I’ve begun to realize that I love the world of media and media-making because I am captive to the power of visual language. So are you. We all are. Visual symbols shape our consciousness in ways we haven’t yet begun to grasp. Many have made attempts to decode symbol, to bring it into the light of rationality, and have succeeded to a point. We can thank 20th-century psychoanalysis for penetrating the overstuffed jello molds of our subconscious minds to find symbols, which afforded Madison Avenue the opportunity to feed and feast on our countless, insatiable hungers.
If you look at symbols through Freud’s lens, you have a 99% chance* the symbol will end up representing a penis, depending on the image’s ratio of height to width. (*Don’t bother fact-checking this. I know it’s fake news.) For me, this draws the unfortunate vision of a jello mold filled with Vienna sausages and pimiento-stuffed olives. (I will spare you a photo.)
So let’s go with Jung’s lens. C.G. Jung explored symbol in more depth than anyone I know in the last century. Among Jung’s many definitions of symbol, this one fits my purpose today: “What we call a symbol is…an image which in itself may be familiar to us, but its connotation, use and application…hint at a hidden, vague or unknown meaning.” (C.G. Jung - Collected Works)
I’m interested in one particular symbol that hints “at a hidden, vague or unknown meaning.” The Almighty Screen. What does this represent to us today? My personal orientation, which was rooted in the pews of my father’s church, sees the screen as our modern-day altar, to which I’ve alluded in earlier writings.
Look at this idea with me: Who among us does not lie prostrate before a television screen that occupies an enormous part of their residential real estate? Who among us does not bow before their desktop or laptop screen, and leave upon it the innermost longings of their heart? And who will not testify that the diminutive screen of the phone in their hand is in fact their refuge and strength in time of need?
(Omg, the jello reference seems so apt here because no salad was more sacred at a church potluck)
Anyway, to my thinking, screens are the latter-day gods right now. If that makes you squirm, there’s another way of seeing the screen as a more secular symbol.
The Great Mediator
The screen is easily symbolized as a window. It reveals the world, but keeps out the elements. I see it also as a shield. (Dare I say a windshield?) It gives us an opportunity to have out-of-this-world, but safe-ish, experiences, fending off real-life, flesh-and-bone peril. Screens temporarily shield us from this fickle world where our only real escape is ultimately - gulp - death. Oh, the pain.
In his podcast Offline a couple of years ago, Jon Favreau interviewed Stanford psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke, author of New York Times best-seller Dopamine Nation. In discussing smartphone addiction, she explained that pain was always a given in human experience due to scarcity, until recent technology introduced a new kind of abundance to the human race.
“If you think about how humans evolved, they lived in their bodies. They had to rely on their bodies to survive. They had to tolerate a great deal of pain, whether that was the pain of exertion to get food, or the pain of living against the natural forces. But [today] we are completely disassociated from our bodies — we spend all of our time in our head. We don't even really have to get up off the couch.”
I’m fascinated with why we’re content to spend so much time in a flattened, 2D existence. In that screen existence, we get light, color and sound. But screens provide no taste, smell, texture, temperature, or other fleshy sensations (although they can certainly inspire those). Americans on average spend somewhere between 7 -11 hours per day on screen. The conclusion I draw is we’re escaping from the pain of being in bodies for the pleasure principle (aka numbing) provided by the screen. These days, pleasure is only a a click, or a pill, away, the disembodied state is costing us more than we realize.
This was mirrored to me recently as I listened to poet/philosopher David Whyte in his current online series entitled Breakthrough: Finding the Narrow, Creative Road Between Crazy and Brilliant.
David Whyte
If you don’t know David Whyte’s work, you must! He defies categorization. He is a maestro whose weave of words can elevate even the basest human inclinations into the light of the sublime. James Baldwin has done the same for me. I will put a link to his Substack below.
In the first talk in this series, Whyte reflects on his childhood admiration for Jacques Cousteau, and how Cousteau’s television series opened a portal through which he could enter the realms of the deep sea. “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” was a major factor in Whyte’s choice to study marine zoology at university.
As a student struggling to make ends meet, Whyte would dive to collect lobsters to sell, which allowed him to move from the “study” of the sea to experience the actual rapture of its depths. Whyte’s professors were “quite scandalized that I was going beneath the surface — they weren’t much interested in what I'd seen, actually. They’d much rather look under a microscope.”
His discussion of the impacts of the “remove” provided by academic inquiry inspires me to take a deeper dive into this phenomenon at some point. “It’s astonishing how, especially at university, the very way of studying the world becomes the very way of distancing you from it…it all lies at a categorical distance from this heartfelt participation in the world that we’re desperate to have…I found that when I’d finished my degree I’d caught the contagion of abstraction — so when I got this miraculous job in the Galapagos Islands and found myself on those shores, I found myself quite terrified by the physical world that I inhabited.”
This was the 1970’s. No internet. Barely even mail service from that location. “You couldn’t retreat to your cabin and suddenly look at your screen…you were a witness to mortality and death and an incredible world that didn’t care about your human happiness.”
Even in this most remote, primal spot on planet Earth, Hollywood played a role in Whyte’s experience.
“You’re living on this death-dealing medium called the ocean…there were five or six species of shark.” As providence would have it, during the time Whyte worked as a guide on the islands, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws had just been released. Everyone visiting the Galapagos during that time brought oversized emotional baggage from the film, and Whyte describes their terror as “contagious.” No matter how much he attempted to educate and calm people down, fear ruled the day.
Through a Glass Darkly
Within this anecdote lies the perfect invitation to return to my jello salad theory. We humans are living in a realm so much like a jello salad that every experience we have — whether delivered directly or by screen — reverberates throughout the whole wobbly construct of the human collective. Whether we’re a weiner or a marshmallow, we’re rocking it together.
If screens function as symbolic windows of possibility, do they also provide the shield we hope for? Do they actually keep us at a safe distance from the wreckage of 3D life? Based on Whyte’s account alone, it doesn’t sound like it.
So what to do? Dr. Pembke recommends a “fast” from screens to reset our neurotransmitters. For the most extreme of us, a 30-day fast might do the trick. I think that sounds like a wise course, certainly. Would I do it? Heck no. I don’t expect many of us can or will do that unless forced by circumstance. Maybe another solution lies in awareness, as Pembke also encourages. When we are compelled to our screens for whatever reason, we would do well to ask ourselves why we’re going there, and what it’s doing to us.
The escape from embodiment begs the existential question: what does being in our bodies truly provide us? Many religions have organized around this question. Some cast off the body categorically — “sins of the flesh” and all that. I am decidedly not in that camp. In my practice, I find the body to be my most faithful, trustworthy ally and teacher. As I grow closer to leaving it, my fondness for it grows commensurately. But this is a question for each of us to ask and discern. Even in asking, our awareness increases.
I do worry that our fascination with external technologies keeps us from experiencing and awakening the intelligent technology internal to us — technologies the ancients found, but we have lost. The adage “if you don’t use it you lose it” definitely applies here.
Here’s my hope: Even as we enjoy our screen escapes, we can use curiosity to escape into our bodies to discover the miracle of our own “biotechnology.” The body’s technology is an unfathomable one to be sure — we may never nail down the whole picture of how we function, which must both inspire and frustrate the scientific community. But its infinite wonders deserve our devoted study and attention. If we can aim to balance our very valid tendency to escape from the body, with the willingness to escape into it, we may enjoy our human experience far more. We may stand a chance of reaching our potential as a species. War may become an appalling proposition to us if we can come to prize the body more fully.
Escaping into the wonder of our body reality also means accepting that we experience pain, and learning from that pain, yet not clinging to it as our primary identity. We can learn proper use of the shield — and to wield the shield with wisdom gained by courageous 3D experience. That wisdom can only come from the deep dive, the plunge into the world of the real, where we have so much to lose, but everything to gain. Yes, the screen can give us a window into the possibilities of the world, and a shield from its dangers. But being fully human requires the willingness to throw open that window with a dollop of flourish, so that we can plunge into the quivering, luminous jello salad that is life. Let us pray that they hold the mayo.
Qi-Tips:
A Simple Balancing Act
You can do this watching, or not watching, a screen.
(You can do it here, or there. You can do it anywhere!)
You might want to be barefoot for this but not necessary. Try it both ways.
Stand near a support in case you need to balance yourself.
Stand with feet hip distance apart.
Settle onto your skeleton. Give yourself to gravity, and allow the soft tissue to drape and be held by the stable skeletal structure.
Rock forward slowly toward your toes. Scan the soles of the feet, and the body sensation. Notice what keeps you from tipping over.
Rock backward toward your heels. Scan. Notice what keeps you from tipping over.
Now repeat this a few times, rocking forward and back, looking for the point of the movement where forward becomes backward, and vice versa.
Slowly reduce the motion until you come to rest on this midpoint, your own sweet spot of balance.
Notice the sensation across your whole system — your breath, your tension level.
Let yourself be in this place of balance.
Let yourself breathe.
Next time you do this, you will likely find balance in a new way, in a new place. Dynamic stability is everything.
I ponder the difference between screens and books. Like movies & TV, books can provide escape. And, like books, screens can provide information that helps us engage in life. I think one difference is that a movie is what Marshall McLuhan (“The medium is the massage”) called a “hot” medium, one that provides all the sensory input you need, in high definition. A book is what he would call a "cool" medium, one that doesn't do the work for you, but gets you to participate. A book doesn't give you complete input; you get words alone, and you have to supply the sounds, sights, and other sensations through your imagination. McLuhan said film is "hot" and TV is "cool," but they're both way hotter than books! In a darkened movie theater the film surrounds you, and basically is your world. Your TV is part of your world, but you have to make some choices about watching it instead of anything else in the room. But a smartphone, partly because it's continuously, instantly updated, is hot in the sense that it invades your world and invites your attention. Its “heat” is not necessarily the size of the screen or the high-def quality of the sound or picture, but the sense of immediacy. You become passive and “zone out,” scrolling... It's not the same for a book that lies there waiting for you to read it, that allows you to go at your own pace. The absorption we experience in reading a book for four hours nonstop is a “deep dive” of immersion, while our absorption in a phone is often an act of escape, scrolling away from real life, and away from what we were just looking at, and away, and away.... So maybe movies can teach us to stay put, at least for a couple hours.
Love the jello Analogy!