Infinity State of Mind

I think that one concept that’s prevalent in western culture, more so than other cultures, is the concept of the infinite. It’s a concept that’s tied in with other concepts that you’d associate with the west – universality, conquest, freedom. The desire for more. The idea of progress.

It’s something that occurred to me when I looked at the lyrics of “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem. It draws me in, because it reminds me of this other indie album that I particularly like, “Emergency and I” by the Dismemberment Plan. That other album was also about the life of a young, 20-something American. I am not an American, but I spent some of my 20s in America, in college. I never subscribed to that lifestyle, but I had a privileged position of being adjacent to it, and trying to make sense of it, and trying to think about what it all meant.

I was a mathematics student in college. And I learnt about functions, and the behaviour of functions. You always classified them according to their limits when it came to infinity. There were functions which tend to some finite limit, but just as often, the limits would either be infinity or zero. We thought about those which tended to infinity, and it turned out that some functions went to infinity more quickly than others. What stuck with me was the idea that this tendency towards infinity was an intrinsic, and essential property of the function.

Infinity as a yearning

I think about the mythology of the USA. At the time when the USA still had a frontier, it manifested itself to you as some blank space. You didn’t know what it was, but it drew you in, manifesting itself as the spirit of adventure. There was something beyond the horizon, and damn it, you had to have it. It was yours. It was the stuff of dreams. You were able to imagine what it was, project whatever you wanted to project on it. It was a bit like the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz. It was a long journey, and you weren’t sure what was at the end of it, but you just had to keep on travelling. And there was actually a time when I traversed the state of Kansas on the I-70. Literally the yellow brick road.

The most famous theme song of the “Wizard of Oz” movie was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and that fit in perfectly with the idea of travelling with no particular destination in mind, wandering, simply because you were following where the road led you. You were in love, simply with the road and the aura of possibilities.

And the young protagonists of the LCD Soundsystem songs were of a very similar mindset. They were young and willing and partying mindlessly, living in the moment and not giving a whit about where their lives were leading, and not really thinking so much about what tomorrow was. You were young and dashing and full of verve and energy.

And yet again, for Dorothy, there was a destination. She wanted to get back home. And that was basically the psychology of a vacation. There was a period of time for you to explore all the possibilities you wanted to, but at the end of it all, you just wanted to go back home. It was the limited antithesis to the infinity. And at the end of the adventure, with a bunch of ragtag travel mates that she hardly knows anything about, (because they exist primarily as caricatures), she realizes two things – first, the wizard of Oz was basically some kind of sham. Which is a repudiation of the original idea of infinity. But at least she had that adventure, right? Well, as it turns out, the adventure itself was also unnecessary, since she was wearing those ruby shoes that she could have clicked and gone back home to her farm house.

So it’s pretty incredible that one of the stories that has come to define what America is all about – that story is something that lays out some abstract existentialist philosophy in some way that is completely accessible to the lay man. It’s truly a marvel.

Infinity as exhaustion.

“All My Friends” looks at infinity in a darker sense. Implicitly, life is a series of tensions and trade offs. If you had too much fun or took too many drugs when you were young, your life is shortened. If you stay on the straight and narrow and concentrate on “trying to get with the plan”, then you jeopardise being with your friends. And if you go travelling and touring, you’re also giving up your friends. Friends, in the abstract. Maybe not even real friends, just friends as in the abstract sensation of having friends. Maybe some weird sense of connection.

In this sense, infinity is a state of mind, but there’s only so much hard living that you can do, before old age comes on and puts a halt to the proceedings. And yet, it seems that everybody is a bunch of atoms clashing against each other. Not really interacting. There doesn’t seem to be any much more meaningful or deeper interaction, other than partying partying partying. It’s mainly about being allowed to enter a club. People might talk about shared experiences, but I wonder if they really know each other.

Speaking of entering a club, it’s similar to “You are Invited” by the Dismemberment Plan, where life was portrayed as a game, where getting access to the most fabulous parties was the true objective of the game.

Infinity as conquest.

Vladimir Lenin wrote an essay that imperialism was the highest form of capitalism. What these two things have in common is this proselytising instinct, whereby the imperative was to keep on acquiring more and more territory.

The emphasis was on the individual. The point of view was the first person narrator. A person would try to put his stamp on things. He would tell stories by the dint of his imagination, and he would make sense of the world exactly as he saw things. What would then transpire would be a person trying to take in the world, make sense of the world, and in a way, gobble up the world. The process of consumption would be similar to the something trying to conquer the world. Somebody engaged in an endless process of acquisition and consumption.

This idea extends to the way that the economy is perceived. Of course, everybody has to eat every day for as long as he’s alive. Sorda. But he may not need to consume everything. Economics doesn’t look at it this way. The consumer or the user is encouraged to consume more and more. It used to be that blogs on the internet were organised more like books, which were hyperlinked and had indices, so that you could tell how much stuff was in this website, where you were able to make sense of how much material was encapsulated in something that was finite.

Then one fine day, I saw that things had changed. Everything was suddenly organised around the infinite scroll. If you scrolled to the bottom, more stuff would be fetched, so it seemed like infinity. And whatever was scrolled past the top was suddenly forgotten. But what was not forgotten was that sense that you were exploring something that was potentially infinite. It would not be wandering around a garden. It would be like wandering around a jungle, where you could get lost. Of course, the idea was for you to keep you in and let you get lost.

Infinity as freedom.

There was one sense of freedom here. Sometimes what we thought of as freedom wasn’t really freedom. It was mainly about a sense that there was possibilities. IT was about the yearning for something beyond the horizon, just like Dorothy singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. But it wasn’t actually being in more than one place at the same time, because that’s just not possible. If you had this, you couldn’t have that. The illusion, was that you momentarily forgot that there were these limits. You actually believed that you could have it all at the same time. Maybe that’s the reason why buffets are kinda scammy, because there’s only so much food you can eat in one sitting, whereas you’re being charged for eating 2 or 3 meals.

The antithesis to freedom, in a way, was this sense that life was finite, that your time on earth was limited, that certain things were precious and sacred, instead of being infinitely cheap. The antithesis of a life of possibilities was that if you made your bed, you were to lie in it, that you bore the consequences of your own actions. That you made your peace with the people around you. That you learnt to be comfortable and have harmonious relationships with the nearest and the dearest. That you acknowledged your interdependence, that you avoided taking more than was due to you.

How many times are we told that something better is around the corner? It’s not just the promise of heaven that makes us content with living in hell. School mottos, like “The Best IS Yet to Be”. Or “Some bright morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away”. Or “The sun will come out tomorrow”. We talk about El Dorado, about the Gold Rush. How many times do we tell ourselves to stake our happiness on the prospect of a better life somewhere else, or worse still, an escape? Are we telling ourselves to hold on until we reach that fabled isle of happiness? How often do we tell ourselves that happiness is somewhere else, a magic land far far away, that we have to leave our current circumstances and move away to, in order to reach it? How do we know that we are not on a wild goose chase for happiness? How can putting up with this fucked up shit be good for our mental health?

Maybe this thing about being Asian was that in some way you always knew your limits. You didn’t have this concept of infinity. People understood the meaning of boundaries, and if anything, Chinese people had way too much concept of boundaries. That which is Chinese is Chinese, that which is not Chinese is not Chinese. “All under Heaven” actually means China. It was a cloistered mindset, albeit some kind of cloistered within a large space. And in a way, it’s more racist because you simply treated outsiders as an other. But it’s also less racist, because it wasn’t an imperialistic and conquering mindset. For example, you would not be importing millions of slaves from West Africa and consigning them to hundreds of years of slavery.

Halo effect

It’s pretty funny how it happens. The reason why this blog was named “play punk composition” is that there was a time when I felt that I had cracked the code to writing music. I wanted to put up a blog where I could just teach people how to write music. I thought that I could communicate something as arcane as that to other people.

I probably conceived that during a time when I was struggling with my computer science degree, as a form of a diversion. And it reflected some kind of tendency on my part, to be more of a content provider than a platform. Maybe I just didn’t like doing what goes into building a platform, which just sounded like dreary work.

And yet, in 2020, it just seems that platform providers are the ones who are raking in the dough, and basically nobody else is doing it. Content providers are not earning money. The internet was supposed to be a place where everything was available for free. And it turned out to be not a great world.

I still remember being in a train, somewhere in Europe, on the eve of the millennium, and something hit home to me: in the future, the scarcest resource will be human attention, and we will spend endless amounts of time and effort in order to capture it.

But why would we spend all our time trying to capture attention, rather than to make objects of beauty and wonder? Why is life so inefficient? I recall being scolded by my boss. You should be spending more time learning about programming and upping your computer skills. And yet, I felt, deep down, that life was about richer things, like pondering the intricacies of human existence. Deep down, I always liked bookish things more. Being a programmer was like being a construction worker. I went into it thinking that I was doing something noble. But I was probably setting myself up for disappointment in the end? If you’re doing something “noble”, then you might not be enjoying it, and what happens in the end, when you start to tire of it?

I was surfing youtube aimlessly the other day, when I came across a series of videos which were basically mini documentaries about “why this movie is great”. I thought it was nice, but I also noticed that there were just those same few films that people salivated over. There was supposed to be a canon of 100 films out there which were supposed to be great, and after that you didn’t stray too far away from the canon.

This post was triggered by a friend who watched “Parasite” one day and concluded that it was a waste of his time. He was looking for something that was totally uplifting, whereas he ended up with a film that all the critics were talking about. The first half of it was gently mocking social satire, and probably something that found favour with a lot of film audiences. The second half, which probably started with a secret underground chamber, turned out to be some kind of a horror freakshow. (This is a spoiler, but since somebody got pissed off at the lack of forewarning, I thought I’d just tell everybody that the tone of the film changes halfway through.)

He subsequently got disappointed over the film. But the question for me was not why the acclaim of the critics did not align with his taste. Of course, he was suitably scathing about it, wondering if the critics were just too high and mighty and riding roughshod over the culture, while plebeians like him would never join the ranks of the tastemakers. Of course, there was a lot of talk over whether it was totally pretentious. I also have my beef against critics who sometimes seem to love works which are too self-consciously arty and precious. I think that is one reason why hipsters are disliked, because that is self-consciously arty and precious on steroids. And I think that people who are resentful against critics are just taking that argument a little too far.

But I do believe that there’s another element at work. Critics sometimes feel that they have to ride on the zeitgeist of the moment. And that very often means that everybody has to find that “it” piece of work and fetishize the heck out of it. Like they have to accentuate that dreaded power law distribution over the attention they pay the various works of art. They have to be the ones commenting on that one or two hot topic movies, just so that their websites / channels show up on search results, and they get traffic diverted to their content. And this strategic posturing just accentuates the difference between the top 10 “best” movies and the rest of the movies.

Since critical writing went big (for me that was the 90s, but it could have been even earlier), there have been a few movies which somehow slipped under the radar. There are movies that have turned into cult classics, mainly on dint of being discovered by audiences and passed on by word of mouth. Reviews of the Austin Powers movies were generally positive, but they didn’t anticipate that the Austin Powers movies would be classics. They didn’t anticipate that people would love watching the worst movies ever made. They didn’t anticipate that Vanilla Ice’s movie would be a classic of the “so bad it’s good” genre.

Film criticism is usually western centric. There might be an undue leaning upon movies that consciously take after masterpieces of the western canon. “Parasite” got a lot of props because it used the cinematic language of western cinema. Bong Joon Ho was careful to acknowledge his debt to his directors from the West. There were other movies that don’t usually trade in the western tradition, and they tend to get overlooked.

Not a lot has been written about Tsui Hark or Stephen Chow in the western press. I don’t even know what the cult classics of Bollywood are. I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff out there but the paradoxical thing is that even though we have access to a greater and greater long tail, it gets harder and harder for anything of much use to get through to the audience.

Anyway, here’s an essay on Collateral the movie. I’ve always thought that Michael Mann was a brilliant director. Somehow, “Heat”, “Insider” and “Collateral” form some kind of a trilogy for me.