The Haunted Hero of Bondarchuk’s “Fate of a Man”
The object of nostalgia in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man (Sud’ba Cheloveka, 1959) is the hovering, tantalizing, maddening reality of a pre-war world. The image of this hopelessly lost terrain refuses to yield; it lingers in the mind as a promise and a torment. Andrei Sokolov (Bondarchuk), an escaped prisoner-of-war, has lost his entire family in the Great Patriotic War. For him, the past is more real than the present. He embraces the torments of recollected wholeness. We might guess that such memories would preclude Sokolov’s engagement with a present that is, for this bravest of men, unpeopled, undesirable, and even frightening—an empty map from a book about journeys one would rather not take.
But it is precisely the survival of memory, of the image of a longed-for past, that motivates Sokolov’s first, audacious step toward a workable future. Sokolov had once defined his peacetime identity by his love for family; he had become a husband and father in the brief era between the twin upheavals of forced collectivization and total war. Peace without family is for him a kind of grim joke. He can conceive of forward motion only through an echo of the past. He finds it in a tiny, towheaded orphan-beggar named Vaniushka.
After giving Vaniushka a lift in his truck and learning that the boy has also lost his entire family, Sokolov turns to the child.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I am your father.”
The child throws himself upon Andrei with kisses and tears, and together they set off on a journey into the unknown, each holding close a phantom of a lost past to steady, direct, and sustain them on their way.
The union of these two lost and longing souls leaves some crucial questions to be resolved in the post-film world of the viewer’s mind: Will Andrei attempt to raise the boy as a replacement or reincarnation of his lost son (an expert mathematician and heroic wartime captain)? Or will he focus his longing not on the impossible return of a departed son, but on the very real prospect of having a new one—of experiencing anew the longed-for feelings of family commitment. In short, will he help the boy toward a future of his own?
The imagery of the film itself—Sokolov’s close attention to the boy as an independent and proudly self-aware creature (note the boy’s prickly greeting of the driver at the film’s beginning) seems to bode well. But when the words of Mikhail Sholokhov (upon whose writing the film is based) appear on the screen at film’s end, they strike a dissonant note. After a tale that so boldly exposes the horror of war rather than trumpeting its glories, Sholokhov’s words pose the question of Vaniushka’s future as a purely martial one: Will Andrei raise a boy capable of going through what Andrei went through for his country? This is sheer ideological overlay, imposing final thoughts on a film that did quite well on its own in provoking thoughts.
Of course, it occurs to us that a father who has been so extraordinarily strong in the most beastly of circumstances, and yet lost none of his capacity for tenderness, may raise a brave and honorable son. But we have more fundamental worries about the future of Andrei and Vaniushka: Sokolov remains deeply damaged and far from recovered. At night, he tells the driver, he worries he’ll have a heart attack and die and frighten the child. He still laments, reasonably enough, that his life has been twisted and ruined. It is clear that Sokolov will need the boy as much as the boy needs him, and that the fathers and sons debate that will unfold during the Thaw years (who will teach whom?) is, as in reality, unresolved. Least of all are we concerned about how the child will grow up to serve the nation. Our concern is simpler. How will he grow up?
In this film, pain is not elegiac but raw, more realist than neorealist. Bondarchuk, as Andrei Sokolov, is not quieter than life like the heroically observant Alyosha Skvortsov of Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959) or the suffering thinker-heroes of Tarkovsky’s films. He is, instead, intense and forever battling, a man in motion both physically and mentally. This motion of his mind projects onto his muscles, his jaw, his stride. He is, like the best creations of Brando or Steiger, filled with despairing rage and fierce despair. To this he adds an awkward gentleness, a halting language of hope, sustained and challenged by ghosts.
—Greg Blake Miller
Kalatozov’s First Masterpiece
Mikhail Kalatozov, the renowned director of the classic Soviet films The Cranes Are Flying (1957), The Unsent Letter (1959), and I Am Cuba (1964), had his cinematic roots in the vibrant creative ferment of the Soviet 1920s. At decade’s end, after learning his craft from the great documentary filmmakers Esfir Shub and Dziga Vertov, Kalatozov brought his camera to a Georgian mountain community where the routines of both subsistence and spirit had changed little since medieval times (Leyda, 1983). There he created one of the masterpieces of early Soviet cinema, Salt for Svanetia (1930).
Like many great Soviet films of the 1920s, Salt for Svanetia bears thematic richness within an agitprop libretto. On one hand, the film, exuberantly modern in its rhythmic editing and oblique camera angles, calls for socialist modernization (in this case, for road construction) as the guarantor of a more humane way of life. On the other, it is a hymn to communal timelessness. This paradox reflects the peculiar temporal ambivalence at the heart of both early Soviet cinema and early Soviet populist-enthusiast dreams of modernization. By 1930, as the midpoint of the First Five Year Plan approached, the half-romantic notion that modernization could be achieved without trampling the communities the state sought to modernize was on its way out. But in cinema the old dream was exiting with an extraordinary flourish, highlighted by Kalatozov’s film, and still more famously by Dovzhenko’s Earth. In Salt for Svanetia, the pre-industrial struggle for daily life is so lovingly depicted—even in its tragic moments—that it becomes impossible to read the film as an uncomplicated call for ends-justify-the-means industrial progress. (Thirty-four year later, Kalatozov would revive the 1920s populist-enthusiast synthesis in I Am Cuba.)
Salt for Svanetia, like Earth, refuses to look forward without simultaneously looking back. The intellectual inheritance of the Soviet revolutionary spirit mixes the utopian, past-denying forward thrust of Marxist modernization with the back-to-the-people dreams of the 1870s Russian narodniki, populists who both idealized the peasant commune and sought to transform it through literacy and political consciousness. If, under conditions of capitalism, holiness had melted into air and the sacred had been profaned, the dream of the Socialist modernizer was not to mock the sundered spiritual instinct, but to renew and repurpose it.
—Greg Blake Miller
Wild Dog Dingo (Dikaia Sobaka Dingo, 1962, dir. Yuli Karasik), is one of the most striking examples in Thaw cinema of the way neorealist nostalgia penetrates social frameworks and cuts a path to the looming, haunting, bittersweet personal past. The film does not willfully ignore social themes and the life of the nation; it just finds them beside the point when more pressing matters are in question.
Through the eyes of the film’s teenage heroine, Tanya, played by Galina Polskikh, we experience the phenomenon of childhood’s end—the magical thinking of youth, the sense of frightfully shifting ground, the longing. A tree waves in the schoolroom window, seeming to beckon to Tanya. She asks to change seats. “The tree is distracting me,” she says. The teacher looks at her, perplexed. “It’s just an ordinary tree. What’s with you?” At night, in her bedroom, Tanya looks out the window, pinches a star between her thumb and forefinger, cups the moon in her hands. Here, on the verge of adulthood, she is taking the imprint of her childhood mind, both saying farewell and saving it forever.
There is an air of tantalizing hauntedness hovering before her even in her seemingly lightest moments. At the end of the school day she slaps portfolios with a classmate in a Russian version of a farewell high five and then turns to the empty, windswept road. Less than a second has passed and the mood has changed keys from major to minor and the enchanted air of the village has acquired a heaviness, a strangely pleasing bitterness. The sudden change of mood, the heightened perception of the world and the extraordinary rapidity with which this perception translates to affect—is this not what we both lament and cherish in our teenage years, the uncanny pleasure-pain of it all? Here Karasik has taken us beyond any pose of “social independence” and into a terrain of of pure subjectivity. A girl’s life is carved from the matter around her by the intensity of her own perception, her own magical thinking, the stuff of her own memories of fast-fading childhood and the father who has long-since left and now, on this day, is to return.
The film is dominated by Galina Polskikh’s eyes, by her constant perception, searching, wondering, remembering, reassembling, weighing of the evidence of matter and memory, dominated by her longing for what has been lost before and what continues to be lost now, what must therefore be fully taken in, fully seen, while the moment lasts.
People here are, if anything, more silent than in real life. And the silence leaves room for richer perception of time. When Tanya’s father, having returned from the city to the village, speaks to her, she says, “You don’t have to speak so loudly. I hear you quite well.” The country and the city have both different volumes and different time sensibilities, but it is all too easy to see silence and lack of environmental transformation as stasis. “It’s amazing how everything has changed in the city,” says Tanya’s father, “and back here everything’s the same as it ever was.” Tanya’s mother, the woman he left, replies flatly: “Yes, same as it ever was.” She says this with pain and hope and awareness of her own artifice. Things are not the same as ever. For one thing, years have been lived without a husband, a father. A little girl has grown up: the father himself has just looked upon his daughter with astonishment: “You’re so big!” Life never remained unchanged, not for a minute. Tanya’s mother excuses herself and goes to the kitchen to make tea. “I should have brought you flowers,” Tanya’s father says to her. He reaches into the pocket of his military dress blues and produces an oval box of candy. He hands it to her, embarrassed to have missed all that he has missed, the time that can be longed for but never regained. One cannot even remember what one has missed. A clock ticks in the background.
After three years away, Tanya’s father is now anxious to join in her life. He has brought an adopted son, Kolya, along with him, and though the families will not merge, he would like them to get along. He understands that micro-changes, the changes you don’t see in the layout of a town’s lanes but in the lives of its inhabitants, are the real dynamism, the things one must see or regret not having seen, the matter that is most essential to the shaping of intimate memory. As he meticulously prepares pel’meni, Russian dumplings, Karasik’s camera stays with him through the entire process. (The scene brings to mind the famous morning-in-the-kitchen scene in DeSica’s 1952 Umberto D.) On the left side of the screen, Kolya is talking to Tanya’s mother, who is offscreen.
We do not see Tanya in the scene, but she is a looming presence. We know those eyes; we are watching with those eyes, watching for her, taking in the moment, measuring the weight of the world.
—Greg Blake Miller
The Rebel Alliance
If the end of March Madness (and what divine madness it was!) has you in a bit of college hoops withdrawal, please take a look at my story, “The Rebel Alliance,” in the March 18 issue of Vegas Seven Magazine. The article looks back on the UNLV men’s basketball team’s 1990 national championship and considers the ways in which the team was—and remains—uniquely intertwined with the city’s sense of itself.
Opening the Code: Scripting, Sincerity, and the Soviet Thaw
In December 1953, just six months after Stalin’s death, the Moscow-based literary journal Novy Mir published a series of essays by Vladimir Pomerantsev titled “On Sincerity in Literature”. Pomerantsev criticized the “varnishing” of reality; literature, he wrote, could no longer avoid reflecting and contending with “the vulgarities of life” (Zubok, 2009). Pomerantsev’s watchword, sincerity, was taken up by a generation of Soviet artists. In cinema, its great champion was the filmmaker Mikhail Romm, who as a professor at the State Cinema Institute (VGIK) openly encouraged his students to be themselves—to process and portray the world according to their own perceptions and in tune with their own sense of artistic integrity . The ethic of sincerity required not simply that one be oneself, but–a far more difficult thing–trust oneself.
Suddenly, one’s experience of the world mattered, even if that experience contradicted the world-narrative passed down from on high. If sticking to a closed cultural code meant creating works out of joint with what one saw and felt and believed, the code had to be opened. If what one saw and felt was stirringly, disturbingly complex, it would be insincere to ignore that complexity. If the drama of personal life intersected awkwardly–or did not intersect at all–with the drama of public life, it would be insincere to portray a world in which the two were harmoniously intertwined. The closed “dominant code” of postwar Stalinism was inadequate to the artist who felt a duty (both private and public) to be sincere. Sincerity required a closer look at both the internal and external world; it required the ability to see beyond imposed codes— to create a subjective response to the disorder of the objective terrain.
Stuart Hall (1974) proposed that cultural products are “encoded” according to the producer’s value-set and subsequently “decoded” by consumers. These consumers might decode the product using the same “dominant” code as the producer, creating a direct match between how the producer wants the work to be received and how it is received. On the other hand, an empowered consumer might use a different code to decipher the work, one that negotiates with the work, questioning it in some ways and accepting it in others. Consumers might even deploy an “oppositional” code that willfully reads signs against the intentions of the producer: If you write stop, I’ll read it as go. Nikita Khrushchev’s extraordinary revelation, in his February 1956 “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress, of some of Stalin’s crimes (namely those committed against the Party faithful) no doubt emboldened a subset of Soviet citizens to read highly varnished Socialist-Realist depictions of, say, 1937, with an ironic or oppositional code. Indeed, by the 1970s, ironic decoding of empty Communist orthodoxy would amount to a sort of spontaneous, ongoing passive resistance to the more marked absurdities of the regime—a stance not so much oppositional as creatively adaptive, a way of playing with the available toys in the sandbox (see Yurchak, 2008).
But in the late 1950s and early 60s–the post-secret speech period known as the “Thaw”–irony was not yet king. Many members of the Soviet intelligentsia took Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign to heart, but they were not rolling their eyes at the communist experiment; they were searching for a way to restore the presumed purity of its roots. And they were looking for guidance and inspiration in this search. In this environment, the encoders of cultural messages played an extremely important role; in the Russian tradition artists are expected to provide not simply diversion from reality or even reflection of reality, but instruction on how to live within reality. The “accursed questions”–What is to be done? and Who is to blame?–had been tacitly assigned by the people to their artists like a particularly high-stakes homework assignment. In answering these questions, it would be unacceptable for artists to continue shaping their answers with an old code that excluded observed reality. While most Thaw-era artists did not dispense with socialist realist tropes and codes (Prokhorov, 2002), they began to change the way they way they built their word-and-image worlds upon the increasingly pliable socialist realist scaffolding. If they wanted to fulfill their cultural duty, to follow the path of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Mayakovsky, they would need to open the code to worldly input.
To open a code, though, is violate its fixed nature—that is, to make it unintelligible. Without codes, life can become baggy, formless, intimidating in its chaos. Codes are the child of the narrative thinking—the habits of thought that allow us to create scripts for our world and our lives; scripts transform the ambiguous elements of life into recognizable, “priceable” commodities in the narrative economy. If our narrative tells us that X leads to Y, we can more easily deduce the worth and meaning—that is, the codified value—of X in our lives. Can we really free ourselves from this adaptive scripting, which can so often ease the cognitive burden of life?
The opening of conventional codes is, then, one of the trickiest propositions in the creation of artistic or journalistic artifacts. No representation of life is free from some sort of restrictive code. We are all hemmed in by the limitations inherent in having a point of view, and the need to impose form on a world in flux. But there is a sort of sliding scale of representation, in which we open codes up in a number of ways: one of these is to include in our representation a reflexive awareness of our own point of view; this allows us the privilege of our own script without denying the scripts of others. Another is to populate our represented worlds with multiple voices and multiple scripts, each of which are given the space for expression and integrity–the ability to enter the story, the competition among scripts. Dostoyevsky was a master at this development of multiple voices, which Bakhtin called “polyphony”. (Sarah Young (2004) offers an outstanding discussion of competitive scripting in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative.)
Seen in this light, “open encoding” is the telling of tales in which the master narrative has not pre-determined the actions and attitudes of the people and the shadings of the setting. It is an encoding in which the accidents of creation are permitted to happen. This very openness to “accidents of creation” is a sort of creative ideology. It is not an outright rejection of scripting, but an awareness that the world is composed of competing scripts, all of them operating above the unscripted stuff of nature, attempting to tame that nature, sometimes succeeding, sometimes being utterly defeated, but most often having subtle, unexpected, and even unintended consequences.
Scripting, of course, takes place not only in works of art, but in political, cultural, and individual life. We are forever creating stories about our world and ourselves. When we gather a bit of power–whether the power of an older sibling, a titan of industry, or a President–we often consider it a right, or perhaps a duty, or maybe just an irresistible temptation, to make others subject to our scripts. On the grand scale, the competitive rough and tumble of human scripting does—to borrow a phrase back in vogue—“bend the arc of history”, but rarely in a direction prescribed by any single script. (This, of course, is one of the insights at the heart of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.) Totalitarianism consists in the attempt to administratively wipe out not only the humbling underlying inaccessible truths of time and nature, but also all competitive scripting about those truths. Marxism-Leninism could posit neither humbling truths nor competitive dialogue about them. It was an attempt to install a master narrative that dictated both the national dialogue and the sketch of the world in each individual mind. This is why the late-Stalinist insistence on “conflictlessness” in cinema was the apotheosis of Communist cultural hubris. It was an authorial attempt to erase contradictory words and images from Soviet life once and for all; dialectical materialism remained the religion of the realm, but the dialectic was a museum piece, in which all contradiction was pre-scripted by the master and the synthesis was a forgone conclusion, the end of dialectics.
—Greg Blake Miller
The Aviation Museum
The Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, takes us back to a time when flight was a thing to dream about and inspires us to dream about it once again. It’s a pretty good place to experience the “progressive nostalgia” I’ll be discussing in this blog. In any case, it got my 8-year-old son dreaming! Here is a poster we made from one of our photographs when we returned from our visit this August.
Gorby and Me
Here is a link to a piece I did a few years back that intertwines memories of my own experiences in Russia with a meditation on Mikhail Gorbachev’s singular role in his nation’s history. I wrote the article when Gorbachev spoke at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2004.
http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/archive/2004/mar/25/feature-gorby-and-me
Pavel Brun-Quotes from Underground
Here is a link to a story I did a few years ago on the talented Russian theatrical producer Pavel Brun, who was instrumental in the creation of Cirque du Soleil’s ‘O’ and ‘Mystere’, as well as Celine Dion’s ‘A New Day’. Pavel is a fascinating thinker and speaker, and his reflections on memory and immigration are at once deeply personal and broadly indicative of the complex nature of nostalgia. He is now back in Moscow, where he recently worked on Eurovision 2009.
http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/archive/2005/may/05/quotes-from-the-underground/
Thoughts on Bergson’s Matter and Memory
The essence of time is that it goes by….
The psychical state, then, that I call ‘my present,’ must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future.
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 137,138
At the root of Henri Bergson’s conception of consciousness is the elementary and vaguely scandalous assertion that the universe exists. (see Matter and Memory, p. 63) This universe is a vast constellation of images; at the center of any individual’s world is an image of a special sort: the body. The body moves through space, acting upon and being acted upon by other images. It perceives these external images in two ways: The more primitive, and more important to survival, of these ways is determinate perception. The body perceives in an image of the external world exactly what it needs to perceive in order to successfully make its next move: When I see a falling branch above my head, the most important quality to perceive in the branch is the quality of falling; it matters very little whether the branch is oak or birch, white or tan, whether the branch may have moss on its north side and a sizable knot on its south. In the moment, I am unlikely to recognize any of these qualities. I sense precisely what is necessary for the proper motor reaction—that is, to get out of the way of the falling branch. Out of necessity, the representation of the image or the branch in my mind is something much less than the reality of the image itself. (see p. 35) Consciousness does not add to an image; it must always subtract.
Consciousness subtracts from the image in indeterminate perception as well. It simply subtracts less. The more sophisticated the brain of an organism, the more capable it is of perceiving more than is necessary for the simple (survival) motor reaction. In other words, higher intelligence means the capacity to perceive the functionally useless. (History is littered with connoisseurs of Bergsonian uselessness. Walter Benjamin has, in the elegiac tones of an insufficiently devoted Marxist, spoken of the souvenir collector’s capacity to liberate things “from the drudgery of usefulness.” The contemplative intellectuals of the Russian 1840s earned for themselves the label “superfluous men”.) The Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev wrote that each image holds within it an entire universe of characteristics and connotations—indeed, its very own dialectic of ideas and counter ideas, shattering the Cartesian/Aristotelian dualism of object and idea (see Lossky, N.O., History of Russian Philosophy, pp., 292-297). If you seek an idea about a thing; it suffices to look intensely at the thing. Losev’s concept dovetails nicely with Bergson’s indeterminate perception: Any worldly image has more within it than we can possibly process. Indeed, our effectiveness as bodies in action demands that our perception subtracts from the object. But when we have both the sophistication of intellect and the luxury of reflection—in other words, when the branch is not falling—we have the capacity to perceive more in an object than is strictly necessary.
We process the image in two immediate ways. First, we process in order to act in relation to the external world. We can get out of the way of the branch, we can catch the branch, we can shout for help once the branch has struck us and opened an impressive gash in our head. Second, once we have perceived the image, and perhaps attempted to act in relation to the external world, we sense the internal action of our body. This action is processed as affect. We feel pain. We feel fear. Perhaps, when no one comes to help, we feel sadness, or even regret that we have so few helpful friends. The image of the external world has called upon the image at the center of the world—that is our body—to act internally upon itself.
A perceived image becomes part of our trove of pure, or virtual, memories. These memories are essential to all future perception. In Bergson’s model, perception and memory are mutually constituted: stirred by a new perception of a worldly image, the relevant pure memory “comes out to meet” the image. Upon this meeting, the memory is no longer pure or virtual, or even memory—it is an active phenomenon, the “memory-image,” which completes the perception, fleshes it out, provides it meaning and context. Upon our very first childhood perception of a stove, we do not know it is a stove, but as we acquire a store of memories of the stove, future perceptions of it are completed by those memories: It is a stove. It is hot. Mother uses it to make food. I should not touch it when mother is using it to make food, because that is precisely the moment when it is hot. Some memories lead us directly to action, without creating the representation of an image in our mind: these memories are nothing more than habits, appropriate learned reactions to familiar objects or constellations of objects in the external world. Other memories form pictures—these are the result of attentive perception. Attentive perception, writes Bergson, “involves a reflection…the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object upon which it comes to mold itself.” (p. 102)
Bergson argues that memories are not stored as images in the brain. In their virtual, or pure, form, accumulated recollections do not have sensory detail, only the capacity, when activated by current perceptions, to call upon the sensory centers of the brain to reconstruct imagery in the present. The mind’s eye, then, sees in a memory not the past, but an image being created at that very moment by diverse sensory centers at the distant reaches of the brain. This is not only in accordance with recent neurological science (see Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi’s Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000)); it also presupposes artistic forms that accept that the images of past and present are layers in a unified spatio-temporal environment: Memory is the mind’s present, not its past: Note, for instance, the scene in Citizen Kane in which Leeland is telling Thompson of his long-ago adventures with Kane, and the images of this supposed long ago can be seen through the window directly behind Leeland. This is not played up in the film as some fantastic conceit, singing look at me; I’m a new idea. Rather, the scene is brief and could be missed by the inattentive eye (i.e., the determinate perception of one who sees only what one needs to see for one’s motor needs—if such a viewer finds his way to Kane); the layering of time in Kane unfolds in a way Bergson, one imagines, would approve of: as something utterly natural.
* * *
Bergson locates the body between past and future, image and action. It is, he says “that part of my duration which is in the process of growth.” (138) The body, in short, is the place where we feel the flux of the material world. But what is this material world?
Matter, Bergson writes, is “a present which is always beginning again” (138). That is, insensate matter is that which repeats, or “acts” its past, while living things are that which act anew, and thus bring change (beyond geological change) to the material world (themselves included). Useful motion depends on our recognition of the matter that surrounds us; recognition is the process that permits us to compare our immediate perception of matter to our acquired, generalized understanding of what things are. Without this comparison, living things are condemned to forever to react to the world only through uninformed guesswork. More advanced brains are those which make more intensive use of memory: that is, they not only react and move, but reflect, bringing ever more memory to bear on the imagery of the material world. Our ability to perceive the complexity of the material world increases in proportion to the amount of memory we utilize in the act of perception: in this way, perception becomes reflection. The present perception, which is always technically a memory (“the remembered present,” as neurologists Edelman and Tononi call it. (E & T, 107)), becomes an image mediated by thought, a coordinated complex of richly grasped sight, sound, smell and touch, accompanied by conceptual understanding, affective response, and even doubt.
Our capacity to sense such heterogeneity in the material world is not a given: it is, rather, an ingenious solution we impose on the continuity of matter in the universe. Since matter occupies our entire sensory world, air and object alike, our minds must, for the sake of our own survival, learn how to perceive strict boundaries between material objects that, in reality, blur into one another like shades in a rainsplattered watercolor. This blurring of boundaries reflects the reality of the material universe: what we call “space” is a limitless and indivisible vibration of matter; there are no breaks between matter, no emptiness, no place we can declare the end of matter. There is only ceaseless vibration, the hum of creation.
Our minds impose a similar, and even more artificial, disciplining grid on time. Actual duration, Bergman writes, has no “instants”; a motion that takes place in time and space is indivisible; it is not a series of mini-movements that can be measured in units of distance and time. A movement is not a movement at all if we impose these imaginary subdivisions upon it: What is half a movement? An eighth of a movement? To imagine the point at which to measure fractional movement, we must impose an imaginary cessation of the movement in time and space, an interruption to its duration at which we match it up to an imaginary time-grid with arbitrary but agreed-upon units (Bergson calls this “homogeneous time”) and an imaginary space with equally arbitrary units grafted upon the essential continuity and indivisibility of space. The divisible line one would draw to graph a movement in time and space cannot represent actual movement and “duration in its flow” (191); it can only symbolize the duration to make it more convenient for our use.
Bergson does not condemn the use of these imaginary and arbitrary time-space grids; they are essential to facilitate our effective action within and upon the material universe; action becomes almost incomprehensible without them. But, he argues, if we are to speak about true knowledge, and to attempt to understand the nature of how man survives, thrives, and ultimately goes beyond surviving and thriving to reflect and create, we must be willing to admit that we have created a world of minutes and miles as a tool, that nature in reality unfolds not in homogeneous time and space but in movements that occupy certain durations in undivided space, and that these durations may—depending on the nature, capacities and needs of the being perceiving them—appear to stretch or contract to infinite lengths or imperceptible flashes. “Imaginary homogeneous time,” writes Bergson, “is…an idol of language, a fiction… In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being.” (p. 207)
If what we call space and time are, in actuality, continuous motion and indivisible duration, they become extraordinarily supple conceptions for the reflective mind. Our indeterminate perception can draw more from the motion of matter, allowing more memory to pour forth into the moment of perception—bringing, indeed, the entire plane of individual memory to bear upon the object under examination. (see Bergson’s diagrams on p. 152 and 162) As we do this, the pure memory is activated, the various sensory centers of our brain generate inner sight and sound and smell, and what was virtual and image-less is coordinated among the parallel systems of the brain (in a process Edelman and Tononi call “reentry”) to form a “memory-image”—a present internal image composed of perceptions of the past.
This image, the remembered past, informs, interacts, and contrasts with the newer image, the “remembered present” that we see before us. The more intently we look upon the images of the material world, the more we can extend the tension of our memory, breaking with the generic, imposed rhythms of homogeneous time and space. We have torn the transparency that human consciousness, for eminently practical reasons, has laid over time and space, and replaced it with one of our own individual making. This is what happens when we become “lost in thought” or experience seemingly interminable “instants”. It is why sometimes, in moments of contemplation we may find that “time has gotten away” from us. (In reality, it is we who have gotten away from “time”.) This variant tension of memory also explains why, in moments of intense concentration, we may experience in our mind an extraordinarily rich and lengthy internal duration during a patch of homogeneous time in which the hands on our watch have scarcely moved.
For Bergson, the essence of sentient life is movement, and the essence of movement is the solidarity of past and present. (p. 218) The life-form that is slave to necessity must impose discipline on this solidarity, narrowing the sieve through which past can inform present; such a being hasn’t the luxury of seeing more than needs to be seen, and cannot countenance the indeterminacy of coexisting and conflicting images of time: The environment cannot be permitted to exhibit more than its most relevant and immediate traits, and the memory is useful only to the extent that it provides useful crib-notes to these traits: notes that enable us to recognize, classify, recall useful responses, and react. But Bergson is interested in the outer boundaries, or perhaps the boundlessness, of human consciousness. If space and time are better seen as duration of movement of matter upon matter, the division of past and present become less relevant: if the action of our mind upon the world consists in perceiving it in a particular way, and that perception draws on memory-images of what we have previously perceived, has not the past become an active part of the present? Has not the past made itself real in its action upon the world? This form of action is, granted, less easily diagrammed and symbolized as a motion across measurable homogeneous space and time, but it is an action: the mind (itself represented in space as matter) moves: the human brain is a veritable hive of movement, an extraordinarily active bit of matter, and never more so than when it is making copious use of the memory image: Consciousness, Bergman argues, moves constantly back and forth between the demands of present perception and the memory-images that can more deeply inform that perception (this constitutive process is another element of the theory of “reentry” developed by Edelman and Tonino eight decades later). This internal movement engages an ever-greater number of memories, calling upon them either because of their similarity to the perceived image or contiguity with the similar memory.
The apparent complexity of Bergson’s thought has at its core the beautiful simplicity of corresponding to our own consciousness of the way our minds work: I order a cup of coffee and look around the old cafe, I remember a distant day in a similar place, I recall a moment that took place just before we went to the cafe—my small son and a little girl playing on a windblown, deserted blacktop playground beneath the scorching desert sun; I remember the sounds of the tetherball chains, the balls themselves long since removed, clanging against the poles; I recall a story I once wrote with a similar concluding image, a story I was proud of, which I ought to have published but never did; I feel a sense of regret sweep over me, and then, a sense of determination to write once more.
The usefulness of my resolve to write again can be debated; what is clear, though, is that the impact of memory upon perception has utterly transformed my experience of the “present” moment in the café. A present that, in its most determinate sense, ought to have consisted in me taking my coffee from the counter, being conscious not to spill it upon myself, and drinking it, was turned into a present in which I perceived not only the hot mug in my hands, but the clanging chains of my son’s early childhood and my own creative regret, events spanning ten years in homogeneous time but at this very moment coexisting as the present action of my mind in response to the cues of the material world, Indeed, the memories are not an adjunct to my perception of the coffee shop, but an integral part of my perception of the shop. My consciousness has managed to find a rhythm of duration different from the homogeneous, measurable rhythms that purely determinate perception would have required. I have, in these few moments, contracted time and made seemingly disparate scenes share the present moment. I have freed myself from the rhythms of necessity.
Bergson spends much of his book arguing against both materialism and idealism. He writes with scientific precision and a pronounced taste for the logically verifiable. Nonetheless, what he seeks in the end is to demonstrate the union of body and soul, and he apprehends in memory the unmistakable stamp of the divine. The memory-image, by giving us greater access to, and insight into, the implications of the material world, enables us to break free from the responses of the automaton. It gives us the liberty to perceive the world and react to it in all of the unexpected and idiosyncratic ways that bring meaning to life and dynamism to the world. “Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds,” Bergson writes, “and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.” (249)
—Greg Blake Miller
Appendix: Bergson’s last three sentences alone are worth the price of admission:
“Not only, by its memory of former experience, does this consciousness retain the past better and better, so as to organize it with the present in a newer and richer decision but, living with an intenser life, contracting, by its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number of external moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable of creating acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity. Thus, whether we consider it in time or in space, freedom always seems to have its roop deep in necessity and to be intimately organized with it. Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.” (249)
Reentry Shock 