Leviathan: Hallucinations, Health, and Power

William Blake. Behemoth and Leviathan, 
from Illustrations to the Book of Job (1826).
Image from Encyclopedia Mythica.

Yesterday I made an attempt to see Andrey Zvyagintsev's new film, Leviathan, praised by the critics and already collecting various prizes and accolades. I wanted to form my own opinion about it, but knew enough about the movie to expect that it might be difficult to sit through, so I planted myself in an aisle seat of the penultimate row at the Film Forum.

At 6:30 pm the screening began with five or ten minutes of previews. At 7:25 pm I was at West 4 subway station, waiting for the F train and reading Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations. This means that I lasted only about 30-40 minutes of the film, after which I sprang to my feet and ran out of the movie theater with the lightness and speed of a gazelle. Half hour of looking at the well familiar doom and gloom, drunkenness, self-loathing and self-destruction, hostility, rudeness, corruption, hopelessness, and denial of dignity was all I could endure. After that I decided that for the sake of my mental hygiene I needed to spare myself from seeing the rest of this film. I am sure that if this were a Japanese tale of woe, I would have had no troubles watching it, but Russians are adept at inventing and building their own circles of hell, the sights, sounds, and smells of which have an immediate effect on me and make me very, very light on my feet. 

But Hallucinations provided little respite... Before my F train reached Queens, Leviathan was in front of me again, on the pages of Sacks' book, in a different, though not entirely unrelated context. 

In chapter 5, Sacks compares visual hallucinations in patients with classical Parkinson's disease and patients with Lewy body dementia. As an example of a person whose intellectual capacity and creativity were well preserved despite severe motor impairments brought about by Parkinson's disease, the author mentions Thomas Hobbes (1588-1689), the founding father of political philosophy, whose book Leviathan (1651), an early treatise on the theory of social contract, explored the relationship between an individual and state. Hobbes started showing signs of "shaking palsy" at about the age of sixty, while completing the work on Leviathan, and although his condition worsened over time and eventually led to nearly complete immobility, he remained mentally lucid until his death at the age of 91. 

In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that political order is a necessary alternative to chaos, a state of war of all against all, into which humans would be inevitably thrust if they were to follow their nature without restrictions. He dispensed with the idea of the greatest good, but argued that there is the greatest evil, or the fear of meeting a violent end. Hobbes favored absolute monarchy as a safeguard against anarchy, which was perhaps not surprising considering that the book was written during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651). Leviathan, which appeared with a frontispiece that resembles a Tarot card and depicts a giant whose body is formed from hundreds of human figures, immediately stirred up a great deal of controversy and won no favors of the clergy for the author. 

The frontispiece Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes;
engraving by Abraham Bosse. Image from Wikipedia.

In matters of health, Hobbes was an exemplary patient: according to John Aubrey's biosketch (full text of Aubrey's Brief Lives), Hobbes was a man of strong stature, regular habits, moderate in his diet, and mentally and physically active. He would rise at seven in the morning and take a long walk, during which he would think and contemplate and jot down his thoughts with a pen and inkwell concealed in his cane. He also played tennis (until the age of 75) and received regular massages. He spent the rest of the morning in contemplation, had dinner at eleven, smoked a pipe, took a nap, and wrote down his thoughts in the afternoon. Apparently, he was methodical and organized in his meditations, which he undertook "always with this rule that he very much and deeply considered one thing at a time." An eccentric and a wit, "[h]e was never idle; his thoughts were always working." He sang before bedtime (behind closed doors and when nobody could hear him), because he thought it to be good for his health, and composed verse shortly before his death. He loved to argue, he courted controversy, he was a friend of Galileo and playwright Benjamin Johnson, and he was often in trouble with the church. In addition to his works on morality, politics, and law, he translated classics into English and wrote on optics, motion, and geometry. 

Going back to the source of the Leviathan synchronicity, I came across Oliver Sacks' writings in a roundabout way, even though I first learned about him over a decade ago. Recently, after the death of Robin Williams, I watched the comedian's old stand-up routines, movies, and interviews, in some of which he spoke about his work on Awakenings, a 1990 film based on Sacks' book of the same title, about his experience of treating survivors of encephalitis lethargica, who had been frozen for decades in catatonic state. Sacks, who, according to Williams, is a combination of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Albert Schweizer, and Santa Claus [and who speaks about hallucinating the color indigo with a fascinating Yiddish-British accent], spent a long time with Williams and Robert De Niro, helping them to prepare for their respective roles of the doctor and patient. Sadly, in the aftermath of Robin Williams' suicide, it became known that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and struggled with depression, anxiety, paranoia, and sleep disorder, and postmortem showed that he suffered from diffuse Lewy body dementia.

In his tribute published in New Yorker, The Man Who Could Be Anyone, Sacks described Robin Williams as "that adorable genius", a phrase once spoken about psychologist William James, and wrote warmly about their friendship that began when Sacks was helping Williams to become Sacks on the set of Awakenings.

Update March 7, 2015: In mid-February, Oliver Sacks announced that his ocular melanoma that had been successfully treated nine years ago metastasized in his liver and his time in this world is probably measured in months.

Update August 30, 2015: Oliver Sacks died (NYT obituary). Radiolab posted this wonderful program in his memory, based on their last conversations with Sacks, a friend of the program over many years.

Killer Heels

At the “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoes” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Arts (until March 1), one item is accompanied by a quote from an 18-century Dutch comparative anatomist Peter Camper (1722-1789):

"The wealthy women walk... by reason of the height of their heels, on the fore-ends of their feet, and consequently, very badly; they walk... like the majority of quadrupeds - on their toes only."

(Dissertation on the Best Form of the Shoe, 1781)

Yeah baby! Finally someone said the truth!

Fukushima Shoes

Another exhibit in my collection of art inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster is a work titled “Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels)", currently displayed as a part of “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (until March 1, see the video intro on the museum page and my report).

These shoes were co-created in 2012 by an artist and designer working under the pseudonym Sputniko! (I thought that this was a plucky Yoko-Ono-like grandma, but it turned out to be a 30-year-old assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, Hiromi Ozaki) and a shoe designer Masaya Kushino, a person with the most Baroque imagination when it comes to creating shoes.

Masaya Kushino. Stairway to Heaven (2013).
Heaven? Nah. If I were Hermes, this would be
my footwear of choice for trips to Hades.

The Fukushima shoes are decorated with the flowers of nanohana, a kind of rapeseed, a plant that absorbs from the soil caesium-137 and strontium-90 and stores them in its stalks, but not its seeds. The idea is that the wearer of the shoes walks on the ground and the seeds, which are stored in a drum on each shoe, are deposited through the heel into the soil at every step. The plants grow and absorb the radioactive elements, and the contamination is cleared. A short movie displayed alongside the shoes demonstrates how the shoe is supposed to work.

Nanohana Heels in action (movie screenshot)

What to do about the fact that both caesium and strontium have 30-year half-life is still unclear, but then who said that art needs to be practical. In terms of audacity, originality, impracticality, and quixotry, this opus has no serious rivals at this exhibition. 

Children's Books at the Grolier Club

The Grolier Club, the oldest active bibliophilic club in the US, was founded in 1884 by a small group of book lovers headed by Robert Hoe III, a manufacturer of printing press machinery and an avid book collector, and was named after Jean Grolier, a statesman, diplomat, and book lover in 16th-century France.

The club regularly mounts exhibitions on literary and bookmaking topics. The current offerings are One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (until February 7) displayed in the ground floor hall and Quotations of Chairman Mao (until January 10) in the second floor rare book room (free admission).

Grolier Club entrance.

Since 1917 the club occupies a small building on East 60^th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who was also the author of the iconic California Tower in Balboa Park in San Diego. Currently a large-scale construction is going on next door, where a 51-story building is being constructed, using air rights acquired from the Groiler Club and a neighboring church. The facade of No. 47 is also obscured by scaffolding.

One Hundred Books Famous in Children's Literature.
Groiler Club, ground floor hall

The place is charming and the exhibitions are attractive and well attended. The children’s books exhibit is the sixth in the series of “the Grolier Hundreds”, after previous exhibitions focused on English literature (1903), American literature (1946), science (1958), medicine (1994), and fine printed books (1999). The selection of the “most famous 100” can be debated, but the most significant works are represented by delectable old editions going as far back as 17th century. Many of these books come from the Morgan Library and large university libraries. The oldest book on display appears to be Johann Amos Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), an illustrated encyclopedia published in London in 1659, an influential early book in children’s education. Curiously, a number of older books on display are really tiny, as if made for the children’s small hands rather than for their parents’ and grandparents’ presbyopic eyes.

A first edition of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou Contes du tempts passe (left) published in 1697 was illustrated with engravings by Antoine Clouzier (from the Princeton University collection). The French edition is open on the first page of Puss in Boots and the English translation lists The Little Red Riding Hood as the very first tale in the table of contents. 

Another famous forest-roaming Hood - Robin Hood - is represented by the 1883 collection of stories, retold for children and illustrated by Howard Pyle (UCLA collection).