SEPARATE REALITIES

In the novel In the Region of the Ice, a nun who teaches literature, Sister Irene, speaks of a brilliant, mad student. "'I'm very grateful to have him in class. It's just that ... he thinks ideas are real.' Sister Carlotta, who loved literature also, had been forced to teach grade-school arithmetic for the last four years. That might have been why she said, a little sharply, 'You don't think ideas are real?' Sister Irene acquiesced with a smile, but of course she did not think so: only reality is real."

Under literacy, particularly print, all experience was subject to a single code. Inner experiences were expected to conform to outer perceptions. Any failure of correspondence was regarded as hallucination. The individual who failed in this was thought to be living in a world of self-deception.

Spatial metaphors were employed to describe the inner psychological states of tendency, duration & intensity. Literate man said, "I cannot come to grips with your thought because its level is over my head, our views being so far apart I lose touch with what you are trying to make clear."

Surrealist art was wholly unacceptable. It was nonsense.

Even dreams were expected to resemble waking life. When they failed to do so, they were dismissed as temporary mental aberrations, unworthy of attention.

Freud advised his readers to take dreams seriously because, he said, they are proper history; one need only translate them out of their secret code into waking, historical experiences and then they will all "fall in line" & "make sense."

To the young today, however, the dream experience is its own reality, a separate reality: it doesn't need to be validated by translation into the historical world of sensory experience. It validates itself.

Similarly, they regard media as self-contained environments, having little correspondence with other realities or environments. TV is its own reality, radio its reality, film still another reality.

Each creates its own space, its own time. The clock on the "Today" Show has no hour hand.

When TV fans seek correspondence between TV & reality, reality often surrenders to TV. Recently two communities, each lying within the Salt Lake City broadcasting area, but in another time zone, petitioned the Department of Commerce for rezoning. They wanted clock time to conform to broadcast time.

The young in particular regard media environments as designs, patterns - what William Blake called "sculptures" - states that have no separate physical existence. We pass temporarily into one or another & when in any one, it seems overpoweringly real & all other states shadowy. We imagine, of course, that any state we are in is physically real. This makes it splendidly attractive. It doesn't occur to us that only our spirits can enter these realms, and that events experienced there can never be tested against observed reality.

I think this is one reason the young find nothing incongruous about conflicting reports in the press, radio, TV, etc.

That same absence of concern with the contradictory, on the part of preliterate peoples, led the French philosopher Lévy-Bruhl to write an entire book in which he concluded that natives suffered from a "pre-logical mentality." He said they weren't bothered by the coexistence of contraries, but let mutually contradictory reports exist side by side. When we examine closely the examples he offered, we find many remarkably close to modern experiences.

I asked students who had seen the film Patton to read A. J. Liebling on Patton. Liebling points out that the press credited Patton with victories others achieved. The students enjoyed Liebling, just as they enjoyed the film, but not one mentioned contradictions. To them, each was its own reality . Each was self-contained. Neither validated nor invalidated the other.

Then I asked them to read a biography of Rommel, who as a tactician was certainly Patton's equal, but in habit mild-mannered, thoughtful of his men, an anti-Nazi who plotted to kill Hitler. This, too, they enjoyed & accepted. They didn't see that Rommel's life challenged the theme of the film that it takes bullies to win battles.

As a boy I was enormously impressed with Charles Laughton's performance in Mutiny on the Bounty. But when I read a book on Captain Bligh, which described him as a humane & able leader, and documented this historically, my faith in the film was shattered. Then I read a second book on the fifteen mutineers who, far from being noble martyrs, on Pitcairn Island turned into murderers, rapists, & alcoholics, with only one surviving. At this point the film, for me, became a total fraud.

Recently I showed this film to students & asked them to read both books. I even projected a contemporary portrait of Bligh, showing a small-featured gentleman of pleasant expression, not the heavy-browed sea dog of film fame. No one raised questions of accuracy.

When I raised such questions, they dismissed them. They refused to relate art forms outward, to take reality as arbiter.

To someone my age, this is disturbing. To the young, it's entirely appropriate. They regard the press & TV, in fact all media, the way they regard LP records: as separate worlds. They don't relate recorded music back to performance. That music exists now, with them in it. It's complete, no mere shadow of some distant original. And it's doubtful, in any case, if there ever was, in any conventional sense, an original performance, especially where audience involvement becomes part of the performance.

One Christmas, President Eisenhower sent out cards bearing color reproductions of a watercolor he had painted on top of a drawing by a talented enlisted man from a photograph of the White House. Counting negatives, these cards must have been at least eight generations removed from "reality."

To the young, I suspect each version is a separate reality.

None of this, George Steiner tells me, applies to students in England or Europe. He regards it as an American phenomenon. Certainly the present ratio of telephones to world population remains minute. One can still hike in Northumberland or in an Alpine valley, right in the heart of industrial Europe, and encounter few electronic images. Even within the United States the pattern is not uniform.

But where electronic media prevail, they are the new environments. They even have the power to challenge language, man's earliest & perhaps most basic environment. TV deprives its viewers of speech. Those who live within it retreat from language. When Jean Piaget asked Swiss children, "What do you think with?" most replied, "The mouth." Children in the most diverse cultures make this association. It may, until recently, have been a universally held concept. But today, in the United States, there are reports of children who associate thinking with television.