mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.”
Vladimir Nabokov, arguing that insomnia had aided his creativity (and quoted by Natface). Discussions concerning the relationship between mental dysfunction and creativity abound today, but I’ll simply note my agreement with Nabokov: when I reflect on how much of my life I lose to detestably purposeless and un-recollected sleep, the penultimate nullity of consciousness, it brings me near to enraged despair.
“The shadow of a passing cloud drags over railroad tracks in Minnesota,” by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings. “Angelic Melancholic, 2008,” ibid. “`Umikûmâlima,” ibid. Looking at Heineman’s photographs affects me in a peculiar way that recalls the pitched sense of longing I felt seeing my grandfather’s old model train set, with its European hills and forlorn, precisely-painted trees, and the German buildings of an architecture at once archetypal and unfamiliar to me. Miniaturization, and I would include such phenomena as tilt-shift photography and Heineman’s beautiful loops*, provokes an irresolvable sort of longing in us that is familiar from aging: by reducing the scale of the world, we can envelop its structures and forms completely, bringing buildings into ourselves, holding trees in hand and running our fingers over the smooth hills. We can at last examine the details in which we’ve hidden so much youthful meaning, the spaces into which we crammed our childhoods, while holding cities still and at arm’s length. At the same time, minituratization excludes us forever from these spaces. We cannot enter the train station and run between its delicate columns and benches, and we can no longer climb into the tree and consider it our castle. The hills are papier-mâché or plaster, and will break beneath us. Perhaps the world was too vast when we were young, but now it is too small. Growing larger means we nervously and clumsily handle these fragile artifacts, while when little we bounced between them with abandon; we sink into the cushions which were once our forts; we have in hand the whole tiny world and can at last bring it fully into mind, but we lumber like plump monsters across shrunken fields -how could we have thought them so vast?-, and looking at the marvel in our palm -the scale model of something that we might have entered only decades before- we feel at once expansive and banished, encompassing and forbidden (while perhaps inside, childhood continues without us). It sometimes seems to me that Heineman can return at will to those spaces and stride into the model train stations or onto the tops of little skyscrapers, staying long enough at least to send us photographs we recognize: that’s what our world looked like before we reduced it irretrievably: “Only Minutes from a Dream,” ibid. *Note from above: speed and repetition are associated with size for reasons worth contemplating.

“The shadow of a passing cloud drags over railroad tracks in Minnesota,” by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings.

“Angelic Melancholic, 2008,” ibid.

“`Umikûmâlima,” ibid.

Looking at Heineman’s photographs affects me in a peculiar way that recalls the pitched sense of longing I felt seeing my grandfather’s old model train set, with its European hills and forlorn, precisely-painted trees, and the German buildings of an architecture at once archetypal and unfamiliar to me.

Miniaturization, and I would include such phenomena as tilt-shift photography and Heineman’s beautiful loops*, provokes an irresolvable sort of longing in us that is familiar from aging: by reducing the scale of the world, we can envelop its structures and forms completely, bringing buildings into ourselves, holding trees in hand and running our fingers over the smooth hills. We can at last examine the details in which we’ve hidden so much youthful meaning, the spaces into which we crammed our childhoods, while holding cities still and at arm’s length.

At the same time, minituratization excludes us forever from these spaces. We cannot enter the train station and run between its delicate columns and benches, and we can no longer climb into the tree and consider it our castle. The hills are papier-mâché or plaster, and will break beneath us. Perhaps the world was too vast when we were young, but now it is too small.

Growing larger means we nervously and clumsily handle these fragile artifacts, while when little we bounced between them with abandon; we sink into the cushions which were once our forts; we have in hand the whole tiny world and can at last bring it fully into mind, but we lumber like plump monsters across shrunken fields -how could we have thought them so vast?-, and looking at the marvel in our palm -the scale model of something that we might have entered only decades before- we feel at once expansive and banished, encompassing and forbidden (while perhaps inside, childhood continues without us).

It sometimes seems to me that Heineman can return at will to those spaces and stride into the model train stations or onto the tops of little skyscrapers, staying long enough at least to send us photographs we recognize: that’s what our world looked like before we reduced it irretrievably:

“Only Minutes from a Dream,” ibid.

*Note from above: speed and repetition are associated with size for reasons worth contemplating.

“…I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed must ultimately coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.”

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Sebald’s prose alternates between the most luminous, affecting descriptions imaginable, not at all lyrical but structured with unfailing prosaic perfection and a visual density that draws his subjects in your mind almost against your will, and ponderous, subtly amusing formulations of a very Germanic sort. Above, one of the latter that struck me.

Through the various concerns of Sebald and his fictional character Austerlitz runs the quality of futility: whether in shatteringly fruitless pursuit of a history annihilated by the Holocaust or laboring vainly to recompose lost memories from his own life, the terrible elusiveness of the past -which literally does not exist and whose barest outlines fade rapidly from mind despite this or that artifact or record- reduces Austerlitz to exhausted despair. Once one loses continuity with one’s past there is no recovering it, and it is on such continuity that our sense of identity is built.

The furious efforts of totalitarianism in the 20th century to subsume us into their “all-embracing and absolute perfection” involved attacks on identity and historical continuity alongside the actual slaughter of innocents. Nearly as vile as the Communist and Nazi atrocities were the sophisticated measures undertaken to deprive both ordinary citizens and the persecuted of their identity, their sense of connection to the past. The real meaning behind revolution is more than the assumption of power: it is the placement of a caesura, the cutting of the ties to the past. Doctoring photographs, making new calendars, razing buildings, dispossessing business owners, evicting minorities: it is not mere symbolism.

The destruction of culture, of history, and of human beings for the perfecting of scientifically inarguable ideologies went on quite apart from the “chronic dysfunction” of such systems: further evidence that it is the assertion of “being undeniably right,” rather than the quality of being right or wrong, that permits authoritarianism. Error and futility define us.

Milan Kundera famously said that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Inside of a society with sufficiently ambitious control systems, whether it is Marxist-Leninist or National Socialist or Wahhabist or otherwise in possession of absolute truth and an eschatological sense of its inevitability, this is a struggle most lose. They are erased and forgotten, or reduced to figures in textbooks which recount only the “chronic dysfunction” of failed movements without illuminating how it is that, again and again, we rationally conclude that we must kill in pursuit of an “absolute perfection” as elusive as memory; I think it is because, like memory, it is integral to our identity, and for that we will kill readily.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Thirstin Howl III - Still Live with My Moms

During the last great Mardi Gras of my drinking days, my friends and I used to drunkenly sing this song to my mother, who hosted a weeklong bacchanal replete with delicious food for my variously persnickety college friends, some vegan and some pescetarian and some revolted by seafood, all loaded, all smokers, all screamers, all deranged all the time.

Those were the days. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

Funeral in Santa Maria Matamoros, Oaxaca, Mexico (photo by Alexandre Meneghini, from The Big Picture).
Funeral in Santa Maria Matamoros, Oaxaca, Mexico (photo by Alexandre Meneghini, from The Big Picture).

A Minor Theme

It has already gown so hot here that streets and outdoor patios empty of life by noon, a fact which suits me well; I am fond of the extremity of heat, which reminds me of mind-breaking exercise; particularly when combined with bright light over lidded eyes, it so overwhelms my perception that my conscious internal monologue abates at last and gives way to an impressionistic, even dream-like stupor: the stupor of summer, of half-awake hours on a towel on the sand.

This morning, I walked to the coffee shop near my house to read and sweat and listen to my dogs pant themselves into exhaustion. After arriving and ordering, I realized that -as usual- I’d forgotten my wallet, and -as usual- the girl behind the counter offered to let me pay later, but -as usual- I declined, hoping that with enough walking back and forth my mind would learn to remember.

But there is little one can do to consciously direct the memory, which in its refusal to absorb work details, the concerns of lovers, the conversations we share with scarcely-tolerated office-mates, the dates of empty ceremonies, is probably the most honest part of the mind. It works according to its own dark set of rules, a hierarchy of prioritization to which you do not have access; it chooses what to retain, often to your embarrassment or detriment, and it chooses what to recall, sometimes in a rush of associated visions that seem to have come from nowhere at all.

My memory is exceptionally indolent, as am I. Last night, Yumwatch mentioned Steely Dan, which called to mind the amusing fact that they attended my college (and wrote disapprovingly of it); I also heard their song ‘My Old School’ last night, as part of difficult-to-explain set of circumstances which I noted in a comment on her blog at idiotic length. Last night, after seeing her post, I decided to look up several old professors and see how they compared to my highly unreliable memories of them. I spent perhaps half-an-hour reading about them, and when I went to sleep my recollective apparatus, which behaves as a rusty, complexly malfunctioning antique machine, must have decided to keep Bard in its short-term cache.

So when, hot and spent, I returned from the labor of acquiring coffee this morning and entered the cool, dark house, I was not merely surprised to hear Will playing Neil Young’s ‘Dead Man’ but actually taken aback by this modest confluence of themes, all directing my attention to that final year at Bard, when I walked endlessly in the heat peculiar to the North, less humid but perhaps more intense, intently listening to ‘Dead Man’ and despite my distressed state occasionally thinking of how wise Donald Fagen was to say: “I’m never going back to my old school.”

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Neil Young - Dead Man (untitled track).

In my final year at a small college in New York, I spent some drawn weeks wandering the campus and surrounding woods with a borrowed, paint-splattered yellow Walkman, listening to a cassette tape I made of solely this track, over and over and over. I was ill, in a dissociative and frangible state; such music seeped into my mind like water into rocks and dissolved what meager stability I had, but -as is often the case when we are upset- I didn’t want to be stable anyway; I wanted to feel as much as I could, despite the fact that I felt almost only various forms of anguish. I was younger.

A fallen streetlamp in grasses, for Chad; it rests along the levee separating the lake from a ditch (larger, uncropped version here; from Photophobia).
A fallen streetlamp in grasses, for Chad; it rests along the levee separating the lake from a ditch (larger, uncropped version here; from Photophobia).

8-Bit Video Game Background

In the games of my childhood there was a sense of space: the vacuum of blackness behind the last drawn sprite was the end of the world, an abyss beyond the range of your bouncing character. Some squared hills, a pixelated building and what seemed to be clouds: these delimited the universe. Infinity of depth coupled with extreme finitude of motion: the 8-bit game mirrors our terrestrial world.

In all games there was this loneliness: one’s range of motion stops, one ceases advancing the storyline, and one hurls fireballs at walls that don’t destruct, or jumps endlessly for a platform out of reach, or respawns again and again on a multiplayer map without anyone else. Jump off the edge; sink into the lava; drop down when the screen no longer scrolls: after a while, death is all that is left. Simple games leave us with only extreme options.

A story carries us forward and so long as it does, sketched castles suffice as background. But when the narrative momentum is arrested, when we step off course, the flatness of a videographic topography is the saddest, loneliest thing imaginable: a universe of ultimate inflexibility. Scream into it and nothing happens; mash the buttons into paste and nothing happens. Change weapons, jump up and down, crawl on the ground, pause and unpause: nothing happens. The most modern games retain this quality: there is a place you can go that is the edge of the world; nothing can be experienced beyond it. Isn’t it one of the best places to find? Doesn’t the game lose its depth after one runs into it for a few moments?

No matter how engaging a story is, a game’s paucity of meaningful freedom -particularly experiential freedom- means that one will resort to oblivion above boredom. Violence is integral to video games because only acts in extremis can distract us from the finitude of these virtualized worlds; while enabling limits can draw out creativity, they can only be abided for so long before we experience the urge to destroy.

The screen stops scrolling. When you walk through the door you will arrive at the next level, but you’re not ready. Jump in the air, crawl on the ground, shoot, shoot, shoot.

Streetlamps are one of my twee interests, and a favorite photographic subject, along with trees. Here is one on Esplanade avenue casting its color onto imported tropical flora. (From this set; larger version here; originally posted on Photophobia).

Streetlamps are one of my twee interests, and a favorite photographic subject, along with trees. Here is one on Esplanade avenue casting its color onto imported tropical flora.

(From this set; larger version here; originally posted on Photophobia).

'Mad Pride' »

The excellent Psychotherapy tumblelog linked to an article on so-called ‘Mad Pride,’ a movement which argues through the liberal use of romanticism and lyricism that mental illnesses are less crippling organic diseases which lead to ruin or death if untreated than marvelous alternative configurations of the psyche which a less conformist society would celebrate.

I’ve written about this subject twice before, but at the risk of being redundant: there is without question a tremendous problem with over-diagnosis of mental illness (as there is of under-diagnosis, incidentally). This is less a function of facile collusion between evil companies and greedy doctors than a reflection of America’s predilection for technocracy and medicalization, which we might paraphrase Hamlet in describing: if nothing is but thinking makes it so, in an objective and post-industrial world nothing is without technocratic thinking saying so, preferably in jargon.

Sadness is meaningless; only depression suffices to communicate how severely I mourn my deceased cat. Or perhaps I am bored in class and daydream of ultraviolence and fast cars; three decades ago I might have made a fine mechanic, but in the 21st century parents feel everyone must be a white-collar professional, so Adderall is needed stat.

Etcetera. The desire to have a lexically-inviolable, sacred excuse from a priest of our new church is powerful, and doctors err, and companies attempt to make money. Excessive diagnosis and faddish disorders come and go, and while it is no light matter it does not justify the literary leap Mad Pride activists make, which reflects a terrible poverty of understanding.

Taking as a departure point the fallibility of diagnostic processes, Mad Pride advocates sentimentalize mental illness as a poetic, associative, richly experiential mode of human existence that is under attack from reactive, repressive forces of social control; they cite their skimmed copies of Brave New World and deploy the alluring language of the academic to condemn “the codification of psychical norms and the enforcement of society’s expectations through psychopharmacological punishments.” They imagine that in a free enough world, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and depression would be accommodated and accepted and even desired: after all, think of how many artists have been insane!

To call this bullshit is almost charitable; it is something much worse: it is the exploitation of the diseased by the lyrical, the erection of platforms and podiums on the backs of the homeless alcoholics and the hallucinating mental cripples and the stricken and fearful among us all. That some of us with mental illness cheer along makes this not better but worse: it is like preaching to alcoholics that perhaps total abstention isn’t really needed. This intellectual crusade against “mainstream society” comes at the expense of people for whom medication means life and lack of treatment means despair and death.

As I have said before, I hope they save some of their wise words and soaring emotions for the eulogies they’ll need to deliver, unless they can find it in their hearts to leave us alone and protest an injustice that is actually occurring. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of them, and meanwhile in the world of consequences doctors and nurses and families do not need further difficulty in persuading those like me to accept that the brain -like any other organ- can be dysfunctional enough to require treatment, and that mental illness isn’t an identity but in fact an obstacle. It bars one from formulating the identity one feels within oneself, hemmed in by the ‘spectacular’ topography of aberration and damage, buried underneath witless moods and unfriendly delusions.

Note: the author of Psychotherapy was not advocating ‘Mad Pride,’ just noting it; none of this is in opposition to him or his work.

Today, due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding, I went to the office dressed like a Boca-retiree in search of shuffleboard. While there, I finally made and ate a donut-bacon-cheeseburger with Frank, living up to Nudawn’s claim that I “metabolize trash for fuel like the Delorean from Back to the Future.”
Today, due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding, I went to the office dressed like a Boca-retiree in search of shuffleboard. While there, I finally made and ate a donut-bacon-cheeseburger with Frank, living up to Nudawn’s claim that I “metabolize trash for fuel like the Delorean from Back to the Future.”

Who are you?

My comment on a previous post that this site mostly reflects who I am when alone -that is, that the tone and content of my posts tends to come from the iteration of my self that exists in between bouts of social extroversion and the stimulated enthusiasm that comes from them- drew interesting notes from Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings and Raynor Ganan of The Ragbag (two of my absolute favorite presences online, both genuinely brilliant and delightful and fascinating).

Joshua wrote:

ever notice how you’re a slightly different person to everyone you know? & how you play into that, whether consciously or no… & how it makes you feel dirty. & by you, i mean everyone (i think?).

I have, and I think it explains a bit of the everpresent shame I feel about my identity, the persistent notion I have that I’m a fraud: this multiplicity of willed and unwilled personas makes any one personality seem false, manipulative.

Nudawn was emphatic that we are not who we are online, and this is true. But it is also true that we create from our selves, and the question of which self is truer or more authentic is as unanswerable as it is irrelevant. Milan Kundera claims that the self present in an author’s works is truer than the self present in his or her biography, making inquiries into whom this or that writer slept with or what a writer drank or smoked utterly beside any point. This seems only partly convincing.

I know that those who know me as a giggly, gregarious, immature, screaming, profane boy sometimes find these posts affected, as though I pretend to a severity that is not mine, but the reality is that in the hours of the day, and particularly those of the night, when I’m not in laughing conversation, this is closer to how I feel, think, and see. It is the version of myself I know best; it is the least automatic as well.

In other words: for most of my life, this is who I am. Raynor added, with characteristic wit:

i would love for all my favourite tumblrs to fill out a sentence like this. as for me, who i am here is who i am had i been born 100 years ago and in a romanticized parallel dimension.

So, for Raynor, whom we all owe a great deal for his brilliant work: who are you?

Given that she knows everyone, it is by now public knowledge that Nudawn, whom you don’t want to call ‘Nudawn’ in real life unless you’re looking for some chrome to your dome, came to New Orleans for the second weekend of JazzFest. My inclination was to try and describe with some fidelity what she’s like, partly from fondness and partly because she’s fascinating, but as she noted with emphasis on our first night out -when we met DHK and she calculated the precise mathematical division of her antipathy for me and Will- people are not who they are on their blogs. This is well-known, but not to me: while people often tell me that I’m not as I come across here, that’s because who I am here is who I am when I am alone. It thus seems to me like the most representative instantiation of my self to me, while those who know me find it slightly alien (and more than slightly sullen). I won’t presume to disclose Nudawn’s personality to the world except to say this: she is as much fun as she seems and also gentler and more happily enthused than the title of her blog would lead you to imagine. She is also peculiarly self-deprecating, and as in her writing mixes ribald and scatological humor with a reflective intelligence she seems slightly uncomfortable with; this reminds me of myself, which makes sense, as we share a father. I would have preferred her trip last longer; we were hitting our stride when she left, and Big Daddy’s was likely only hours away. Her photos, about which she is characteristically too modest, are here; mine are here. Experience! the splattered remnants of her crawfish boil experience on Syd’s pregnant expanse! See! how much Nudawn likes to sabotage dull group photos! Witness! her endless good spirits as her guides fucked the logistics to bits again and again! Fear! me holding a handgun, as captured by Nicki! And catch! us having the best JazzFest of my 28-year life. Thanks for coming, Nudawn, and I recommend Mardi Gras next year: trust me, we do it well.

Given that she knows everyone, it is by now public knowledge that Nudawn, whom you don’t want to call ‘Nudawn’ in real life unless you’re looking for some chrome to your dome, came to New Orleans for the second weekend of JazzFest.

My inclination was to try and describe with some fidelity what she’s like, partly from fondness and partly because she’s fascinating, but as she noted with emphasis on our first night out -when we met DHK and she calculated the precise mathematical division of her antipathy for me and Will- people are not who they are on their blogs. This is well-known, but not to me: while people often tell me that I’m not as I come across here, that’s because who I am here is who I am when I am alone. It thus seems to me like the most representative instantiation of my self to me, while those who know me find it slightly alien (and more than slightly sullen).

I won’t presume to disclose Nudawn’s personality to the world except to say this: she is as much fun as she seems and also gentler and more happily enthused than the title of her blog would lead you to imagine. She is also peculiarly self-deprecating, and as in her writing mixes ribald and scatological humor with a reflective intelligence she seems slightly uncomfortable with; this reminds me of myself, which makes sense, as we share a father. I would have preferred her trip last longer; we were hitting our stride when she left, and Big Daddy’s was likely only hours away.

Her photos, about which she is characteristically too modest, are here; mine are here. Experience! the splattered remnants of her crawfish boil experience on Syd’s pregnant expanse! See! how much Nudawn likes to sabotage dull group photos! Witness! her endless good spirits as her guides fucked the logistics to bits again and again! Fear! me holding a handgun, as captured by Nicki!

And catch! us having the best JazzFest of my 28-year life. Thanks for coming, Nudawn, and I recommend Mardi Gras next year: trust me, we do it well.

From the wonderful Bronze Medal: “He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something he could attach his floating heart to…” —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Photo from last night’s walk).

From the wonderful Bronze Medal:

“He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something he could attach his floating heart to…” —Virginia Woolf, Orlando

(Photo from last night’s walk).