I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss’s The View From Afar, which contains a short essay entitled Schizophrenia and Cosmopolitanism. As always, I have an interest in most things having to do with schizophrenia from an intellectual standpoint. In this essay Levi-Strauss is trying to draw some parallels between the features of schizophrenia (dualistic splits, identification with celestial bodies, sensation of internal organs re-arranging themselves, etc.) and features of a Chinook myth. The final conclusion is that the features of the myth were borrowed from other tribes with whom the Chinook had commercial relationships, and in some cases reversed or trans-figured.

This borrowing, in a cosmopolitan culture, looks alot like cut-up or collage to me. Many of the photomontages I’ve done for the last 20 years have a quasi-mythical feeling, and the essay starts to explain that. I’ve always felt this about surrealism, and there is overt exploration of the unconscious as revealed in “random” placements and re-placements.

I was wondering today if Burroughs, John Cage and Duchamp, the artists I consider the paragons of the 20th century, had ever met or been in the same place at the same time.

We’ve been watching the early episodes of 24 lately. I love intersecting story / POV plots in general. Crash and 13 Conversations About 1 Thing come to mind. They do a great job in some of the title prologues of showing the same scene from separate cameras. This is like a sort of temporal cubism, which is a kind of reversal of the collage technique (explosive vs. collective / implosive).