Douglas Mercer
October 8 2024
A shark has black eyes, lifeless eyes, dead eyes, a doll’s eyes—Robert Shaw
Nothing is real—John Lennon
Stay, illusion!—William Shakespeare
Carl Jung has been variously described as a depth psychologist and an analytical psychologist, the latter being styled as an empirical study of the psyche (for the Greeks psyche was soul not mind; mind was nous). Jung as a child was described as being frighteningly internal, would often dream of secret underground caves with throne rooms and he fashioned a manikin which he put in a pencil case and hid it away in the attic.
Depth: death
I once went to a movie and we were waiting to go in and in front of a different theater was one of those cardboard cutouts they use to promote the showing feature, this one being a replica of a pink unicorn about as tall as a somewhat small horse. The woman I was with had once told me that she had a photogenic memory; but now she told me oh look: a life-sized unicorn. One can be as caustic as one chooses but when one is in the presence of greatness all one can do is smile.
The cluster of words relating to the concepts of the eerie and the enigmatic are a means to attempt to domesticate a disturbing feeling of some kind of unknown enormity and so shield it from admission to the psyche. Freud said the uncanny is when one becomes lost in space or unmoored by some feeling which takes one away from the cozy, the known, the homey, the homely, the seemly, the everyday, the normal, the ordinary, the quotidian, the schmaltzy and the kitsch, the infantile and the nostalgic. This violent eruption is as when the floor falls out beneath one and one sails out along a different set of coordinates (if coordinates there are) and one finds oneself lost in the woods with no breadcrumbs to lead one back. The uncanny is said to be beyond the ken or beyond the pale or a bridge too far, and is always associated with the heebie jeebies, the creeps, flesh crawling, horror and the unseemly and the unwholesome. Critical theory calls this the abject state, when one has been cast out and disoriented and things feel abnormal and, often, unclean; and certainly one is frightened out of one’s wits or, as is said, scared to death.
The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling or disturbing in a way that feels oddly familiar, rather than simply mysterious. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar entity is encountered in a frightening, eerie, or taboo context.
A familiar : a ghost
In his peculiar ersatz way Pynchon (paranoia is connecting everything with everything) called synchronicities Kute Koincidences. But there is nothing cute about it to the one who experiences them: it is ominous, baleful, threatening, haunting and spooky. That is the peculiar feeling occurs in the midst of what is most at hand and known; but everything is transformed into something odd and frightening, as if the call were coming from nowhere but inside the house. These are the freaks of nature or the gaps or blanks or lacunae in reality like déjà vu or synchronicities, thoughts which frighten one for a time and then are repressed. Familiars are supernatural entities or interdimensional beings or simply ghosts. When the familiar becomes strange one begins to see the thing in itself for nothing is ordinary, all is inordinate. The entire subject is taboo because nothing frightens one more than losing one’s mind, so to speak; and the phenomena is often associated with the secrets of nature of divine secrets which come spilling out of nowhere.
Nietzsche termed nihilism the most uncanny of guests; when one experiences the uncanny one wants to pinch oneself to assure one that one is real, the way young girls (Ophelia mad) will cut themselves as a way to counter derealization. It is recommended that instead of cutting that victim of this species of psychotic break be given sharp sensations such as sucking on bitter or tart candy.
Derealization is when one believes that one is not real but others are; solipsism is its opposite number, when one believes that one is real but others are not. For this one there are no sharp sensations that will provide a remedy for the feeling itself is the sharp sensation.
Schizophrenia is defined as a break with reality, but a breakdown is always necessary for a breakthrough.
The strange, the mysterious, the secret, the odd, the uncanny, the eerie, the creeps, the heebie jeebies, the peculiar, things freak us out, or weird us out, one’s flesh is said to crawl, one gets goose bumps, one’s hair stands on end, as if a cold wind or electric current were suddenly running through the voltage.
Nihilism is uncanny because with it comes a belief that all the known rules one thought are in place depart, all the guideposts which one has known are suddenly seen to be gone and one finds oneself trackless in an unknown waste, with nothing to lean on and nothing to trust. Thus one becomes a babe in the woods or lost in the woods, the floor drops out, the ground begins to move beneath one’s feet. Uncanny is said to be out of the ken; but perhaps it means not to be canny. Canny: clever, shrewd, prudent. Also snug which makes sense because uncanny means uncozy or un-snug. In baby talk children are said to be tucked in tight so as to be as snug as a bug in a rug.
The infantile rage is to go back to the womb, to regress indefinitely. Freud said that was what repetition was all about, to be surrounded by the known and the normal, to regress to a former stage where one feels at home.
Weird: fate, destiny, word, toward
Going forward into the uncanny is to leave the known for the unknown; German Idealism posits that the uncanny most occurs when taboos or forbidden secrets of an esoteric or divine nature are revealed; this is supposed to be a violation of a sacred order, the crossing of a limn and is deemed to be an enormity. Heidegger says that this time of transition is the most dangerous because the aura of unwholesomeness and unseemliness surrounds man when he begins to transcend his measure (see The Heart Of Nature, White Biocentrism, September 25 2024).
Freud’s discussion of the uncanny centers on the issue of dolls, particularly the doll “Olympia” in Hoffman’s story The Sandman. In the story the uncanny relates to the uneasy uncertainty regarding the reality or unreality of the doll which vexes the protagonist and make him abject; the eponymous evil figure is said to blind children by throwing sand in their eyes to make them have black eyes, lifeless eyes, like a doll’s eyes. To throw fairy dust in one’s eyes is to subject one to bitter illusion.
The Valley Of The Dolls is a 1967 American Film starring Sharon Tate (see The Moist Star, White Biocentrism, June 30 2024) and in the movie dolls refers to barbiturates which are depressants with hypnotic or trance like effect hence “dolls.” In the movie everyone is vapid and has dead eyes and dead souls. The Stepford Wives is a 1975 American film in which the wives are turned into docile or hypnotized dolls or robots by their husbands.
The Uncanny Valley refers to people’s relative level of unease or disorientation related to a robot’s perceived degree of resemblance to a human being. The hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is at least fairly unlifelike people feel comfortable and increasingly positive and empathetic, until the robot is made more human seeming but not quite perfect the response quickly becomes strong revulsion, unease, and disorientation. However, as the robot’s appearance comes to seem indistinguishable from that of a human being the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels. That trough where a kind of eerie horror and recoil manifests itself due to the almost human like appearance of the doll is called in the professional literature as the valley of the uncanny. It is the state of almost being human which one finds deeply enigmatic and problematic. In god’s workshop he crafts the bodies and the spirits, like a master sculptor bent down over the material and he never settles for perfection.
A fugue state is where the normal frame of reality seems to break down for a moment and reality goes haywire, one is thrust into a kind of hurdy gurdy or pell mell or helter skelter state of being and is at sea for a moment, and then all the lights come back on and one is once more ensconced within the normal everyday flow of things, that is one has seamlessly slipped back into what we take for reality. One pinches oneself when one does not know if one is awake, or may be in a dream (German traum, trauma).
It is our age (the Ultimate Age) in which confabulated reality comes to the fore in the guise of AI which collects all the strands of the fears and horror of the verisimilitude problem and in which Rilke’s pointed question “What Is Real?” is asked with increasing and pointed persistence. Under the rubric of dolls are any object said to imitate humans: statues (The Winter’s Tale, Pygmalion), dummies, stuffed animals, marionettes, puppets, automata, wax works, holograms, mechanical animals stuffed animals. Pinocchio is a marionette who wishes to become a real boy and this wish is related to the concept of lying. Borges says that mirrors and human reproduction are abominable because they propagate more beings. The issue of Mechanical Reproduction was prominent in Avante Garde circles relative to Andy Warhol, with its various theoretical offshoots of fakes, simulacra, copies, and replacements. In his essay (see A Real Bird Sings, White Biocentrism, July 27 2024) Phillip Dick facetiously speculates what would happen if the mechanical animals at the Jungle Ride at Disneyland were replaced by real animals, his conclusion being that were that to happen a real bird would finally sing.
Gary Kasparov said that when he started playing Deep Blue the computer ended up beating him from to time because it could simply grind out the sequence of logical moves one after another at a faster rate; but that in the brief space when the game could go either way humans had one advantage: making the human move, an unpredictable and intuitive move that the computer was not capable of as it was moving only according to a formal logic. Then one day out of the blue the computer made what Kasparov considered to be a human move and he looked across from him and wondered what in fact he was looking at; so sudden and shocking was it and so startled was he that his hair stood on edge and bumps were raised on his skin. Now no human can beat Deep Blue.
A famous American Novelist said that if a computer ever was able to generate a novel that he considered to be one of quality he would cease to write, as it would call into question the very nature of creativity and human identity.
Should our title then not be The God Of Illusion but the Imitation Game?
***
The original title for Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History was The God Of Illusion.
Infantile omnipotence is the sense of omnipotence that arises in the misapprehension of reality which is endemic to the period of primary narcissism, during which the infant hallucinates its world and thinks that it itself is the cause of this world; during regressions to the infantile state one indulges in wishful thinking and attributes total power to his psychic states. Infantile omnipotence is also a feature of obsessional pathology, in which it appears as superstitious or magical thinking; in psychosis, as delusions of grandeur; and in creative people who are able to escape reality and manipulate a world of fantasy. The condition can include beliefs in telepathic and animistic thought, and also through pathologies such as obsessional neurosis and psychotic megalomania and inordinate self-aggrandizement.
No sooner does one open an umbrella than it begins to rain; when one opens one’s eyes one creates a world. Causally speaking the victim of primary narcissism puts the horse before the cart. Cartesianism is the belief that the mind exists in an absolute elsewhere but has no physical instantiation in the brain. An old undergraduate parlor trick is to do a thought experiment which asks one to give a logical proof that one is not in fact a head in a vat (she keeps her face in a jar by the door) in a laboratory which is receiving electrical impulses which create one’s reality. Of course one cannot; one might say that the graphics are great or, perhaps, that the paint by number morning sky looks so phony.
For the psychiatrist the life of Yukio Mishima is a fertile field, it is one long extravaganza of psychosis, and on the subject one could give both a clinic and a master class on schizophrenia (breaks with reality). His first book was called Confessions Of A Mask summoning up the images of false identity and obscured reality from the beginning. He vacillated between thinking he was not real and the world was, or vice versa, the world was real but he was not, and in the end concluded that nothing was so he might as well take a crack at the screen and see what lay on other side; and in his fantasy there was a fable called the realm of death where he once supposedly lived and to which he would return. These of course are regressive babblings of an infantile mind which longs nostalgically for some putatively lost world to which the succor of oblivion can reclaim. They say that his death was ritualistic in the most profound sense, he planned it down the last detail for over a year, this was a case of premediated suicide; all his life he had been a slight man and working out with weights was his last chance to establish some sort of contact with the world, to experience his corporeal reality; the results were ridiculous as he had spindly legs and a lopsided out of proportion muscle bound torso which was grotesque; it was like he was a sculptor who had created some ludicrous being half this and half that, a figure out of nightmares; for one who pursued the images of beauty all his life it must have been chastening and disheartening and mocking; he also began a campaign for Japan to go back to the Samurai way of life, another fantasy of allegedly pure beginnings and once more as way of exerting power in the world; the little corner of their grounds that the Japanese Army provided for his as a celebrity for what was after all his toy Army must have struck him as ridiculous as well; it was this sense of being unable to break through in the realm of his life, his art, or in politics which set him on the course to Seppuku.
Yukio Mishima likened life to life being a screen and that death is like taking a scimitar to the screen to cut through the screen but as you do you find yourself staring into another screen thinking about taking a scimitar to it (to life to life with me, Harrison 1968; successive states, Pierce 1977).
When he turned in his manuscripts they were always flawless and spotless—not a blot on them. The morning of his death he turned in his last work at the end of which he shows a man entering into the heart of the void, the light within the darkness, known popularly as satori:
“On 22 July 1975, just before a hospital appointment, Honda goes to Gesshū Temple for the first time since February 1914. Satoko, who is now the Abbess, admits him, but during their conversation he mentions Kiyoaki, and she claims that she never knew anyone of that name. Baffled and desolate, Honda replies. Perhaps then there has been no I. In the final scene of the book, Honda strolls through the temple garden at Satoko’s invitation, a place that had no memories, nothing.”
When the men got the to the Army headquarters they told them that they wanted to speak to the commandant; like many of those on the right Mishima was horrified by the spirit of 68 and the radical left taking over universities and the streets; among other things he wanted his death to be a martyrdom for ancient Japanese life; the commandant was annoyed upon hearing that Mishima was downstairs but he had learned long since that it was far easier to humor and indulge him if one wanted him to go away. Once in the room Mishima’s men tied up the Commandant and demanded that the men all be assembled in the courtyard below; after a desultory attempt to talk Mishima out of it the Commandant complied; you can see the pictures of Mishima standing on the ledge outside the building haranguing the Army about ancient Japan and its values; but it was of no avail; having been hooted down he returned to the room and ritually disemboweled himself as one of his friends sliced his head off with a scimitar. There is no I, no memories: nothing.
In addition 25 November is the day he began writing Confessions Of A Mask, and this work was announced as Techniques of Life Recovery, Suicide inside out. Mishima also wrote down in notes for this work: this book is a will for leave in the Realm of Death where I used to live. If you take a movie of a suicide jumped, and rotate the film in reverse, the suicide person jumps up from the valley bottom to the top of the cliff at a furious speed and he revives. Writer Takashi Inoue believes he wrote Confessions of a Mask to live in postwar Japan, and to get away from his Realm of Death; by dying on the same date that he began to write Confessions of a Mask, Mishima intended to dismantle all of his postwar creative activities and return to the Realm of Death where he used to live. On the way to the Army Facility they had a route planned out but, by chance that morning, road work blocked the way and thus rerouted they drove by the school where his children (boy 8, girl 6) were; sitting in the back of the black vehicle Mishima turned to the person next to him, laughed softly, and noted that were they in a movie right now this is where the sad music would play (lush scores often try to manipulate the viewers emotional response to images on a screen).
In the Middle Ages in Europe the stars (or suns) were thought to be pin pricks on a dome which encircled the earth through which the all-encompassing light of God poured in from without; that is in their minds they inhabited a kind of toy universe. We also inhabit in our minds a kind of toy or model universe and what Artificial Intelligence is is the god’s way of modeling for us how to become creators of worlds, beings and images ourselves, it’s why it is seemingly so uncanny and why it unnerves so many to see life recreated; but it’s the only way to learn how to project the images in both space and in time and to impose our fantasy life on the world.
We live in a toy universe, and we are in a game like the one they play in Second Life, with avatars and splash screens. But the game is about to go live, to be broadcast generally, that is the game is about to go on the air. It will not be a toy then but the real thing, even better than the real thing, really, for in the god’s workshop they are beginning to clean up to do the mopping up exercises, the index on the endex.
***
If one chooses to peer into the god’s workshop, to go down into the interstices and peer behind the arras one should expect to be alarmed. One will see the figure up on the ladder in perfect concentration working on the materials; one will see molds and casts and body parts will be strewn across the floor as in some primal scene of murder. For when one sees the doll or the robot it is not its relative state of sentience or reality that spooks us: it is our own. For it can be done once why not once before or even a million or an infinite amount of times? For in the workshop, down in the basement, where one can hear the sound of the machines, it is not anything as trifling as nihilism which is the most uncanny of guests: it is us, man, the most dangerous animal of them all.
The idea that we can create the dolls, that we can create the beings, is what allures us and scares us all at once; but it is their synthetic nature that seems uncanny. It is this fear which triggers the regression, for when one gets near the god’s secrets being revealed we both recall and recoil and return and regress to the infantile state with its feelings of solipsism and oneness and omnipotence; but adulthood is our destiny, that it is time we grow up by learning, not panic at what we perceive to be the horror or crossing the so called threshold or limn of the supposed taboo. If you are going to dive through the splash screen go all the way to the ocean’s floor the purpose of which is to find the Rhine Gold and bring it to the surface. The valley of the uncanny is in fact the valley of the shadow of death—which is why the icy Hyperboreans always live in the rarefied heights of the glacial skies, for it is better up here. This is where the commanding heights are found in the sunny uplands, and we no longer search for the songs from the mouth of the river, but find its outlet to the sea. We are not going home, to want to go home is to want to be wrapped in a mother’s love and a father’s guidance, to be enchanted by a lullaby, to dream sweet dreams; to want to go home is an infant’s dream; to want to repeat is a childlike magic incantation to make one feel at home among the familiar; much better to have a nostalgia for the endless future, much better to be sailing along the edges of forever. There is no going back, no breadcrumbs are needed, no one needs to click their heels three times, for there is place much better than home, and omnipotence is the least of it, open your umbrella and it will reign. It’s what happens when you finally find that life-sized unicorn.
***
Notes:
The movie The Game (1997) tells the story of a wealthy investment banker who is given a mysterious birthday gift by his brother, participation in a game that integrates in strange ways with his everyday life. As the lines between the banker’s real life and the game become more uncertain, hints of a larger conspiracy begin to unfold.
Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing (1982) examines the nature of honesty and uses various constructs, including a play within a play, to explore the theme of reality versus appearance.
A pretty nurse is selling poppies
From a tray
And though she feels she is in a play
She is anyway
The Real Thing—ad line for Coca-Cola
When he was two years old Mishima's father would take him to the train tracks, hold him out over the track as the onrushing train barreled down, and then whisk him away at just the final moment. The purpose of this exercise was to steel the child's nerves.
The chimerical unicorn is the national animal of Scotland; the Scottish Play is Macbeth where nothing is but what is not.
A splash screen is a graphical control element consisting of a window containing an image, a logo, and the current version of the software. A splash screen can appear while a game or program is launching. A splash page is an introduction page on a website. A splash screen may cover the entire screen or web page; or may simply be a rectangle near the center of the screen or page. The splash screens of operating systems and some applications that expect to be run in full screen usually cover the entire screen.
Now, my excellent friend, said my companion, you are in possession of all you need to follow my argument. We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god. Does that mean, I said in some bewilderment, that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence? Of course, he said, but that is the final chapter in the history of the world.
The God Of Illusion
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Douglas Mercer
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