The heavens opened
on watermelons!
On the hottest day in England, I thought you would appreciate something cooling. The delivery of watermelons to Caltagirone in Sicily, filmed on holiday there in 2015. Great fun – and congratulations to those fearless Piaggio drivers!
Reflections on the reflexive
You may remember from previous posts that I’m particularly interested in the concept of mise en abyme – a story nested in a story perhaps nested in another story, and/or in some kind of continuous reflexive/reflective and recursive sequence.
I’m also interested in the way mise en abyme, for me at least, has a connection with the notion of being hoist on one’s own petard1. I see it as the worst kind of mise en abyme, effectively being blown up by one’s own bomb, because it’s so final. It creates an end to the recursive that’s ultimately recursive. It’s quintessential self-sabotage (another theme that intrigues me as I’m so proficient at it).
I’ve referenced one of the core texts – if not the core text – about mise en abyme, Lucien Dällenbach’s The Mirror in the Text. And I’ve given examples of mise en abyme as I’ve come across them, such as the ‘play within a play’ in Hamlet, which Dällenbach himself references, and which turns out to be a dumbshow reflecting the play within the play, which reflects the Shakespeare’s play as a whole, which reflects the world; or such as the presence of Mantegna’s selfie in his murals in La camera degli Sposi in Mantua’s Palazzo Ducale.
Lasciate ogne speranza2
There’s an abyme where we put ourselves in or behind or through screens.
Self-regard in the mirror or the smart phone is easy, but can become uber-enthralling. You can even Mirror Front Camera to see the image of yourself as it will appear in a photo, rather than as a reverse selfie. The very word ‘selfie’ suggests self-absorption, and as the OED points out, apart from the modern meaning it traces to 2002 (earlier surely?), it notes the word also has the meaning ‘Self-centred; selfish’, originally Scottish and dating from at least the 1640s. The online dictionary usefully offers the following example of usage:
What Chimera's of invention, wil men make use of to uphold most groundlesse conceits.., for strengthning and promoving of their sinful and selfie designs. Phil-Alethio, Resol. Subj. of Scotland 9 1661
If that’s not a description of a smart phone, then I’m a haggis.
In a recent article in London Review of Books, William Davies reviewed The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane) and quotes Haidt as follows:3
Smartphones became a mass phenomenon in 2007, and Haidt’s central contention is that this is the explanation for the dramatic increase in youth mental illness in the years that followed, as ‘play-based childhood’ was supplanted by ‘phone-based childhood’. Haidt thinks that smartphones are responsible for four identifiable harms: the loss of face-to-face social contact outside school, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. …The physiological transition out of childhood is fraught with anxiety and conflict at the best of times, and throwing Instagram and TikTok into the mix scrambles the processes that otherwise set the child up for a healthy and psychologically secure adulthood.
In spite of his conservative and ‘gender essentialism’, does Haidt have a point?
While in Italy this summer, I came across an article in Corriera della Sera about the themes that over 500,000 fifth year students decided to write about in their state exam. Themes included Pirandello, rediscovering silence, the use of atomic energy, a poem by Ungaretti on war, beauty and the protection of artistic and cultural heritage, and imperfection.
But for one in three students their favourite theme – and one on which the students must have felt well qualified to write – was ‘Profile, selfie and blog.’ This suggests a degree of reflexive self-absorption in self-absorption.
28.9% Profiles, Selfie and blog
17.3% Use of atomic energy
14.7% Rediscovering silence
13.1% Pirandello and a reflection on the use of machines
11.5% Imperfection.
11.1% Ungaretti on war
3.4% Beauty and the protection of artistic and cultural heritage
As William Davies points out in his review, we know
from the testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen that the company’s own research showed that Instagram (which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta) was doing demonstrable harm to girls’ mental health. The question is how much weight to grant social media when we try to explain wider demographic trends and their gender discrepancies.
It is the loss of non-screen-based activities, added to the rise of ‘fearful parenting’, that concerns Haidt as much as anything. Encounters with nature, aimless messing around and physical synchronicity (when dancing or playing sport) are features of healthy human development that are obstructed by a ‘phone-based childhood’, not just because teenagers stop sharing physical spaces, but also because their interactions are increasingly asynchronous.
However, as a balance, Davies points out that:
NHS figures show a strong correlation between the incidence of mental health diagnoses in children and the economic insecurity of their parents. A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Anxiety Nation?, shows that being a homeowner and having savings goes along with better mental health across a wide range of indicators, such as good sleep and feelings of self-worth. Prescriptions for anti-depressants are issued in greatest numbers in the most deprived areas, to children as well as adults. Whatever else might be going on, mental health disorders are certainly not a symptom of privilege.
And Davies adds:
It needn’t be the case that the only options for children are hanging out on street corners, scrolling through TikTok in their bedrooms, or taking endless violin and ceramics lessons. There is another possibility: invest in public institutions for children. In the UK at least, the post-2008 environment has been a disaster in this respect. At the time of the 2010 election, 3631 Sure Start centres were providing support for early years development (and for parents), receiving £1.8 billion in funding. By 2023, that funding had fallen by two-thirds, and there were only 2204 centres left. The YMCA found that local authority funding for youth services
Ray of relation
In Chapter IV of Nature, published in Nature; Addresses and Lectures, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) writes:
He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the sense of a person being at the focal point of an array exactly mirrored my interpretation of a particular scene that I have been writing about.
A seagull in Brighton seems to have got the idea.
Flying off till next time. May you have blue skies from now on.
Dante’s Inferno. Canto III, line 9 ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate’ = ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’.
LRB 20 June 2024