Occasional Thoughts is an ongoing series of short essays on the arts, politics and culture featuring thoughts and observations on a wide range of topics.
Entering Another World: Holographs at the MIT Museum
by Daniel E. Levenosn
Wandering around the interweb (as I prefer to call it) the other day I came across a blurb about an exhibition of holographs, entitled “Holographs: The Light Fantastic,” at the MIT Museum. Being intrigued, as I often am by these sorts of thing, I decided that further investigation was in order, so I hopped on the Red Line and made my way to Kendall Square, where, after a pleasant walk I found myself in front of the museum entrance. I expected something more sedate – perhaps a rock garden with concrete Bunsen burner looming above the entrance, but instead I found a lively place right near Massachusetts Avenue. I was further surprised to find that the museum was having a festival of some sort, complete with a person in a beaver costume, balloons and throngs of children swarming about.
There was also an acapella group, which I did my level best to avoid.
Wading through the first floor festivities I found my way to the second floor, where I found myself walking through the hallways, stopping occasionally to examine the various scientific doo-dads and thing-a-ma-jigs that lined the walls. This is all very interesting, I kept thinking, but where are the holographs?
Finally I found them, off in a dark corner with few explanatory signs telling me about the history of holographs at MIT and other interesting bits and bytes of information concerning the process of holograph creation.
At first, I have to admit I was a little skeptical when I saw the exhibition. After all, from the outside they appeared to simply be frames with slightly blurry something-or-others inside, suspended from the ceiling or attached to a wall.
I took a step into the darkness. I took another step. And then I found myself face to face with the first of my quarry: a dull-purplish gray frame hanging marionette-like from the ceiling. I peered closely.
Nothing.
I took a step back.
And suddenly, an image appeared: the ghostly lines of a house without a foundation, without any attachment to the earth.
Ok, so far so good.
I moved on to the next one and was immediately struck by the delightful way that the light seems to leave the glass, the way in which in this dark room, somehow, magically, little beams and forms of colored light issued forth from the two-dimensional surface before me. One of the best examples of this effect is in a piece by the late Fritz Goro, entitled “Goro Blocks” in which he offers a scene of varying geometric shapes, each one alive and shiningly cast in hues of glowing red, green and orange. A fallen cylinder is foremost, the tunnel of its mouth looking out at the viewer, offering a doorway to the landscape beyond, where pyramids, blocks and other shapes await discovery and exploration. By using the cylinder to bridge the world of the hologrpah with that of the room in which the viewer stands, Goro hints at the possibility that just as the cylinder is a fully-formed object which can exist in more than one dimension, so too may the other objects be. It drew me in, and made me think about what other, unknown, undiscovered properties some of these other shapes might have, waiting to be discovered, if only I could climb inside the tumbled tube and enter Goro’s world.
Continuing on, I found that the sample on display from MIT’s much larger collection represented a wide variety of subjects, ranging from imaginary worlds of abstract lines and glowing objects to portraits of famous scientists and a collage that combines the face of a woman with that of a tiger. In the second room of the exhibition, I found myself spending several minutes looking at a piece by Melissa Crenshaw, entitled “Levels With Light Blocks,” which looked, to me, either like neat, long, rectangular strips of newsprint or perhaps stacks of miniature books hanging by an invisible thread, above a floor and ceiling unseen.
As I found myself walking slowly throughout the darkened rooms, pausing to consider each frame, each image, I realized that this was by far one of the most physically engaging art exhibits I have seen. Sculpture may require one to walk around a piece to appreciate the work of the sculptor, or a painting may ask you to step back from the canvas in order to appreciate the perspective of the image, but looking at the holographs was a process in which I used my entire body, or at least very nearly so. In order to really see each of these images I had to approach them, then reposition myself so as to get the correct angle so that they would reveal themselves to me. I had to turn my body, take a step back, sideways, bend down, squint. In the end, it was worth the effort. The way in which these talented artists have created slices of light and color, the way they ask each viewer to bring the image to life, is worth praising, and experiencing as well.
Copyright Daniel E. Levenson 2007.
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Reflections of Class in Updike’s Rabbit, Run
by Daniel E. Levenson
Critics and scholars have found no shortage of themes to explore and expound upon in the writing of John Updike. Virtually any idea which is sure to attract the attention of readers may be found in Updike’s prose, from religion to sex to the troubled internal machinations of families in dissolution and decline. We like Updike because his writing speaks to us in a way that is at once familiar and startling. There are things we expect to find in his works, and things which seem to jump out of nowhere.But it is the things that seem to lurk at the edges, the things that Updike only hints at, that are perhaps the most fascinating, and account for the tone and themes which form the frameworks for many of his novels. One of the themes which lurks around the edges is that of class consciousness and the dream of upward mobility, two themes which are undoubtedly present in Updike’s most famous, enduring, and best-crafted work, his Rabbit tetralogy.From the first installment, Rabbit, Run, which is a joy to read, to his less-than-stellar final fifth work, a novella chronicling the time after his protagonist’s death, Updike paints a portrait in words of not just the uneven path trod by one man and his family in the landscape of class in America, but the movement and tumult of an entire nation coming to grips with newfound wealth and prosperity (and often its unequal distribution) in the decades after World War II.Class and its attendant issues make for difficult (or non-existent) discussion in America.
In a society in which we are supposed to judge (and treat) each man or woman according to personal merit and character, it is uncomfortable to consider that the way we may actually be treating others is even remotely related to our perception of their status. But in fact, this is something we do all the time, and not just on an individual level. As a society we have a variety of different metrics that we use to judge one another, from obvious clues such as the way someone is dressed or speaks, to more subtle things like how they respond to the prices of consumer items.If we go below these superficial aspects (those which are on the surface) there are other clues which we seek through questioning: What school did they go to? Where did they grow up? What do they do with their leisure time? Did their parents go to college? Did their grandparents? All of these questions, and the answers received in response to them help us to orient ourselves in terms of class in relation to other people. Most of the time, though, it’s not even conscious, because as humans we seem to become so easily entrenched in the belief that whatever we ourselves have experienced is the standard, normal way to experience the world. And while these issues may be well below the surface, consciously, in our every day interactions with the world, in Updike’s Rabbit series they swim much closer to the surface, often breaking through, offering to reveal some truth about a society obsessed with wealth and status and the pursuit thereof, yet painfully endeavoring to conceal such ambitions.
The central character in this series is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star who is struggling with the fact that all of the accolades he received and the promise he felt as a teenager have now begun to fade. He is a lost figure, trapped in a marriage he despises and without much in the way of future prospects. Harry Angstrom is also acutely aware that as an American he is supposed to want to achieve the “American Dream,” an ill-defined state of being in which he will be financially secure and blissfully happy. Throughout the series Harry struggles with this idea and his frustrated attempts to replicate the kind of success he had on the basketball court in his adult life, in terms of his family and financial situation. Along the way Updike shows his readers how Harry interacts with various other characters whose class backgrounds differ from his own. This is not merely a plot device, but a sharp social commentary on the hidden class structure underlying American society.
He does this in an ingenuous way, showing us these people and their conditions through Harry, who becomes a lens through which we can see the world as Updike sees it.There is one scene in particular, early in Rabbit, Run, which is both symbolic of the frustration Harry feels at the time and the disappointment that will haunt him later in life, and it comes when Harry seeks out his old high school basketball coach, Tothero. After fleeing his wife and child in search of something he can’t quite define, Harry seeks out Tothero, and finds the man he once looked to as a role model and mentor is now a shadow of his former self: poor, disheveled and living in a seedy, rundown boarding house. The scene that Harry encounters there is not just one of poverty, but of the failure of the American Dream; in the small attic room where Tothero lives Harry observes that all of Tothero’s possessions have a shabby quality to them and reveal that his once-important coach has sunk below the radar of middle-class American life.
The affect on Harry is one of depression and even a hint of panic; nothing is as it was before, so therefore nothing may be what it seems now. And what of the future? What does that hold for Harry? And the rest of us for that matter?It is telling that Updike wrote each of the books in the series toward the end, or slightly after the decades he explores in the novels. Of course it is not the story of every man and woman in America, but it does address ideas central to the way we live our lives and how we not only measure our own personal success, but how we understand class and class issues in a society which professes to exist without such antiquarian notions and restraints. In the 1960’s Harry is befuddled by shifting notions of race and economic status as the dynamics within his own family shift, in the 1970’s he has some measure of financial success while fending off a variety of personal demons, and then in the 1980’s he is struggling once again to keep himself afloat, having achieved something close to the American Dream, but not quite the penultimate goal itself, and suffers an ignoble end.
But however Updike chooses to explore these themes, there is the element of class and the dream of upward mobility driving each the plots forward and showing us how the blind pursuit of wealth can ruin every other aspect of our lives. In the end, the pursuit of our unattainable dream goal is exactly that which is the root of our undoing, and for Harry this is certainly the case. While discussion of issues relating to sexuality, race and religion may still be somewhat taboo in America, there is no doubt that discussion of class is even more so. All the more reason to appreciate what Updike has done by bringing these class issues out into the open for our consideration. Updike did his part when he brought life to Harry Angstrom and his odd assortment of literary companions. What we choose to do with these issues and the difficult questions they raise is up to us.
Copyright Daniel E. Levenson 2007
Archive of Occasional Thoughts
“An Optimistic Nature,” June 7, 2007.
“On Elizabeth Bishop and the Sea,” May 24, 2007.
