Papal Infallibility

Scandal could easily be a sword-and-sandal drama, because it's not about people so much as it is about flawed gods. (However, I don't mean to overstate how much people are like people.) Undoubtedly I have this image because one of these characters calls them "gladiators in suits"--the cheesiest line that ever was, as another acknowledges. Every character is remarkable and/or "weird" (and "weird is good"). Even their names seem ostenatiously legendary or fictional: Cyrus, Gideon, Pope, Huck. But greatness only lands on them like so many traumatic bricks; the rest they have to work at. The plane of infallibility is out of reach insofaras it is already within them.

While the writing begins with a bountiful antagonism reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin, it moves quickly toward forceful monologue. Olivia Pope executes takedowns not with elaborate ploys, as Gossip Girl's Blair Waldorf would, but with a single bomb of a speech made up on the spot.

Cyrus has the sarcastic version of her eloquence, and naturally becomes more her enemy throughout the course of the first season. There are reasons for this, but I'd like to entertain the possibility that Cyrus is untrustworthy simply because the mechanics, motives, and effects of his speech cannot be reconciled with Olivia's. Nobody really listens to him, so he is oblique. In one scene he tells the President how his life will be now that his dirty secret is out. He ends this acid prophecy with "but you just work on your speech, because that's important," and a little chuckle.

Olivia Pope is the clearest manifestation of greatness around. But if she were a stable element, it wouldn't be much of a show. The first episode reveals that her gut is never wrong and is wrong, that she doesn't believe in crying and cries. Yet this hadly diminishes our devotion, nor her employees. It seems to us that life's chaos can only be met with rash decision. Anything less is wallowing, or so we are convinced, watching her. With a little swallowed whine of discontent.

Her advice to her cohorts borders on patronizing aggression. She advises everyone to "get some normal," while she herself freely admits "I'm not normal." One of her worst moments is, to use the new employee's word, "demolishing" a girl who claims to have had sex with the president. And if she had not? For her, contemplation is done through action. Which is a fine thing for television. For someone who has made contemplation the only possible thing, it's also tempting, by way of sheer self-loathing, to say Olivia's knowledge through mistakes is the finest thing. Her attitude reminds me of a very defensive thing Michel Foucault wrote (if it were shorter, today it could be called a subtweet):

As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next--as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.

It's at once inspiring and arrogant. He defends analytic thought from contemplative paralysis, which is nearly tantamount to giving himself a free pass to analyze whatever and however he wants. Olivia Pope means to move herself and everyone around her into such great motion that nobody will ever be stuck or lost ("giving up is not an option"), and her noble cause gives her justification to destroy or manipulate whoever stands in her way.

Also, Olivia Pope is not from the same planet.

Being from a different planet can inspire respect as much as it can eros. A funny thing, for her--she's mostly indifferent to it. But she does have desire. The president's romantic gesture is to ask her for "just one minute." Taking one minute to stand staring into each other's eyes could not be more alien to her nature. Inaction being under such a foreceful prohibition, perhaps for her it's better than sex. They do have sex, but annoying as it is to watch two people look into each other's eyes for this long, surely it's the pause that's apotheotic.

She trusts him; she hates how her trust blinds her. She loves him; she's at war with him. Lucy Snowe (Villette) says it best:

Reader, if in the course of this work, you find that my opinion of Dr. John undergoes modification, excuse the seeming inconsistency. I give the feeling as at the time I felt it; I describe the view of character as it appeared when discovered.

Maybe it's best not to think in terms of opinion. Yet it is so often solicited. The "gladiators" have a ritual of observing their clients from behind glass, before they take them on, but Olivia has always already decided. They're supposed to vote whether they believe the client's story, but the vote never matters. Why do this? Why have a minute of looking into each other's eyes? Any show with a bit of self-respect (or maybe vanity) is more interested in the eyes averted, glancing, or spying. Oddly, the cynical view of characters with cynical gazes gives a clearer picture, while Scandal's direct and sustained eye contact (tearing people apart, too, is done face-to-face) makes character more difficult to gauge. There is no one-way glass. The potential clients know they're being observed. In these open conditions Olivia sees clearly the "character as it appeared when discovered," while everyone, including us, are busy trying to get to the bottom of things.

If the show is so counter-voyeuristic, why this love of bevelled windows? At nearly every opportunity, the camera pans slowly across the edge, yielding a rainbow-tinged double of whoever's there that's always slipping in or out. It seems incongruous that the barrier of the window is necessary to introduce this nagging visual error. In the world of the show, all that is necessary is to pull down all barriers, and one senses a lie crawling away.

The Men In My Mind (In Theirs, Too)

Innovation is a gross word. It probably gives Evegeny Morozov hives and/or an erection (a critic's diptich of conditions). The same cake is on the stove as four months ago, on another stove. I persist writing mood pieces about cakes.

Has Mad Men ever changed the way it does what it does? I doubt it. It's just intensified. These days it's a series of Mad Men Moments and setups for Mad Men Moments. Is it slapstick? Arrange things so that characters stumble into saying something unwittingly wise or prophetic. Last episode, the poetic phrase (and image) was "Why are you being punished?" "Because the wallpaper doesn't line up."

It sounds like a Don line, but this MMM belongs to his son, and suddenly he loves him. He says so to Megan, and she hugs him because oh my god, a man is having an Emotional Experience. (Much like the show's spectacle of whites spectacularly emoting over MLK's death. I'll give you one guess what two colors the wallpaper was.)

Don is more interested in his son's emergent familiarity than how he might be different. The show couldn't care less about its subject, only that it's poetic. Don is in love with himself, and the show is in love with itself.

Why do I care if I make new cakes? This one's delicious. Are there fruit other than apples?

Once, MMMs were delicious. They sustained interest. (A much messier word.) I'm always trying to decipher what made one meal delicious and another unremarkable. Odd--delight in eating is a terrible index of delight in anything else. My latest theory is to eat well is to take interest. A meal of variety is exemplary (there's always one), but even a lone bowl of broth may hold interest.

Interest is as suspect to Rectify as thought is heroic. One of the first things Daniel says in public is that in prison he developed a routine intended to avoid thinking. When he wasn't trying to stamp out thinking with chants, he read books, and thoughtfully conversed with the man in the next cell.

His half-brother, Ted, is calculated to make us as uncomfortable as Daniel, suspected of rape and murder, makes everyone on the show. Ted's problem is that he's as thoughtless as he is self-interested. He distrusts Daniel because he assumes Daniel will take his job. He thinks Daniel is guilty because Daniel tells him about being raped in prison. Presumably, he feels raped by Daniel's story. That's his epistemology.

"Never seen so many dumb Georgia crackers descended upon egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken in your life," Ted says. "That's interesting," Daniel says. "I guess." Ted has too much interest to find anything interesting. Daniel finds everything interesting and tries self-flagellatingly hard to not be interested in himself. This impersonality embues him and his thinking with an aura of goodness.

Verlyn Klinkenborg posits interest to be a way of bargaining with abudance. Being interested is the thing he urges us to recover from underneath our education. The bargain he proposes is: trust in the abundance of your interest, and receive the abundance of your interest. If I say I'm not sure about this, he can say that's why. I'm not sure whose circular logic it is, but still, I'm not sure. I'm the sort of person who can be engrossed by a novel for hundreds of pages and never read the last fifty. (Or reverse those numbers.) I routinely commit Klinkenborg's sin of being anxious I'll lose interest in a piece of writing. Not because the piece is a terrible idea, not ultimately worthy of interest, but because I'll make cake, watch television, worry about those things that impetuously solicit worry. Thinking that I'll think about something in the future is pretty much meaningless. My calendar and to-do list are records of futile promises. This is so apparent that, like Alison Bechdel repeats "I think" in her diary, I append question marks to half of my tasks.

Actually, they're all terrible ideas. Given enough time to mull over anything, I'll come to the conclusion it's stupid. (Which, yes, is a stupid conclusion, but what can I do?) We would have nothing if this logic reigned. Robert Creeley's introductions to his own collections of work are graceful for letting their contents be. But they would never have been written if he always took the long view. Creation is a process of outrunning understanding, for me at least, I think.

Which is stupid. What's wrong with making a cake I'm not infatuated with? Klinkenborg critiques the notion of writerly genius, in which all writing comes in flashes and unstoppable flows. Because his is a self-help book and everything has to be about doing better, the problem with needing to be infatuated with what you're doing is that it's deterimental to doing. It's also a reaction to the danger of fantasy, to being in hot, precarious relation. Interest appears as an appealing alternative to infatuation because it's cooler, more reliable.

There are relations other than detached tepidness and compromising intimacy. I know that I placed those adjectives to show their misplacement, but the motive is dim.

What's that about cake?

Hunger

"Usually temperature was a battle," but every once in a while one gets smug. One finds "the particular ecstacy in greeting" the perfect temperature. Then again, is it the knowledge that one is in perfect temperature--the posession of which is smugness--that gives such ecstacy, or the lost time of not knowing, of not being aware of temperature at all? Irina is witnessing--always, happily, worryingly, a bit too late--the dissolution of both consciousness and control. It's perfect and it's a bit frightening.

The same could be said of food. I'm constantly wondering if I've eaten enough to stave off hunger hours later, and this worrying feels a great deal like hunger, if it isn't in fact the feeling itself. I say hours, but I think of it as forever. The point of eating becomes to create an infinite duration of not worrying about eating. Perfection is quite a load to burden eating with, making it something to worry about, and such heavy expectations tend to make the act itself awfully light, hardly noticable.

Once in a while, though, I'm overcome (or rather, I just barely perceive that something is barely perceptable) with smugness. Too exhausted to worry about eating, the hours in retrospect seem not to have been counted. I did not interpret the restless gnawing an hour after a large meal as hunger, as I tend to.

Of course, I have to say that when I was thinking "I'm not hungry" with an air of accomplishment, I was sitting down to a snack. This was not a contradiction, in part because the snack was inedible. Yet I was eating it. Are samosas gross, or were these gross samosas? Old, greasy pastry thick with dry chickpea mash. Their disgustingness was more comforting than off-putting, though. I only felt compelled to eat them out of a pointless, neurotic aversion to waste. But the fact that they were nasty was so--what? Undemanding? Time did not expand or "stop"; it was already more than one could ever need. It was inconceivable that it ever wouldn't.

Which is why I missed reading Lionel Shriver, I think. We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World are different in form, but they share a pervasive distaste. It's like the astringency of tea at the back of the throat, absolving one's mouth from consuming food. It's not that Shriver's irritable characters don't swallow, so to speak, but things come back up and don't go down easily. The nausea is an oddly permeable prophylactic.

Irina's discovery of her lack of appetite for a better temperature comes when she's getting what she wants, even if she didn't know she wanted it. My moment of equanimity seems at first not to involve such crisscrossing of appetites, but then, I had given up on the day being useful or productive in any way, and not as a decision. Irina gave up on her non-marriage of nine years, and, indeed, the whole lifestyle that surrounds it, without intending to. Reading her "go wobbly" with slice after slice of chocolate-cappucino cake from Tesco, brandy, "a secret packet of cigarettes" and blasting Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes is an unattainable wish-fulfillment, not because any of these things sound particularly pleasurable themselves, but because she has so much rigidity--"trout and broccoli"--to make a mess of.

My attempts to impose rigidity on my life (no, I'm not saying I'm free; I'm saying I'm lazy) can only be endured with constant snacking, or rather, constant worrying. Otherwise, the thread of the next thing and the next thing is lost, and I suddenly realize how exhausting it all is. The drain seems to have come to the same realization; it has stopped draining. The stagnant water festers. But finally--finally--it has stopped stoppping-draining-stopping-draining. No more gurgling in the middle of the night.

Everything in One Room

Nature is said to abhor a vacuum, and Harald in The Group is "a perfect fanatic about waste space." For someone whose ideal apartment is "a machine for living," his speech, though mechanical, lacks economy. He's so verbosely inexpressive--of which lifting Le Courbusier's famous phrase is an example--he has class stupidity. He is, despite his fanaticism, a fan of lofty form evacuated of content: He reads the Old Testament and Marx "for the style." His vision of the perfect household might use space efficiently, but perhaps it can be more clearly regarded as empty forms: "everything built in: bookcases, beauros, chests. The beds were going to be mattresses and springs, supported by four low pegs, and they were thinking about having a table to eat on that would fold up into the wall like a Murphy bed--a single leaf of wood shaped like an ironing board but broader." Having just moved into an apartment consisting of two rooms and less than 200 square feet, this domestic vision filled me not only with dread, but with a kind of cross-eyed, doubled sense of too-closeness. Not only did it describe the very conceits that would in theory liberate a tiny space like my own (and therefore underline the tinyness of that space) but there is a peculiar cramped sensation that accompanies reading about an aspect of your life that you try to ignore. Like watching Portlandia in Portland, or watching a television show about someone with a stressful occupation having just come from a stressful occupation earlier in the day.

There is almost nothing in The Group that isn't a little funny. The narration is uniformly amused and cruel. One might characterize this disposition as "detached," "distant," or "cold," like Lakey is said to be. But while not warm, the narration has friction with its many subjects. That is, this kind of mercilessness seems to come not of distance but intimacy. If it were cinema, we might be close enough to see the pores of the group's skin--almost dehumanizingly close, and not nearly distant enough to be sexy. This is not a narrator who runs on desire, projecting into other minds, but rather seems to be laboring to survive among overabundant overcloseness--the group. The strategy is to put all those impinging in their places, to use intimate knowledge to characterize them so accurately that they're kept temporarily at bay. Rather than narrating from a position of presumed subjectivity, the narration is in the process of becoming a subject, eking out a tiny space. Not a room of one's own; not a space from which to speak. If the space were secure, there would be no reason to speak. There would be wonderful silence.

Nothing that's not a little funny, but some are funnier than others, like a fold-out table that's shaped like an ironing board. "Using ironing boards as dining tables" can be a handy metonym for poor, aspiring professionals. Because of course separation of functions is just what they're hoping their future career's monetary gains will enable their living space to have. Space is, indeed, something money buys and tends to mark class. The vast, alienating interiors of the rich have been a cinematic cliché at least since Citizen Kane. The classic image is of the married couple sitting at opposite ends of a table so long they can't hear what the other is saying. It's distance that attenuates relationality, that brings occupants all too close to themselves. But these same estates can be romanticized, not so much for their height and breadth, but for their labyrinthine profusion of rooms, the seclusion of which enables a romantic intimacy. Brideshead Revisisted, for example, is nostalgic for the getting-lost-in-rooms-ness of the English country estate. There's always a room to escape to. There are so many walls that both individuation and eros are possible.

Environmentalism, like the technocracy Harald is so enamored with, views waste with a moral intensity. Interior space must be conserved not because the world must fit neatly together, but because space takes materials to build, and takes energy to heat. Smaller is better, and after all it's cozier, too. This idea has become a movement of sorts, of building and living in very small houses. It comes, of course, with a prescription that one ought to spend more time outdoors anyway. One will want to go outside, if one lives in constant indoor proximity with another. As delightful as The Group is, not everyone can channel their frictional mood into a novel. Moreover, The Group, as you've already surmised from its title even if you haven't read it, does not spring from the friction between romantic partners. The goal is space among others, not space enough to romanticize an other.

The other night I was walking behind a man and a woman, who I assumed from the enthusiasm of their speech were both drunk and on a date. They were arguing, but their tones were not serious. That's different from mock-arguing. The woman, who had moved here six months ago from a city I didn't catch, was defending Portland against the man, who was from Tulsa. "But Tulsa is so clean and lifeless! You don't understand! The people here are so nice!" (I assume nice meant quaint.) The two just went on like this, completely but cheerfully disagreeing about not especially fundamental issues. They were loud, and listening to them was fatiguing. It felt like we were all being rubbed with sandpaper, but they didn't seem to mind. These were two people who may as well have been yelling from separate rooms; their only conceivable connection was sexual. In the same room together they could not have kept it up; that that their words were not hitting home would hit home. Walking down the street, though, allowed them not to care. In an expansive public space their nonconversation could be euphoric.

It's bad enough being in constant indoor proximity with oneself. Having everything condensed into one or two rooms means there can be almost no spatial metaphors to rely on to separate aspects of life at home. The only possible changes of scene become shifts in perspective, rather than different rooms. It could be argued, of course, that the difference between sitting in the chair by the window to laying in bed means just as little as the difference between the living room and the bedroom.

Mary McCarthy has, nonetheless, managed to make the difference between the time The Group is about and the time she wrote it matter. From this era of hyperbolic disgust towards foods fashionable in the midcentury (all things gelatinned, canned, full of preservatives), the novel sounds equally disgusted with the food fashionable in the 30s.

I know, I always have to drag my writing woes into it. I never know how to end anything. Pieces of writing that I don't finish are like a sticky gelatin. They break into tiny chunks that I can't get off. I keep making infinitesimal edits to sentences that even though nobody else has read them are shameful, and uncomfortably close. They populate whatever room I'm in, crop up on the sides of buildings and the trunks of trees. McCarthy has figured it out: the only distance is time.