Collage by Joseph Cornell

I was asked last year to quickly come up with a piece to share with a large mingling audience at a fundraiser event some friends were hosting. Having been working on some new texts for other projects, I thought I would experiment with the use of language appropriated from advertising. Advertisements play a convenient and poignant role in a lot of contemporary art (Cornell, Warhol, Prince among others), and the mystique of the advertising zeitgeist contributes to the popularity of Mad Men, which I have just started watching.

This proposed piece (it was never actually performed–due to a sick kid–mine) was to take snippets of written advertisements, or in some cases implied meanings from ads, and attach them to a single jingle bell on a bracelet-sized piece of yarn. Each attendee at the fundraiser would wear their jingle around with them for the evening, along with a single example of modern ad-speak. Here is a partial list of texts I might have used:

connect to your inner self
watch this
consider this ride
need a lawyer?
how about more school?
in case of a fire
cash back
take care of your feet
remain alert
report fraud
beware of bugs
perfect yourself
visit art
travel back in time
it will be fun
listen louder
compete
new shoes better
witness a fight
don’t leave

I have been spending most of the summer so far wading through David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” I am, at turns, overcome by the enormity of this book, its spellbinding intimacy and also maddened by DFW’s distractible and obsessive imagination. The sections of the book that I struggle most with are his satires of political history. They seem so blatantly devoid of any genuine character or frankness that I find them intriguing only because they are annoying.

This morning, though, I read one of these political satire sections and had quite a different experience. The section in question was a transcript of an absurdist puppet show from a film detailing the fictional transition in the US to “subsidized” time (I wish I could do a better job here, but bear with me). On the matter of a (again) fictionalized budget gap, the book’s government officials (Tine and Gentle in the following quote) point out a common political predicament:

TINE: Outflows required, inflows restricted, balance demanded.

GENTLE: The classic executive-branch Cerberus-horned dilemma. The thorn in the Achilles’ tendon of the democratic process.

Hmmph, I thought. What a particularly pointed insight on democracy here in the middle of a book ostensibly about addiction, depression and obsession. Of course, DFW’s analysis (however absurd its context) is striking today because it is being played out every hour in the political discourse of whether we should be spending more money to support a broad progressive vision (and adding to the deficit) or if we should be cutting the deficit (even if it means ending financial benefits to the unemployed and risking stagnation).

Rather than weigh in on which of these perspectives I am partial to, I am more interested in thinking about the relevancy of narrative (satirical or not) to politics. Writing in the mid-1990′s DFW was not referencing directly the political climate of 2010, but he was admittedly influenced by political reactions to previous moments of progressive expansion, notably during the FDR and JFK administrations of the 1930’s and 60’s respectively. Not to mention, these issues must have been in the aether during the Clinton years of “Infinite Jest’s” milieu.

But these historical cycles are not, by themselves, interesting enough to be elucidating. Instead, it took the handiwork of the fiction writer–the artist–to reveal, through his imaginary narrative, the absurd reduction of political perspectives. In this case, DFW’s narrative is a satire, but there are other examples (Picasso’s Guernica sticks out to me) of frank and literal representations that, while of their own time, are also timeless. Guernica is politically ambiguous as it is both a warning and a reflection of violence. Narrative gestures are remarkable for this reason–whether or not an artist intends it, his representations contain the stories (political or otherwise) of a wide history and future.

Last week, I polled my friends about what their flying dreams were like. I got a range of different answers including:

The thing is…. I do fly

In my flying dreams, I always fly well in the beginning, and then I loose the ability

my flying dreams are more that my legs can, if i want, be held above the ground indefinitely.

If I try to abandon the rivers or train tracks I am no longer able to fly at all.

I did some research and came up with this description of flying from a letter that Wilbur Wright sent to the Smithsonian Institute in 1899 as he began his research on flight with his brother, Orville (it should be no wonder that these two men met with success in their lives–their names are exquisite!)

Birds are the most perfectly trained gymnasts in the world and are specially well fitted for their work, and it may be that man will never equal them, but no one who has watched a bird chasing an insect or another bird can doubt that feats are preformed which require three or four times the effort required in ordinary flight.

I am struck by the sheer audacity of Wilbur’s tone as he belittles the people who idolize “ordinary flight.” There is something kind of disturbing about someone who writes to a scientific agency (the Smithsonian) to request literature on aeronautics and then precedes to infer his own intellectual superiority.

Gets me thinking about human flight and the connections to attitude that generally characterize the quest to “take off.” There is the age-old story of Icarus whose hubris seals his fate. And there is a new movie out about Amelia Earhart and her dynamic aviatrix persona (spoiler alert: she gets lost, see Icarus). But there are also more fantastic stories like those associated with superheroes-Superman’s ability to fly comes at the cost of loneliness.

My personal preference, or at least the scenario that regularly appears in my dreams, is that flight is unexpected. Just when I need to outrun the home invaders who are chasing me with rubber belts (!), I gently levitate off the ground, rounding my back and dangling my limbs in uncertain attempts to balance myself. This may be due to some Freudian-inspired insecurities, or maybe a remembrance of a time when flight (or any desire to reach great heights) was not bold and haughty, but clumsy and awkward. This image of “The Greatest American Hero” a campy, Pink Panther-inspired romp from the 80′s might capture best of all this childlike attitude of wonder. Which leads me to question “Is solving problems good for the imagination?”