“Me-e-e-mories are made of this, da, da, dada, daDA, da, da . . .” Does anyone remember this song? Perhaps you’ve never heard it or of it. Perhaps you’ve heard it on an oldies radio show? Maybe you remember hearing your parents play it on their phonograph? Perhaps you remember what a phonograph is? If I heard the song, “Memories are made of this,” the first time it was ever played and you heard it played on an oldies show in 2007, is your memory less real than mine? If I used a phonograph, or stereo record player, for years and you have only seen one in a movie that is set in the sixties, is my memory more real? Is the phonograph I used more real than the one you saw in the film? My comments are aimed more toward the earlier class discussions that looked at the relative realness of memories. Hmmm, seems the realness thing is my personal theme. Well, like my comments on reality, I don’t think memories exist in a hierarchy of realness. I could see some differentiation based on their relatively to a particular use or point of view, but that would not indicate a memory was “more” or “less” real. The event that one remembers is presumably a real event, but does the accuracy of the memory affect its reality? A more pertinent question might be, and one touching on Memento themes in particular, does the memory affect the reality of the event? (Be warned—I fully intend[ed] to raise many more specific questions than I will attempt to even tentatively answer)
Someone who is invested in the worldview which insists there is one true reality and deviation from it indicates falseness or delusion would say the event that occurs is real and any memory that is “inaccurate’ would be unreal and a subversion of reality. In a way, this would concur with Annie Dillard (in a totally unrelated book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek) who related a instance of living in the moment, familiar to Zen Buddhists and other Eastern spiritual practitioners, which produced for her a revelation—the immediate experience only exists at the exact moment it is experienced and any subsequent attempt to remember, recreate, or capture the moment is just an attempt to describe something real and is not reality. I say ‘in a way’ because the true reality believer would probably argue that an accurate memory is real—which opens a whole other can of worms. Someone who takes an even slightly more flexible view might look at how an inaccurate memory could affect reality by influencing current events through decisions or attitudes based on faulty memories. So, the faulty memory would not be “real,” and yet, it would surely be part of the reality that would not exist if it hadn’t been there to affect it. So, causal relations would seem to have some impact on the relative status of memory as reality. So there it is and on it goes. There are multiple frames, arguments, and relations that can be applied; like the character in the new Jim Carrey movie, I tend to say “yes” to everything. In my world of multiple, fluid, infinitely unique, and endlessly intersecting realities, everything is true/real, and every memory is real. Oh, I forgot to mention the Idealist philosophy, which state the only reality is in the present, and which I interpret to conjecture that when one remembers something, they create a new reality of that memory as they bring it into their current consciousness. And yes, you can change the past because what you are doing is accessing a different past that shifts you into the present reality that included that past. Yes, I do remember going off; yes, I have turned this into way too much of a personal reflection; yes, I will gladly go down any road: yes, you can watch me fall, or yes, you can see soldier on—that part is up to you.

It’s been fun

When considering the concept of transcendence, whether in Gibson’s Neuromancer, Wordsworth’s poetry, his pontifications on reconstructing reality to a more intellectually challenging standard of beauty, or certain factions of Buddhist and Yogic practice, the first step is similar to our discussions on themes such as “Reality: is it real, or is it Memorex?” A coherent understanding of the nature of transcendence is a required prelude to meaningful discussion, or at least, a consensus working definition. My P.O.V. on the discussion and comments so far concerning transcendence holds that we are jumping the gun—bypassing the primary examination of transcendence to propose how it presents in the works under discussion.
Case in point: We question whether Case is reaching transcendence since he must be plugged into the Matrix to experience what is being posed as a transcendent state. The question becomes irrelevant once the fundamental assumptions of the frame are examined. No, that is not quite true. One implication of the re-framing would not render the question irrelevant, but would make the answer self-evident within the altered context. If we look at whether “jacking in” offers a transcendent experience, or conversely, a merely addictive escape mechanism. The argument can and as been made that living is an inherently addictive experience; one such theorist, author Terence McKenna, claims, “[Humans] are addicted to breathing.” Although he makes this statement with his tongue at least nearing his cheek, he is reflecting the idea that human existence is basically addictive in nature. I would argue there is a level at which this is true, but practically speaking, there is a distinction between necessary physical requirements that sustain life and consciousness-altering practices that take on the mantle of addiction—but only through the compulsion to seek them, not through the experience itself. In this context, we can clearly see Case’s impulse for the Matrix as an addiction since he compulsively seeks the temporary escape from material existence. This fits with eabraha 1’s comments except for the comments that define Case’s experience of the Matrix as non-transcendent due to the fact they are not permanent. Which leads to the next examination of the premise involving definition and understanding of transcendence. I would like to work on the hypothesis that transcendence and enlightenment are not the same thing, that transcendence is a path to enlightenment, and, most important, that both are states of being not some static destination that one achieves and then “sits” there feeling bliss (yeah, you caught me, if each is not a place, one can’t sit there). There are some segments of Eastern mystical/spiritual practice that seem to see enlightenment as complete separation from the material plane, but the majority would agree enlightenment is an altered state of being—just as much and more connected to the rest of existence but with a different perspective and experience of that existence. States such as enlightenment and transcendence, and even addiction, are part of the continuous cycle of existence and not a static, permanent removal from the process. A couple of quotes form Eastern spiritual traditions come to mind: “Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water; now that I am enlightened, I chop wood and carry water” and the more contemporary, “After enlightenment comes the laundry” (Generally attributed as Zen proverb). Transcendence can be and is a temporary state of being, but the phrase state of being is the operative concept. So, one could experience transcendence in a number of ways and not be permanently in that exact state (although it could provide some change in perspective), but a state of enlightenment, while not a static end of existence, would be a permanent shift in perspective that would not revert to the previous unaware state. The level of awareness of one’s previous life may depend on one’s personal belief. I don’t presume there is a one true state of enlightenment any more than there is only one absolute true anything that denies the some other truth.
Well, I’ve had my say, Peace Out.

The dislocation of Blade Runner is just a premise: What if we created sentient beings, possessing all the qualities of humanity, which are yet artificial? This has, of course, already been done with test tube babies. The difference is an application of a very basic anthropological distinction that every reader can recognize: Us vs. Them. These test tube babies are accepted as human—us. Androids and the monster are, for somewhat abstract reasons, them.

They resent this isolation. An android could ask, like Shylock, Hath not an android hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Of course, this would just undermine the Android/ monster position. Shylock is forced to ask that question because he has found himself on the wrong side of the Us vs. Them dichotomy. It seems almost human nature to continually find the other, on the basis of religion, race, and sex. Why?

By rejecting the other, we create our own identity. Frankenstein and the Blade Runners define what it is to be human. Us vs. Them is an extremely basic and closely held distinction, common to many ancient cultures. In ancient Egypt, the word ‘Egyptian’ also meant ‘human’. Victor is afraid of giving a mate to the monster for fear that it would eventually destroy humanity. Would he similarly deprive a giant stitched-together hamster of the same? I think one of the main parallels between Blade Runner and Frankenstein is the fear of creatures of sentience married to unnatural physical powers. A strain of fear and jealousy exists because, having recognized these essentially human characters as other, there humanness threatens our very central notion of uniqueness. It is for this reason that we cannot simply allow androids to live, let the monster to himself. They are either us, or they are undermining us—no middle ground. The forces that retire the androids are called Blade Runners. The name is appropriate—they hunt along the knife’s edge separating humans and androids.

Mary Shelley had a preoccupation with abandonment of dependant relationships that she wrote into Frankenstein. The reason that the monster cannot be embraced is left to the reader’s supposition; ugliness, which is the most frequently commented characteristic of the creature, is unsatisfactory. First of all, Victor specifically undermines the supposed grotesqueness of the monster immediately before he gives it life. Secondly, he had worked on the thing for months without any qualms.

It is clearer in Blade Runner why the android can never be accepted, and it sheds light on the monster’s predicament. The replicant is so nearly human that his abjection must be even greater. He exists very nearly on the edge of the blade, separating unique humans from the Other. The line in the sand extends to cover test-tube babies, but not replicants. The android cannot be embraced because he can just a little more easily be made. They can be duplicated, standardized, and by that virtue they become commodities. Their perfection, beauty, and strength only enhance their otherness, and offend the assumed superiority of naturally-limited humans.

Turning human beings into commodities still hits modern man’s nerve. It offends our preconceived uniqueness. Mary Shelley’s audience was in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the total economy. In her nascent Market Society, the economy was given primacy in order to allow the State to compete with other nations. The idea of the fictitious commodity—Land, Labor, and Capital, none of which are actually produced—was invented a short time before she began writing, in order to include those factors of production into the economic purview. The economic formula had to include every resource for peak productivity. What is labor, but people? Frankenstein’s commodification of human beings would have deeply worried her audience with threats they could only just have begun to understand. The almost-divine human was on the verge of being dethroned, and Mary Shelley was one of the first to see it.

Blake writes On Plate 14 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.” The plate is headed with a striking image: a male body lies limp, flames springing from his body, as another person (of ambiguous gender) floats, arms outstretched like wings, above. The image is suggestively sexual; the flames like unrestrained passion, exploding from the body and merging with another. Yet the lying man evokes death. In almost every version his body is colored in pale, lifeless tones.
This is the plate where Blake declares, “…the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”
The burning body breeds a flying personage, springing from the fire and towards the reader. This may suggest destruction as a source of energy, analogous to Blake’s corrosive plate making. Or we can see the hovering body as committing some sort of diabolical ritual, basking in the flames of destruction; arms open to the infinite. Perhaps both figures are participants.
However, the image seems to be most directly a reference to the fire to come at the end of six thousand years (the Biblical apocalypse). This fire is to “consume the world,” yet only the body of one burns in the picture. Perhaps we can claim that to Blake, the individual is not a small part of the universe, but that they are one and the same. We see this theme repeatedly throughout The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Blake’s interview with Isaiah and Ezekial, Isaiah speaks of his revelations being derived from his senses discovering, ‘the infinite in every thing.” This posits our sensual perception (seemingly the most individual thing we experience, by definition) is the voice of God. And God is everything. Blake finds the universal in the most individual, like a single object containing the infinite. These are the impossibilities that fuel Hell, the contradictions that defy Reason.
A burning body, a dead man, a flying figure in the heat of the flame. It is a simultaneous depiction of life and death, pain and energy. Perhaps such contradictions are Blake’s method of communicating the sublime, the struggle to reconcile opposing ideas producing fervor to grasp the expansion of what is inarticulate.

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The Shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

The camera is held by the subject, which according to the philosophical definition is the thinking feeling entity, and pointed at the object, which is external to the subject’s mind. The use of the mechanism necessarily delineates who is the subject and what is the object. And yet when the mechanism produces a medium, like a photo, that distinction is undermined. The viewer automatically identifies with the object. Just as we identify with the hero of a novel, we identify with the object of a photo. The message of the medium is incorporated into the subject’s memory, and becomes accepted. The media vision of the past becomes our past; even though, because we have identified ourselves with the object, it is not really any objective past. We have identified with the object and it therefore exists not in the past but in a separate version of our own time. Of course, the camera is just one such mechanism.

Let us investigate some of the others for a moment. The electric saw is a unique mechanism in the poem because its process in the poem is entirely metaphoric. The saw bites into decades just as father’s photos bring William back decades in time. As he scans the photos of and by his father, William begins to identify with the object. For a moment he becomes his father, and is subject to that man’s sensations, the smell in his nose and the taste in his mouth incidental to standing in a saw-mill.

The electric saw is a powerful image because it implies an absolutely standard subject-object dichotomy. The subject uses the saw necessarily on an unthinking object, which here is wood. You could use a saw on a subject, a conscious entity, but lets suppose right now that when I say ‘saw’ none of you immediately leap into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Wood is a non-thinking object, external to the subjects consciousness. However, through the photo and Gibson’s identification with his father, the saw-mill is cutting into time and memory. Gibson is asserting that the saw mechanism separates subject from object, but that through the photo the saw is actually uniting the viewer and the subject. Gibson can actually taste and feel “the sweet hot reek” of the wood because the saw cuts it.

Finally, the gun is a powerful mechanism. It appears in the poem a few times, and one of Dennis Ashbaugh’s etchings featured the gun as well. Certainly it mirrors the tropes of death and danger in The Book of The Dead (the poem is partly a homily on the dangers of media). It also separates the object and subject, making them the ‘empowered’ and ‘threatened’. Are bullets a medium? The quote that begins Memento Mori, Jonathan Nolan’s short story and the basis for Memento, is by Herman Melville: “What like a bullet can undeceive!” Like a medium, as we use it we forget about it. Just as by being gripped by a book we forget about interpreting the symbols of the alphabet, grammar, or even the concrete book we have in our hands and just fall into its world, Gibson forgets about the gun—until a round ricochets off a rock and nearly kills him.

One would think that the gun uniquely separates object and subject. How can the user of the gun identify with the mind of the object, if the use of the gun ‘ends’ the object? Yet Gibson implies this is not so. The gun reminds him that he is

Absolutely alone
In awareness of the mechanism.

Like the first time you put your mouth
on a woman.

Gibson is separated from everything that he interacts with through the mechanism. Even oral sex, part of an act that promotes spiritual unity and is opposite to loneliness, causes Gibson to separate himself from everything interacted with through the medium. He is claiming that the awareness of the mechanism of a clitoris alienates him from his partner, makes him “absolutely alone”. Gibson’s world is truly lonely.

Slavoj Zizek inserts the following poem in his book “Violence” (while discussing billionaire philanthropists). I thought it would be relevant to discussing Falkland, who as the ultimate horizon of the chivalric notion of the “good,” deserves a bit of deconstruction. The poem is by Bertolt Brecht.

“The Interrogation of the Good”

Step forward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightening
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend.
Are you also a good friend of the good people?

Hear us then: we know
That you are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration
of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth

Merrill and Jakko Hintikka, in “How Can Language Be Sexist?” claim, “The referential system does not by itself supply enough information to enable the structural system to operate.” The definitions of words often do not hold the full meaning of their actual use, in context (what Hintikka means by the “structural system”). They write, “…the word good… the way it operates is to rely on some evaluation principle but to leave it to the context to settle which one this evaluation principle is… pre-existing valuations are typically determined by someone’s interests.”
What the Brecht poem introduces is a different level of moral analysis. “You are wise/ for whom?” When we say someone is “wise,” Brecht suggests we are not speaking about some ambiguous, universal ideal. “Wise” refers to a certain set of behaviors that exist in the context of real social relations. So a good opinion might in reality be good for a distinct group of people, and negative for another. This is why Brecht was a Marxist; he recognized ideology and valuation to be connected to class interests. Or, to put it in the perspective Zizek aims for, the claims of moral legitimacy by excessively wealthy bleeding-heart liberals rings disgustingly false, given their wealth is often built on brutal exploitation of the poor they claim to help.
So what does this have to do with Caleb Williams? Is not the novel an interrogation of the good? Does it not introduce a greater, contextual moral analysis? Here lies the irony in Godwin’s descriptions of Falkland at the outset of the novel, as possessing the highest moral caliber. As the novel unfolds, we get a different context, one that asks us to consider that Falkland owns a slave plantation, or that his notion of “honor” involves hierarchy and subordination. We could say that the chivalric moral system is deconstructed

One thing I think that is so interesting about the movie and connects back with Wordsworth is “remembering” and what the act of remembering really is.

The word re-membering is much like Wordsworth’s word choice of re-collection. Does Leonard have true “memories” from his life pre-accident or is he simply piecing together feelings and moments to construct himself a feeling or memory which he wants to be real? The latter can be seen especially through the scene with Natalie where he “re”members her - you don’t see a full moment; you see bits and pieces of moments that he pieces together well enough to know that he is angry she is gone.

Memories may have a direct connection with our past and an event that occured, but the act of remembering said memories is always in the present. We cannot remember in the past, or how we felt at that time. When we remember something, that memory is shaped by the in-between moments, and so a memory we have can be different if we remember it after a year, or after five or ten years. Though memories are often though to be objective things - something happened, I remember, fact; the act of remembering that memory is and always will be subjective.

For Leonard in “Memento”, the act of remembering is a construct, just like him. Teddy continually tells him “You don’t know who you are” and Leonard replies - “I’m Leonard Shelby, from San Franscico” to which Teddy says “That’s who you were - not who you are.”

Just like memories, Leonard has been shaped by his actions and emotions since the accident, despite his inability to remember them. The audience sees Leonard constructing himself - through polaroids, tattoos, etc. Though these things cannot be taken as fact, Leonard chooses to take them as fact. He is shaping himself by choice, to be something which he believes he needs to be to find his wife’s killer. Much like memories, which can change with whatever occurs inbetween the memory and remembering, we construct them to serve whatever purpose we need them to (at any given time).

However, the fact that Case has to plug in and the fact that he eventually has to unplug himself, to meet basic human needs, proves that he isn’t in a PERMANANT state. Unlike Wintermute/Neuromancer who, after the unification, don’t have to DO anything to be in a sense of spirituality, Case has to depend on the accessibility to plug in. In the beginning of the novel, when his nervous system was destroyed, Case was a substance abusing, depressed suicidal being because he didn’t have this access.

Case is an addict in the truest sense of the word. He NEEDS to plug in and he is miserable when he the option isn’t right in front of him.

So, why can’t Case have a permanent plug-in? It is the constraints that he is born with, given that he is a human. Unlike, Neo in the Matrix, Case’s human nature won’t let him get past the fact that he needs to eat, breathe, have sexual relations etc. He wouldn’t be able to attain any of these so called ‘needs’ if he were permanantly in the Matrix. However, Wintermute/Neuromancer, an AI, that isn’t constrained to such human restrictions can spend all of its existence being plugged in.