This story represents the basic existential angst that infiltrates the late 20th century American conscience. Note the theme of the threatening stranger who goes unrecognized by the innocent old man, obviously an analogue for Uncle Sam, the perennial archetypal figure so beloved of editorial cartoonists and poster collectors. He invites the “wormhole”, which is here strangely personalized, although it is a science fiction concept. A wormhole is a “hole” in the structure of the universe, which the old man invites inside, and then it proceeds to, as the author puts it, “beat him senseless.”
On one level of course this is an Aesop-type tale, telling us, “Beware of strangers.” But on another level, it could well represent a warning to the voters who elected Republicans to the House and Senate, a message of distrust; the Republicans, of course, being the wormhole, and as we pointed out before, the old man representing the United States via the imagery of Uncle Sam. The old man’s offer of baking chocolate, which is basically inedible, points up the utter impossibility of communication with Congress. Congress does not want baking chocolate; they want, instead, to beat America senseless.
Yes, “The Old Man And The Wormhole” is a tale cruelly told, but someone needed to have told it. It is Kafkaesque in its inimitably challenging angst. By God, when I read something like this, something stirs in my soul and shouts, “LITERATURE IS NOT YET DEAD IN THIS COUNTRY!!”2
The Essay on On The Aesthetic Education Of Man
On the Aesthetic Education of Man Friedrich Schiller wrote an interesting book called On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In this book he defines patterns of beauty and art and also he is trying to integrate the patterns of beauty into the educational process of humans. This is a philosophical approach that he is trying to implement in evaluating the concepts concerning the issue of aesthetic ...
The Old Man and the Wormhole is an exemplary surrealist work. As such, it can be examined from multiple angles. One way to look at this is as a surrealist piece which contains its own review. The original story about the old man and the wormhole is full of bizarre events, irrelevant dialogue, and questionable imagery. Why would the old man mistake an eyeball for a hat? Alternately, why would the wormhole claim that his hat was really his left eyeball? How has a wormhole come to be walking in the woods and speaking to an old man? Why the offer of baking chocolate? “Happy Dog Potatohead” supplies a rather astute analysis of these questions, providing several possible answers that shape the allegory from a nonsensical blathering into an understandable tale with a direction and a moral. Of course, as even he himself points out, his is not the only possible interpretation.
Another way to look at the story is as a single, cohesive work. That is to say, the review is not detached from the piece, but is in fact an integral part of it. Now we are asking ourselves why the fable would have anything to do with Republicans (does the artist’s political bias change the meaning of the work?), whether the imagery of baking chocolate is really meant to symbolize a breakdown of communication, if in fact the old man hadn’t done something to deserve his beating in the first place. In either case, the important thing is that we are asking ourselves these questions, we are contemplating the issues. We have considered Happy Dog Potatohead’s thoughts, and we have decided whether they have merit.3 We have seen that there can be multiple interpretations of anything: that there are two sides to every story. Now the audience is beginning to get the perspective, the insight, that it has previously lacked.
This is what is most important about a surrealist work. Whether it provides answers or not, it must always provide the questions. Consider surrealist painter René Magritte’s painting “The Married Priest.” It is two objects which look like green apples, with leafy stems, standing close to one another on a plain under a cloudy night sky. Both wear purple eye-masks, though of course they have no eyes. One (on the left) is turned toward the other, which is slightly out in front, and appears to be giving it a light kiss or a nudge. What does this mean? Is the priest the apple on the right, staring straight ahead while the object of his desire tries to win him over with a kiss? Is he the apple on the left, passionately casting aside his vows for a single kiss with his lover, which is not reciprocated? Or is it that a married priest is like two apples, one kissing the other, the other ignoring the gesture? Does this painting represent the battle between the id (the left apple, full of desire) and the superego (the right apple, which must remain steadfast and resolute)? Are the masks a facade, an appearance the apples are trying to keep up, or are they a disguise, to hide the apples’ wrongdoing from chance onlookers? Only the left apple appears to have its mask tied on — is it the only one serious about maintaining this illusion, or is it the only one who needs to work to do so? Any or all of these are possible interpretations of the painting. The value of the work, and the skill of the painter, lie in being able to make the viewer ask these questions. Magritte’s personification of the apples, and his seemingly whimsical title, force the viewer to reconcile their apparent lunacy.
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The major question in 'To be or not to be' cannot be suicide. If it were, as many have noted, it would be dramatically irrelevant. Hamlet is no longer sunk in the depths of melancholy, as he was in his first soliloquy. He has been roused to action and has just discovered how to test the Ghost's words. When we last saw him, only five minutes before, he was anticipating the night's performance, and ...
It is easy to see, in light of all this, how magical realism and surrealism are excellent choices for the socially-minded artist looking to electrocute the public intellect back into regular use. By deliberately blowing fuses in everyday object relationships, by alienating the individual’s own world from him/her, it is possible to force a sort of scrambling for sensibility that makes the fullest possible use of the individual’s mind. But what to do with that mind once we’ve jump-started it? Can surrealism or magical realism continue to guide it?
Sartre considered the use of surrealism for ethical purposes. He supposed that it might provide a creative outlet for the francophone black poets whose cause he was championing when he wrote Black Orpheus. However, he quickly rejected this idea, saying,
The Essay on Jack Black School Speech World
I. INTRO Me and my brother Kyle, we were walking down this long and lonesome road, when all of a sudden there shined a shiny teacher, in the middle of the road, and she said, write the best speech in the world, or I'll eat your soul. If you haven't figured it out already I chose to do my speech on the great Thomas Black or better known as Jack Black. Actor, comedian, singer songwriter, and lead ...
“. . . it is the aim of surrealism to recover, beyond race and condition, beyond class, behind the conflagration of language, the silent dazzling shadows which no more oppose themselves to anything, not even to the day, because the day and the night and all opposites finally are dissolved and absorbed in them. . . .
“At the bottom of his soul, the white surrealist finds release; at the bottom of his soul, Césaire finds the fixed inflexibility of vindication and of resentment.” (Sartre, Black Orpheus, 36 – 37)
Sartre makes a good point. Since surrealism primarily asks the questions, rather than providing answers, it is conceivable that out of its mysterious shadows of meaning one could extract a support for apartheid rather than an attack against it. And in any case, surrealism, which fundamentally expresses a kind of senselessness, would do little to comfort the disenfranchised and justifiably angry black poets such as Césaire and Senghor. Magical realism, with its closer ties to the traditional artistic language of symbolism and imagery, might do better, but on the whole, it seems that Césaire and company are best served by the poetry of affirmation, of negritude, with which they eventually ended up. This seems to be a limitation of surrealism and magical realism. It would be one thing to use them to demonstrate the essential absurdity in the subjugation of one race by another — that could work quite well for both art forms, if orchestrated correctly — but for the purposes of the oppressed community, something more tangible, more down-to-earth is undoubtedly necessary.
But in our modern world, it is certainly a blessing to have found a form that allows us to make people think at all. In a world full of certain types of television shows, movies, video games, drugs, and the incessant stream of advertisements which hammer away at the average individual’s brain, knocking the brain out of this deadening stream is nothing short of the cultural responsibility of those of us who claim still to have the use of our mental facilities. It is time we reconstructed our world — by deconstructing it first.
Creativity York Times
Creativity Creativity is the sole heart of modernization, technology and the arts. Without creativity, humanity would still thrive in caves. There is no argument against creativity being an important aspect of our society, there is, however, a question whether creativity is spawned by mental disorder. Albert Einstein came up with ideas that seemed impossible or eccentric. Froyd's psychology ...
[1] I maintain that, while art is certainly not to be equated with entertainment, and while it has, in many ways, a higher calling than entertainment, it has also a responsibility to entertain, lest it should fail to affect its audience entirely. However, that discussion is outside the scope of this paper.
[2] This text found by a friend of mine on a South Jersey-based computer bulletin board system in 1996 and has been reprinted with grammatical errors intact. I have no idea whether it is an actual review or was created as it is from whole cloth. Neither do I have any clue as to the legal names of either “Shinobi” or “Happy Dog Potatohead”.
[3] This may be the real value of critics; not that they tell us the truth about a work, but that they give us an opinion to accept or reject, a point from which to start.
Works Consulted
Artaud, Antonin, trans. Mary Caroline Richards. The Theater and Its Double. (New York: Grove Press, 1958.)
Authors Unknown. “The Old Man and the Wormhole.” Available online: http://justice.loyola.edu/~mcoffey/ce/wormhole.html , May 9, 2000.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting For Godot. (New York: Grove Press, 1956.)
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. (New York: Grove Press, 1962.)
García Màrquez, Gabriel, trans. Gregory Rabassa. One Hundred Years of Solitude. (New York: Harper & Row, 1998.)
Magritte, René. Painting: Le Prêtre Marié (The Married Priest).
1961. Available online: http://www.magritte.com/3_detail.cfm?ID=253 , May 9, 2000.
O’Brien, Dan. “Borges Rides the Cyclone.” In Ketchin, Susan, and Neil Giordano, eds. 25 and Under/Fiction. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. S. W. Allen. Black Orpheus. (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1948.)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. Lloyd Alexander. The Wall. (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975.)
