You know how several things can happen to you almost at once and all of them seem to illustrate a common theme? At worst, they can seem to comprise a miniature cloud which follows you around, raining on you alone. At best, they can combine to form a kind of individualized zeitgeist (and hey, I've got a name for it - a Personal Pan Zeitgeist, which calls to mind both the slightly sad "dine alone" pizza and lusty Greek god, root of the word "panic"), the component parts of which seem to have been designed to mesh with whatever abstraction you're most taken with at the moment.
Max Wertheimer, one of the fathers of Gestalt Theory, spoke of "our innate tendency to constellate" things which have similarity, proximity and economy of structure. Example: Your car dies on the road, you get out to look under the hood and accidentally lock the keys in it; you set out to walk and it starts to rain. The similarity (bad) and proximity (in time) of these events lead you to to connect dots and make a (fallacious in this case) gestalt conclusion: "I'm cursed".
Which brings me to yesterday. I was driving, running errands and listening to a great radio program called "Twine Time" on the public radio station here in Austin. The night before, Elle and I had rented the 1928 silent film "The Man Who Laughs" with Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, a carnival performer who was surgically mutilated as a child, his mouth carved into a permanent, hideous grin. His picture has served as my icon on some communities.
The thought process while driving is desultory and tangential, so in addition to the film, I was also thinking about appearance vs. reality and simulation, having recently re-read Baudrillard's essay "The Precession of the Simulacra", which I didn't pay enough attention to in art theory class when it was assigned reading. Suddenly, my mini-trance was broken by Paul Ray on the radio as he cued up the 1953 Lloyd Price song "I Wish Your Picture Was You". And I thought to myself as I parked at the post office, "of course". Constellation complete.
on the hi-fi: The Flashing Lights - Where The Change Is
on the reading table: "Art, Design, and Gestalt Theory" - Roy Behrens.
