Jeremy Hacker

There’s a scene in The Sorrow and The Pity in which the interviewer climbs down into the cellar of two former French Revolution fighters of World War 2. In prior shots we see these two ex-fighters working the field, suggesting them as peasants and being close to the land. Inside the cellar, one of them fills up multiple glasses of wine from a rustic looking barrel. They all sip the wine and the whole scene seems musty and cozily damp and dark. Despite this film being black and white, and somewhat grainy, my mouth waters at the sight of this wine, particularly homemade wine made in France, which has the stereotype attached to it of probably being superior tasting wine. Later that evening I’m in Safeway and decided to get red wine instead of my typical moscato or prosecco, which I usually mix with fruit juice. While circling the few aisles they have I’m confused by the prices of wine, which seem absurdly high. This is when I realize I was unconsciously being snobbish. I lived in Italy for the past four years, and the wine there is cheaper than water. I remember being confused the first time I saw the prices of the wine there, disoriented by the comma being in place for a decimal. At first I thought these wine bottles were in the thousands, but questioned why there were only 3 digits.

I lived in Italy for four years, in an apartment with a spiral staircase at the top of the complex, overlooking the city and Monte Berico. Now I’m at the Safeway cashier and it’s time to hand him my I.D., and without fail this fantasy surges to my mind, in which I imagine that he’s going to think I’m giving him a fake I.D.  It really, really annoys me at having to be carded. In the 10ish months I’ve been back to America, I’ve been carded every single time I buy alcohol, but in the four years I lived in Italy, and the multiple countries I travelled, I was carded 0 times. In a way it feels infantilizing. In this fantasy I always suppose the cashier wanting to land a kid whose trying to use a fake I.D. and quickly become nervous that it’s going to be me. I leave the store with my 15 dollar bottle of wine, which would probably be 2 euro in Italy, and look at the entrance of the store as the light to my key flashes red as it unlocks the door. A sudden memory flashes back of stolen beer, Harry Potter, and a watermelon.

Gigantic Hearts is a term I think of when you have an impossible to explain feeling of a particular moment in life, particularly good feelings which are embedded in a group of friends. I’ve only shared it with one other person, but she understood that nostalgic feeling I was trying to purvey. When I was 16 my parents finally divorced and my mother was set free. I was happy because I had the house without parental supervision, and a crew started to form of surrounding neighborhood kids. The real driving force behind what sparked Gigantic Hearts was a brother and sister moving into a house nearby. You read about these kind of people in coming-of-age stories, usually the main character who opens up the narrator’s eyes and sparks some kind of push to the protagonist’s boundaries. One of the first times I’d met the brother, he was playing an acoustic and singing random shit that popped in his head, in a two story house with absolutely nothing in it. I escaped to that house often, lying on the floor beside Stephanie. I’d been dumped by a girl I dated for around 3 years a few months before meeting Stephanie and the siblings, and felt extremely free, thinking it would do me good to just not give a fuck for a while. Every Wednesday this group would meet up at night and drink stolen beer, skipping school the next day. The way we stole beer was to drive to multiple Safeways in different cities past midnight, walk into the front door, and grab as many cases as we could hold and run out screaming back to the car. My buddy actually knocked one of the sliding doors off its hinges once, which I didn’t think was possible, imagining it would shatter. Sometimes instead of instantly stealing the beer we would scout around and walk through the aisles. I managed to collect the whole series of Harry Potter books by stealing them from Safeways. 

Today, as I look at the Safeway entrance and recall the stacks of cases of beer piled up to our ceiling which we called a byramid , I realize it’s the same store I stole a few watermelons from, and threw out in the middle of the intersection nearby. I live just minutes from here now, and it just occurred to me those events years ago. On these drives home from our stealing escapades, I would always get a melancholy feeling which latched onto my anxiety acutely. I would think that I would never have a group of close friends such as this again, and in a sense it became true. I wish I could go back in time to those sorrowful moments and shake myself out of that turmoil. The separation of our group was slow, and one by one time takes us to different places despite our wishes to remain in each other’s company. My anxiety eventually died away, and I never really met close friends, who lived carelessly and by the minute, until I moved to Italy a few years later.  Stealing beers and books is an odd memory to look fondly back on, but it’s the people whose company I was surrounded in I cherish the most.

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #2
April 12^th, 2015

In Slavoj Zizek’s, Looking Awry, he claims, “The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not exist for an ‘objective’ gaze.” (1) When looking at Swann’s love for Odette, we can see a similar desire arising which mimics this definition. In what was initially thought of as disgust, Swann has replaced with an artistic masterpiece which he transposed those early feelings into. In creating a want for Odette which was initially nowhere to be found, Swann has formulated this desire through a distorted view, one which eventually grows into a jealous, self-absorbed desire to conquest the Odette of his fantasies. In creating this desire, Swann comes to pass over glaringly obvious signs of which she does not share mutual affections. These desire glasses which Swann wears resembles one of the harsher facets of desire of which we’re all privy to. In lesser strengths, we’re subjected to desires of which we create realities that do not fit into an objective world or object. An easier way to think of this is that we become blind with passion and forget the things along the way in our quests for the end, golden goal. If we think about Swann’s formulation of this desire, I’m sure we can see similar aspects of behavior that resemble our own lives. We see something that makes us angry, cynical, or blasé about, but may find ourselves wrapped up with those feelings, and even sometimes wanting to reconstruct that object so as to fit harmoniously into our world. It is not necessarily a bad thing to desire, for desire is a good motivational tool and inspirational push. What we should be wary of, is entrenching ourselves into that obsessive, controlling behavior of which Swann takes on in his falsified love of Odette, in which he hasn’t fallen in love with the person, but with the desires he’s created.

Bibliography

1.)    Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992. Print.

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #1
April 2^nd, 2015

In the winter quarter of 2015 I attended a 3 week lecture series held by historian Thierry de Duve, which focused mostly on avant-garde art and French history, particularly dealing with modernism. The one thing that struck me when coming across this passage from Proust, “But none of them would go so far as to say ‘He’s a great writer, he has great talent.’ They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not do so, because they did not know. We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled “great talent” in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicary, strength; and then one day we realize that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.” (1), was that it closely resembled the way in which Manet’s art pieces were received by art critics around 1870. “More often than not, the critics judged that Manet could pull off successful morceaux, which, however, did not amount to tableau.” (2) A tableau in this context is a collection of successful parts, or, morceaux. In comparing Proust’s description of those judging Bergotte and the critics addressing Manet’s unsuccessful tableau, we see the timidness involved with judgment when something unique and new comes across our field of view, particularly forms of art which fail to meet what our memory of talented works are supposedly composed of. I think it’s easy to look in retrospect and tsk those who judge harshly, but I wonder at what lengths all of us may perform this somewhat harsh judgment toward something new and confusing. I imagine the rise of modernism, modern art in particular, came to fruition from the reflection of these unsure judgments and experimenting with notions of what makes art good, and whether it even matters. It’s in this respect of reflection that we see the genius of such modern artists as Manet, for they maintained a thin line separating themselves from traditional tableaus while still being able to be recognized as art worthy of examination.

Bibliography

1.)    Proust, Marcel, and C. K. Moncrieff. “Swann In Love.” Swann’s Way. New York: Modern Library, 2003. 137. Print.

2.)    De Duve, Thierry. “The Invention of Non-Art: A History.” Artforum Vol. 52, No. 6, Feb. 2014, 197. Print.