Katyn Massacre) that drove dissidents towards a more comprehensive and accurate retelling of the event -- an ambitious aim which seemed more realistic than ever during the Solidarity Movement of 1980. It was not, however, until the final convulsions of Soviet Communism had exhausted the system in 1991 that the historical record could finally be reconstructed -- and dramatically augmented. Censorship was abolished, state-run media organizations became independent, and state archives were opened. Like many other events in Polish history, the Uprising would undergo a transition from an event fraught with ideological distortion to the object of accurate historical representation, and the public at last was free to learn about it, or in many cases, to relearn it.

Professor Cogito or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Ceiling

All fears that the nation today would fail to avert financial apocalypse should be laid quietly to rest. (Though this still leaves biblical apocalypse open for October). A new law to raise the debt ceiling has been passed, yet few soothsayers in the Beltway could really have doubted its passage. The lead-up to those eleventh-hour negotiations, a rather convenient bit of suspense in any political drama, was remarkable not simply for the intransigence of both sides, but for its theatricality. In staging this battle, congressional leaders proved themselves more invested in the narrative of their conflict with each other, than in the future of the country. What shall we call it? Unscrupulous political dramaturgy.

What shall we call the resulting compromise? A farce.

Lucian Freud Has Died

As told by one of his models:

The artist with the all too penetrating gaze, Lucian Freud, has died. What his eyes saw in the human form, his hands rendered, not as Michaelangelo or Titian had done -- that is, with a newborn reverence for the human body -- but more probingly, in long sessions, under the shadow of the first half of the twentieth century. What his portraiture revealed was his subjects' own stark humanity, shorn of grace in a graceless world.

Many years ago, I sat for my own portrait in Lucian's studio. If I remember correctly, the work lasted six months. But I rather enjoyed the time I spent with him. The man had a genius for story-telling and often regaled me, as I lay naked on a bed, with wonderful anecdotes and reminiscences. Of the early, hungry days in the East End, he had great picaresque tales. (I seem to remember a string of encounters with a devious landlord). Of artist friends, he was generous and kind; of predecessors, most discriminating, though often brazenly iconoclastic. (He had, for example, no mercy for the pre-Raphaelites). When I wasn't laughing, I was looking back at him, into his eyes, which I imagined always saw more than I saw in myself, at times seemed almost remorseless.

When Lucian first showed me my portrait, I nearly recoiled from it, much as Dorian Gray had from his decaying likeness. Though I'd seen and known other of his works, it almost never occured to me, at least not while I lay there and listened to him, that I could be exposed to the same scrutiny. But there I was, all of myself, swathed in nothing but the flesh tones of my body, lying uneasily on a bed. And in my anxious gaze, the faint recognition that I had never been so naked.

Something unlikely

It is unlikely for a tradesman to have the name Thornton Stanwick III. If a plumber introduces himself with that name, you could be certain that he has escaped from somewhere and is eagerly expected back. In the rare instance that Thornton Stanwick III really is a plumber, then you might wonder what tower of glory he has fallen from, how he came to his present condition, and what the other Thornton Stanwicks would say about him. Moreover, what on earth would possess someone to name a child Thornton Stanwick?

Bloomsday

June 16, 1904 is legendary for two events, one of which never really happened. The date exists in reality and in fancy. On that day, the young author James Joyce escorted his bride-to-be, Nora Barnacle, to Ringsend, a village outside Dublin. In a separate iteration of that selfsame day, Leopold Bloom, advertising salesman and Everyman, embarked on the most sublimely banal excursion in modern literature. If Ulysses is an allegory of the modern experience, then it's all the more fitting that we, its readers, commemorate the journey of that novel's hero as though it really happened -- a veritable holiday. What a thing of wonders is our collective memory!

The Black Spot: Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

There are two related myths about history. One concerns the evolution of time, the idea that time is constantly unfolding in advance of some final incarnation, like utopia. The other is that man, who exists in time, is constantly outpacing the primal aggressions and irrational impulses of his prehistoric and uncivilized origins.

Shirley Jackson's haunting tale, "The Lottery," deconstructs these myths, though without the hopeless pessimism we might expect from such a deconstruction.

The story is set in a small, nondescript village during an annual "lottery." Neighboring villages, we learn, have a similar tradition, but some have been doing away with it. While the townsfolk gather in the square to take part in this ritual, a group of boys is piling up stones, as though in preparation for a game of war. The village official who organizes the lottery produces a black wooden box filled with slips of paper, from which every adult male will take several pieces and distribute them to the members of his family. An old man, under whose steely gaze this ceremony has been watched and conducted for generations, remarks that the lottery has always yielded a good crop, a hint of the superstitions underpinning the ceremony. Finally when the slips of paper have been meted out, the townsfolk will open their pursed hands and look inside. On one of these scraps is marked a black circle, betokening an act of brutality and inhumanity that belies the quaintness of this seemingly well-ordered village.

When "The Lottery" was published in 1948, it aroused a violent public reaction. Jackson received hate mail and harsh criticism, readers cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the story was featured (The New Yorker), and in the following years, discussion groups were formed to better understand this bizarre story. In a sharp turn of critical awareness, "The Lottery" has since been integrated into school reading programs, having become an educational rite of passage for many young students.

Though one may not be able to imagine the shock produced by "The Lottery" when it first appeared, who can doubt it? Sneaking into public circulation amidst the growing anxiety of a "cold war," Shirley Jackson's haunting parable was not only a blow to American confidence in its own noble character and mission, but was inimical to the perception of man as innately good and capable of civilization. Earlier in the century, the Anglo-Polish writer, Joseph Conrad, challenged this myth in novels which evoked the barbarism latent in purportedly civilized Western society. The "Lottery" was, by analogy, America's own "Heart of Darkness," and caused its own reverberations.

In one sense, "The Lottery" overturns the hackneyed notion of the innocent and gentle countryside, the pastoral idyll as envisioned by Virgil and many Renaissance poets. But that assessment limits the story and its author's intentions too strictly. Jackson was writing an allegory of the human soul, and she was drawing on the wide span of human history to show that something was deeply wrong, particularly in the light of two devastating world wars. As the story suggests, there is a deep reservoir of irrational impulsivity in human society, a notion that had been gaining currency since the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced in particular by Sigmund Freud, who discovered an underworld of strange and largely unconscious menace lurking beneath genteel Viennese society.

For Jackson, as for Freud, that menace is an atavism of man's primal heritage. History and human enlightenment have failed to eradicate it. We must live with our innate barbarism and suppress it with layers of civilization (albeit to our discontent, as Freud theorized). Yet, like Freud, Jackson seemed to believe that this irrationality could be controlled. While the "lottery" symbolizes the antiquated traditions, rituals, and superstitions that man preserves against his better reason, it fails to hold man in perpetual sway, as seen in its repudiation by other villages. Thus as an allegory of the human soul, "The Lottery" also reflects, if meekly, an optimism about man's inclinations toward freedom and happiness.