Tag: The Tempest

Forbidden Planet

Science is a practice that emerges from myth, its form found in the stories we tell of it. I’ve identified a pattern connecting the stories we’ve told of AI. Yet I know not what to make of it or how to respond to it. What is my role in this pattern? How much of it found, how much projected?

Time to rewatch Forbidden Planet (1956), classic 50s sci-fi retelling of The Tempest, filmed in CinemaScope, with Ariel recast as a nonbinary robot and Caliban recast as the Id. “For your convenience,” says the robot, “I am monitored to respond to the name Robby.” When asked if it’s male or female, Robby replies, “In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning.”

As this initial exchange indicates, gender is one of the film’s primary concerns. Like the island from The Tempest, the planet here in Forbidden Planet includes a father and his daughter among its few inhabitants. Prospero and Miranda have here been replaced with recluse philologist Dr. Edward Morbius and his daughter Altaira. Where The Tempest begins with Antonio and his fellow castaways washing up on the shore of Prospero’s island, Forbidden Planet opens with the arrival of a space cruiser. An all-male crew led by Leslie Nielsen lands on the planet as the film begins.

Morbius thinks of Robby as “simply a tool.” He commands Robby to walk toward a disintegrator beam to demonstrate to Commander Adams and his crewmates the robot’s “absolute selfless obedience.” “Attribute no feeling to him, gentlemen,” says Morbius. “Order canceled,” he shouts as Robby marches toward the beam.

As Morbius notes Robby’s superhuman strength, a concerned crewman replies, “Well, in the wrong hands, might such a tool become a deadly weapon?”

Morbius tries to disarm such fears: “No, Doctor,” he says, none too reassuringly, “not even though I were the mad scientist of the taped thrillers, because you see there happens to be a built-in safety factor.” Built in, we soon learn, by none other than Morbius himself, Robby’s creator. “I tinkered him together,” he explains, “during my first months up here.”

Morbius is no Frankenstein. Yes, he inhabits laboratories. Yes, he creates a robot. His science, however, is linked with philology, parlor magic, and most of all, technologies belonging to the Krell, an ancient alien civilization of the planet’s archaic past.

It is this other technology, with its triangles and pyramids, that constitutes the film’s innovation into the continuum of the Frankenstein narrative.

Morbius tours the crewmen through an underground museum of Krell technology. Advanced mnemotechnics. “On this screen,” he says, “the total knowledge of the Krell, from its primitive beginning, to the day of its annihilation, a sheer bulk surpassing many millions of Earth libraries.”

As the tour continues, we witness another device: the Krell’s “Plastic Educator.” Gathering around the object’s plastic pyramid, Morbius explains it to the crewmen as follows: “As far as I can tell, they used it to condition and test their young — in much the same way we once employed fingerpainting among our kindergarten children.” I picture Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The device outputs holographic images, manifestations of mind visible to others.

“I often play with it myself for relaxation,” Morbius adds with a smile, sitting down beside it. “Although working here, I sometimes wish I’d been blessed with multiple arms and legs.”

The Krell as pictured later in the film are hideous — though here, I picture an Octopus.

Awed by Morbius’s demonstration of the Plastic Educator, Lt. Ostrow, the ship’s doctor, calls it “Aladdin’s lamp in a physics laboratory.”

Next, as if moving sequentially through a space similar to the Futurama exhibit from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Morbius guides the crewmen on a tour of the Krell’s thermonuclear energy system. The men board a capsule-shaped vehicle and descend into an underground space of vast proportion, an imaginary architecture: hints of what would become the atrium of the Westin Bonaventure, with its ascending glass elevator, rendered in the style of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Despite these grand glimpses of the post-scarcity utopia on the far side of history, Morbius is still cut from the Frankenstein cloth. For something befell the Krell. There’s something tragic and forbidden about this alien knowledge. Their experiments had apocalyptic consequences. Morbius, “answerable exclusively to his own conscience and judgement,” feels mankind isn’t fit for such knowledge, and resists Commander Adams’s wish to share these discoveries with others.

However, as Lt. Ostrow explains after his ill-fated “brain boost” via Plastic Educator, the Krell forgot one thing: “Monsters from the Id.” When pressed by Commander Adams, Morbius defines the Id as “an obsolete term, I’m afraid, once used to describe the elementary basis for the subconscious mind.”

“Monsters from the subconscious: of course!” replies the Commander. “That’s what Doc meant!”

The veil parts, Morbius awakened suddenly to the danger of technologies that bestow the power of creation via thought. “Why haven’t I seen this all along?” he says, awed by the realization. “The beast. The mindless primitive. Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning.”

The Commander, angered, digs deeper. “And so, those mindless beasts of the subconscious had access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet, all set free at once to loot and maim. And take revenge, Morbius! And kill!”

As Morbius struggles to acknowledge the vengeful power of his own subconscious, the Commander scolds him with the standard Freudian prognosis: “We’re all part monsters in our subconscious. […]. Even in you, the loving father, there still exists the mindless primitive, more enraged and more enflamed with each new frustration. So now you’re whistling up your monster again!”

“Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!” cries an anguished Morbius, accepting the tragic Oedipal weave of the film’s borrowings from Freud whole cloth.

As consolation to Altaira upon her father’s passing, Commander Adams delivers the film’s closing words.  “About a million years from now, the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. And your father’s name will shine again, like a beacon in the galaxy. It…will remind us that we are, after all, not god.”

“The Instant Is Its Own Interpretation”

What delight it is to read The Tempest, Shakespeare’s words strings precisely plucked, so perfect in their utterance. I’m gonzo for Gonzalo, the utopian of the troupe. “Long live Gonzalo!” as says a mocking Antonio, another of the play’s castaways. Antonio is the usurper, the schemer: he who dethroned his own brother, Prospero. He for whom “what’s past is prologue, what to come, / In yours and my discharge.”

Charles Olson reiterated this equation of Antonio’s, but with past swapped for present: charge placed on the instant. “My shift is that I take it the present is prologue, not the past,” he wrote in his essay “The Present is Prologue.”

“The instant, therefore, is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action — a poem, for example. Down with causation…And yrself: you, as the only reader and mover of the instant. You, the cause. No drag allowed, on either. Get on with it.

In the work and dogmas are: (1) How by form, to get the content instant; (2) what any of us are by the work on ourself, how to make ourself fit instruments for use (how we augment the given — what used to be called our fate); (3) that there is no such thing as duality either of the body and the soul or of the world and I, that the fact in the human universe is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right, whatever you are, in whatever job, is the thing — all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks).”

“I find it awkward,” confesses Olson, “to call myself a poet or writer. If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession. I am an archaeologist of morning.”

See, too, for Olson’s further commentary on The Tempest, his essay “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays.”

Postmodernism is for Olson a Post-Western condition — an escape from the Western “box” by way of remembrance of what is prior. Western consciousness is descriptive, analytical, alienated, skeptical in its relationship to the cosmos. Those who wish to enter postmodernity do so through change of consciousness, thinks Olson: change of psyche’s relationship to cosmos. Poets transform the world through transformation of syntax. The key is to embrace the instant — “the going live present, the ‘Beautiful Thing’” — as a moment open to acts of mythopoetic response-ability. The past is no longer prologue. Reality, taken honestly, is “never more than this instant…you, this instant, in action” (Human Universe, p. 5). Myths are function calls. Constitutive utterances, they call worlds into being. “The care of myth is in your hands,” writes Olson. “You are, whether you know it or not, the living myth — each of you — which you neglect, not only at your own peril, but at the peril of man.”

Remembering this constitutive, “projective” power of mythopoesis — the world-making power of our words as used each instant — prompts/executes/enacts recursive return to the primordial, archaic, pre-Greek, pre-Socratic, pre-Western condition of unity with the cosmos.

Olson’s classic statement of these themes is an essay of his titled “Human Universe.” Western logic and classification, he says, “intermite our participation in our experience.” To restore a proper relationship between psyche and cosmos, he argues, one must achieve a new methodology, an orientation toward knowledge that sloughs off overreliance on Western logic. Postmodernity is a movement from logos back to myth.

But what of Olson’s relationship to Antonio?

Olson’s understanding of “right relation” between human and universe isn’t exactly a humble one. “We cannot see what size man can be once more capable of,” he writes, “once the turn of the flow of his energies that I speak of as the WILL TO COHERE is admitted, and its energy taken up” (Human Universe, p. 21). The human defined by Olson’s will to cohere is of heightened stature; “man’s measure” magnified, heroized, made Maximus. Mad Max.

I can’t help but think of Olson — a massive man, 6’7’ — “towering” over poor Arthur Koestler. What did Koestler see in Olson? Did the mushroom reveal to him something of Olson’s nature?

I’m reminded, too, of an episode recounted by Olson scholar George F. Butterick.

“Jonathan Williams,” writes Butterick, “tells a story of going to a movie theater one night with Olson in Asheville, N.C., the city outside Black Mountain — the Isis Theater, no less — to see a film called, yes, The Bride of Frankenstein. And at the end, as the screen went dark and the lights came on, and he and Olson stood up in the center of the theater preparing to go, Williams noticed the rest of the audience, good Asheville citizens, tradesmen and their wives, farmers from the hills, were eyeing Olson peculiarly. Wide-eyed, unable to take their eyes off him, they inched further and further away, making their way without further hesitation to the doors. It was as if they were witnessing — and suddenly participating in — a continuity of the movie, the image from the screen become live in their midst!” (“Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance,” p. 14).

Butterick reads Maximus as Olson’s “post-modern hero.” “Maximus fulfills Olson’s mythic ambitions. He absorbs the disorder, grows large on it. […]. Maximus is a proposition, a proportion to be filled, a challenge thrown ahead from the moment of its naming. […]. He is a magnification, a metaphor for human possibility” (16).

Olson’s “will to cohere” is a “re-animative” will, as paratactic as it is projective, existing somewhere on a spectrum with the wills that animate The Tempest and Frankenstein. Heriberto Yépez reads Olson’s will as imperial — every bit as much a will to dominate as the wills of Antonio, Prospero, and Victor. Olson’s insistence, though, is that past is not prologue. This is no mere neo-Promethean bid to steal back juice from Zeus. He wants out of the Western box altogether, in ways that align him — in the body, the substance, of his faith — with the utopian desires of Gonzalo and the decolonial desires of Ariel and Caliban. When the townspeople shrink from him, it is not because they think him Victor, but because of his resemblance to the Creature.

Cyborg Gardens

I imagine paths in the Cyborg Garden ranging, fork-like, amid a mind-map of topics: “God’s Gardeners,” characters from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; Olson’s distaste for “sylvan” utterances; constructions of the wild in Gary Snyder.

Reading Olson’s “Quantity in Verse,” I’m struck by the force of his preference for the urban over the sylvan, a distinction he believes “got into England from the Italians of the 16th Century).” Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan poets, says Olson, “were in a dilemma between urban and sylvan by and about Elizabeth’s death (1603): though they had exploited London midland speech magnificently in drama, the moment they wanted to do something else, had to do something else, they knew no other mold for it than a sylvan one, the pastoral, than, in fact, that masque which Comus, god help us, has been called the triumph of” (“Quantity in Verse,” p. 38).

Milton’s Comus is a masque in honor of chastity, presented on Michaelmas 1634 before John Egerton, Lord President of Wales. The sylvan favors innocence.

Olson’s claim is that Shakespeare, in late plays like The Tempest, “sought a form…which would deliver him from the pastoral and enable him to do what long form has taught us: to be urban at the same time that we are forever rid of ‘nature,’ even human ‘nature,’ in that damned sylvan sense” (38).

This is not to be confused with a mere championing of the urban in opposition to the pastoral. The Gloucester of Olson’s Maximus Poems is, after all, a “tansy city,” one where the “real” and the “natural” proliferate amid the “made.” This inseparability of the two is what he finds in the late plays of Shakespeare: not a return to sylvan innocence, but rather what critic Joshua Corey calls an “avant-pastoral” poetics rooted in body and breath. After hundreds of years of it, sez Olson, we have “got our fill of urban as city” (38). “Whatever you have to say,” he wrote, “leave / the roots on, let them / dangle / And the dirt / Just to make clear / where they come from.” Hence postmodernity, with its dreams of Cyborg Gardens and Electric Sheep and Machines of Loving Grace.

John Dee, as Imagined in Light of Empire

The British Empire — a thing culled from Arthurian legends whispered between Faerie Queenes and court astrologers — stood for a time as proof of magic’s power. ‘Twas a rabbit pulled from the hat of Elizabeth I’s wizard-friend John Dee. The same rabbit that draws Alice down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

Enlisted as Her Majesty’s spymaster — indeed, he was the original secret agent, Mr. 007 himself — Dee stormed the reality studio, made Elizabeth a Time Traveler, conversed with angels.

And this thing Dee dreamt into being was of course a terrible thing: an expansionist project armed with ships of fools and launched outward to seize others — other persons, other worlds — for purposes of self-aggrandizement.

Literary greats went on to reimagine Dee just as he himself was a reimagining of Merlin. Shakespeare figures him as Prospero, and against him imagines the colonized subject Caliban. To overthrow Prospero, says Caliban, “Remember / First to possess his books, for without them / He’s but a sot.”

Christopher Marlowe supplies the more influential imagining of Dee, however, by casting him as Doctor Faustus.