Reading Eric Packer Through Erik Satie

Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopédies"

How to Play Gymnopedie No1 by Erik Satie on 

Piano Lesson Pt1

If you listen to this music while you are reading this you will feel what Eric Packer says this music does for him. If you have access to a piano you can play it yourself with this fine tutorial. No previous music knowledge needed.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. (C 8)

I have two private elevators now. One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole. (C  28-29)

In the Krasny youtube interviews DeLillo emphasizes that Eric Packer is not a normal Wall Street cyber financier. He reads poetry in different languages, he appreciates the art of Rothko, he listens to Satie and rap music. He has turned Satie into his very own musak musik elevator music. 

DeLillo's emphasis here is to project a character who is a  consumer of high avant garde culture. An aesthete perhaps. This contrasts with his Philip Dick sexual seduction dialogue with Elise. The paradox makes the dialogue very sexual indeed. 

I am equally sure that The Cronenberg did not include Eric Packer's ride down on his own elevator listening to Satie. 

Again we turn to Babette Babich, and a chain of signifiers floating all through Cosmopolis:

Nancy Babich, Nietzsche, excess, limits, implosion, aphoristic writing, musical writing, discontinuous, non linear, non- descriptive, non-explaining writing, writing that is all short, choppy dialogue even more so (Baudrillard) than the choppy, start and stop in quarter inches Foucauldian grid of New York City traffic and the power/knowledge/capital grid of our world where "there is no outside".

New York City Street Map

Agnes Martin

Für Elise - a non-review

“It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

"Without everything just as it was, with nothing altered and holding nothing alterable, nothing at all - not even the most transient, ecstatic moment of happiness or joy - can have been. Causality works forwards in this kind of passionate affirmation only by working backward like the ray of sunlight Nietzsche sees shining on his life: “I looked backwards, I looked forwards, never did I see so many and such good things at once.” Nietzsche’s account, telling his life to himself, thus works upon his life as a benediction. And it is this benediction which transfigures the glance, transfiguring
what was into what was willed as such, which is the meaning of what it is to will backwards, declaring: “how could I fail to be thankful to my life?” (EH Epigraph,KSA 6, p. 263)"
- in Babich, Nietzsche's Imperative as a Friend's Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing

"Everything in our lives has brought us to this moment".
Benno to Eric in Cosmopolis (the book and the movie!)

Without Elise, there's no all of Eric in the movie. Without Elise, this everything Benno talks about is NOT everything, it's just what's in Eric's world. Elise is not in Eric's world, she is Gradiva, Euridice taking him out of the limo, seducing him who has it all and wants nothing but a haircut into having no choice in the end. Having no choice but to accept the irreversibility of his Destiny and not look back on destroying the circulating capital, his money, her money because of a yen. And not just to accept it, but to love it seeing it for what it is.

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.
For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.

Reading Eric Packer Through Rudolf Steiner and Kolisko

He watched a hundred gulls trail a wobbling scow downriver. They had large strong hearts. He knew this, disproportionate to body size. He'd been interested once and had mastered the teeming details of bird anatomy. Birds have hollow bones. ....He didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut.


He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it, trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat of its scavenger's ravenous heart. (C p.7)

In the above quote DeLillo's language soars with the bird. As Baudrillard has said, Your writing must mirror what you are writing about. If it is a soaring bird, then, your writing must soar even more than the bird. It does.

Eugen Kolisko

Lili Kolisko

http://sueyounghistories.com/archives/2009/04/18/eugen-and-lili-kolisko-and-homeopathy/

Zoology for Everybody: Birds Bk. 2 Eugen Kolisko [Paperback]

Rudolf Steiner

As the story goes, when Hitler was asked who his greatest enemy was, he said, "Rudolf Steiner".

Steiner, Eugen Kolisko and Lili Kolisko were colleagues in Anthroposophy.

If you study a bird's skeleton you will notice that it is extremely light, and all the bones, especially those of the skull seem penetrated by air.  (p.9)

The bones of birds are whiter and contain more calcium. They are more brittle and more dense than those of other animals. Very early they lose their content of blood and marrow ....The marrow shrinks and its place is taken by a space filled with air. ...The better a bird flies                                                                                                ,the  more its bones are permeated with air. Life in the air makes the bones dry, brittle and filled with air instead of blood....Studying a bird's bone, we come to the conclusion that it has the qualities that other bones acquire in old age. ...A phenomenon which appears only in old age in all the other animals and in man, appears immediately in the bird. It has a senile skeleton. (p.10-11)

In the eye of a bird is a much greater limb-activity. Because it is so well provided with muscles and a ring of bones, it acts more like a limb than an eye. It is not only a physical apparatus to receive light, but also as an organ coordinated with the limb-system. A bird of prey (or scavenger?) looks and strikes; the activity of its eyes is followed immediately by a reaction of the wings and beak.

The birds are thus very sensitive to conditions in the atmosphere through which they fly; they are attuned to the activity of the winds and air currents. They have an extremely well developed muscular sense, a sense of motion, a sense for their own movements and at the same time a sense of touch.

And here I remember David Foster Wallace's essay on his own tournament tennis playing. How he won because he played with the air currents.

The third remarkable feature in birds is the development of the breathing system. Birds have huge lungs, reaching as far below as the belly. The diaphragm  is missing. From the lungs branch off air-sacs, entering the bones and the wings....Some of those branches enter even into the feathers, so that the bird is everywhere surrounded and embedded in air. (20)

The strange phenomenon of migration can be understood if we know that they only fly according to routes having certain ether configurations. They follow the way of rivers.  Much has been written concerning the study of migrating birds, but it shows the great mistake of looking for the explanation in the intellectual capacities of the birds, attributing much to their small brains. Their intelligence is spread out all over the atmosphere. We do not realize the various changes in the atmosphere, for we are not sufficiently sensitive, but the birds are. They migrate on those air currents where they sense certain ether configurations. They are in unison with the air.

Now we turn to the soul-life  of the bird. Everyone who observes birds, remarks that they are more alert than any other animals. They need very little sleep. ...Although birds are very much awake, they are very easily distracted.  They certainly lack the capacity for concentration....Creatures endowed with feathers cannot really concentrate. (23)

Conte in Duvall,  In Cosmopolis Packer possesses an almost preternatural ability to recognize the patterns in currency values that shift in nanoseconds and cyber-capital that is traded instantaneously on the Nikkei and Nasdaq markets. He assumes the hieratic role of the prophet.


He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He

studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and

chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts

were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and ...




....midnight sweat reduced to liquid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself

was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the

eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic

form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every

breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our

bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole. (C 24)

"There's an order at some deep level," he said. "A pattern that wants to be seen."

"Then see it."

...I always have. But it's elusive in this instance. My experts have struggled and just about given up. I've been sleeping on it. There's a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world."

"An aesthetics of interaction."
"Yes. But in this case I'm beginning to doubt I'll ever find it."

Amazon

"Doubt. What is doubt? You don't believe in doubt. You've told me this. Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing," she said. We need a new theory of time."

Speed and Politics -  Virilio. The new theory of time. Speed is the last World War. (C 86)

Amazon

 In 1896, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche asked Steiner to help organize the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg. Her brother by that time was non compos mentis. Förster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher; Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. Steiner later related, "Nietzsche's ideas of the 'eternal recurrence' and of 'Übermensch' remained long in my mind. For in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the 19th century....What attracted me particularly was that one could read Nietzsche without coming upon anything which strove to make the reader a 'dependent' of Nietzsche's."^[18]

In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin. He became part owner, chief editor, and an active contributor to the literary journal Magazin für Literatur, where he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy. Many subscribers were alienated by Steiner's unpopular support of Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair^[22] and the journal lost more subscribers when Steiner published extracts from his correspondence with anarchist John Henry Mackay.^[22] Dissatisfaction with his editorial style eventually led to his departure from the magazine.

Amazon

Rudolf Steiner's theory is spiritual, connecting all knowledge with the cosmos. Agriculture, education, music, plants, animals, an incredible array of knowledge about the world. His theories and observations were originated to provide exercises for spiritual development.

Eric Packer is using his spiritual practices to give him knowledge about cyber numbers "floating currency" for huge financial gains. Steiner never intended that.

DeLillo is making a statement against theory making that can always be turned against itself to strengthen the opposite for what it was intended. For example, Virilio was dismayed to find his work and theories on speed were being taught in military institutions around the world. For the very institutions it was intended to expose.! Deleuze and Guattari 's book A Thousand Plateaus was studied careful by an Israeli general to use against the Palestinians.

So when developing and explaining theory one must be careful Baudrillard warns.

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Wins MTV Movie Brawl: Robsessed Fangirls Packer An Implosion Voting

A victory in Eric Packer style. MTV voting allows multiple voting with no limits. This ensures multiple hits, increased revenues from advertisers,eh.

Certainly Dark Knight and Hunger Games have funneled multi $$$$$$ into MTV: trailers, movie stills, all that hoopla stuff. Already these franchises have spent a fortune and the movies are not even in the theatres yet.

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis has no trailer yet, and no movie stills with the exception of Caitlin Cronenberg's photo. What is the meaning of this win by the underdog, the Seabiscuit of a movie race?

A Baudrillardian/Nietzschean example of an excess of voting carried beyond limits, over the edge in an excess so tumultuous that the voting machinery was turned on its head, defeating its purpose, which was to garner votes for their advertising giants, create an award for them, and promote their franchises.

They got fooled big time by ladies at robsessed who voted day and night all weekend long for Rob Pattinson and brought Cosmopolis to victory.

This is what Eric Packer does to the yen in Cosmopolis. He buys vast amounts of yen, creating a vast demand for yen by everyone who follows him. The higher the yen goes, the lower the dollar falls.

Like gas prices. Gas doesn't go up. The dollar goes down. 

The yen goes so high that all other currencies in the speculative global circulating currency market crash to nothing.

Baudrillard through Nietzsche calls this IMPLOSION. The destruction of the mass marketing tool which is MTV for its advertisers to give the win to The LIttle Engine That Could - Cronenberg's Cosmopolis.

And who imploded MTV? Women from robsessed who love Rob Pattinson. And who also hold a deep grudge against Scummit Summit/now Lionsgate for messing up Twilight, thus beating their next hopeful multi-billion enterprise franchise The Hunger Games.

A pity says Jane.

The fangirls showed how you can beat the big machine. They voted all day and all night all weekend. Nothing but love as motivation.

Reading Eric Packer Through Ayn Rand

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex. (C p. 5 the first page)

Raymond Massey

Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead has his bedroom at the top of his penthouse where it is glassed all around. The world can watch him fuck women. A little bit of trivia that DeLillo throws in for Ayn Rand intelligentsia. A "floating sign"? 
"When she entered his bedroom, she found it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside."When Dominique enters his penthouse after their marriage.

Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper - Fountainhead

Alert cue, alert cue!

He bypassed sleep and rounded into counterpoise, a moonless calm in which every force is balanced by another. This was the briefest of easings, a small pause in the stir of restless identities. (C p.5-6)

The dialectic is stilled, balanced, the see-saw is even, straight across. It's not charting. The line is flat. Like a brain-dead flatline on the oscilloscope. 

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow. (c p.6)

The appearance of the Double, just barely sensed, like a shadow. Restless identities stirring. Death enters the novel quietly, on the first two pages, like a shadow, with the appearance of the Double.

DeLillo writes in this way: He types a paragraph on one sheet of white paper, edits it, retypes it again on another white sheet of paper, re-edits it, etc until it reads the way he wants it to read. There is always plenty of white around the paragraph. If you have ever seen a shot of an Ayn Rand manuscript, not like DeLillo at all.

Eric Packer:

When he died he would not end. The world would end. (C p.6)

Freud is finished. (dead). Einstein is next. (to die) Their worlds are dead.(C p.6)

On reading Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller:

On the last page:

"It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end," Ayn Rand liked to say. It is a favorite quote of hers her fans like so much.

DeLillo is challenging Baudrillard on ending global capitalism through narrative transcendence, and he is also challenging Rand and  her moral defense of capital. 

Anne Heller

Although Heller's book was published after Cosmopolis, it seems prescient that this quote is on the first page of Cosmopolis and the identical quote is on the last page of Heller's biography of Rand. DeLillo's self chosen book cover for Underworld seems also prescient in its erie image of the coming 9-11. And Cosmopolis is clairvoyant about the 2008 meltdown.

                                                                                                                                       

Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals

Now I feel that DeLillo's ghost is following me as I am reading Cosmopolis through Atlas Shrugged but even more through Rand herself. I am coming to believe that she is the great unacknowledged post modern philosopher her rather poorly educated disciples have always thought her to be, but not for the same reasons as they. I believe she is Nietzsche's heir, more than Foucault and Baudrillard, and taking in the consideration that she disavowed Nietzsche early on, stopped writing in her journals about him so much, all his thought embedded in her mind went underground. Until Baudrillard came along and blasted it up in my face without even knowing about her.

Does DeLillo intend to just blast her for her defense of capital? Or is DeLillo somehow divining her   unconscious catastrophic collision with capital via Greenspan in the 2008 meltdown. As a defender of capital on a moral foundation of self-interest,  this is the flaw Greenspan told Congress he had found in his thinking.

From Digby at Hullabaloo who blames Rand for the 2008 meltdown.

Digby

Under questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, Greenspan acknowledged that the failure of that expected self-regulation represented "a flaw in the model" he used to analyze economics. "I was going for 40 years or more on the perception that it was working well."

This is the fundamental problem with Randian thinking. They really do believe that capitalism is a moral system in which the people become wealthy because they are morally and intellectually superior to those who don't. Why, it would be wrong for them to not self-regulate and endanger the whole economy, right? It wouldn't make any sense. - Digby

No Digby, that's not the reason they believe it is a moral system. They believe it is a moral system because it is based on man's reason and self-interest. The flaw is rational self-interest. Why would these financiers destroy their financial empires? Well, Mr. Greenspan, you should have known in 1968. Rand destroyed her lucratively financial, philosophical empire of Objectivism that Nathaniel Branden had built for her, his lover, because he didn't want to fuck her anymore. She wanted to punish him, destroy him, kill him for choosing a beautiful young woman instead of an old brilliant frumpet.

And OMG I believe she was following Nietzsche all this time. Taking every single premise she had and carrying it to the extreme. And every goddamn one of them from sex, to friendship, to love, to her writing,  all of it, to the extreme, to excess. What is Atlas Shrugged as a novel, but a novel that is more a novel than a novel, a hyper-novel, an excessive novel, a novel that is "worse" as Nietzsche would say. All the way to Death as Canetti would say. Being more a capitalist than a capitalist. More so. Worse as Nietzsche advocates to bring something down. To destroy it. This is where Baudrillard kills Foucault in Forget Foucault. This is where Rand does it in reality through Greenspan instead of advocating or writing about it. She is a major philosopher by default. She didn't know she knew.

Does DeLillo know that he knows. I dunno.

To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. ...For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. (Jean Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death 37)

Reading Eric and Elise Through the Symbolic Order of Seduction/Challenge/Surprise and Destiny

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer and  Sarah Gadon as Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis

Destiny is stalking Eric and Elise. Destiny does not leave it to chance but repeats to make sure. Destiny is of the Symbolic Order of Seduction always paired with challenge, the duel and surprise. In each encounter with Destiny the self divides into a before and after. As time passes the two selves bifurcate and diverge away from each other, farther and farther away. They occupy parallel universes. As Eric and Elise meet and separate all day, each changes as a modified  and different self emerges from the previous encounter with each other. Elise is an apparition as she surprisingly appears and disappears. Apparition is always coupled with disappearance.

Following through (free download) Gradiva-Elise here and here. (earlier posts here)

Continuing through Baudrillard:

He took off his sunglasses , for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily with fixed attention.
Your eyes are blue, she said.

Switching to Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals: He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

Eat breakfast yet?

No, she said.

.... You never told me you were blue-eyed.

That face. Even in ten years time, I shall not know the colour of its eyes. But I see it in the street, in my dreams and just beneath the surface of a great number of other faces which suddenly start to resemble it. Baudrillard (Cool Memories, 1980-85b p. 54) :

Reading Eric Packer As Baudrillardian Seer

Available at Amazon.com

Yes I said Packer is a seer. He is not a loser, nor a nihilist as Rob Pattinson has called him. And it is important to make his character crystal clear. Why? Because De Lillo has emerged as a great American writer  of his generation and has written clairvoyantly of our time.  His novels have predicted similar singular events that occur soon after their publication. The characters in his novels are now the subject of extensive academic writing, dissertations, theses, and numerous papers and books within the academic world. Eric Packer is consistently described in terms of his downfall: that is, losing all his billions betting on the yen. Not to mention his sexual exploits, all lumped together, undifferentiated, the same meaning attributed to each one, carbon copies of the same experience, as if he is a paid prostitute. Elise Shifrin is given short shrift as the estranged wife, one of his fucks for the day by academics, men and women, and cold and frigid by Pattinson girlfans. None of them are anywhere close.


My problem with this is not unlike my problem with Nietzsche, who is tagged with being a nihilist when he so emphatically counters this label in his The Genealogy of Morals in the last pages of this essay, one written near the end of his life. But Nihilist is pasted on him forever and anyone speaking or writing about him must continue to deal with the erroneous labeling.


I see this is going to happen with Eric Packer. Decades from now someone may think otherwise and present convincing evidence, but it will drop into the fold of the prevailing Discourse and be lost until another Foucault comes out of the intellectual woodwork to say and write otherwise.  All these writers, Schuster  in his book Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum  and http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=schuster+%2B+de+lillo&x=0&y=0


John N. Duvall's The Cambridge Companion to Don De Lillo  (composed of a different author on a wide variety of topics in each DeLillo novel) without exception do not acknowledge Eric Packer's great game playing heroism in the face of evil and ruinous, global cyber-capital speculation. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=+duvall+%2B+the+cambridge+companion+to+don+delillo&x=11&y=14


I am not saying he acts heroically, but instead acts within a game. He is in it to win it. And I see that I am going to have to go against heavy hitters to stake my claim on the character of Eric Packer. I think I have Cronenberg as a possible ally. One can read Cosmopolis through Baudrillard, but  one can also read it through eXistenZ, which is what I think Cronenberg will do in his upcoming film. And eXistenZ and Baudrillard can each be read through the other, illuminating both in a singular way, and taking the character of Eric Packer out of the psychological and interpretive dead end. After all DeLillo says through Packer that Freud is dead.

Available at Amazon.com

Available at Amazon.com

All these writers are incredibly intelligent, well acquainted with Lacan, Baudrillard, Virilio, Lyotard, and others. They all write within the interpretive, hermeneutic mode put to bed for good by Foucault. I am beginning to realize that if you come to Baudrillard without being first steeped in Foucault and his genealogical tool chest, as Baudrillard himself once was, then it is likely that Baudrillard's refusal to engage in the interpretive method, so completely a part of western thinking and writing since the Biblical commentaries, will not impact you enough to toss it as Baudrillard did in Forget Foucault.  It is painful to let it go as that is the mode in which we have all been educated. It is enchanting and seductive and allows us to feel how very intelligent we are as we read it and understand it. 


Here is Nietzsche on it:


We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: how can we ever hope to find what we have never looked for? There is a sound adage which runs:"Where a man's treasure lies, there lies his heart." Our treasure lies in the beehives of our knowledge. We are perpetually on our way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. The only thing that lies close to our heart is the desire to bring something home to the hive. (preface The Genealogy of Morals)