thanks Dougald! i have not read that yet, and will definitely add it to my list. sounds very interesting. i'm about to get stuck in with research for the zombie book (Jung, McGilchrist, Campagna, maybe The Secret Life of Puppets) and will put that on the stack. hope all your projects are going well, it sounds like you've been very busy.
Really love this and your particular inquiry here. The Dead Don’t Die was in fact a bit of a head scratcher for me, other than seeing it as an artist saying “enough with all the Zombie garbage, it’s over used, please stop. I hope this kills the genre.”
Then a couple years later we have a zombie series’s on HBO where the zombies come from a fungal outbreak and the entire story is based on a video game. I couldn’t help but think this series was the logical end of the mushroom as metaphor. The number of essays talking about our collective mycelial networks and connections are everywhere, from Dark Mountain to Sophie Strand and of course stemming recently from Paul Stamets “Mycilium Running” all the way back to the 60s counter culture finding the Shaman Maria Sabina.
The weird irony is that I could cut here and not mention the elephant in the cultural room which is the dumb film Avatar. I remember when I first watched it, it was technologically a marvel but the dialogue felt pathetic, though the story was undeniably a mythic story. I watched it fairly recently and somehow the timing and pacing seemed kind of perfect, it was somehow less dumb, especially in comparison to something more recent things like The Mandolorian. If we look at the time line of when Avatar was released and all that is implicit in this “dumb” myth so much of what is being written about is about the same ideas embedded in so much ecological/environmental writing today, yet it is almost never acknowledged as source material. Avatar functions similarly to the Matrix, it implicitly shows that we are not our bodies. Also we humans tend to not think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals. Animals do not see themselves separate from nature (animism.) Everything in nature is connected, our ancestors literally return to and become part of nature and can be directly accessed through mother trees which could be seen as the mycelial networks connected to trees.
It’s also a degrowth story and warns that by seeing ourselves as separate from nature man will destroy the sacred, and further distance himself from seeing his/her own connection to it. Lastly it clearly offers a contrast between indigenous/pagan values and those of secular materialists.
Look at the timeline of when Avatar was released 2009 (to be fair Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss was in 2003, Mycelium Running 2005) and then look at when Dark Mountain was started. I don’t mean to diminish the work of Dark Mountain in any way, I love it and find incredibly thoughful writing as well as community there. But how many of the essays and ideas in Dark Mountain were being implicitly discussed and displayed in a dumb film that made over a billion dollars at the box office? Even if you hate Avatar it created a universal framework for understanding these ideas that were largely isolated and trapped in books geared toward middle class educated “liberals.” Avatar as a dumb film with a central protagonist as a soldier managed to escape the political divide that tends to befall most written environmental work.
As this is getting long I’ll just add one major spoke worth considering to your argument. “They aren’t facts derived from the world, in the way that reductive materialism would have us believe;²these are the truths that shape material reality, the way a melody shapes sound into music.”
This seems like a clear argument, but if John Cage were here he would likely vehemently disagree with this as wrong or an over simplification at best. Cage was an avid forager, studied Hinduism, Buddhism etc. music for him changed over time from using melody to turn noise into music into something that could be a designed process, randomness with prepared piano, and on to something like a Buddhist practice of presence. 4’33” is about hearing what is happening all around you at any given time, it’s about taking the reigns off our desire to construct and orchestrate music and realize we are already in music all the time 4’33” as a concept it inherently makes music Animistic if we simply go to the wood and listen to our own 4’33”.
Again trying m to keep this brief I’ll just say I don’t disagree with your path of inquiry, I just think it’s missing a pillar and that is a real understand of Art and how Art functions. Film has the capacity to tell myth, but also to show art, and transport us. Like Cage, David Lynch was also into transcendal meditation and openly said he was just a channel for the ideas, though he was specifically interested in image, the ideas came from outside himself. I’m not sure he wanted to change culture, I’m not sure if he had a strong interested in mythology (personally doubt it.) I do think he wanted to step aside and let the fertile unconscious speak through images and in doing so was more interested in Art. Myth tends to lead us in a particular direction (order) and is perhaps more akin to a parable. Most effective Art presents something unknown, a field of uncertainty, that the mind does not understand. It often has no referent or purpose other than to create an experience of mystery. The meaning, purpose, connections to this unknown are all individual and may be accepted and built upon or rejected and pushed against (creative chaos and destructive chaos). I am of course oversimplify things. Art can be linear and ordered and have specific aims and goals. Myth can be used to undo an ordered understanding and create a field of chaos. We can be transported to filmic time/world or we can be in perfect presence and also somehow through presence escape our material selves.
There are plenty of bullet holes in this as I’ve written it quickly off the top of my head but as you are writing a book thought I’d share and hope this is helpful, rather than me just being a performative dick hole.
hey, thanks so much for taking the time to write such a great comment. lots to chew on here. first—fair point about music and melody. i knew i was getting out over my skis with that analogy, because i really don't know much about music. i would venture a counterpoint that, perhaps, Cage's larger project was to re-define music *as an idea*—to make it an intellectual exercise—which would seem to be antithetical to his approach of releasing control within a particular song. Cage is trying to make his own completely idiosyncratic form of music, which is a valid creative exercise, but very different from putting himself in the service of Music. efforts to make music more marketable for the creator—stylistically distinct, innovative, challenging—are byproducts of a commercial industry, which shouldn't be conflated with the human need for Music as a form of real transcendence. in this, the elemental forms are almost always the best. while Cage might find it boring, some of the most accessible and powerful forms of musical transcendence are created with simple instruments, in dialogue with a particular landscape, and a long-lived cultural tradition within that landscape. this is not a form of art that can be packaged and sold off. the qualities that make these forms of music so powerful are precisely that make them commercial nullities: because they are ancient and persistent, because the path is so well-worn, because they don't belong to any one person or group. and again, this is different from an aesthetically stimulating experience. i'm talking about music that will change our brain function and put us into a trance state, allowing us to travel to the Otherworld more readily. maybe Cage's music has that power too; still, i suspect it's not quite as universal as the fire-circle variety.
i think that chimes with your thoughts about Art, as well. i agree completely: Art has immense power, but only when it is *as unmediated as possible.* every phase of translation and ideation and iteration, boxing-up and redefining, takes some of its power away. there is no DoorDash art. we simply can't have it. Art should defy convenience. unfortunately, what we have now is the belief that art should be universal and immediately available, should require no sacrifices from the consumer—or, conversely, should be so esoteric that it serves as an aesthetic barricade for certain elitist in-groups. neither of these is the function that Art is meant to serve.
and finally—i think there's an important distinction between "mythic" and "epic," in our conventional usage. i was dismayed to learn that the ancient Greek "epos" refers more to poetry and prophecy, whereas "mythos" is more prosaic. alas, in These Dark Times, we're stuck with "epic" connoting grandeur or scale, and "mythic" referring to metaphysical potency. by those lights, i would provisionally say that Avatar is an epic story, but not necessarily a mythic one. i might walk this back later (we'll see what ends up in the book) but for now, i would propose that a properly mythic story can and should be taken as literally as possible, requiring a minimum of figurative or allegorical translation. this is the approach i'm taking with the book: what if the zombies in these stories are, literally, the Dead?
thanks for thinking through this stuff with me! it's super helpful.
Really appreciate the response and back to you, there’s a lot to chew on. I’m just starting to really dig into Cage so will have some more depth to my understanding of him and his work soon. I suspect he loved traditional music just was not interested in making music that way himself. He specifically said he heard entire symphonies while out foraging for mushrooms. His work was intimately tied to landscape/place and just of personal interest he was at Black Mountain College outside of Asheville (which if not familiar was this explosion of artistic activity and Ideas including Buckminster Fuller, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, etc) then when it folded he ended up in Boulder at Naropa University during the opening years alongside Ram Das, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Chogyam Trungpa, Anne Waldman and just about every one from that period. He just had an incredible homing beacon.
“Art has immense power, but only when it is *as unmediated as possible.* every phase of translation and ideation and iteration, boxing-up and redefining, takes some of its power away. there is no DoorDash art. we simply can't have it. Art should defy convenience. unfortunately, what we have now is the belief that art should be universal and immediately available, should require no sacrifices from the consumer—or, conversely, should be so esoteric that it serves as an aesthetic barricade for certain elitist in-groups. neither of these is the function that Art is meant to serve.”
Hah, I have a lot to say there, but will try to restrain myself. I’m currently (slowly) working on a project that is intentionally trying to subvert much of this by trying to present images that have no coherent meaning, in combination with a matrix that gives discrete meanings that can provide multiple meanings and enhance the potential for multiple interpretations. As in I can an image that on the surface has no coherent meaning, then provide clear meaning, then flip it to mean something else entirely. So the viewer is left with multiple, often contradictory definitions rather than “mystery.” We’ll see. It’s a massive undertaking and sadly not hesitant waiting to see just how far down the bad path the US plans to go.
Agree on the elitist language of art / institutions and how problematic and limiting they are. High art institutions are the ones playing catch up to black art whereas black art has been at the forefront of popular music for decades. I felt strongly that I knew how to solve for this but now as AI is coming into maturity it’s thrown a monkey wrench in to things. So long as billionaires own entire platforms that most artists are posting on, their AI will easily be able to steal and outcompete real artists. Whomp, whomp.
Lastly, as a Jim Jarmusch fan, I hope you watched Patterson. It’s pretty incredible and rewards repeat viewings.
absolutely... Patterson's one of my favorites, and i'm due for a re-watch soon.
that's part of why i was so disappointed in The Dead Don't Die: after Patterson, in spite Jarmusch's studied coolness, i know he's capable of genuine warmth and optimism.
obviously a zombie movie isn't the right venue for that; his other films have a definite jadedness to them, so i don't expect him to be a ray of sunshine all the time. but Don't Die seemed almost viciously misanthropic to the point of petulance. he's grasping for some mythic themes, and in the past, he's described (what i consider) the proper approach to creativity when reaching beyond mundane artifice. nevertheless, he apparently had a bug up his ass about politics at the time he was making Don't Die. that seems to have scuttled the whole thing.
thanks again for following along! definitely looking forward to your thoughts on future entries in this series.
Great piece, R.G. Have you read DBH's All Things Are Full of Gods? If not, I think you'll enjoy it.
thanks Dougald! i have not read that yet, and will definitely add it to my list. sounds very interesting. i'm about to get stuck in with research for the zombie book (Jung, McGilchrist, Campagna, maybe The Secret Life of Puppets) and will put that on the stack. hope all your projects are going well, it sounds like you've been very busy.
Really love this and your particular inquiry here. The Dead Don’t Die was in fact a bit of a head scratcher for me, other than seeing it as an artist saying “enough with all the Zombie garbage, it’s over used, please stop. I hope this kills the genre.”
Then a couple years later we have a zombie series’s on HBO where the zombies come from a fungal outbreak and the entire story is based on a video game. I couldn’t help but think this series was the logical end of the mushroom as metaphor. The number of essays talking about our collective mycelial networks and connections are everywhere, from Dark Mountain to Sophie Strand and of course stemming recently from Paul Stamets “Mycilium Running” all the way back to the 60s counter culture finding the Shaman Maria Sabina.
The weird irony is that I could cut here and not mention the elephant in the cultural room which is the dumb film Avatar. I remember when I first watched it, it was technologically a marvel but the dialogue felt pathetic, though the story was undeniably a mythic story. I watched it fairly recently and somehow the timing and pacing seemed kind of perfect, it was somehow less dumb, especially in comparison to something more recent things like The Mandolorian. If we look at the time line of when Avatar was released and all that is implicit in this “dumb” myth so much of what is being written about is about the same ideas embedded in so much ecological/environmental writing today, yet it is almost never acknowledged as source material. Avatar functions similarly to the Matrix, it implicitly shows that we are not our bodies. Also we humans tend to not think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals. Animals do not see themselves separate from nature (animism.) Everything in nature is connected, our ancestors literally return to and become part of nature and can be directly accessed through mother trees which could be seen as the mycelial networks connected to trees.
It’s also a degrowth story and warns that by seeing ourselves as separate from nature man will destroy the sacred, and further distance himself from seeing his/her own connection to it. Lastly it clearly offers a contrast between indigenous/pagan values and those of secular materialists.
Look at the timeline of when Avatar was released 2009 (to be fair Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss was in 2003, Mycelium Running 2005) and then look at when Dark Mountain was started. I don’t mean to diminish the work of Dark Mountain in any way, I love it and find incredibly thoughful writing as well as community there. But how many of the essays and ideas in Dark Mountain were being implicitly discussed and displayed in a dumb film that made over a billion dollars at the box office? Even if you hate Avatar it created a universal framework for understanding these ideas that were largely isolated and trapped in books geared toward middle class educated “liberals.” Avatar as a dumb film with a central protagonist as a soldier managed to escape the political divide that tends to befall most written environmental work.
As this is getting long I’ll just add one major spoke worth considering to your argument. “They aren’t facts derived from the world, in the way that reductive materialism would have us believe;²these are the truths that shape material reality, the way a melody shapes sound into music.”
This seems like a clear argument, but if John Cage were here he would likely vehemently disagree with this as wrong or an over simplification at best. Cage was an avid forager, studied Hinduism, Buddhism etc. music for him changed over time from using melody to turn noise into music into something that could be a designed process, randomness with prepared piano, and on to something like a Buddhist practice of presence. 4’33” is about hearing what is happening all around you at any given time, it’s about taking the reigns off our desire to construct and orchestrate music and realize we are already in music all the time 4’33” as a concept it inherently makes music Animistic if we simply go to the wood and listen to our own 4’33”.
Again trying m to keep this brief I’ll just say I don’t disagree with your path of inquiry, I just think it’s missing a pillar and that is a real understand of Art and how Art functions. Film has the capacity to tell myth, but also to show art, and transport us. Like Cage, David Lynch was also into transcendal meditation and openly said he was just a channel for the ideas, though he was specifically interested in image, the ideas came from outside himself. I’m not sure he wanted to change culture, I’m not sure if he had a strong interested in mythology (personally doubt it.) I do think he wanted to step aside and let the fertile unconscious speak through images and in doing so was more interested in Art. Myth tends to lead us in a particular direction (order) and is perhaps more akin to a parable. Most effective Art presents something unknown, a field of uncertainty, that the mind does not understand. It often has no referent or purpose other than to create an experience of mystery. The meaning, purpose, connections to this unknown are all individual and may be accepted and built upon or rejected and pushed against (creative chaos and destructive chaos). I am of course oversimplify things. Art can be linear and ordered and have specific aims and goals. Myth can be used to undo an ordered understanding and create a field of chaos. We can be transported to filmic time/world or we can be in perfect presence and also somehow through presence escape our material selves.
There are plenty of bullet holes in this as I’ve written it quickly off the top of my head but as you are writing a book thought I’d share and hope this is helpful, rather than me just being a performative dick hole.
hey, thanks so much for taking the time to write such a great comment. lots to chew on here. first—fair point about music and melody. i knew i was getting out over my skis with that analogy, because i really don't know much about music. i would venture a counterpoint that, perhaps, Cage's larger project was to re-define music *as an idea*—to make it an intellectual exercise—which would seem to be antithetical to his approach of releasing control within a particular song. Cage is trying to make his own completely idiosyncratic form of music, which is a valid creative exercise, but very different from putting himself in the service of Music. efforts to make music more marketable for the creator—stylistically distinct, innovative, challenging—are byproducts of a commercial industry, which shouldn't be conflated with the human need for Music as a form of real transcendence. in this, the elemental forms are almost always the best. while Cage might find it boring, some of the most accessible and powerful forms of musical transcendence are created with simple instruments, in dialogue with a particular landscape, and a long-lived cultural tradition within that landscape. this is not a form of art that can be packaged and sold off. the qualities that make these forms of music so powerful are precisely that make them commercial nullities: because they are ancient and persistent, because the path is so well-worn, because they don't belong to any one person or group. and again, this is different from an aesthetically stimulating experience. i'm talking about music that will change our brain function and put us into a trance state, allowing us to travel to the Otherworld more readily. maybe Cage's music has that power too; still, i suspect it's not quite as universal as the fire-circle variety.
i think that chimes with your thoughts about Art, as well. i agree completely: Art has immense power, but only when it is *as unmediated as possible.* every phase of translation and ideation and iteration, boxing-up and redefining, takes some of its power away. there is no DoorDash art. we simply can't have it. Art should defy convenience. unfortunately, what we have now is the belief that art should be universal and immediately available, should require no sacrifices from the consumer—or, conversely, should be so esoteric that it serves as an aesthetic barricade for certain elitist in-groups. neither of these is the function that Art is meant to serve.
and finally—i think there's an important distinction between "mythic" and "epic," in our conventional usage. i was dismayed to learn that the ancient Greek "epos" refers more to poetry and prophecy, whereas "mythos" is more prosaic. alas, in These Dark Times, we're stuck with "epic" connoting grandeur or scale, and "mythic" referring to metaphysical potency. by those lights, i would provisionally say that Avatar is an epic story, but not necessarily a mythic one. i might walk this back later (we'll see what ends up in the book) but for now, i would propose that a properly mythic story can and should be taken as literally as possible, requiring a minimum of figurative or allegorical translation. this is the approach i'm taking with the book: what if the zombies in these stories are, literally, the Dead?
thanks for thinking through this stuff with me! it's super helpful.
Really appreciate the response and back to you, there’s a lot to chew on. I’m just starting to really dig into Cage so will have some more depth to my understanding of him and his work soon. I suspect he loved traditional music just was not interested in making music that way himself. He specifically said he heard entire symphonies while out foraging for mushrooms. His work was intimately tied to landscape/place and just of personal interest he was at Black Mountain College outside of Asheville (which if not familiar was this explosion of artistic activity and Ideas including Buckminster Fuller, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, etc) then when it folded he ended up in Boulder at Naropa University during the opening years alongside Ram Das, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Chogyam Trungpa, Anne Waldman and just about every one from that period. He just had an incredible homing beacon.
“Art has immense power, but only when it is *as unmediated as possible.* every phase of translation and ideation and iteration, boxing-up and redefining, takes some of its power away. there is no DoorDash art. we simply can't have it. Art should defy convenience. unfortunately, what we have now is the belief that art should be universal and immediately available, should require no sacrifices from the consumer—or, conversely, should be so esoteric that it serves as an aesthetic barricade for certain elitist in-groups. neither of these is the function that Art is meant to serve.”
Hah, I have a lot to say there, but will try to restrain myself. I’m currently (slowly) working on a project that is intentionally trying to subvert much of this by trying to present images that have no coherent meaning, in combination with a matrix that gives discrete meanings that can provide multiple meanings and enhance the potential for multiple interpretations. As in I can an image that on the surface has no coherent meaning, then provide clear meaning, then flip it to mean something else entirely. So the viewer is left with multiple, often contradictory definitions rather than “mystery.” We’ll see. It’s a massive undertaking and sadly not hesitant waiting to see just how far down the bad path the US plans to go.
Agree on the elitist language of art / institutions and how problematic and limiting they are. High art institutions are the ones playing catch up to black art whereas black art has been at the forefront of popular music for decades. I felt strongly that I knew how to solve for this but now as AI is coming into maturity it’s thrown a monkey wrench in to things. So long as billionaires own entire platforms that most artists are posting on, their AI will easily be able to steal and outcompete real artists. Whomp, whomp.
Lastly, as a Jim Jarmusch fan, I hope you watched Patterson. It’s pretty incredible and rewards repeat viewings.
absolutely... Patterson's one of my favorites, and i'm due for a re-watch soon.
that's part of why i was so disappointed in The Dead Don't Die: after Patterson, in spite Jarmusch's studied coolness, i know he's capable of genuine warmth and optimism.
obviously a zombie movie isn't the right venue for that; his other films have a definite jadedness to them, so i don't expect him to be a ray of sunshine all the time. but Don't Die seemed almost viciously misanthropic to the point of petulance. he's grasping for some mythic themes, and in the past, he's described (what i consider) the proper approach to creativity when reaching beyond mundane artifice. nevertheless, he apparently had a bug up his ass about politics at the time he was making Don't Die. that seems to have scuttled the whole thing.
thanks again for following along! definitely looking forward to your thoughts on future entries in this series.