When I was a kid, I watched a lot of National Geographic. It’s what my mother considered best for her two sons. Television was limited to something like two hours a day, and we had to ask permission before watching. The alternatives were music, ping-pong, study, playing outside, bike rides, friends or boredom. National Geographic is on my mind because I’ve just spent too much time looking for interesting things on YouTube–nature documentaries mostly–and as I did so, I was overwhelmed by “the superlative.”
As I watched, I (again) noticed how “loud” documentaries have become when compared to the National Geographic of my youth. A few things I found irritating were the music (over-dramatic), the visuals (too many special effects and computer generated images), and over-enthusiastic narrators who spent too much time “gawking” instead of informing. Compared with what I recall from childhood, documentaries have since gotten fat, really really fat. It’s as if the nature documentary no longer sufficed as documentary. They are now pseudonymous forms of action movie. That’s what bothered me. Bombarded as I was by verbal, visual and aural superlatives, it seems that the producers are more interested in me than they are in their subject matter.
As I browsed nature documentaries on YouTube, an interest in “nature” seemed to be about only half of what was going on. The other half (three quarters? nine tenths?) was an overt attempt to capture my attention. I almost want to say to “seduce me.” Are these videos here because somebody found something interesting and wanted to share it? Or are they here because of an antecedent need to validate a certain number of “subscribers” and “likes”? Me and my attention seemed to be more important than the actual content of the productions. I was looking to learn; yet I was forced to be “entertained.”
Like a lot of content on YouTube, it doesn’t seem to matter “what” you share (and one does find an abundance of inanity), so long as a whole bunch of people “subscribe and like.” This rather adolescent pursuit of attention relies heavily on a rhetoric of exaggeration, which has pushed the Nature Documentary of my youth in the direction of the Action Movie, ergo the title of this essay: the superlative.
Constructing the wonderful
Human beings want to be engaged–or is it that they flee boredom like death (?). Not sure. Whatever it is that moves humans the most, whatever it is that gets them excited or drives them to action, I’m going to pack all that under “the wonderful,” as an expedient for thinking. You might equally call it “fascination,” “engagement,” “awe” or even just “interest,” but what I want to get at is the deep emotional contact (with what?) that really drives humans to act. I suppose that underneath this approach to my subject is a belief that one really only ever does anything at all because of an emotion. “Reasons” can be seen as cover stories for unreasonable things, such as “emotions,” “beliefs” and “values.” So…”the wonderful” then is going to be the center of gravity here. We are drawn to it, but like the black hole at the center of our galaxy, it’s largely invisible–which I think might lead to some interesting observations. After all, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re a little more open to being surprised by what you eventually find.
Limits? No limits?
Children everywhere are drawn to limits: the strongest, the biggest, the fastest, the most [put qualifier of choice here]. School children quickly discover The Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley’s Believe it or Not! through which they dispute (and then resolve) the boundaries of human reality. Who’s the tallest man in the world? What’s the most dangerous wild animal? What’s the biggest earthbound mammal? What’s the smallest machine? This is admittedly a very elementary way of probing reality, but it does allow children to circumscribe the outermost (and innermost) limits of the human experience. It’s also pretty clear that adults retain this interest in superlatives. Google, “The ten most [put anything here]” and see what happens. And if you want to include another object of intense human fascination, you might as well try: “World’s largest breasts,” or “Biggest known penis.” (Go ahead, you know you want to…)
The “every-day” doesn’t seem to suffice to fill a life (who wants to be “average”?), and people will go looking for “wonder” somewhere along the outer edges of the human experience in an attempt to feel more alive, to have a more interesting existence. I liken this to filling in the blank spaces of a medieval map. If “the known world ends here,” we don’t leave “the unknown world” blank but fill it with wonderful (outrageous?) creatures: kraken, sea serpents (of superlative proportions), maelstroms, Scylla and Charybdis and other fantastical creations you yourself can recall from history or mythology. Homer’s Odyssey begins where the world map ends. That “end”–though “outside” of knowledge (professional cartographers will not venture there)–lies clearly within the boundaries of the human experience. It’s like in art class when the teacher asks you to draw the space around the object, the so-called “negative space” whereby your subject begins to define itself a contrario. Once you’ve done that, you’ve created a limit on the other side of which lies “the unknown”; this side of which lies your intended object. Although the original plan was to draw the statue your teacher put in the center of the room, by drawing what the statue isn’t, you inevitably end up drawing both: what is and what isn’t. It’s this isn’t that is of interest to me.
Fact and Fiction
Fact and Fiction. It is a clear mistake to think of the latter (“fiction”) as “unreal”–and therefore unimportant. Not only is fiction real, it’s probably more consequential to human well-being than 1+1=2 (a “fact” that most of us are incapable of doubting). It is when 1+1 is not 2 but say, 12 (or 13, or 14 or more) that life become interesting (fascinating, wonderful). A life filled only with facts is no life at all. What does a robot need but facts? Any time we hear about a machine substituting itself for a human being, it is because the human being has already been reduced to a fact, a mere algorithm, and she is now therefore replaceable by a robot. I’m not trying to deny the utility of facts, for there are practical applications (which are really expressions of value–different essay) for which a fact can be extremely useful. How can you build a safer automobile or find a vaccine without facts? All feats of engineering require a fixed relationship of facts to keep that bridge from collapsing. I get all that. Who doesn’t? It’s so patently mindless. But once we get good at manipulation of facts and the objects in the world to which they “correspond,” what’s left to account for the general quality of a human life? Are you going to translate a human life into a bunch of numbers and facts? Then hocus-pocus your way to some scientific “happiness function” whereby one can then “connect the dots” to a happy life? Pffffft!
Put it this way: As you sail your ship towards that star which most illuminates your heaven, a little practical knowledge (far less than you might think) will help you avoid otherwise hidden reefs. We do cherish the wonderful, its manifestation as love above all things. Of this I am convinced. But if you sink your ship on the way there, well…”Wonder” will still enter your life, but it will do so in the brief and paradoxical form of your own unexpected death. Clearly, the practical has its place in this world. It is simply the case that the human heart may not be one of them.
The superlative in every-day life
If superlatives set limits, and if there is some odd association between these limits and a feeling of wonder (“gawking” at superlatives), this may be so because limits are invitations to transgress. The adolescent pissing contest, whereby we are all tempted to engage in “one ups manship,” is a good example. Such conversations often start with, “If you think that was bad…” This is a form of everyday, human satisfaction that is hard to resist and which consists in going beyond the limit which was just spoken by your interlocutor. “It snowed 5 INCHES at my place last night.” [“Ha! If you think that was bad…] It applies equally to pleasure and to pain, with an odd penchant for the latter, as if my life experience is greater for having been the more painful. This pissing contest is rather pathetic, I know, but you see it happening all the time. Of much greater interest is the transgression of limits as a form of imagination. If you tell me that this marks the edge of the map, well, that’s license to fill it with whatever I want. And thus begins another voyage into wonderland. Leaving medieval maps behind, the best example of this today is probably outer space. Look up at the sky on a clear night. What do you see? The vastness of space is an immense blank canvas, the universe’s way of presenting you with a nightly invitation to the sublime. All manner of fascinating things are going on out there. Star Trek? Star Wars? ET? Aliens? Hollywood makes enormous use (and profit) of that huge blank space. And let’s not forget: long before the christening of the star ship Enterprise (NCC-1701!) somewhere in that infinite space were situated both heaven and hell. “God” is up there. And “up” isn’t necessarily up at all. Look up, look down, look any way you wish. If your mind is not already over-filled with too many facts, you’ll find empty space all around you that is just waiting to be filled.
What I’m getting at is this: There is a way of folding experience with the wonderful inwards. One need not appeal to the night sky and the infinite vastness of space to discover just how small one really is. There’s poetry in a discarded gum wrapper, in a lipstick stain, or in a few words spoken quietly to oneself about moonlight and an empty tin can (Maurice Sendak). There is pathos in loneliness and an even better pathos in love, human and divine. Nobody, on the other hand, escapes the pathos of death, so we needn’t worry about that. What we really want out of life is a wonderful life.
The Nature Documentary qua Action Movie
If the contemporary documentary often sins by being more interested in me than in its subject matter, what is it about me that is so important? More prosaically, if every documentary about sharks ends up looking like a partial remake of Jaws, what is it that the producer is really trying to do? If I came here to learn, why am I being treated like someone who came here to be entertained? “Why so much noise?”
It is a horrible injustice to the subtleties of human being that it is forced to grow up in a world that treats it as both deaf and blind. There’s another pissing contest going on here, and it’s called “market share.” Nobody is ignorant of the phenomenon, but I think its consequences on human being have been vastly under-estimated. If everyone is pounding on my door, the last thing I want to do is answer the door. As anecdotal “proof” I point to the pile of junk mail (more than a month’s worth) sitting unopened on the table to my left. (I wonder if there’s anything important buried in there?) All these people, when faced with an intransigent door (mine), their most common reaction is not only annoying but rather bone-headed: they knock harder (or, they delegate the task to some machine that does it for them…”Scam Likely,”…the bastards). If old-school National Geographic found itself losing the pissing contest of market share, the solution was obviously to piss higher and louder than its competitors. Unfortunately, their competitors apply the same mindless logic and drink more beer so they too can piss higher and louder. The end result of this seems to be a world populated by the deaf and blind, who become so out of self-defense. The loser in all of this is ourselves. Nobody can hear or see for lack of head-space in which to do either. That space has been filled with the noise of people pissing.
I generally find superlatives to be in rather poor taste. That’s just a question of preference. Chalk it up to heightened rhetorical sensitivity. I’m not going to reproach you for overusing them, but when communication itself degenerates into a pissing contest, this is the superlative twisted into a mindless form of attention grabbing. Yes, it’s still about the wonderful and being captivated, for that is ultimately what we wish to feel. (“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” Anyone?) Instead of being constantly bombarded by the noise generated by people competing for your attention, why not come at it from a different angle? The vastness of outer space, this infinite and virtually blank canvas which both fascinates and sets our minds to wandering has its analagon within the human mind: silence. In order to feel anything at all, one must have some reserve interior space to do so; empty spaces which lie beyond the limits of the map where one can draw sea monsters and other fanciful creatures that both amuse and captivate. (Or leave it empty! The point is that if it is populated, that it be by people and things that aren’t screaming constantly at you: “Buy, buy, buy!” but for other, more human reasons; and ultimately by you and through fee exercise of your own ability to choose.) That’s where Homer (and Joyce) put Ulysses. It’s where you’ll find More’s Utopia. “Fiction!” you say? Fine with me. All these wonderful places are everywhere and nowhere, which is really just another way of saying that they exist in only one possible location: within ourselves. In the case of my mother sitting two children down in front of a nature documentary, it worked. The transformation of the nature documentary into an action movie was not necessary for us because within the silence of my childhood, any sound at all was enough to captivate. Fascination arises out of the void.
I wonder to what extent this remains possible in a world where one’s interior space–from the moment of birth–is under constant assault by those pretending that your attention is not your own. There is form of subjective colonialism we have accepted as the norm, which not only includes constant banging on my door, but also the treatment of every new human being as an opportunity for brand-name sailing vessels to rush in and plant their flags. If personal identity (gender inflected or otherwise) is more problematic than it used to be, this is clearly in part because of the over-crowding of interior space–which we both allow and encourage because it is seen as the primary motor of economic growth in consumer societies. This is why nature documentaries have gotten louder and fatter. They want “their share,” but of what? Of something that does not belong to them: me. Every human being on this planet has this void inside of him/her/it/them merely by virtue of being born. My mother may or may not have known this, but she got it right anyway. With my threshold for fascination being what it is, I cannot help but find obesity, superlative obesity–Baudrillard might call it “obscenity”–in too many places. Force fed in this manner, it kind of just makes you want to vomit.
I will close this line of thought by taking a rather stock philosophical off-ramp: If each of us possesses empty space, the void, as our most intimate possession, then we have ill-advisedly allowed too many of the wrong people to assuage our fears of death. Decadence is not a substitute for wonder.
The Wonderful?
I don’t think anyone knows what the wonderful is per se. Although I am convinced of one thing: it isn’t “out there,” no matter how many times you post it on Facebook. There’s nothing inherently wonderful (or boring) “out there,” for if there is no one to admire your “purple mountain majesties,” I find it hard to maintain that there is majesty at all. (Much less a “purple mountain”). Of course the packaging of reality certainly does exist, and that’s kind of what I’ve been talking about this whole time. If nature documentaries (cooking shows, televised sports, or even… the News!?!) all borrow the rhetoric of the action movie, it’s certainly for a reason. It’s those reasons I’m putting into question, and the fundamental narcissism of making “me and my attention” the primary object for your productions. Me and my attention–in the deepest sense of these words–belong to me. They are mine! I give them freely to those for whom I care and who care for me. The rest of you YouTubers, influencers, spammers, junk-mailers, scammers and social media morons can go to hell. You’ve “captured” my anger and my frustration, I’ll give you that, but you’re not going to catch the rest of me that easily with superfluous packaging which resembles the inanity of saying, “Mmmmmmm!” real hard to make the food taste better. It’s like having forced fun. People around you may be tricked by some form of imitative envy and thereby start to like, genuinely like (?) exactly what you so enthusiastically “Mmmmm-ed.” I’m sorry, but your disingenuous enthusiasm, though quite a disease, is not very contagious to me. If I “Mmmmm” with you, it’s because the food we share has already spoken to me. I don’t need your superlative exaggerations to make this happen. I have my own values to do this for me. The rest of you are free to go to Disneyland.
I’ll close with a thought that took me quite by surprise, following as it did on the heels of the preceding bit of rantiness. If it’s packaging we’re dealing with here, how about the following as another place to start thinking: Sharing the wonderful is inherently problematic because it isn’t inherently wonderful. Go figure.
Thédoc
