Bed: The Essay, Part I

Now that "Bed: The Etymology" and "Bed: The Painting" have primed and prepped our thoughts and imaginations, I will open our more global discussion of the bed by mapping out the various valences of symbolism and signification of this primal and principal piece of furniture. Consider the order relative, though I think that it roughly obeys some kind of logic.

Valence 1: Sleep, or The Biological Self

At its most apparent, the bed is pure organismic functionality. As organisms of Kingdom Animalia, and especially as organisms in Class Mammalia, we need significant amounts of sleep. While the science of sleep still remains shrouded in much mystery, scientists have amply observed that organisms deprived of sleep become sick and eventually die. Whether we sleep to conserve energy or to "recharge our batteries," the bed serves and is reserved for this most basic of man's biological needs. As such, the bed first and foremost represents our identity as biological creatures with immediate, habitual requirements.

Valence 2: Others, or The Cultural Self

As organisms with complex societal structure, technology, and language, we have ritualized sleep. Humans have largely and historically slept in a common area with their tribal or familial units. And this behavior is not confined to early humans, as a number of modern, especially non-industrialized, cultures share sleeping space with kith and kin. The modern, industrialized human exhibits these customs for newborns and for siblings. And of course, the modern couple typically shares its bed. One of the signatures of the emergence of a serious modern relationship occurs when the couple decides to move in with each other; they thusly sleep in the same bed. One of the signatures of the dissolution of a modern relationship occurs when the couple can no longer sleep under the same sheets. Young children often experience significant anxiety when they begin to learn to sleep alone. Many of us can recall slipping into our parents' or parent's bedroom when the terrifying mysteries of the night, of dreams, of being alone overwhelm us. Many of us can recall the youthful dread of bedtime as we stalled to perform our nighttime routines when older siblings and parents continued their evenings. And more generally, each culture has developed its more global ritual of working hours and sleeping hours. The bed, therefore, signifies our cultural selves—that we live with and rely upon others in necessarily organized structures.

Valence 3: Sex, or The Sexual Self

This valence needs little explanation, though it warrants much discussion, which I will tend to in "Bed: The Essay, Part II." Nearly as primal as sleep is sex, and so the bed is the domain of intimacy and situs of sexual union. To enter "a woman's bedchamber", "to lie down with" another, "to bed" another, to "get laid"—all are common phrases directly conjoining the bed and sex. The bed thus literally and figuratively signifies the sexual self.

Valence 4: Privacy, or The Discovered Self

Perhaps this valence is mostly indicative of a modern Western, perhaps even American, household, but I believe it is present and pervasive enough to merit its own category.

During adolescence, the youth begins to undertake the project of individuation, through which the youth starts to assert himself or herself as an individual separate and distinct from his or her parents. We thus have the common yearning of the young adult who shares a bedroom with a sibling for his or her own room. The adolescent bedroom provides the physical boundaries for the individuation project. The teenager decorates and arranges his or her room with their own symbols of individual identity; the teenager seeks out his or her room to achieve the solitude from the rest of the family necessary to fulfill the project. The privacy of the bedroom thus provides the teenager with the environment and the materials to promote and assert their self-discovery.

While adults may have lost or outgrown the initial individuation or angst that drives teenagers into their bedrooms, the bedroom is equally their province of privacy. Most obviously, the bedroom provides the privacy requisite for sexual activity. But the adult (and adult couple) craves privacy in non-sexual manners as well. I have observed two common phenomena of the master bedroom in the modern American household. First, the bedroom is frequently set off from the rest of the house, and often set off from the other bedrooms. Second, the master bedroom is frequently minimal and simple in its decor. Both of these phenomena I believe are explainable in terms of the adult's need for solitude and separation from the demands of adult life. The first phenomena achieves the physical separation. The second phenomena, I think, is the attempt of the adult to construct one environment relatively free from the constant bombardments of adult responsibility, from the constant torrent of distractions and noise of modern life. This provides the adult with a stripped-down, noiseless, stuff-less, information-less psychic clarity.

Whatever the case, the bedroom—and its focal bed—makes possible some kind of sanctuary, refuge, or den of privacy that the individual, self-aware of himself or herself as an individual, needs for psychic health. In this capacity does the bed serve as a symbol of our selves as discovered individuals who require privacy, temporary separation, temporary solitude from others, from the world.

Valence 5: Purpose, or The Transactional Self

I think this valence can best be summed up in the almost truistic question: What makes us get out of bed in the morning? In other words, what purpose drives us to be, in Heideggerian language, a "self-in-the-world"? For most of us, I believe this purpose takes the form of work. First, work furnishes us with the monetary means, in our modern era, to obtain the food and shelter in order to secure our basic, organismic needs. Second, work furnishes us with the means to partake of man's diverse manifold of cultural creations, to partake of the world as self-aware beings who can marvel at the miracle of being alive and at the miracle of the universe. Third, and ideally, work furnishes us with the answer to the question rankling in all our breasts: Why am I here? A profession, a vocation, work—no matter how humble or how noble—forms that (sense of) meaning, mattering, purpose that fuels us to go to sleep in order to rest up, leave our tiredness behind, and get out of bed to be a self-in-the-world. In order for our lives to be for something. Perhaps this valence is most romantically apparent in the lives of artists, teachers, agents of social justice, doctors, and all of those workers guided by the purpose to create and change.

Nevertheless, the bed in this valence serves as a kind of symbol "in the negative," as we are defined by what compels us to rise from it to interact with the world, with existence. And this is why I have termed its corollary aspect of selfhood the "transactional self," an emendation from my original "economical self." We leave bed in order to pursue that transaction of purpose between the world and our selves-in-the-world.

Valence 6: Illness, or The Vulnerable Self

What happens when we cannot get out of bed? We have fallen prey to some kind of illness. Physically sick, from a common flu to terminal cancer, we are in many ways reduced to supine bodies, sometimes with lucid consciousness, sometimes not, confined to our beds. In the extreme scenario, we are condemned to the miserable strangeness and alienness of a hospital bed. And physically ill, too, when we are the victim of personal injury, of sheer accidents, of being thrown into a world of violence and war, of being born into a life of indigence.

When we are psychically ill—I intend no judgement or derogation in my use of the work "ill"; I use the word literally to convey the sense of being in some way removed from what is considered the norm—when we are psychically ill, it is as if we are reduced to supine minds confined in a body confined to a bed. Psychically sick, too, when we are born into traumatic childhoods of abuse and neglect, into the arbitrary cultural psychoses of racism and social inequality.

Demoralized by worklessness, dehumanized by grief or guilt, depressed, overwhelmed by dread of life or of death, adrift, lost, wandering aimlessly as ghosts of our selves, or the victims of senseless, impersonal chaos, we see no reason and feel we have no purpose to get out of bed in the morning. In its valence of illness, the bed is a symbol of our bodily and mental imperfections, our brokenness, our fallibility. In its valence of illness, the bed reveals our vulnerable selves—selves vulnerable to a world teeming with randomness, uncertainty, and inexplicability.

Valence 7: Death, or The Mortal Self

Finally we arrive at the valence lurking spectrally behind all the valences: the bed as a symbol of death and a reminder of our mortality. I think we can read each valence through the lens of this death valence. Utter deprivation of sleep and complete isolation from others lead to death. The denial of sexual expressiveness, "bed death," the unhealthy repression of sexuality, impotence, infertility, the overgrowth or perversion of sexuality—when our sexual (and procreative) selves confront significant distortion, it is as if a vital part of us dies. The loss of individuality and obstruction to healthy solitude and distance from others and the world, along with the absence of purpose and meaning in our transactions with the world, can render us symbolically dead to the world.

"Deathbeds," "final repose," "resting in peace," "the big sleep," "eternal rest, "laid to rest," "requiem": the language of the bed, implied through the register of sleep and rest, is here intertwined with the often euphemistic language of death. Then there is the appearance of the corpse prepared to look peacefully asleep in the final bed that is the coffin. And, lastly and morbidly, there is the most frightening fact we all face: What is to guarantee that when I go to sleep tonight I will wake up in the morning?

Bed: The Essay Preview

For my upcoming post, "Bed: The Essay, Part I," I have mapped out the most prominent significations and symbols of the bed that I have detected. I organized them into seven major categories, which I call "valences." Each of these valences, furthermore, I have correlated to the underlying dimension of selfhood that I believe they represent. I am nearly half-finished with my initial or introductory remarks on each of these valences, but decided to preview them by list in the meantime. Anticipate the remarks this weekend. Without further ado:

Valence 1: Sleep, or The Biological Self

Valence 2: Others, or The Cultural Self

Valence 3: Sex, or The Sexual Self

Valence 4: Privacy, or The Discovered Self

Valence 5: Purpose, or The Economical Self

Valence 6: Illness, or The Fallible Self

Valence 7: Death, or The Mortal Self

Some of these valences are more primal than others. Some of the valences exhibit a more modern character. I encourage you to unpack each of these valences before I post my own interpretations, and, if you feel so inclined or inspired, offer in a comment any valences or aspects of self that you feel I have overlooked.

Bed: An Introduction

My latest idée fixe is one of the earliest yet most primal words we learn, one of the simplest yet most taken-for-granted routines we perform, one of the most comforting yet complex symbols we possess: bed. In my next posts, I will be offering the etymology of this seemingly straightforward but startlingly sinister syllable, a poetic sequence (if it will so permit me) on this most basic of phenomena, and some essays on what the bed signifies in our existence. The topics will be manifold. Childhood, entropy, sex, and, among others, death, will be my fodder. In the meantime, as I tuck in my sheets and prop my pillows, good night.

On Direct & Indirect Experience: Memory

I. Photographs Lost

I am still formulating my thoughts on the promised Walter Benjamin installment of "On Direct & Indirect Experience." Rereading Benjamin is both challenging and stimulating; his theories on the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art are not as black-and-white as some readers are tempted to make them out to be. Here is a taste of my contributions to come. We the viewers of art now wield in our hands the technology—the digital cameras, the camera phones, even video phones—that can reproduce art. What is the effect on the work of art when we ourselves are the reproducer? What are the new politics and values birthed thusly?

There is much to be said. But, in the meantime, I would like to share the rather unhappy logical extension of my discussion on experience and memory in Scotland.

To review briefly, I carved up my trip to Scotland into two parts. The first comprises so-called direct experiences, which includes time I did not spend behind the lens of a camera and the unmediated memories I can evoke as such. The second comprises so-called indirect experiences, which constitutes time I did spend behind a digital camera and memories I recall through the actual photographs I took. 

Now, let's suppose I lost these photographs and their negatives—to a fire, to a flood, during a move, or what have you. What have I, as the photographer, lost? At their best, I conceive of these photographs as portals or triggers: seeing them can transport me back to the site and sight. At their worst, I can conceive of those photographs as archives or time capsules: seeing them can remind me of I place I found worthy of a photograph but that I do not remember experiencing directly. My idea here is, "I know I was at this place, but I have no memory of being at this place." 

A vigilant gargoyle perched on pyramidal stones somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I do remember taking the photograph.

In the first case,  if I lose the photographs, I lose a means to return potentially to a direct experience through a document or artifact of indirect experience. In the second case—and this I find haunting—I may forget all knowledge of ever having been at a certain somewhere or having seen a certain something. In a sense, perhaps stronger than I want to admit, it would be as if I never had actually been at X or seen X at all.  

What, then, am I left with? I am left with a means without an end. I am left with the memory of taking photographs. I am left with the memory of using technology. A pen without ink and paper with no words on it. 

A castle window overlooks a gardened courtyard somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I do remember taking the photograph.

Before I move on to a more general discussion of memory, here's a short experiment I would like to conduct or that, perchance, has already been conducted. The subject is I) a person who went on a major vacation/trip (parameters need more definition) at least one year ago; and II) the person primarily responsible for photographically documenting that vacation/trip. The experimenter first conducts an interview, asking the subject to recall and describe significant episodes, places, and experiences from the trip. The experimenter next presents the subject with all the photographs the subject captured while on that vacation/trip. A second interview follows. The experimenter thereafter compares the quality and quantity of what the subject remembered during the first, without-photograph interview and the second, with-photograph interview.  

II. Memories Lost

These considerations compel me to ask the questions: what is memory and what is it for? Clearly we need to account for evolutionary neurology. Simplistically, in terms of prehistory, memory prevents us from making the same mistake twice: "This fruit made me ill; don't eat it again." Memory aids us in the location and re-location of nutrition and shelter: "Past this ridge is a cave by a watering hole." Memory enables us to learn and apply critical skills: "Strike the flint like so." Memory helps us identify kin or enemy: "I am related to this person; that person is competing with my resources." Memory thus serves the purpose of our navigation through life and our fulfillment of essential needs. We can abundantly adapt these scenarios for modern analogs: skill acquisition, education, professional development, trial and error; object, location, and person identification; and so on. All build towards effective socialization, shelter, provisions, income, general welfare.

But what about non-survivalistic memory? What are my direct and indirect experiences in, say, Scotland for? Or why do I remember so vividly, as I do, a tattered, rain-soaked, dirt-smudged copy of P.D. Eastman's children's classic Are You My Mother? lying in the middle of row-housed street of a once-factory-thriving section of Cincinnati?

And what about the nature of memory itself? Oftentimes we think of memory as a kind of discrete databank. Cached somewhere among the labyrinthine file folders and file pathways are memories, like objects, retrievable with a click of the neurological mouse. It is easy, it is tempting to see the brain as a magnificent supercomputer. But what are the ramifications of our understanding of memory if we view it more phenomenologically? Maybe memory is kind of sedimentation—whether or not we can conjure up a specific image or sensation, whether or not we can conjure up a specific name or word, all of our experiences, direct and indirect, all the lessons and facts we have learned, stick to us, become indelibly embedded into us, absorbed by us, taken in, sometimes transmuted in a way where memory alters truth and thereby becomes the truth, the reality, the actuality.    

Lastly, how has memory changed during the digital, information age? When we upload digital photographs onto our computers, is the machine doing the work of memory for us? When a quick Google search—and the inevitable query result of Wikipedia—can tell us how to tie a necktie, provide us a list of all the US state capitals, or break down the events of World War II, is the machine doing the work of memory for us? In some sense, I do think this is the case. Perhaps out of necessity, as I believe the modern person faces an overwhelming amount of and access to "fact." But it seems to me that these memories—personal, historic, collective, utilitarian, emotional—are fundamentally different if the machine does the work. They are preserved in a level of unimaginable detail, yes. Yet, they are, perhaps, no longer ours. They are "outside" of us; we do not carry them within us. It is as if we have surmounted a level of biological necessity, have evolved a kind of post-memory. For we no longer need to remember the specifics if the machine remembers for us. No, we simply need to remember how to use the machine: to transfer memory to the machine, access memory on the machine, navigate its menus, exploit its functionalities. Is this any different than the storage and preservation of memory—knowledge, history in all their forms—in books? I am not sure, but I want to say yes.

Memory is a portal. Someone spray-painted an apt memento mori somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I remember taking the photograph.

I opened this discussion of memory with the question: "What do I lose if I lose photographs?" I will end with this one: "What would we lose if we lose computers?"

On Direct & Indirect Experience: The Informal Overture

Earlier this month during a trip to Chicago, I, along with a few close friends, made a point to spend several hours touring the recently debuted new home of the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing. The impressively designed and sized edifice exhibits a breathtaking and comprehensive collection of modern and contemporary art. Indeed, these well-spent few hours did neither the building nor its collection due justice.

I stand before Salvador Dalí's Invention of the Monsters (1937; oil canvas) beside an equally captivated viewer. To our right is Joan Miró's spectacular Personages with Star (1933; oil on canvas). Photo by Matt Bauman.

At the museum, I was struck by the pervasiveness of a certain phenomenon which I know you have witnessed and which I am most certain we have all engaged in ourselves: snapping photographs of art on digital cameras and camera phones. Now, what most struck me was not just such photography itself; rather, it was the behavior of most of the photographers. I did not observe many of what I will dub the "phone-photographers"—in order to distinguish them from professional photographers, though I am aware that there exists legitimate cellphone photography—stopping to consider and contemplate the artwork. Instead, I observed them quickly pointing-and-shooting artwork before moving on to point-and-shoot another work.  

I admit that such behavior is to be expected in a digital age, visual culture, and perpetually plugged-in period. Further, I believe the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones in our lives is of colossal value, as it enables us to document our lives and experiences in ways, both creative and ordinary, heretofore unimagined. Thus, I urge you to know that I seek to judge neither the phone-photographer nor the technology itself. No, my intention is only to tease out and reflect on the ramifications of such technological usage, as many before me have done, most noticeably, though in a different capacity, by Walter Benjamin in his groundbreaking "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." I will return to this important essay in the next installment.

My initial reaction was one of annoyed distraction. I have a difficult enough time viewing art in the first place. I don't want to spend too much time reading plaques, but I need the information to digest a work of art historically, which need often compels me to believe I am missing much of the point of the art itself. The result is that I feel my eyes moving over the words without really absorbing them and feel my mind working too deliberately to allow the work to speak to me viscerally. I move on to the next painting or sculpture uncertain about what I just beheld or what I was being asked, solicited to behold. At this new work, I then hear the voice: "I am here before X. Take it in, remember it. Remember that you saw it." This directive immediately obliterates any direct experience with the art I hope to have. And then there is the whole issue of what to do with my hands. Fold them behind my back? Cross them on my chest? Place them contemplatively under my chin? Anyhow, the intervening layers of concept, context, and social code eventually do weaken, and the artwork does receive me and I it—prepredicatively. This most frequently and memorably occurs when I stand before works by Mark Rothko. His fields of color are to me sublime, hypnotic; the boundaries draw me into a space beyond their horizons, as did this painting in the Art Institute...

Mark Rothko's Untitled (Purple, White, and Red) (1953; oil on canvas).

...until there materialized before me the arms of a man lifting a camera armed with a flash. He snapped his photograph and moved on. The aura, the trance was lost.

My second reaction was more reflective and self-critical. I recalled a vacation to Scotland I took with my father and eldest brother a few years back. I spent most of the trip documenting the trip behind a digital camera. This, to me, is not entirely different than the phone-photographers I observed at the Art Institute, as most of them, like me, were tourists who wished to document their vacations. (In the next installments, I will be discussing more specifically, however, the ramifications of photographing art, as I think it warrants more attention.) I'm glad that I did so in Scotland, as such a major and splendid trip as that deserved a chronicling, but, in many ways, I'm sad that I did. For, when I think back to those travels and experiences, I summon two distinct sets of images and memories. The first is the memory of directly being there. In these images, in these memories, I wield no camera. In these, for example, I am in a bar having robust local ales over hearty local fare in the company of my father and brother, all of us stumbling happily into the afternoon sun back down the cobblestone hills. These images and memories are of what I will now refer throughout as "direct experience." The second set of images and memories are themselves twofold and are what I call "indirect experience." The first fold comprises images and memories as framed by the digital camera's eyepiece, as framed by the digital camera's display of what I captured, as framed by me framing the sites of Scotland. (Perhaps as opposed to Scotland framing my experience.) The second fold comprises all the developed photographs I took. Yes, I took some great ones, but I find it very surreal that my images and memories of the significant monuments, architecture, landscapes, castles, etc. are constituted by the very photographs of those sites, objects, places, things. In other words, I remember the Edinburgh Castle, for example, indirectly through my photographs of it more than I remember my directly being there.   

Through these two reactions to the phone-photographers, I arrive at my principal concern. We live in a "hyper-now" where we can document our lives, chronicle ourselves and others, and record our world so directly, immediately, so rapidly, and so diversely in such forms as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, especially through the photography of our digital cameras and camera phones. Yet, now more than ever, we are, it appears to me, farther away from our lives, ourselves, others and our world because our experience of them is indirect. Our existences are preoccupied with our documentation of them. 

Await the next installment where I explore direct and indirect experience in greater depth, including a discussion of Walter Benjamin and photographing art.