Monthly Archives: September 2020

Book of Days – Between Time and Plagues.

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Voices from the twentieth-century interview a variety of individuals in a medieval town; a woman, a jewish itinerant storyteller, a Benedictine friar, a madwoman, a jewish man named Jacob, a physician and a knight. The image is frontal and unnatural. The questioner speaks bluntly, unemotionally and succinctly. The questions asked are formulated in a very direct, inquisitive and somehow assertive style. These are twentieth-century questions brought into the medieval age mind by the interviewers, questions that are charged with current knowledge; political debate; social habits, and current western ethical and moral dilemmas. The most expressive and powerful moments of the interviews are shown by their facial expression and the ways they formulate their responses. The characters appear to be surprised, puzzled, insecure, or just ignorant of the nature of the questions.

In a premonitory way, a Jewish girl called Eva, whispers to the camera that she has had a vision where many people die. The camera pans into a modern day street, the screen suddenly floods with a red filter and different color images of nature and human life start to unravel. The sequence follows planet earth set from the surface of the moon; the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion; rough seas and waves; a spider creeping its legs looking at the camera; a flower hanging upside down and blooming in fast motion; Ku Klux Klansmen and military parading around a bonfire, a group of men seated in a kitchen table toasting, soldiers in Vietnam, a couple kissing, magma flowing downhill at night.

The Black Death strikes and the peoples start to die from the ailment all over the city. The camera enters the darkness inside the door of the jewish home. In the left, laying in bed, rests the body of a woman. As the camera shifts to the right, another woman lays facing up in the top of a table, beautifully dead with her arms and long hair hanging graciously down to the floor. The camera keeps moving aiming at the floor where three bodies wrapped in dark cloth lie together. In the last image we can see the dead bodies of Jacob and his young granddaughter Eva; her head peacefully resting in her grandfather’s chest and hugging him. There are signs of disorder in the room, pieces of bread and a dish in the floor, there is dust in the bodies, maybe commotion ending in some violence. The camera pans out of the room immediately, and connecting through vocal music, a sequence of images of maps showing undetermined locations in each continent follow. Each continent shows a brief take of its native peoples carrying out their daily rituals and routines that freezes an instant before the next follows. Persia starts, then moves to North America, South America,  Japan and ending in Africa.

Comment on Book of Days.

The movie pulls many different strings and opens enormous possibilities for conversation by blending imagery and inquiry. The initial explosion opens the perspective into an old town in the medieval times. The blown wall is a gateway into the past within the present of a twentieth-century city. Despite the divergence in time, the questions its citizens are trying to answer are all the same ones we still ask ourselves today.These are timeless and like Yael Samuel says “depicts all of history happening at once”. This blending of two cities in different ages in one single location at the same time contemplates the enigmatic question of a society and a civilization that fundamentally remains unchanged over the centuries.

From a broad perspective the movie opens the conversation about the human experience and how we understand the equilibrium between nature and progress in our societies. The questioning of the locals  is connected through the eyes of the jewish girl and her family to quotidian life routines and nature scenes. The images are powerful, some violent, others lovely. The questions, while very obvious and vital to us, are intriguing and puzzling for a fourteenth-century mind. The answers show a different understanding of the cosmos and the world. We can see that there is a different believe system, with superstition, magic and natural religion. Social anxiety, existential concerns and contradictions might shape differently but coexists with life as in today’s society.

These images and interviews are woven together to inquire, explore and converse about different realms of society, times, history and elaboration of thought. This is done by shifting simple daily activities and structures of thought into a different historical moment six centuries ago. By interchanging these realms and mindsets elsewhere in time, a world of contrasts erupts in an unexpected way.

Reflection on Book of Days.

Monk’s goal “to create an art that breaks down boundaries between the disciplines, an art which in turn becomes a metaphor for opening up thought, perception, experience” 1is abundantly accomplished in this movie. The images, vocal music and words portray a rainbow of symbolism and metaphor.

The movie originates from a fundamental metaphor, the plague and death, which is used by Monk as the conductor of a plethora of other metaphors that ramify simultaneously across many different dimensions of the human experience. These other metaphors are strongly rooted in our societal behavior, and Monk comes to open a crack, and “create a world in which the audience has a chance to see things that they take for granted, or never think about, in a new way”2. She invites us to explore and inquire onto all those other plagues we inhabit: segregation, intolerance, homophobia, aporophobia, religious fanaticism, xenophobia, because as she argues “projecting fear onto an ‘other’ seems to be a recurring thread throughout human history”3.

In his article Yael Samuel says that “everyone has a story to tell in Book of days”4; Meredith Monk later gives more sense to it replying: “I’m trying to leave a lot of space, so people can hook in, in their own way”5. Indeed there is a deep dialogue and connection between those who speak in the movie and the viewers that enter that space to hook and reflect on the myriad of conversations it promotes. Equally, the viewer and character juxtapose their roles. The viewer also has a story to tell, and the dialogue happens. Samuel closes the circle of time and dialogue in a fascinating way: “The human narrative is like a palindrome: it can be read in either direction”6.

There are indeed lots of hooks to choose from. I however refused to narrow my evaluation solely to a question of intolerance, Holocaust, pandemics or AIDS. I became specially interested in the hook of the relationship between Eva and the madwoman, because made me think of beauty and the complexity of creating that relationship.

Eva and the Madwoman, in their loneliness, relate to each other through music (niggun) Samuel argues, “the niggun becomes a medium of communication”7 for both. I find it lovely that music then and now is a “meeting of minds”8.

Citations/Footnotes:

1 Meredith Monk – Mission Statement, 1983, Revised 1996. Para 1.

2 Meredith Monk – About Book of Days. Page 160, para 1.

3 Meredith Monk – About Book of Days. Page 161, para 2.

4 Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 16, para 3.

5 Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 17, para 1.

6 Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 22, para 2.

7 Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 19, para 1.

8 Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 19, para 1.

Are we in a race against the machines?

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The wave of technology and internet rides alongside the logical and controversial debate of how technology will affect humanity individually and collectively. The questions in the conversation emerge as we advance towards a high-tech unknown world where these are natural and genuinely concerning: What is the impact and effect of technology in our cognition? How do the sources of thought that come from technology and the web shape our thinking? Are we facing a mechanization of the human intelligence? How do new intellectual technologies change the metaphors we use to “explain ourselves”?.

In our technology adaptation process, one way in which most of us notice how technology impacts us occurs when we sense that our ability to read deeply diminishes, we “get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do”, and like Scott Karp, a media blogger points out “seek convenience”. He speculates: “What happened? What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed. i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has changed?. It seems that “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”, “I’m not thinking the way I used to think”, worries Nicholas Carr, a technology and culture writer. 

To understand the reasons of this impact, we have on one hand Carr, whose biggest concern is that as we become more adapted to technology and internet, these can turn to be the arbitrators of our understanding of the world and the way we relate to it. We know that throughout history, technology has shaped our mind while we are adapting to it. Some neuroscientists even argue that “thanks to our brain plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at the biological level”. Since the human brain is indeed very malleable, and the internet gathers the power of all prior technological inventions like maps, pens, printed books, typewriters, calculators, telephones, Carr ponders how it is really “reprogramming” us. On the other hand Clive Thompson, a science journalist, envisions our relationship with technology as a “symbiotic” one that shapes and enhances our minds into higher cognitive levels. In his view, a collaborative relationship with technology produces an enriching world of “public thinking” and “superfluity of information” in the style of a fantastic “technological renaissance”. Thompson’s argument is partly based on the extended mind theory of cognition, whereby humans are intellectually superior because “we outsource bits of our cognition, using tools to scaffold our thinking into more rarefied realms”. He admits that new technologies shape new forms of behavior and move us away from older ones creating what the Canadian professor Harold Innis described as “bias of a new tool”. From Thompson’s perspective “living with new technologies means understanding how they bias everyday life”. Thompson and Carr arrive to a commonplace of understanding on where the issue is; not from the viewpoint of its consequences but for part of its causes: whether to use it or not and how much.

I will step into the conversation between Clive and Carr as I can agree with both that technological advancements have taught us that “every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about”. I agree that the human brain is infinitely malleable, and as such, it will adapt to new intellectual technologies as we gain new skills and open new pathways in our brain that will lead to higher levels of intellectual understanding. But I strongly object with those, like the founder of Google, that we “will be better off” connected to an artificial brain with all the world’s information attached to it. I see that trend of thought in other authors as well (like Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”), and I would reply that the idea is a simplistic interpretation of how the human mind works, understanding it as a mechanical process. From the social perspective of the analysis I concede that there is indeed an “advent of public thinking: the ability to broadcast our ideas and the catalytic effect that has both inside and outside our minds”. This is something fantastic to see, however in this respect Clive shows some naivety as the great mind enhancers of internet public thinking (e.g. the liberal arts) do not percolate into all individuals of society in the same way. I maintain that as social animals we need to posses emotional awareness to be present in our habitat, creating humane relationships around us and exerting our civic duties as educated and responsible active citizens. As it becomes more problematic we need to be able to distinguish what is real and truthful from what is fake, unreal or fantastic, and discern what is good for our wellbeing as individuals and in society. Following Carr’s quote “internet intellectual ethics remain obscure”, losing discernment of what is fake or real, is something of great concern about our future relationship with technology. The issue is important because “one of the great challenges of today’s digital thinking tools is of knowing when not to use them, and when to rely on the powers of older and slower technologies,” like a compass and map to navigate life. Definitively, technology demands a high level of “mindfulness” – “paying attention to your own attention”. I end agreeing with both Thompson and Carr posing the question: are we relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world to the point where is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence?” As a result “Are we losing some of our humanity?”.

Nicholas Carr: “Is Google Making us Stupid?”

Clive Thompson: “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is changing Our Minds for the Better.”