|
|
How real Objects look like
|
|
|
ObjectiveThere are two possible ways to look at a puppet theatre. First you are a child or a naive spectator empathizing with the play as if you are really part of it - the puppets are living beings. Secondly, you are the adult accompanying the kids, seeing from time to time the hand of the player peeping from behind the scenes - you are the critical observer. A world of difference. My personal history evenly determines my sight on real puppets. If I ever was Pierlala myself (on the stage for example), then my perception will be completely different from that experienced by a person having pulled the strings himself/herself all his/her life. SubjectiveFinally we arrive at the gems gallery. We give this kind of stones a special name, because they are that special and rare, that only very special people were rich enough to buy some and show them off. But in fact we are looking for the contents of what could have been a sardine can. Have a closer look isn't really what we want here. So we take some steps backwards until the curled up strips seem to belong to some metal pipes, arranged neatly one next to the other.
Why the curled up tip hasn't been removed perhaps has a reason : you can widen up the opening or make it smaller with it, and what is more, the whole installation is hidden in the back of the case, where nobody sees anything of it. Except we of course, because we are so curious. On going further backwards, the collection of pipes begins to belong to an organ. Here we see very special pipes, normally not shown in the front of the organ, but which always are installed to represent a known musical instrument - a register they call it. Just in front you immediately see that it must be an organ. It's the usual display we find everywhere. From the moment you ever saw it once, and especially heard it at the same time, the picture generates a specific meaning. The object is compared with the collection of impressions from the past, bound together with the word 'organ'. The bunch of memory traces, connected by a pack of wires as if it were a marionette, we usually call a symbol, and the puppet itself, coming to life each time somebody manipulates the strings, a kid. The word organ, labeling the organ object, is the pointer to the thing. Along with the amount of organs you experience, the category becomes broader and more general. For example, you only see and hear street organs - on the Gent Festival, and not any other sample. then the symbol for organ will contain a man or woman turning a handle mounted on a small case - wheeled or not - with a slit accepting joined stiff perforated pages with the blueprint of the music. Perhaps the man or the woman is begging for money to make a living, wears an old fashioned costume or not, and out of the case are heard peeps called music. People walking about stand still to watch the scene, or just go along without paying attention nor money to the player. You never know whether they listen or not of course. Then, the pipes of the street organ are not very eye-catching... Every detail defines some element of the symbol, connected by associated things or impressions and/or emotional feelings. Everything is gathered in the organ hall of our personal symbol gallery - up there in our head. The original kid responsible for the first registration of the organ object, wakes up when we experience something with organs in our vicinity now. It completely awakens when a specimen is heard having more than one element of the original organ, resembling the primary symbol very close, the firstling, or activating more than the average of elements and affects at the same time (or, when Pierke Pierlala's strings are manipulated the way it has to be done). In Gent Pierke Pierlala is a famous puppet on a string. We found a pictures of a performance, in which Pierke has a rabbit to deal with...
The object we look at here, is a picture of Pierke, quoted from the internet. This is not Pierke... Ceci n'est pas Pierke - Ceci n'est pas une pipe, in which Magritte emphasizes that in fact the picture is not the thing itself (das Ding an sich). It may arouse an impression, a perception, analogous to previous experiences with puppet theatre puppets on a string, early in history. The resurrection of the awareness is a completely subjective experience, characteristic of a person an his/her background (das Ding für sich). The puppet comes to life in the ashes of memories, recorded in categories and on view in the symbol gallery. The kid representing descriptive consciousness is like a ghost emerging in the mist, a hodge-podge of actual contingencies and background information. We offer a personal example.
First, some twenty years ago we went to Pierke Pierlala in Gent (Huis van Alijn, etnographic museum, Ref 3), with the kids you know. It's nice to see the children go along with the story, as if the puppets are real people to begin with, and as if each kid personally is involved in the act, as if he/she participates in it. Perhaps it is because of children get involved so easily in such circumstances - go along with the objects, that we call the puppets there on the stage 'naive objects'. We get affective communication, contrasting sharply with analyzing the performance as if you see some wooden constructions covered with patched clothes and directed from above by a player doing his/her best to stay invisible in the dark. Such a point of view generates 'critical objects', not affecting you as a subject and suitable to speak about with others, with words and gestures : textual or pointer communication. I remember my enthusiasm for puppet theatres, for sure before my 12th birthday. The performance is much more realistic than a movie picture, more gripping, animated... For me personally it is still more interesting to distinguish between going along with the story as a participant, watching as a fascinated spectator, or being a distant critic. Imagine, once I was Pierlala myself, on the stage, when I was about twenty years of age. I am looking for something about Pierlala on the internet, when I suddenly am confronted with a text I was forgotten for more than forty years. It always comes on like an electric shock or something. Bang in the middle of my heart, certainly when memories about the first happening are still in place, saturated with an affective charge, and when the medium (the text in this case) contains some adequate and correct historical elements.
The story is simple : Pierlala comes into the fortune of his father, and in the beginning is very unspary with it and also he does not care very much about his wife. He gets in real trouble and goes to the army, a bread and butter job. Then he inherits from his mother, and wants to get rid of the army and his loose life. Pierlala simulates being dead after all, and is berried symbolically. His better self takes over ... The beginning of the tale is as such :
and that's enough to reactivate the whole story and the melody. We are in the senior year, the proud last year of secondary school, with the Brothers in Bruges. Each year a revue is organized : students' performances in front of the assembled parents and teachers. It is the most important happening of the year (much more important than the lessons), because it presumably will forge strong bonds between the students - for the rest of their lives.
... here a picture is missing, showing Pierlala (me) going to the café to have a pint and to decide that dead he would be better off. So he writes his testament...
The farce contains several necessary elements to become a real farce. Being born and claiming everything in the world without any compromise, making one mistake after the other, en getting into real trouble in consequence. Then, the solution : going into the army to acquire discipline, not being able to see one's way out any more and eventually accepting compromise anyway, after the death of the bad guy. The story contains the resurrection myth as well, with eternal happiness, in accordance with the laws of the Holy Church...
Telling the whole story, with all associated feelings and memories, is a very difficult exercise, but we try to clarify one and the other in our website, by means of dream series and accompanied free associations. Some overview of psychoanalysis. You can see how 'idiosyncratic' every symbol becomes in the course of every personal life. The puppet (the object), the kid (the subject), coming to life every consecutive conscious moment, is completely confined by the combined history of all intern and extern interactions I already had in my short life, and adjusted by the contingencies of the present moment wherein I function as an embodied conscious being. In other words, the appearance of objects (things) only has meaning when they are differentiated against the background of my personal reference frame. Furthermore I have the possibility to speak about objects only insofar the discussion partners have eyes for that reference frame. It is not enough to have an idea about your personal background, you have to accept that the reference frame of other people is completely different of that of your own... and that emotional feelings coming up in your partner, in association of your words, could well be wide of what you had in mind yourself to begin with. It is interesting to distinguish between naive and critical objects. The installation of subjective understanding (intersubjective experience) is possible only when both parties can share in a naive interaction each other's affective perception. Furthermore it is necessary afterwards to distance from the subject to critically interpret the experienced objects. This is the basis of psychotherapy, an important subject of interest in this website, and necessary for symbolization. The emotional feelings a certain symbol arouses are different for each of us. Each object is the cause of a subjective affect, and subjective coloring in pushes the interpretation of somebody else's original declaration in the direction of the receiver's reference frame. A feedback loop is generated, wherein the place of the real object isn't specified any longer. We even don't know any longer whether the object is really real (realism), or that it is born out of the reciprocal discussion about what is the effect of the presence of the thing (nominalism). So you see, a jewel in this site isn't just a jewel, even when the stones are real. If we consider the looks of things, gems are great champions in that matter. At first glance you would think that this picture
represents a Sapphire, and that isn't true at all. It 'is' a Cordierite (Iolite), showing a beautiful blue from one side, but is really gray when you see it from the other side (90 degrees rotated - pleochroism). You really have to know that such things exist, else you simply don't believe your eyes, thinking that it has something to do with thickness of the stone, or with the angle of the light shining on it or something like that. In order to know whether the appearance of the gem is in accordance with the name labeling it, or whether the name is standing for the real mineral, or whether the real mineral is from natural origin or it has been synthesized in a lab... you need a small lab and lots of patient investigation. In fact it is just like psychoanalysis. Nothing is as it looks like, and for sure not if explicitly is stated that everything is OK, and, that, if at all there were a problem, it for certain will be brought about by something or somebody else, or by accident.
|
References
|
|
|
A. Syberg, Belgium
Copyright © 2005 A. Syberg
|
