Gombrowicz writes in his diary that “I must combat the pettiness of the reader. His is a cowardly reading of my texts. It seems that they are afraid of getting the entire meaning, not because it would terrify them, but only because they are not accustomed to complete contents. They try violently to change me into one more specimen of conventional literature [even while] they themselves claim that my writing defies all conventions.”
From Weds. Last night we had a little party at the theater, and we watched Michael Hoffman's 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At first, no one at the party came in to watch it from the roof. But by the end, almost everyone was watching.
I watched an educational video about the relative depth of the Titanic. I didn't realize that in the 1950s, French explorers made 10,000 meters—the very bottom. The Titanic only lies about 2,000 meters down, comparatively shallow waters.
Sometimes when I read Shakespeare, I think he’s operating 10,000 meters beneath the surface, and merely great writers are lucky to get to 2,000.
What makes AMSND such a supreme work of art is that it links up all these different levels of reality: the forest, the court, the theater—realms of pleasure, power, play. It demonstrates how fractalized all things are. Each domain of life is a metaphor for another—which Shakespeare intuitively recognized.
Watching a 20 year old movie in an industrial loft in Greenpoint, you still get the English countryside in 1575, the English countryside of Shakespeare's childhood, through the words. Something has been preserved perfectly in language, in form, and also transcended. It's not just a verbal photograph, but a living organic model of a certain reality as perceived by human beings, as experienced by human beings, that can be inhabited and passed on to the future. A verbal cathedral.
Culture is a membrane through which our thoughts can be translated. Something that allows specific kinds of complex communication. Culture is a specific kind of form and operation. That's what McLuhan means when he says the medium is the message. You