Stephane Mallarme's Haunting Absence in the 21st Century (Part 2)

The Hymeneal Violence of the Poet's Verse and its Rendering as Hamlet

by James Albert Barr


"Whoever hovers around an exceptional character such as Hamlet, is merely Hamlet himself." - Stephane Mallarme: Hamlet (1886)

"All of Mallarme's text, however, is organized in such a way that at its strongest points, the meaning remains undecidable; from then on, the signifier no longer lets itself be traversed, it remains, resists, exists and draws attention to itself. The labor of writing is no longer a transparent ether. It catches our attention and forces us, since we are unable to go beyond it with a simple gesture in the direction of what it means, to stop short in front of it or to work with it." - Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature (1992)

"Reader, this is what you have before your eyes, a written work..." - Stephane Mallarme: Les Mots Anglais/English Words (1876)

Despite the revitalizing experience spent with his great friend and confidant, Eugene Lefebure, at Cannes, in which his creative and intellectual strengths and energies were recharged, Mallarme suffered a horrible following winter in Besancon where he was, somewhat ignominously, transfered from the lycee in Tournon, not just because of his decidedly poor evaluation as an English teacher by the French Ministry of Education, but most probably because of his controversial reputation as a decadent, avant-garde poet of very un-Christian and immoral works that even provoked an influential member of the community to threaten to remove his child from the school. 

After only a short period in Besancon, which initially appealed to Mallarme until he was obligated to socialize with his conservative and complacent new neighbors and colleagues, he asked for yet another transfer; this time to Avignon where, among other benefits, he would be able to better afford a home for his family, see friends who already resided there, and incur more optimal, surrounding conditions in which to compose his unusual poems. He struggled harshly with his bills and inadequate salary while in Besancon.

But while all these domestic problems and distractions were usurping so much of his precious creative time, Mallarme had initiated, what he felt at the time, was a necessary study of both philosophical and scientific texts to significantly prepare him for his exceedingly ambitious "life's work": le Livre, the Great Book, his Epos. This, however, proved fruitless, despite his initial intentions because he wasn't, after all, a trained philospher, and derived very little pleasure from the reading of pure philosphical texts, such as Hegel's, for instance (most of his Hegel books remained in their store-bought wrapping). And, in the end, Mallarme was a fiercely independent thinker who preferred to arrive at his discoveries completely on his own, for better or worse (his understanding of Plato's Ideal Realm, for instance, was fairly inconsistent in his later critical writings, despite their ultimate brilliance, mostly by the more individually original ideas expressed throughout them). 

It was during the summer of 1866 that Mallarme envisaged his great work; a work that he figured would take at least twenty years to achieve. In a remarkable letter (Mallarme's amazing, poetic letters are perhaps only rivaled by those of John Keats) to his friend, Theodore Aubanel, Mallarme attempted to explain to the ultimately perplexed Aubanel the profound transformation his thought, creativity and overall sense-of-self had recently sustained:

"As for me, I have worked more this summer than in my entire life. I have laid the foundations of a magnificent work. Every man has a secret within him, many die without ever finding it... I am dead and resurrected with the jewelled key of the ultimate treasure chest of my mind. It is now up to me to open it in the absence of any impression borrowed from elsewhere, and its mystery will spread out into a most beautiful heaven. I need twenty years during which I am going to retreat within myself, avoiding any publicity except for some readings to my friends. I am working on everything simultaneaously, or rather I mean that everything is so well organized within myself that now, whenever a sensation reaches me, it is transfigured and is automatically lodged in a particular book or poem. When a poem has matured it will fall. I am imitating the laws of Nature, as you can see."

Unfortunately for Mallarme, after such a lofty declaration to his friend Aubanel, he found his exciting new intellectual and poetic clarity was waning as he engaged the philosophical and science texts later that year, and right before the harrowing winter he barely endured at the end and beginning of that 1866/67 period. Reporting once again to Aubanel, Mallarme informed him of his rather slow going regarding his "great work":

" My befuddled mind refuses to return to its former lucidity and I am just having to endure it, on my divan amongst a pile of books which I peer at and dip into without being able to finish them. It is true that they are books of science and philosophy and that I wish to experience through myself each new idea and not learn it from someone else."

Finally coming out the other end of that awful, but also crucial, winter, Mallarme had at last regathered his physical and mental strength enough to reengage his work by composing two of his greatest sonnets: "Quand l'ombre menaca de la fatale loi" (his "religious crisis" sonnet, where he declares his breach with "the old dream" of God) and "Le viege, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" (his exquisite "Swan trapped in ice" sonnet). Between his revelatory visit to Cannes the previous summer resulting in his monumentally important discussions with Lefebure, his taxing winter, in which much of his evenings were spent staring up into the clear night skies and contemplating the constellations (in which the light he was seeing emanated from stars that had died eons ago, thus revealing to him its fundamental paradox and the dichotomy of presence/absence that would incessantly preoccupy his creative vision thereafter), the letters he sent to Aubanel, and the two sonnets he would compose between the spring of 1867 and 1870 (though they weren't officially published until the early 1880s), he came to a renewed spiritual conclusion that would, for the rest of his life, dictate his religious/philosophical attitude and constitutuion. He would officially pronounce (only to those close to him, understandably) his break with his Catholic upbringing and declare himself, essentially atheist, despite his wife, Marie's, continuing belief, as well as the rest of his family and the majority of people he interacted with, particularly at school. Although, he would retain elements of religiosity within the aesthetic confines of his poetic approach, where later he would define his Great Work as "The Orphic explanation of the Earth which is the sole duty of the poet and the supreme literary game."

Essentially, several years, in fact, before Nietzsche declared "God is dead" in his 1882 book "The Gay Science", Mallarme arrived at that conclusion himself. For him, and decidedly for an increasing number of like-minded others (mainly artists, writers, poets, scientists and philosophers, but certain intelligent laymen as well) throughout the 19th century, significantly enough, it was historically important, and about time, that Man become truly "modern" in his thought and in his understanding and perception of the world and of his being. Crucially, for Mallarme, this entailed the realization of the significance - in every sense of that term - of what language actually was and did. In this regard, Mallarme anticipated the 20th century obsession with language via linguistics, semiotics, intertextuality and deconstruction (in the works of Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Eco, etc.) with his painstaking and laborious process of contemplating every-single-word he employed in his poems with exhaustingly precise detail and exact purpose, always noting their etymolgies, sound and double meanings. It was with this "post-Christian" world-sense of the truly modern that Mallarme boldly and confidently wrote to Lefebure:

"Yesterday I finished my first outline of the Work, clearly delineated and totally endurable, if I myself endure. I contemplated it quite calmly and without any horror and, closing my eyes, I saw that it existed. The Venus de Milo - which I like to attribute to Phidias (the Venus de Milo had only been discovered in Milos in 1820, about fifty years before this letter had been written, and was originally credited to Praxiteles who lived around the 4th century B.C., but eventually attributed to Alexandros of Antioch circa 130-100 B.C.), so generic has the name of that artist become to me - and the Mona Lisa seem to me to be and are the two great shimmerings of Beauty on this Earth and my Work, such as it is imagined, is the third. Absolute and unconscious Beauty, which is inalterable in Phidias's Venus; Beauty whose heart, with the arrival of Christianity, received the venomous bite of the Monster, painfully resurrected with a strangely mysterious smile, but a smile of forced mystery which she senses to be the condition of her being. Finally, Beauty which, through the knowledge of Man, has discovered in the universe the relative stages of its development, remembering the secret horror which forced her smile in Da Vinci's time, and to smile in a mysterious manner - smiling mysteriously now, but happily and with the eternal inner serenity of the Venus de Milo which has been recovered, having understood the mystery of which the Mona Lisa could only know the fatal sensation."

Of course, with the exception of several, not directly-related, but incredibly beautiful and brilliant poems (among them "Les Fenetres", "Funeral Toast", "L'Azure", "Sonnet en-yx", his "tomb sonnets" to Baudelaire, Poe, Verlaine, Wagner, "Prose [for Des Esseintes]", "L'apres-Midi, D'un Faune" [for which Debussy so wonderfully translated into one of the greatest pieces of late 19th century classical music], and his collection of exquisite prose poems such as "Le Phenomene Futur", "Plainte D'Automne", "La Pipe", "Un Spectacle Interrompu" and "La Declaration Foraine") Mallarme, in the end, did not live long enough to see the realization of his Great Work. Before he suddenly died in 1898, at age 56, he had composed one of the most radically modern poems of the entire century; a poem that would have a profound influence on 20th century letters and theory: "Un Coup De Des", or "A Throw of the Dice". This landmark Symbolist poem was the culmination of everything Mallarme put into the art of composing poetry and tackling the existential crisis of humanity so viscerally felt more and more by century's end, only to explode climatically and globally in every literal sense in the first half of the 20th century.

But therein lies the ultimate and unbearable irony of the implications suffusing through Mallarme's monumental poetry: the violence, however Silent as well as audible, so inherent in everything, despite the almost equally unbearable Beauty found in existence if apprehended and truly beheld with attending understanding and appreciation, if ultimately ineffable, resisting language and clarification. This is the key to understanding Mallarme's poetry and critical theories. In order to essentially defy and transcend the innate imperfection in language and communication, Mallarme, via Symbolism, short-circuited and circumvented the rules of language, and the Symbolic Order that perpetually vacillates (like the optical trick of the candle between two human profiles) and precariously mortars our collective reality, our world, in order to access truisms of pure perception.

This very "violence" is intimated in one of his best earlier poems, "Les Fenetres" (i.e. "The Windows"). In the poem's final stanza Mallarme, with an existential urgency, asks: "Is there a way, O self, thou who hast known bitterness/ To burst the crystal that the monster has profaned,/ And take flight, with my two featherless/ Wings - at the risk of falling through eternity?" This poem anticipates his "Swan trapped in ice" sonnet composed years later; and is related to an earlier well-known sonnet, "The Chastised Clown", who wants to escape the confines of his make-up and the circus tent; a poem that, not insignificantly, references Hamlet and his own existential dilemma and gloom, brought on, or rather surfaced from its dormancy, by the dark and insidious conditions of Elsinore's grieving, yet corrupted and debased, courtly state.  Mallarme's poetry, in fact, is peppered with either direct references or allusions to Hamlet; and for good reason. Mallarme was a great admirer of Shakespeare's masterful turn-of-the-17th-century play, and became basically obsessed with its titular character. He profoundly identified with Hamlet. In his 1886 review of the play that he had just seen around that time Mallarme quotes in his review: "Whoever hovers around an exceptional character such as Hamlet, is merely Hamlet himself. And, with his useless sword-point, the prophetic prince, destined to perish on the threshold of manhood, melancholically pushes that heap of garrulous nothingness off the path which he himself cannot follow - heap which he in turn might be, if he grew old." 

The "monster" mentioned at the end of "Les Fenetres" is crucial to Mallarme's work and philosophical aesthetics. In his excellent book of translations and commentary of Mallarme's poetry, Henry Weinfield elucidates on his understanding of where Mallarme was coming from regarding the Monster: "A monster, commonly, is something unnatural, something paradoxical, something that, in possessing a dual nature (like humanity itself), surpasses nature. But if we trace the word 'monster' back to its roots (recalling that Mallarme was always concerned with etymolgy), we find that it derives from the Latin 'monere', 'to warn', and that it originally has the meaning of an omen or divine portent, which is consonant with the prophetic quality of the poem ["Funeral Toast" in the case of this specific quote, but indeed related to 'The Windows" as well]."

The notion of "the monster" echoes all through the 19th century, particularly, perhaps beginning with Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sand-man" through to some of Poe's macabre stories (who was one of Mallarme's biggest influences), and eventually to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and H.G.Wells' "The War of the Worlds". Even Joseph Conrad's classic tale, "The Heart of Darkness" implicates the mounting, century-spanning ominousness at the turn of the 20th century, which concluded Marlow's mission with Kurtz's final unnerving words: "The Horror! The Horror!"; and expressed visually in Edvard Munch's famous painting of 1893, "The Scream". Perhaps the best expression of the collective sense of foreboding and dread that ultimately culminated in the pronoucement of "the death of God" in the 1880s, and was fully realized in the global devastation of two World War's in the first half of the next century, was the end of Edgar Allan Poe's, seemingly ironic, breakthrough 1833 short-story, "MS. Found in a Bottle":

" A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul - a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never - I know that I shall never - be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense - a new entity is added to my soul."

This "feeling", this "new entity" added, and inured, to the collective soul of the 19th century, particularly in Europe, had utterly haunted Mallarme and ultimately drove his creativity and feverish desire to express this inexpressible "thing" that hopelessly eluded the narrator of Poe's disturbing story. And in Shakespeare's "Hamlet", a very early example of the initial dread and portentousness that ineffably disseminated through the next few centuries, originally provoked by the alleged "bifurcation of human consciousness" caused by the Calvinist offshoot of the Protestant Work Ethic advent of what would eventually develop into full-blown, and human-alienating, Capitalism, Mallarme would profoundly hitch his star to and attempt a retroactive explanation of what exactly Hamlet was really going through as history's first exponent - regardless of his "fictional status" -  of the existential plight of Man.

In Roger Pearson's superb 2010 book on Mallarme in the "Critical Lives" series, he states that: "For Mallarme the theatre is, ideally, a place where human beings join together in undergoing a 'solemn' ritual of cosmic understanding: 'the stage is the evident foyer/hearth/focal point [in French, 'foyer'] of pleasures taken in common, also and all well reflected, the majestic opening onto the mystery whose grandeur it is our purpose in this world to envisage'....,for Mallarme, 'Hamlet' is 'the play par excellence': 'for there is no other subject, mark my words: the antogonism between man's dream and the fateful circumstances meted out to his existence by misfortune'. With the minimum of interference from the particularities of place, time, and plot, Hamlet's dilemma is our dilemma - to be caught 'between': between childhood and adulthood, sanity and madness, doing and not doing, life and death. He is the 'latent lord who cannot become', a 'juvenile ghost of us all, partaking thus of myth'. Increasingly for Mallarme - although he had already intimated this in 'Un Spectacle Interrompu" - the purpose of art is to hold us in suspense: not the foolish suspense of the melodrama, so glibly resolvable, but a suspense that promises a meaning beyond the suspense, a prolonged wondering that opens onto 'Mystery'. The 'fury against the formless' prompted by the death of Anatole (Mallarme's eight year old son who tragically died in the 1870s) is calmed by the all-embracing 'relations' of the Idee, by the 'ministry of the poet'."

This all-encompassing "between" is what Derrida refers to as "the hymen" when studying and deconstructing Mallarme's work. Mallarme himself used the word in his tongue-in-cheek prose work, "Mimique", which is about a murder by tickling, in order to evade all traces of the crime. In his essay on Mallarme Derrida determines the characteristic "undecidability" depicted in Mallarme's verse. And it's this prevalent, linguistic indecisiveness, much like Hamlet's chronic delaying to kill the murderous King Claudius, that pervades through so many of Mallarme's poems, which Derrida brings to our attention in his patently clever and profoundly insightful way: "In 'Mimique', the word hymen is inscribed in such a place that it is impossible to decide whether it means the consummation of marriage or the veil of virginity. The syntax (and Mallarme was quoted as saying that 'I am profoundly and scrupulously a syntaxer') of the short word or is sometimes calculated to prevent us from deciding whether it is the noun 'gold', the logical conjunction 'or', or the adverb of time, 'now'."

In Hamlet's - and literature's for that matter - most famous soliloquy beginning with "To be or not to be, that is the question", we can see for ourselves the instant connection with Mallarme's syntactical manoeuvrings of "undecidability", as a way of preserving the - sometimes exasperating - mystery, and seeming elusiveness, of his verse in order to protect the integrity and existential delicateness of his message and textual music. Essentially, in the end, Mallarme's text, by virtue of its syntactical and undecidable character, is Hamlet and his ontological being circulating, hauntingly, through the verse, the poetry. And, to conclude here, from Henry Weinfield's closing words on his introductory essay of his book of Mallarme translations: "After observing that the plurality of language militates against the immediacy of spoken truth, Mallarme concludes that if there were only one language, and if the truth could therefore be uttered immediately, then 'poetry would not exist: supreme complement [or completion], it compensates philosophically for what all languages lack." 

                                                                                                               
                                                                 
     
                                                                                                       
                                                                                      
(note: I'd love to hear any feedback regarding this or any of my previous articles! Both positive and negative responses are welcome. If, by any chance, you are having difficulty accessing my comment section located below (like a few people have claimed) then you can reach me at this email address: j.a.barr@hotmail.com, Thank you all for your readership and support here at my blog!) 


    

Stephane Mallarme's Haunting Absence in the 21st Century (Part 1)

The French Symbolist Poet's Crucial Relevance as a "Semiotic Ghost"    

by James Albert Barr

"Poetry is the expression, by human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: it thereby endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task."
                                                                 - Stephane Mallarme (to journalist Leo d'Orfer - 1884)

It's been 115 years since French poet Stephane Mallarme died at age 56 in 1898, and his notoriously elusive poetry has, perhaps, never been more timely than it is right now early in the 21st century. But that so-called timeliness, however, should be taken with an ironic grain of salt. The reason for this is fairly obvious: while we presently live in a feverish world of material dominance, techno-romanticism, gadget obsession, ubiquitous event-presence and the deluge of ever-flowing information (as opposed to genuine knowledge), Mallarme's poetry and literary theories have quietly and unassumingly resided in abject obscurity outside the more appreciative confines of academia and poetry's selective cognoscenti. Yet, his verse continues to haunt us peripherally, like, as William Gibson aptly put it in his 1981 short-story, "The Gernsback Continuum", a semiotic ghost.

What makes Mallarme's work a kind of "semiotic ghost" can be directly analogized with what cultural critic and author Charles R. Acland refers to as residual media, which is usually in connection with a form of technology, but I would argue can, and is, related to culturally artistic media as well, like Mallarme's poetry, and even prose works. Residual media is characterized by Acland as "reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned and trashed media technologies and practices" that continuously haunt and insistently occupy a peripheral space in contemporary society. As Acland further explains: "Figures from the past...creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present. For an era such as ours that puts a premium on advancement and change above all else, declarations of the presence of the past can be confusing or alarming. There is nothing like that old party pooper 'historical consciousness' to dull the gleeful celebrations of progress and the new".

The Gibson phrase, "semiotic ghost", however, is especially suited to Mallarme and his work, particularly, because of the poet's strong connection with both the technical term "semiotic" and
the non-corporeal quality of the word "ghost", which is so prevalent in Mallarme's verse.

The word semiotic is an adjective that comes from the branch of linguistics called semiotics. Linguistics, itself, is the study of the structure and meaning of language, which is prominently associated with the monumental work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), though the basis of this work would be challenged, and some believe superseded, in the 20th century's second half by Chomskian linguistics, cognitive linguistics and generative grammar. His book, "Course in General Linguistics", which was published posthumously in 1916 from the collected notes of some of his students who attended his lectures in Geneva, became one of the seminal works on linguistics in the 20th century. He also, subsequently, was one of the founding fathers of semiotics (or semiology), and introduced the concept of sign/signifier/signified/referent. Semiotics, then, is the study of signs and sign processes (also known as semiosis), such as: indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification and communication. Semiotics is basically divided into three specific branches: 1) Semantics - the relation between signs and the things to which they refer or denote; their particular meaning, 2) Syntactics - the relation of signs in formal structures, such as sentences; and 3) Pragmatics - the relation of signs and sign-using agents, which determines context.

Semiotics doesn't just cover signs found in language structures, but also in non-linguistic and concrete signs that are indicative of a particular culture, custom and time period. Pro wrestling, for instance, is one such example of a semiotic system of signs depicting a staged spectacle where the socially constructed concepts of Good and Evil are acted out by muscle-bound performers who exaggerate stereotypes of human strength and weakness within their pre-chosen "characters", while being watched by an audience who expects to see, time and again, the on-going myth of justice and treachery played out before them, and respond accordingly with great unwitting gusto and excitement. Fashion is another, where what one wears projects and disseminates, either consciously or not, a certain image and identity, class and social position or attitude. In fact, famed French semiotician, Roland Barthes (who wrote about wrestling and fashion in his important books, "Mythologies" and "The Fashion System"), once said that: "Nobody dresses innocently".

For Stephane Mallarme, the semiotic richness suffused in his relatively small poetic output (a little over a hundred published poems) extended beyond the page and thoroughly into his very life and constitution. He was born in Paris, France in 1842 into a middle-class family of provincial lawyers; a profession that Mallarme had never flirted with taking seriously, much to the chagrin of his ineffectual father, Numa. His mother, Elizabeth, prematurely died when she was just 28 - Stephane was only 5 at the time. Mallarme's maternal grandmother, Fanny Desmolins, forthwith became his substitute mother and guardian. He had a sister, Marie, who tragically died young at the age of 13 from a severe recurring rheumatic disorder. Though premature deaths of children were not uncommon for that period, Mallarme was deeply affected by his adored sister's death, and subsequently developed a preoccupation with death and mortality, which would unsurprisingly find its way into his poetry and themes.

After circumventing law school, and inevitably failing a Registry exam to become a clerk, Mallarme chose, practically by default, to become a teacher; specifically an "English teacher". His interest in poetry and writing had gradually developed since childhood, and eventually became not only a passion, but an outright vocation by the time he hit his twenties. His main influences, initially, were Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, thanks, exclusively, to Baudelaire singularly introducing the work of Poe to French readers with his excellent translations of not only Poe's poems and stories, but perhaps most importantly - for Mallarme - his translations of Poe's theoretical essays on poetic composition. Victor Hugo and Theophile Gautier were also significant influences on Mallarme.

When Gautier died in 1872, Mallarme was commissioned to compose a poem in his honor. The title of the poem was "Toast Funebre" ("Funeral Toast"), and it is one of Mallarme's greatest poems. In the poem, Mallarme, while paying due homage to one of his poetic heroes, still took it upon himself to compose an exquisitely elaborate "rallying cry" for all pure poets: "Et l'on ignore mal, elupour notre fete/ Tres simple de chanter l'absence du poete,/ Que ce beau monumentl'enferme tout entire." ("And we who have been chosen guardians of the word/ Are simply called upon to sing the absence of the bard./ Whom this fine monument encloses now indeed.") Mallarme's obsession with absence and nothingness and the void (le neant) is clearly expressed in this remarkable poem. But, as was his subtle touch and uncanny perception, Mallarme would always seem to make a delicate connection with the ontological membrane between life and death, presence and absence, corporeality and nothingness, essence and void, entity and ghost; and with an appropriate sense of wit and irony: "Nous sommes/ La triste opacite de nos spectres futurs," ("We are nothing, then,/Save the sad opaqueness of the future ghosts we bear.")  Aptly enough, we can see how William Gibson's notion of the "semiotic ghost" fits perfectly with Mallarme's poem, its significations and symbols throughout. Mallarme, himself, became one of those "future ghosts" that continue to haunt literary tradition, French culture, English culture, academic syllabuses, linguistics and semiotics, textual space, the blank page and computer screen, modernist tradition and postmodernism, musicality; "the flower missing from all the bouquets"; "the silent thunder suffused in the leaves"; "the shade that now you are"; "The scintillations of the one-and-six"; "the transparent glacier of flights never flown"; "And avaricious silence and night's immensity" - the closing line from "Funeral Toast".

Some of the most memorable, yet unnerving and powerful, lines from "Funeral Toast" come from the poem's middle-section where Mallarme essentially spells out the ineluctable discovery and burden of the pure poet; a poet with an artist's soul, a philosopher's mind, a scientist's curiosity, a craftsman's precision, and a wise person's unvarnished consciousness:

"Vaste gouffre apporte dans l'amas de la brume
  Par l'irascible vent des mots qu'il n'a pas dits,
  Le neant a cet Homme aboli de jadis:
  'Souvenirs d'horizons, qu'est-ce, o toi, que la Terre?'
  Hurle ce songe; et, voix don't la claret s'altere,
  L'espace a pour jouet le cri: 'Je ne sais pas!'"

("Vast abyss transported to the gathered mists prevailing,/ By the irascible wind of words that he did not say,/ Nothingness to this Man, abolished yesterday:/ 'Memories of horizons, O thou, what is the Earth?'/ Howls this dream; with a voice that can barely issue forth,/ Space as a joke returns the cry: 'I do not know!'")

How did Mallarme arrive at this unsettling, if not harrowing, conclusion, which Milan Kundera called, in his 1984 novel of the same title, "the unbearable lightness of being"? In early 1866, when Mallarme had just turned 24, he had been utterly exhausted, mentally and even physically by his composing the first section of what would become his predominantly dialogical poem, "Herodiade". A poem that would ultimately occupy his time and incessantly revisionist activities for the rest of his life, and remain unfinished! That first section was titled "Ancient Overture".

While slowly and painfully composing "Herodiade's" first section during the entire winter of 1865-66, Mallarme made a devastating discovery, and it involved the very nature and dynamics of language and existence itself. As he composed each line, carefully selecting the exact right words in the exact right syntax and line formation with painstaking scrutiny, he noticed the inherent, contradictory aspects of language, as he attempted to synthesize the intended musical quality with the poem's narrative and overall sense. As Gordon Millan put it in his excellent 1994 biography on Mallarme (only the second such official biography done after Henri Mondor's initial tome about fifty years earlier): "He (Mallarme) realized that in practice the kind of harmony or correlation between sound and sense which he desperately sought was extremely rare. What was even more disturbing, he discovered that in the French language at least, these two elements which he specifically sought to unite were frequently in direct and total contradiction to each other. It was a fundamental defect in the language which he commented upon much later, and with some humor, in one of his critical essays: ' Compared to ombre [shadow], which is opaque, the word tenebres [darkness] has little density, and how disappointing it is when one is faced with the perversity which, in total contradiction, confers in the case of jour [day] and nuit [night], a tone of dark upon the former, of light upon the latter.'"

Without any previous knowledge and familiarity with Buddhism, Mallarme viscerally encountered "two abysses" which brought him to the edge of despair. The first one was the sense of Nothingness itself, the pre-Lacanian sense of the notion of the Order of the Real; that which is outside of the language-buffering realm we all became accustomed to when we all learned language as a small child, and thus entered the Symbolic Order, which is to say, the world as we know it in our daily, diurnal and quotidian lives. And the second abyss was the precarious nature of life itself, "the unbearable lightness of being" that Kundera wrote about. Utterly exhausted and anxiety-ridden, Mallarme was in desperate need of a vacation, away from his boring and unfulfilling teaching job, for which he wasn't very good at anyway, and decided to travel to southern France to visit Cannes and hook-up with an older friend, Eugene Lefebure, who was highly cultivated and crucially receptive to Mallarme's existential plight. Their long discussions, which covered nearly all of Mallarme's concerns and passions, all the while beholding the breath-taking beauty and vistas of the Mediterranean, greatly recuperated Mallarme and provided a much-needed mental, emotional and creative replenishment....

Please continue on to Part 2 which is available here at The Culture Fix!   :-)

Daredevil #177 and the Impact of Frank Miller

A Childhood Discovery and its Enduring Influence

by James Albert Barr

In the Fall of 1981, when I was thirteen years old, living in my hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, I happened to walk into a convenience store that was located at the corner of Rothesay Ave. and McAllister Drive on the eastside of town where I lived with my young family. If memory serves, I was simply visiting the store with the intention of buying some candy (a not altogether unusual activity for someone around that age, certainly back then) but when I saw that they had a spinner-rack of comic books, I found myself helplessly gravitating towards it to peruse the collection of new comic books on display. 

The spinner-rack featured comics from the two main publishers - then and now - of superhero comics: DC Comics and Marvel Comics. There were also a few issues from the likes of Gold Key, Harvey, and even Charlton Comics, but DC and Marvel dominated the selection, no doubt. I saw the latest issues of, say, Batman, Detective Comics (the other Batman title, of course), Superman, Action Comics (the other Superman title, of course), Green Lantern, Amazing Spider-man, Incredible Hulk, Moon Knight (issue #14, in fact, which I would buy about a week or so later, thus introducing me to the fantastic artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz; a brilliant, multimedia illustrator whose work is second only to Frank Miller's, IMHO), Captain America, The Micronauts (a personal favorite of mine from the 80s), so on and so forth, until I finally came across an issue of Daredevil ("...in His Strangest Adventure", and it turns out they weren't lying!). It was a lone copy of #177, and it had an immediately eye-catching front-cover, as well as a very intriguing tag-line at the lower right-hand side of the cover that read: "Yes, we did...we dared to publish this, the most offbeat story of the year!" The title of this specific, personal watershed, issue was/is: "Where Angels Fear to Tread". That famous title (which E.M. Forster gave to his 1905 novel) comes from a previously famous line from Alexander Pope's 1711 poem "An Essay on Criticism". The full line reads: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 

The cover to this seemingly irresistible superhero comic book (which only cost a mere fifty cents in 1981, though the next issue - #178 - would cost me sixty cents when Marvel increased their prices to match DC's) featured our titular hero, Daredevil, in apparent peril attempting to escape the gaping, razor-sharp jaws of a huge and hideous, multi-eyed demon! Only on this issue's cover do we actually see Daredevil wearing his cowl (i.e., his mask); it hangs behind his shoulders like a hood all through the issue's interior panels, and with good reason. I picked up this issue and started flipping through its 20-plus pages with great interest and curiosity.

As I jumped from page to page, the speed in which I commenced initially began to slow down as each subsequent page more and more transfixed me and the burgeoning sensibilities I was unaware of inside me during those days of pubescence when the biological changes of a boy just entering his teens had begun to sprout, so to speak. I eagerly purchased that issue of Daredevil and brought it home to read it through excitedly, both absorbing Frank Miller's hardboiled-style writing and his engrossing art more thoroughly. I was immediately smitten with this man's work! I also learned that Miller's first issue on Daredevil was in 1979 with issue #158. He began writing the issues as well beginning with #168, in which introduced his very popular female character, Elektra.

To my mind and memory, at the time, I had never seen such a dark and weird, moody and mature looking superhero comic book before (the closest being Batman #251 a couple of years prior; the classic "Joker's Five-Way Revenge" issue featuring the amazing, realistic artwork of industry legend, Neal Adams), where the story appeared to depict the hero unmasked and fighting some sort of monster in his own mind. In other words, a superhero, in human alias-mode (blind defense lawyer, Matt Murdock), struggling with the psychological complexities of his internal world and past childhood trauma. In Jungian terms, Daredevil/Matt Murdock was fighting against his "shadow", his "personal demon". This kind of storytelling (the raw modern text, the taut, visual illustrating, creatively fluid and cinematic panel structuring, emotional texture and visceral, noir-like atmosphere) was something completely new to me at that understandably naïve age of thirteen. And in a subplot within the same issue there was a story involving the political corruption of a mayoral candidate who was being controlled by one of Daredevil's recently established arch-villains, The Kingpin (Frank Miller needed a crime lord for his developing, issue by issue, plot in Daredevil, and so appropriated The Kingpin from Spider-man's rogues gallery with complete impunity); political corruption was a concept which I was not very familiar with in the "real world" until I got older and more informed (as well as cynical, of course) about said real world.

To provide a relatively brief summary of Daredevil #177, it begins with Daredevil unmasked, fully exposing the head of Matt Murdock as he sports the rest of his costume only in the presence of his former trainer and master; a considerably older, rough and cantankerous man simply called Stick. A couple of issues back in Daredevil #175, our hero was nearly killed in an explosion. Though he survived the blast, Daredevil lost his "super radar sense", which he instantly developed after an accident years before that robbed him of his sight. However, all his other remaining senses were ultra-enhanced to a super-human level. In issue #176, Daredevil is seen struggling with the loss of his radar sense, as he clumsily goes out on patrol in New York's Hell's Kitchen, keeping close vigil of The Kingpin's actions and also trying to track down the deadly female assassin known as Elektra, who just so happened to be his ex-girlfriend from several years back. His girlfriend at the time, Heather Glenn, even witnesses him nearly falling to his death as he was jumping from building to building and slipped a bit.

So clearly Daredevil was in great need of some help in order to get his radar sense back, hence the sudden appearance of Stick. The two of them, at the beginning of Daredevil #177, are in a stuffy, old attic filled with old mementoes and such from Matt's past. He is holding a bow while packing a bevy of arrows. There's a target at the other end of the attic where he's been attempting to hit with arrows for three consecutive days unsuccessfully. He's tired and frustrated, and feeling utterly lost physically, emotionally and mentally. But Stick, who is also blind, is a hard disciplinarian and won't let Matt rest. Stick insists that Matt has to dig deep into himself, psychologically, if he wants to get his radar sense back, and that apparently involves being around familiar things in a familiar setting. And constantly trying to hit the target as he simultaneously travels back in his mind to his childhood where he lived with his single-parent father, a washed-up boxer, who urged Matt to study hard and "become somebody" unlike his father. Matt was also the frequent victim of bullying from the neighborhood kids in Hell's Kitchen. He wouldn't fight back because his dad didn't want him to become like him, which of course frustrated young Matt. After actually fighting back during one instance of getting bullied, Matt ran home, elated by his victory, only to incur his father's immense disappointment, further confusing and frustrating Matt in the process.

With each traumatic childhood memory resurfacing intensely, Matt shoots an arrow at the target only to miss it again and again, provoking Stick to whack him with his han bo (i.e., three foot wooden staff) to motivate Matt with, evidently, good old-fashioned negative reinforcement. It works because Matt takes yet another try at the target, but seems to get more and more frustrated, as well as angry with each increasingly futile attempt. Finally Matt confronts his father (who's been dead since Matt was about eleven) in his mind, in a boxing ring. As Matt (still in his Daredevil costume with the mask off) tries to embrace his father (who's garbed in boxer's shorts and gloves) he's punched in the face by him. This internal confrontation represents, in Matt's psyche, his father's continuing disapproval that still echoes deep inside of Matt even as an adult and superhero! When Matt's dad suddenly is shot in the back by an arrow, Matt is then confronted face to face with the psychological appearance of The Devil, his "personal demon", the very manifestation of all of Matt's hatred and anger, but most importantly, his fear that has been festering deep within him. After fighting the demon with little to no effect, it is at this moment that Matt has a revelation, an epiphany, thanks to the unrelenting taunting from the demon, who states: "This is the end, Mattie boy. I'm gonna rip the flesh from your bones, piece by piece...Scared?" He realizes, probably because he's just so damn exhausted by all his anger and frustration and fear that he isn't afraid anymore, that this is all absurdity and unreal, so Matt then picks up the bow and arrow, slowly and assuredly, and says calmly: "No. I'm not scared. And I'm not angry. Not anymore. And that's why I can kill you." He then shoots an arrow straight into the center eye of the demon. The demon instantly disappears and we then see an arrow stuck into the center of the target within the attic (which represents the human psyche) that Matt and Stick occupy. To be sure that Matt did indeed get his radar sense back, Stick shoots an arrow at Matt as he's pulling his arrow from the target. Matt easily deflects the incoming arrow and then grins.                              

I didn't know it then, but that issue proved, I suppose inevitably, but no less pertinently, to be rather prescient for me personally, as I too would go on to battle my own "personal demons", and psychological impediments, through my beleaguered teens and early adulthood. But the lesson, nay revelation, learned from Daredevil #177 would stay with me, at least latently, throughout those years, becoming more and more manifest with each passing year of my own self-imposed auto-didacticism and investigations into human psychology and human history via my becoming an avid reader and talker/communicator, as well as an aspiring writer. That Daredevil issue and the many subsequent ones I collected over the course of the following year or two, coupled with the revelation that was The Police's 1983 "Synchronicity" album, inspired me to make my own comic books and characters, and write my own songs; to ultimately express myself and my growing world view.

Because of Frank Miller's memorable work on Daredevil I was compelled to seek out his other work, both past and present. One of the most unforgettable works by him, shortly after he left Daredevil with issue #191, was his groundbreaking six-issue mini-series published by DC Comics entitled Ronin. It was obviously a series meant predominantly for adults to read. However, I was only about to turn fifteen when issue one was released, costing $3.00 and was presented in deluxe format, with high quality paper stock, hence the much higher price. Ronin is about a disgraced Japanese samurai warrior whose master is killed on his watch by a demon named Agat. Hunting down Agat the ronin must kill the demon with his own blood, and so when the chance arises the ronin drives his samurai sword through himself and Agat, but before they both die Agat is able to trap their souls in the sword whereupon they are eventually freed eight centuries later in a dystopic, near-future New York City. The ronin winds up being reincarnated into the body of Billy Challas, an unfortunate born with no limbs and working for the Aquarius Corporation testing out cutting-edge prosthetics, and developing his telekinetic and psionic abilities. When the merge happens between the two, Billy's body and his powers artificially develop arms and legs, and the face of the ronin overtakes Billy's own. When the ronin realizes he's back and feels the full affects of disorientation by being reborn eight hundred years after he thought he died, and then learns of the demon, Agat's, diabolically supernatural ploy to escape death, he sets out to find him and destroy him for good.

Admittedly, the story in Ronin can be a little convoluted and unfocused, but Miller's artwork was beyond anything seen in comics before, certainly North American comics, as he displayed a manga influence hitherto unfamiliar to American and Canadian readers of comic books. And the graphic level of violence depicted within the series' six issues (especially issue #2! At the time reputed to be the most violent comic book ever made) was also an example of pushing the proverbial envelope in 1983-84 when comic books were becoming more and more adult-oriented.

This growing-up process in the comics industry culminated in 1986/87 with Frank Miller's monumental 4-part Batman mini-series The Dark Knight Returns, with its heavy political overtones, and returning the Batman character to his initial roots with his 4-part Year One arc in the pages of Batman #404-407. Miller had also perhaps written the most beloved Daredevil arc a year before with the Born Again set of issues. Miller also enjoyed substantial successes with his series of Sin City comics (where several stories were eventually made into a fine 2005 film co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller himself) and his 5-issue mini series 300 (which was also made into a highly successful film in 2006, directed by Zack Snyder). Alan Moore also played a pivotal role in comic books growing-up and gaining much more legitimacy outside the confines of the industry with his amazing graphic novels V For Vendetta and the groundbreaking Watchmen, which brilliantly deconstructed the superhero mythos. Other great writers like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis would shortly follow in Miller's and Moore's considerable footsteps with their own outstanding, literary and mature works.

Admittedly, Frank Miller's latter-day work has been far less inspiring, or just plain bad. His highly anticipated sequel to The Dark Knight Returns released in 2001-2002 as a three-issue mini series and called The Dark Knight Strikes Again met with much disappointment, if not outright hostility, among fans and critics alike. His All-Star Batman and Robin would pejoratively give birth to the regrettable "goddamn Batman" slogan, and his 2011 Holy Terror graphic novel was a lurid exponent of off-the-tracks political propaganda (by his own admission no less!) and sheer lunacy. So Miller has apparently not escaped the fate that has stained the legacy of other great artists, musicians, poets, directors, and so on, who outlived their respective artistic peaks, and yet continued to produce subpar works. But for me, Miller's earlier and mid-period work made an indelible impression on me and influenced me greatly, not just as an artist in my own right, but as a human being and individual.

Dead Malls and the Irony of Nostalgia

The Changing Landscape of Commerce and the Human Element Affected Therein

by James Albert Barr

"I'm a product of my generation." - Peter Blackbird: Deadmalls.com

The very first fully enclosed and functional shopping mall opened its doors in 1956. It was called the Southdale Shopping Mall, and it was located in Edina, Minnesota. The influential architect who designed that mall was Victor Gruen. Years later Gruen would become disillusioned and even abhorred at what eventually happened to his original, allegedly more utopian and human-friendly, vision of the mall. He was quoted as saying during a speech in London in 1978 (two years before his death at age 76) that the prolific development of shopping malls had "bastardized" his ideas. It would seem that the shark-like forward momentum of dispassionate commerce and capital had other ideas for the shopping mall complex and the strategic enticement of its, mostly suburban, clientele.

Before the modern shopping mall, there were "strip malls", or shopping plazas, that featured open-air businesses all set in a row and connected by a sidewalk where customers could enter from the street and exit to continue on to the adjoining store or one located further down the strip. Even today, strip malls/plazas are still around, and almost exclusively found in suburban areas. The strip mall first developed shortly after the first World War. There was even an indoor mall prototype constructed in 1915 and officially opened the following year. It was called the Lake View Store at Morgan Park, and, like Southdale Mall, it too was located in Minnesota, in the seaport city of Duluth.

In the early to mid-19th century the first commercial, iron-and-glass covered arcades were built in Europe and opened to the public, signifying the first genuine notion of the modern consumer perusing the market-place to make potential purchases with legal tender. In Walter Benjamin's celebrated, but unfinished, book, "The Arcades Project" (from myriad notes compiled between 1927 and 1940, the year he died), he retroactively defined a certain characteristic found in a select few that were known as flaneurs (i.e., strollers); ones who would leisurely walk around the newly developing, bustling, urban city streets, and glass-enclosed arcades (in particular, the Parisian arcades), pricing nothing, but merely observing - in their ironic solitude and isolation within the fairly new phenomenon known as the "crowd" - the considerable changes to the public environment they occupied with the majority of less-conscious city denizens. Benjamin's prototypical flaneur, pre-dating mass commodity production, was the reputed father of French Symbolist poetry, Charles Baudelaire.

In one of Baudelaire's well-known sonnets written in the 1850s entitled, "A Une Passante" ("To a Passer-by"), and evidently composed after one of his flaneur-related constitutionals, he sees a beautiful woman in the "deafening", busy streets of Paris. He notices her lifting the hem of her ornate, Victorian-era dress as she gracefully weaves through the bustling crowd initially unaware of the anonymous "stroller" admiringly observing her from afar. They then make eye-contact for a brief, passing moment, which causes a sort of "lightning flash" in Baudelaire's eyes, obviously quite taken by this beauty's returning, if transitory, glance. And then, suddenly, it's nighttime, and the mysterious lady has long since disappeared from the poet's view, probably forever, as he addresses her in his mind: "Shall I not see you till eternity?" Though the poet has no idea where she may be now, his ever so brief encounter with her from a distance, and in a large crowd, has marked him profoundly and seen as a missed opportunity for love. In the ensuing 150 or so years, this kind of fleeting experience has become commonplace for modern and postmodern humans while being typically surrounded by commerce and consumerism, ubiquitous advertising and ever-present crowds - unconsciously immersed in the capitalist ideology of their time and place.

Today, the Baudelairean-type of flaneur is a relic of a long since past time and world, I should think. The kind of modern world that developed after World War II, particularly during the Eisenhower years of the 1950s when the suburban explosion happened, and the conservative "nuclear family" appeared as the standard image, especially in America, of citizenry living under the capitalist economic system, became the ontological norm, the way it simply was. This was certainly the overwhelming case for most of North America in general, as it was unmistakably endorsed and shown on a novel technological medium called a television set. Programs like: "I Love Lucy", "The Honeymooners", "Leave It To Beaver", "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet", and "Make Room for Daddy" gleefully and innocently projected strong conservative family values, politics and cultural behavior that seemingly effortlessly espoused American interests and way of life. And this included a commodity-filled deluge of the newest manufactured household items, fashions, domestic gadgets and appliances, all available at the new shopping malls suddenly appearing after 1956; and not to mention the assembly-line inundation of streamlined model vehicles for which to drive the family to said malls, and loan to one's teenager for that special date. America's celebrated "car culture" and the official arrival of the "teenager" and "teen culture", in general, coincided with the 50s; and this brought along with it the birth of rock 'n' roll too, as its own personal soundtrack. The drive-in theatre would become a cultural sensation as cinema reached new heights of popularity and consumer consumption. More and more conspicuous teens would be seen hanging out at malt shops and burger joints and mall parking lots.

It's no surprise that out of the burgeoning Cold War in the 50s was created McCarthyism and the paranoid notion of the "commies" coming to infiltrate and usurp America's collective identity and material beliefs. This kind of paranoia towards "the other" was implicitly expressed through the "U.F.O. craze" that swept across America's pop-culture landscape at that time, despite the suspiciously willful determination to maintain the apparent idyllic quality of life so overtly displayed in many a common American residential community. But even completely American-derived literary works like "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" (1955) and "Peyton Place" (1956) were beginning to expose the cracks in the smiley-face of the suburban utopia advertised on billboards, television and neighborhoods everywhere.

Shopping malls would continue to be built vigorously, and opened with great optimism and promise, throughout the U.S. and Canada during the 60s, as the culture would alter drastically from the Beat Generation-cum-Hippie Movement, to post-revolutionary comedown, 70s cynicism, drug-addled rock ' n' roll fantasies and disco/nightclub hedonism a la Studio 54. And the first true blockbuster films, such as "Jaws" (1975) and "Star Wars" (1977) would begin to change the way movies were made and marketed, for better or worse, with their endless tie-ins and cross-promotions connected with fast-food chains, original soundtracks, clothing fashions and wide-spreading merchandising and paraphernalia. Movies became more "commercially conscious" as a result. All of this would significantly contribute to what would become known in the 1980s, full-blown, as "mall culture" incarnate.

The shopping mall, its experience, and mall culture in general, would peak during the 80s. It was also during the 80s that malls, particularly their interiors, would commonly be seen in many movies, especially movies geared towards a younger, consumer conscious, demographic, such as the "teen movie". Perhaps no other teen movie, or movie in general, captured mall culture entering its zenith-period like 1982's "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". Many scenes in the film show nearly all the principle characters either working at, or shopping/hanging out at, a mall. The aura of normalcy would be palpably seen and felt by both the film's characters and the viewing audience, who likely went to a mall theater to see "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (one of the film's main characters, Mark "Rat" Ratner, even works at a mall theater). By the mid-to-late 80s the notion of the "mall rat" (someone who spends a great amount of time loitering in malls) was beginning to enter the cultural vernacular.

The typical shopping mall in the 80s could be described thusly, using a prime example from my suburban youth, Parkway Mall, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada: A one-level elongated structure flanked by east and west-located parking lots. Inside would feature a north-end department store, known as the "anchor store" (the heart of the mall's commercial viability); in this particular case, a Zellers. At the opposite, south-end of the mall is located a secondary department store, which is a little smaller than the main anchor store, called The Met (outside of these respective stores are a row of coin-operated vending machines filled with candy, gumballs and assorted plastic trinkets and toys). Between the main and secondary anchor stores is the mall atrium, which is architecturally-designed to facilitate the flow a large bodies of people who go there for shopping purposes (for the most part: see above paragraph for the definition of "mall rat").

As one walks from one end of the mall to the other they will notice a self-contained, circular kitchenette in the middle of the atrium for patrons to sit at in a 360 degree formation (the much older version of the "mall rat" can be found here); a drug store, like Shoppers Drug Mart; across from the drug store, a grocery store, like, say, Sobeys; further down the atrium is a baking goods café and a flower shop, washroom facilities and an electronic store called Radio Shack (now known, collectively, as The Source), a novelty shop, and a clothing store, like Thriftys; men's and women's apparel specialty stores, like Tip Top and Le Chateau; a footwear shop; a jewellery establishment and a book mart/convenience store. At the north-west side is found a movie theater, while across from it is a laundry-mat and a sporting goods shop. At the north-east side entrance is an independent family restaurant, as opposed to the food court that is located at the south-west end, featuring several well-known fast-food outlets to choose from before making your way to the abundant seating area to eat your generically-processed food. And, finally, at the south-east end there's a video arcade for teens and video game lovers to hang-out in and dunk quarters into the twenty or so available video game units. Located outside of the main mall area are separate entrances to the liquor store and a Smitty's restaurant.

For a considerable cross-section of those born in the mid-to-late 60s and early 70s, the "mall experience" was a huge part of their growing up, and dominated much of their adolescence and social life. It became a part of their identity, of who they were as a person, culturally (though they weren't wholly conscious of this sociological understanding, of course), and how they were reflected onto others, who were usually a lot like them. Unlike kids and teens, and people in general, today, there were no omnipresent technological gadgets like a cell-phone, a Blackberry, an IPad, a portable Playstation, what-have-you, to dominate one's attention by fashionably fidgeting with it through constantly downcast eyes and hyper-active hands. The mall culture of the 80s actually stimulated the idea of a consistently active and (relatively) healthy social-life, whatever social group, or economic category you happened to fit into. That would be a "glass half-full" perspective on mall culture. The downside of it all was all the unchecked commerce and consumer-mentality that, customarily, went along with it, like the air that you breathed (Reagan's economic-prosperity plan in action, until it was humbled by decade's end); a surrogate parental-avatar for the then fading unity of the traditional family. Parents no longer "bring their kids up": pop-culture and capitalism do.

By the mid-90s everything would change and a steady downward trend regarding malls and mall culture would begin to show signs of decline, both economically and socially. To perfectly contrast, cinematically, with "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", and it's optimistic view of mall culture, Kevin Smith made a 1995 film entitled, both appropriately and ironically enough, "Mallrats". It starred Jason Lee and Jeremy London as a couple of "slacker buddies" who spend an entire day at a mall. Pop-culture references would frequently be uttered by all and sundry, and adolescent-scale high-jinks would ensue willy-nilly by characters predominantly in their 20s, as opposed to the teenagers that inhabited "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". This represented a significant trend happening in the culture at that time in the 90s: pop-culture was becoming more and more self-referential and self-conscious, literally and ironically; and young people were refusing to grow-up, to mature, even as they became more culturally-informed, savvy and witty, not to mention older; their sense of restlessness and respective defenses becoming sharply honed in the process, as capitalism's ideology was showing signs of transparency and in need of a reconstitution to pacify "Generation X". By the turn of the new millennium, one could hear phrases like "30s are the new 20s" and "40s are the new 30s", and so on, as our now youth-obsessed, and increasingly immature, culture was building momentum, while being dumbed-down, correspondingly.

At one point in "Mallrats", the two main characters relocate to a discernibly older mall with lower consumer traffic and much-dated decor. This mall was clearly an 80s throwback on the decline, unlike the updated, busy mall they initially visited, which was reflected in a very tongue-in-cheek manner by Kevin Smith. This direct contrast in the respective mall's fortunes provided, unknowingly from Smith's perspective I suspect, the economic trend that was happening at that time, and would culminate by the end of the 90s in what we now call the "dead mall" phenomenon. Consequently, and fittingly so, I feel, "Mallrats" would be a box-office bomb and critical failure, as opposed to "Fast Times at Ridgemont High's" great success at the box-office and subsequent ascension to pop-iconic status. However, "Mallrats'" fortunes since its 1995 release wouldn't be all bad, as it has become a "cult favorite" of sorts, likely bolstered by its period-capturing cache. The two films provide a great bookends that encompassed the golden age of the shopping mall and mall culture, generally speaking.

By the year 2000, hundreds of shopping malls across the U.S. and Canada were seriously in decline or completely out of business; effectively "dead", in other words (self-contained "box-stores" like Walmart and Target would eventually dominate the market-place for shoppers). The Internet went commercial in 1995, along with portable cellular-phones, significantly enough; home-bound video game culture was collecting steam, and public smoking bans were coming into effect as well, which would seriously "cramp the styles" of many mall rats and patrons. The mall exodus was well underway. So, in the year 2000, two young men, Peter Blackbird and Brian Florence, started a website solely dedicated to the "dead mall" trend that they were, together, noticing more and more.

They called their website Deadmalls.com. Blackbird would coin the term "labelscar" in 1998, which describes "fading or dirt left behind from a sign on or in a mall. Labelscars leave a readable marking, which is very helpful when identifying former stores". They also defined a dead mall, or grey field, as "a shopping mall with a high vacancy rate or a low consumer traffic level, or that is dated or deteriorating in some manner". Their website is replete with photos of hundreds of dead, or dying, malls, showing both their mostly dilapidated exteriors and abandoned interiors. To gaze upon these photos is to evoke an eerie sense of "what was", as you witness the ghost town-like conditions of these once bustling businesses. And there is a human element that has been invariably affected, consequentially, by all these closed-down malls across North America. That's why people like Peter Blackbird, Brian Florence and innumerable citizens and inhabitants of the respective towns and cities these malls were found in have a collective sense of nostalgia for these once thriving "social centers", besides the consumer and commodity aspect they supplied, simultaneously.

In a 2002 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview, Blackbird was quoted as saying: "Tearing down malls also tosses away a repository of a community's memories. I want to try and preserve what they were [who concedes he loves the old-style malls that seem dated but were once cool places to hang out]. I'm a product of my generation". I too, despite myself, am one of those members of that generation that lived through the golden age of the shopping mall, and its accompanying culture, for better or worse, in all its sociological and historical irony. I too look back, nostalgically (especially compared to how much the world and culture has dramatically changed since then), when Parkway Mall, for instance, was a thriving bee-hive of social activity and commercial consumption. And life was far less complicated and jaded than it is today, especially for the young and culturally-impressionable.

The Police and the 30th Anniversary of Their Swansong, "Synchronicity"

One Special Album Made all the Difference: Reflections on The Police's 1983 "Synchronicity" album

by James Albert Barr

"I have only come here seeking knowledge, things they would not teach me of in college."
                                             -  The Police: "Wrapped Around Your Finger" (lyrics by Sting)

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the final studio album by The Police, "Synchronicity". As anniversaries go this one is pretty significant to me personally. I had only turned fifteen years old a few weeks before this monumentally important album's official release on June 17, 1983. In the month prior to the album's ubiquitous appearance in music shops and retail stores, like Zellers, where I purchased my copy for $6.99 plus tax, the album's first single came out. It was entitled "Every Breath You Take".

I can still remember how utterly blown away I was when I first heard it; that classic, commencing bang from Stewart Copeland's drum that immediately set the dark tone of this incredible song, followed by Andy Summers' arresting guitar melody suffusing the song with an ominous, billowing fog, which, coupled with Sting's steady bass-line, I feel completely warranted the memorable black and white video that accompanied it, giving it a film noir quality, especially as it featured a lit cigarette at the beginning and end. Kevin Godley and Lol Crème of 10cc fame directed the "Every Breath You Take" video (along with the videos for "Synchronicity II" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" as well), and MTV incessantly aired it from then on that May and throughout the rest of the year pretty much. It also dominated radio airplay and 45-single sales by spending 8 consecutive weeks at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart in July and August of '83.

Sting's vocals on the track were uncharacteristically in a low-register, which lent a menacing vibe, given the stalker-theme elicited in the fairly simple lyrics that begin with: "Every breath you take/ Every move you make/ Every bond you break/Every step you take/ I'll be watching you". Many people, particularly unwitting brides and grooms, misinterpreted "Every Breath You Take" as a love-song in the traditional sense, but it's anything but. The song seems to be about a jilted man who's the unfortunate recipient of unrequited love, and has become obsessed with his distant "object of desire". 

However, Sting has intriguingly claimed in a recent interview that the smash-hit song is about the Reagan administration and the conservative political climate of the 80s, with the notion of Big Brother "watching you, and watching us all": "1984", after all, was the title of George Orwell's nightmarish 1949 novel, fittingly enough, so perhaps Sting was, consciously or unconsciously, channelling that novel, as well as his marriage break-up with his first wife, Frances Tomelty, when he composed "Every Breath You Take". Was there possibly a synchronous relationship between said political climate of that time and the deep, personal romantic turmoil Sting was going through concurrently?

Regardless, I bought the 45-single of it in May of '83, and fervently played it to death, if for no other reason than because I absolutely loved its seductive melody and hook and overall mood, while still being intrigued by its sinister overtones. Even as a young teenage boy, I was readily drawn to the strange, mysterious and dark under-currents of the world around me. No wonder David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" is one of my all-time favorite films! There's a definite part of me that profoundly relates to the film's small-town protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, and his irrepressible sense of curiosity and inquisitiveness, whatever the risks and dangers such investigating may entail. Ironically, I seemed to have had cultivated a Faustian taste for "forbidden knowledge" and the truth, however unsettling, about the real state of things.

When June came around, and I saw "Synchronicity" displayed, with all the other new records out at the time, I snatched up a precious copy with my own money that I had earned delivering newspapers with my brother, Jeff. Excitedly bringing the album home, without having heard any of the other tracks, besides "Every Breath You Take", I seem to recall just knowing beforehand, in my mind, that the album was going to be amazing, and IT WAS! The music (side one is the rockier, up-tempo half, and side two is the more subdued, slow-tempo half), melodies, hooks, vocals, production, and each band member's respective instrumental contribution captivated and enchanted my every faculty and sense, which, for a freshly pubescent fifteen year-old boy, were hyper-sensitive and sharply attuned. It was a watershed moment for me when I first heard "Synchronicity" in its entirety. I had never heard anything like it before. It was so different to what I was used to hearing on the radio, despite its accessibility. However, the lyrics were a different story altogether, at least on a conscious, and naïve, level.

First of all, I thought to myself back then, while going to junior high school at the time, "what did synchronicity mean exactly"? And as I eagerly followed along with the lyrics printed on the album sleeve, I also asked myself what did "Spiritus Mundi" mean? And what did Sting mean when he sang "Take this space between us and fill it up someway"? What the hell was Andy ranting and raving on about his mother? Who was "Miss Gradenko"? What did the Loch Ness Monster have to do with suburban families and city life? Why all the vivid negative imagery to express that you're in pain? What was the Scylla and Charibdes? Who was Mephistopheles? And, finally, who were these strange sisters wandering in the Sahara Desert looking for tea? Some of the answers to these teeming questions were thankfully provided by The Police members themselves in the many interviews I came across in the rock music magazines I started to buy in conjunction with my burgeoning love and obsession with pop-music and Top 40 radio circa '82-'83.

For such a dark and dour, intelligent and literary album, "Synchronicity" became a huge commercial hit, spending 17 non-consecutive weeks at #1 on Billboard's Top 200, even keeping Michael Jackson's juggernaut hit album, "Thriller", off the top-spot for most of the summer and fall, as it went on to achieve multi-platinum status with staggering sales of over 8 million copies in the U.S. alone. It also scored three more hit singles: "King of Pain" (#3 chart placing), "Wrapped Around Your Finger" (#8), and "Synchronicity II" (#16). Clearly, the album struck a lot more chords than just mine in 1983.

Eventually, I learned that synchronicity was a concept developed by famed psychologist, Carl Jung, which meant the profound connection between two seemingly unrelated things; and that Spiritus Mundi meant "World spirit, or spirit of man"; the "space between us" is apparently the widening gap within a humanity that has distanced itself from its former god, or gods, and are collectively feeling spiritually empty for it; the rocky relationship between Andy's character and his mother is clearly a depiction of Freud's well-known "Oedipus complex"; "Miss Gradenko" alluded to foreign relations with the Soviet Union during a time when nuclear devastation was on everyone's mind; the Loch Ness Monster was used as a metaphor for the darkness humanity had apparently unleashed from within itself, because of the increasing inhumanity brought on by an alienated modernity (there was also an allusion to William Butler Yeats' famous 1920 poem "The Second Coming"); the hyperbolic, yet poetic imagery, Sting described in "King of Pain" were all analogies to the monumental "pain and turmoil" (which he admitted in interviews around that time in '83 produced his best work) he had seemingly been enduring exclusively; the Scylla is a massive rock formation resembling a many-headed sea-beast, while the Charibdes is a gigantic whirlpool, and both were featured in Homer's "The Odyssey"; Mephistopheles is the personification of the devil that appeared in Goethe's early 19th century masterpiece, "Faust"; and, finally, the sisters in the Sahara Desert appeared as a symbolic anecdote in Paul Bowles' marvelous 1949 novel, "The Sheltering Sky", which Sting had read and was obviously inspired to write "Tea in the Sahara", the mesmerizing album closer on the vinyl version of "Synchronicity", where as the politically-acerbic "Murder by Numbers" is/was the featured album closer on the compact disc and tape cassette.

It's funny though, despite not being privy to all the literary and philosophical references peppered throughout "Synchronicity's" lyrics, and not fully comprehending the underlying themes therein, during that initial time, I felt, on a subconscious, gut-level, what Sting, predominately, was trying to communicate to his audience, to me. And it was ultimately this internal drive and curiosity to understand and to learn that I believe "the seeds to my intellectual being" were originally sown, as pretentious as that may sound. The world was then beginning to really open up to me, to my individual purview, and I wanted to absorb and understand as much of it as I could stand to take in without feeling overwhelmed and frightened by it all, and so the irrepressible urge to express myself, artistically, emerged.

Consequently, I became an avid reader, socially-conscious, and started writing my own songs, which showed, quite obviously, the immediate influence of Sting and The Police. By February of 1984, I had all five of The Police's proper albums in my possession, and they undoubtedly became my favorite band, and top musical artist in general. They've remained a beloved, and continuously enriching, favorite of mine for the past thirty years. And "Synchronicity" has become the single most important and impactful album on my life.