Posted By BillHeise on July 11, 2010

Okay, let’s review. Here’s how I look at art. The viewer starts out with a Status Quo (that’s ‘the way things are now,’ for the less Latin inclined). But the clever artist has identified a conflict in the Status Quo. The introduction of conflict into the previously untroubled world of the Status Quo means that ‘Art’ must come the rescue. By the end of the piece art–whether it is a narrative or a painting–the artist will have resolved the conflict.

Art, therefore, is necessarily opposed to the Status Quo way of looking at things, and artists tend to gravitate towards odd ways of looking at the world. What is more, they tend to think that people who are satisfied with living in the most prosperous area in human history (the American suburbs) are shallow. Only conflict, the artist says, is good. Complacency is bad. This means that artists will fall on the sid of total revolution more often than they will fall on the side of maintaining the suburban Status Quo. That’s what we all expect.

Of course, there are problems with the anti-Status Quo people (can I call them the Anti-Status-Quo-ites? I think I will). Most Americans live in suburbs, but a select few live in cities. The give a direction in the world away from the complacent suburbs to the big, powerful, capable-of-embracing-change cities. In such a world, the city people don’t need to pay attention to the Anti-Status-Quo-ites who inhabit the complacent suburbs or (horror of horrors!) who inhabit the country. This has, in recent years, divided the country up into Blue States (like New York, California, and Illinois) and Red States (like Montana, Texas, and South Carolina). People from the cities look down on their brothers and sisters from the country and their gun-toting, country-music-loving ways. They don’t even know enough to think about the errors of their ways. And, being ignorant, they do not have to be consulted for their opinion on the Coming Revolution.

They are people who candidate Obama (now President) was talking about when he made this speech during his campaign.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. … And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not,” Obama said.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama said.

Such comment bespeak a real divide in this country, and Obama (in my opinion) did a poor job of explaining away his remarks (though he tried). And Rush Limbaugh continues to push the remark forward to divide Obama from the conservative base. But my goal today is not to attack other people’s political motivations (I say again that I am not political) but to point out the limitations of politics through an example from the world of art.

And so I give you, The Dot and The Line: An Adventure in Lower Mathematics.

Chuck Jones was one of the most gifted animators in history. Before Pixar, he was testing the boundaries of art. And in this short animation (released in 1965), he tested the boundaries of art and human relations through animation.

“Once upon a time, there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a dot” (1:20). It’s a narrative, so there must be conflict. He says, “You’re the beginning and and the end, the hub, the core, and the quintessence” (1:33), but she loves a squiggle “who never seemed to have anything on his mind, at all” (1:40).

This puts the knowing reader in mind of a set of ideas. The line is a too-rigid white male. The dot is a “frivolous” woman looking for love. And the squiggle is the totally free spirit unleashed by the rising spirit of free love. This was the situation I grew up with. I could identify myself as a straight line–I think we called them squares in my day. Women were indifferent to me, except as friends. They preferred squiggles.

The Line learns to bend himself—with great effort, mind you— into a myriad of shapes, while the Squiggle remains the same squiggle. The Dot confronts the Squiggle, who confesses that “I never know how it’s going to turn out” (8:45). The line ends up getting over her obsession with the squiggle, as she suddenly realizes “that what she thought was freedom and joy was nothing but anarchy and sloth” (9:00). She falls in love with the line, who imparts to his life a sense of direction and purpose.

Why Does The Dot Change?

Was it the Line’s ability to bend into shapes that made him so attractive to the formerly “frivolous” Dot? If that were the case, then Chuck Jones would have discovered an “Undeniable Truth,” and we should follow him, directing our energies towards guiding our women towards men like Bill Gates, who have a lot of money, and away from men like Allen Ginsberg.

I don’t think so. The lesson I learned from this cartoon and others like it was that learning is good, while staying the same is bad. This, incidentally, is the same lesson that a careful observer might have learned from watching the 1981 film My Dinner with André. In that film, the squiggly world traveler André has had a myriad experiences, while the stay-at-home lump Wally has led a restricted life at home in New York City. The people like the Line in Chuck Jones’ experimental animation, have the same values in My Dinner with André, but they stay at home in NYC, rather than venturing forth, as the squiggle André has:

New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison.

The Sense of an Ending

So my response to the Dot and the Line is not to jump in because the Line brings a sense of an ending to the Dot’s quest for balance in the world, as opposed to the Squiggle. What matters in both models is that we learn and grow. The direction we grow in is a matter of cultural preference, and culture changes. And as it changes, we change along with it.

In the 60s, we wanted to be squiggles. In the 70s, we wanted to be part of the in-crowd (‘the beautiful people’) of knowers, as opposed to the out-crowd of unknowers. By 1981, we were going back to Chuck Jones’ vision of the universe of human relations. Bill Gates and a hoard of geeks were taking over the world again, and ‘the great unwashed,’ with their dreams of revolution, were on the decline. Then, after a generation of greed, we returned to our idealistic roots with Obama.

Literary critics have often mistaken their feeling that they have arrived at an end for the feeling that others, who have not arrived at the same end as they, have not journeyed at all, but merely have stayed home, like Wally, not thinking at all. This is to mistake art—which must have an ending to every story—with life—where there are often different ways that reason can build on the same foundation of experience. This, in my opinion, is what happened in the 60s.

Culture in the 60s

In the 1960s, America was split along our response to the rise, for the first time in history, of American ideals to the center of the world stage. Liberals threw away the middle ground of changing reason for the absolute ground aesthetics, which offered a permanent and unchanging ground for our human experience. People on the left started talking about revolution to overthrow the power of those who were not embracing change as fast as those ‘in the know’ thought they should be.

The neo-conservative movement was founded at the same time. Neo-conservatives were operating on much of the same ground as the Liberals. They embraced ‘American exceptionalism’ as the end-point of history and wanted their rightwing ‘American’ policies to be embraced over the ‘pinko’ policies of the left.

This divide is still operational in America.

Searching For The Ground of Truth

It is instructive to look at a book by a committed liberal—Arthur Herzog’s The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America—to see how many of his statements would be made by right wing politicians today.

Clearly—whatever else is true of us—Americans are a people deeply deeply mired in their own rhetoric. To get on solid ground will mean to carry on a nonviolent struggle against deception wherever it appears, in institutions and in people. Even more than clean streets, we need clear heads. (27)

Our response, when confronted by such a statement, is to dig deeper towards the truth that lies beneath the mounds of error which have destabilized the ground on which we stand. But that statement could be made by Rush Limbaugh speaking about Barak Obama in 2010. It was, in fact, directed at Richard Nixon in 1973.

How, I have learned to ask, do we know when we have settled of ‘stable ground?’ if both Herzog and Limbaugh are voicing the same sentiment coming from two completely separate and politically opposed camps? My answer is that politics only appears to lead us to ‘stable ground.’

Where Would You Put Chuck Jones?

The reaction among academics is to reduce all speech acts to politics and then to judge people according to their politics. The fact of the matter is that Chuck Jones probably wasn’t thinking in political terms at all. But let’s say that the academics are right, and that all speech is political. Let me ask the question “Where would you put Chuck Jones in such a universe?”

• Is he a liberal? He actively campaigned for the reelection of FDR in 1994 with his film Hell Bent For Election. He does propose that the Line bend himself, rather than remaining static? And he does align himself with the citified world of opera (as opposed to hick music of the banjo) in his Long Haired Hare. But he does not go far enough. In 1965, that may have been okay, but in 2010 we have progressed from sweet and innocent Ye-ye to the world of Jane Birkin.
• Is he a conservative? He doesn’t give the Line too much leeway. His shapes need to be ‘rational’ shapes, rather than ‘arbitrary squiggles.’ A reliance on reason has become the mark of someone who is too ‘square.’ And he was thinking about opera in his citified music, not rap.
• Is he a moderate? He does toe a middle line between anarchy and rigidity.

The fact of the matter is that people can decide on any one of these three answers and be satisfied with themselves. But each of these classifications—made through reason—breaks down before we come to the end of reasoning to the truth.

What’s more, the necessity of using reason means that you must take all that you like and dismiss all that you don’t like. This makes is important that, not only do you have answers, but that the opposition have not quested for answers. The proposition that your opposition fails to grasp what you have grasped puts up false—and ultimately unnecessary—boundaries in the quest for the—ultimately unreachable—truth.

It was in answer to this that the Romantics eschewed reason altogether—reason meant that you had to learn things and place them in hierarchies through the imperfect light of reason—in favor of the metaphysical and immediate sense of the self without hierarchy. This has the advantage of having everyone think that because they have quested after and found answers that they are better than their friends. The disadvantage of the Romantic model of education is that it made everybody stupid, while not providing answers that would lead anybody to a ‘solid ground’ except in their own minds. And the concern with liminal boundaries of human existence is why liberals ten towards policies of destruction and revolution until they can end history as it was always supposed to be.

This is why conservatives embrace reason. It provides a ground on which they can build their uni-directional fantasies in a multi-polar and multi-directional world.

Conclusion

Things shift; times change; and with the shifting times, culture changes. Both sides of the American political debate are committed to an absolute vision of reality in which each side believes that they have access to the truth that is denied to their opponents. My thinking is that the liberals have thrown too much of reason away in their pursuit of absolute. I think that conservatives have restricted their pursuit too much by limiting acceptable art in their pursuit of an absolute truth.

And I still love Chuck Jones. He was a great artist who was toiling away in a medium which, at the time, no one thought was artistic at all. His position has changed in that respect: we now acknowledge him as one of the great artist of the 20th century. I can forgive him for not having grasped the final truth of things after which time and history will come to a standstill at last.

So here’s my last tribute to Chuck Jones: it’s a piece called What’s Opera, Doc?, but is commonly called Kill the Wabbit. It is a parody of Wagner’s Ring:

Brilliant!

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