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Karen
Unregistered User
(11/8/02 10:13:05 pm)
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all that is solid...
What a fascinating thread!
Some ill-formed comments:
Firstly, I think you need to make a distinction between the particular kinds of technology which are being used. The thing about the toaster is that it's so bloody ordinary- just a plain old domestic item, not particularly high tech for most people nowdays- so, in that sense, a contemporary audience might respond to the use of a morphing toaster or similar object in the same way as an earlier audience might respond to the morphing comb. However, surely there is a crucial difference between the symbolism of objects which are a part of the audience's daily life and the symbolism of something like the matrix. The toaster is in my home- it's the enemy within. Of course, it's common enough, as Greg notes, for the matrix to be inserted into the human host's body via some sort of tube- so it does feed into that notion of internal corruption. Still, I would maintain that, as spectres of terror, these objects function in very different ways. Perhaps it's because virtual reality and the internet haven't worked themselves into the fibre of many people's every day life to the extent where they are as matter of fact as a toaster. Perhaps it's because the matrix is more explicitly a metaphor for various forms of social control (It seems to jump up and down, waving its broader meaning about like some sort of placard- as distopian fantasies tend to do), whereas the toaster and the comb are a little more enigmatic...
I'm more inclined to read the morphing of the comb into a mountain or the towel into a river in a semiotic way- the sign being divorced from its signified- nothing is secure and no bets can be hedged. I think the toaster and the matrix (particularly the eponymous film) are doing something similar. Even the objects you take for granted, even matter-of-fact reality can topple or evaporate the assumptions you made about them/it, pulling the ground out beneath you. Very characteristic of the modern condition. It all recalls the comments Marx makes at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto about the Borgeois condition, a condition which comes into being with the industrial revolution- "All that is solid melts into air". Marshall Berman uses that line as the title for his study of modernity.
Karen.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/10/02 8:17:19 pm)
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identity, combs, mirrors
No, I am not the Holocaust-book Judith Berman. Nor am I the (from the profound to the somewhat less so) cat website Judith Berman, or the microbiologist Judith Berman, or the German Judith Berman... some of the others that come up when I've done a Google search on my name. A bit disquieting, having gone all my life with a relatively uncommon name, to find that there are actually quite a few others out there. This one is an anthropologist and fiction writer.
Combs: Greg, I think you will have to go back quite a few millenia to arrive at a time when combs were technological wonders. I couldn't say when the earliest combs in Europe date to, but I'd suspect they are pre-Bronze Age.
Mirrors: I'm ignorant on the subject, but isn't silvered glass is relatively recent? -- a big deal in Louis XIV's time, but how far before that does it date to? Mirrors before that were polished metal and such like -- Aztecs used obsidian, but I don't know to what extent those mirrors were used outside of temples. In Europe until the 19th century mirrors might have been something of a luxury item.
But mirrors fall into that category of object that have lots of deep-rooted symbolic associations, like rings and unlike spoons.
Judith
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(11/10/02 9:54:17 pm)
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mirrors
Mirror-like objects incised on Pictish stones, usually in association with a comb, seem pretty definitive to me. (Non technical appreciation.) I assumed they were not silvered but some sort of shiny rockface. Usually high status woman.
Jane
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/11/02 6:30:54 am)
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combs and mirrors
>Mirror-like objects incised on Pictish stones, usually in association with a comb, seem pretty definitive to me. (Non technical appreciation.) I assumed they were not silvered but some sort of shiny rockface. Usually high status woman.
Hmm. I'm reminded of those Balinese flying mermaids (demons of some sort??) who are depicted with comb and mirror -- tourist art, I suppose, and I don't know what if any traditional iconography lies behind them. As if comb + mirror is an of emblem of a particular aspect of womanhood. (Not to suggest there is any direct connection between Bali and the Picts!)
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cpe
Unregistered User
(11/11/02 11:57:20 am)
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judith berman and yo-lin, little bell
well thanks for answering; I am sorry you are none of the Judiths you mentioned, but very glad you are the Judith you are. Judith is a very wise and strong name. And is there a title of fiction that we can read by you? or are you like most of us, deep in the pages still, but hopefully some day soon....? Do you teach anthropology? I have a question for you about the latest in anthro, but maybe it should be on another thread, or if you have a private email, perhaps you could send it? I would understand if you were too budy. But, thank you in advance.
and Jane dear soul, nice to see your comments on the magical mirror. We have a diety in our Aztec stories, (at least what is left of them after Hernan Cortez came, and after they were translated and re-re--re translated over the centuries, and mistranslated and housed in libraries where others quote from the distortions over and over again--SO MUCH has been lost) who is the God of mirrors. He is also the God of memoria, memory. The mirror and memory are often used interchangably in our old poem sagas, and still today in some of our curanderas' chants.
con carino
cpe
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cpe
Unregistered User
(11/11/02 12:02:23 pm)
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Judith again
>>> I would understand if you were too budy. >>>>
How very dorky of me. That's supposed to be "too busy." Otherwise it sounds like I have a cold. Which I don't, yet. So far, so good. (grin)
except forever I cannot spell; you have to guess alot, just like me.
con cariņo,
cpe
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Gregor9
Registered User
(11/11/02 1:55:19 pm)
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Combs
Judith,
I agree that the comb as a revolutionary bit of technological development may be near antediluvian, but given a premise that all of the tales being talked about began as oral tales, maybe its magic has endured. (I mean, cartoonists in the New Yorker still find riffs on the magic of the caveman inventing the wheel.) I guess I'm attempting to triangulate on the idea voiced by Midori et al of the magical power inherent in something that's both mundane and otherworldly at the same time. SF has done plenty of riffs on this--on radios and TVs, on the idea of things we take for granted without knowing how they work (and thereby granting them a certain element of magical power?). This all makes me think of the mother of a friend who always put covers on her electrical outlets because she knew that electricity was ever-present and would leak out into the world if she didn't.
There's something really intriguing to me in this interstitial place, where the common household item meets a kind of tension, an unease, because it might have properties beyond the obvious. Mirrors, a more ancient technology, similarly have lots of tension-producing properties: of turning the world around, of revealing the unseen, of informing evil queens of their lesser beauty, of offering doorways into Wonderland...
Greg
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(11/12/02 4:06:29 pm)
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the secret lives of computers...
two thoughts:
1) going back a bit to the difference b/w tech in the industrial age and tech before, I'm wondering if the anxiety might stem from the notion that the distinction b/w the human and the tool is blurring? I mean, no one ever lost their job to a comb... Maybe this also ties in w/this certain unease we sometimes have w/modern, Western medicine and the benevolence we bestow on holistic medicine, (both having been produced by humans)?...
2) Greg's post about both common items/technology having ties to the fantastic, reminds me of all the new media theory which has really strong spiritual overtones ie. Douglas Rushkoff, Marshall McLuhan. There is a lot of writing about the internet in particular, ascribing to it a very spiritual quality...
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/12/02 9:18:06 pm)
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ordinary and magical redux
Greg,
I think all I meant to say is that the power of combs and mirrors seems unlikely to be because they were new and wonderful objects, although perhaps certain kinds of mirrors might have been perceived so. I assume them to be domestic and ordinary and "turned" magical through how they are used by the storyteller.
It occurs to me all of a sudden, and now it seems very obvious, that the transformation of the most ordinary into the magical is an element of many good fantasies, and is certainly a very important aspect of the imaginative lives of children. One of the things I loved about THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE (and I was never that enamoured of the entire series) was the everyday-ness of the wardrobe and the lampost on the other side. Much of my 3-year-old's imaginative life uses a similar process, I think. Inside the bathtub drain lives a little man who opens the drain to let the water out. Behind a particular door in our neighborhood is "Grandma's woods" (which are actually a continent away in British COlumbia) and if he knocks, Grandma will open the door and let him into the forest. Inside a piece of junk mail he finds a map that will take him on a journey. The mommy in the photograph is going to come out and talk to him. Our house got in a wreck with another house (bad driving, evidently, on my part) and had to be towed to a repair shop. Inside any ordinary object for him is an imaginative space where something else, often very ordinary, can be juxtaposed to produce a non-ordinary and magical result.
I'm not sure where exactly this fits in with the spoon and the comb and the mirror, but perhaps there is an element of the same process.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/12/02 9:37:37 pm)
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judith berman and yo-lin, little bell
cpe,
I apologize for not knowing your name, although I have seen it here -- my brain is a sieve except for things I will never need to know, such as the word for "elk" in Heiltsuk and how to tell an ape from a monkey molar.
I have taught anthropology, although I have been employed mostly as a research & museum anthropologist. I would be happy to at least take a stab at answering your question, but can't promise anything! You can email me at juberman@sas.upenn.edu.
Re your other question, I JUST have a chapbook of stories out (apologies
for repeating information from another thread), called LORD STINK
AND OTHER STORIES, available at www.lcrw.net/smallbeer/ch...erman.htm,
and my novel THE BEAR'S DAUGHTER is due out from Ace probably in
2004. It is sort of a grab-bag of Native myth and culture, all jostled
up and poured out, about a girl who has to find her missing bear
self.
Judith
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