Nana Visitor and the Women of Star Trek Take Us on a Beautiful Journey

Star Trek: Open a Channel, A Woman’s Trek – Nana Visitor (2024)

 

            I waited for this book for a while.  Initially, I heard that Nana Visitor, the actor who played the part of Kira Nerys on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, intended to write a book about her experiences on the show.  I caught updates from the publishing industry detailing her efforts to get the book made, and how it grew from a personal account into an exploration of what it means to be a woman in Star Trek, from the OG days of the 1960’s to the most current iterations of the franchise.  Hearing about Visitor’s interviews with many of the women from Star Trek increased my desire to read this book.  Thank Mario for the wonderful Inter-Library Loan program, since it allowed me to get this book sent to me from the University of Oklahoma.  I was ecstatic when I received it and instantly devoured it.

            Long-time readers of RXTT’s Book Journey will likely know I am a huge Star Trek fan, especially my single favorite television show of all time, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9).  Nana Visitor is one of the leads on DS9, with her character, Major Kira Nerys, serving as the second-in-command of a large, unwieldy, and chaotic space station. It is through her character that we learn about the horrors suffered by the people of Bajor and how outsiders perceive the United Federation of Planets.  Her character is integral from beginning to end.

            The character of Kira Nerys, alongside that of Captain Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, is critical to understanding the central themes of DS9.  The first theme, and the most prominent throughout the series run, deals with how trauma affects us, how we deal with it, and how we manage to move on and continue living afterwards.  This is evident in Kira, a former freedom fighter/terrorist (depends on who you ask), forced to reckon with a lifetime of degraded living under totalitarian rule and how it affects her and her people during the “peace” that follows.  It, like all trauma, touches every single aspect of her life and being.  The same is true for Capt. Sisko, who we meet just after his wife is killed in a huge space battle, forcing him and his son Jake to escape with their lives.  The repercussions of this loss shape Sisko throughout the series, much like the Cardassian occupation shaped every aspect of Kira Nerys’ character.  It was a groundbreaking role for Visitor, whose career previously found her in steady work playing the girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend, the wife, the bothered secretary, etc., all roles with very little emotional or intellectual heft.

            In an effort to understand the dynamics of being a woman in the world of Star Trek, Nana Visitor explores the original creation of Star Trek, and the ways which the otherwise progressive show existed in a world where casual misogyny, the “casting couch” mentality, and abusive producers still ran the show.  To frame this story, Visitor discusses the person besides Gene Roddenberry most responsible for the very existence of Star Trek, comedy superstar Lucille Ball.  It was her DesiLu studios, which she ran alone after the illness of her husband, that green-lit Star Trek, and it was her efforts to keep it on the air that Visitor explores.  For each series, Visitor devotes a few chapters to exploring the lives and work of the individual actresses, including the most important woman on the original show, Nichelle Nichols.  Nichelle was not only a representational force for African-American women, but for all women.  In a world where women were still expected to serve in very limited and traditional roles, seeing a woman of color serve as the fourth in command of a starship was huge.

            Visitor pulls no punches and allows her subjects the bluntness they need  to describe the uncomfortable and terrifying situations these women endured just to be considered for a television show.  Every single one of them has had to deal with lecherous producers, men forcing themselves on them, sexist writing, overly-familiar co-stars, etc.  Some, with help from their loved ones, navigated these treacherous waters without too much horror, but most did not.  From the endless critiques of your appearance to the implication that if you do not do what is asked of you without questions you would be replaced by another “pretty face,” Hollywood has long been a bastion for asshole men and a trap for many a young woman.  After years of insultingly simplistic roles, the role of Kira Nerys helped Nana Visitor create a very real, very flawed, very human character, a character whose lines and actions do not rely on her femininity to succeed, something which she is rightfully very proud of.

            Visitor not only speaks to the various actresses from Trek, but she also re-watched a lot of the older and current shows.  In doing so she witnessed how, even in an era of feminism and women’s sovereignty, like the late 80’s and early 90’s, strong women characters were still mainly written as tropes.  For example, one of the characters, Keiko Ishikawa, married a minor Next Generation character, Miles O’Brien.  They both subsequently appeared on DS9.  While the character or Keiko was written as a deeply intelligent and forthright botanist, she was rarely, if ever, shown on TNG doing botany.  Instead, she was forced to act out endless “worried wife” or “angry wife” tropes.

On TNG, the Doctor was portrayed by the super-talented Gates McFadden, but whereas the original series’ Doctor McCoy was given license to behave as any doctor does, Dr. Crusher’s character, while initially a groundbreaking representation for women, was often used solely as the "mother” or as a potential love interest of the Captain.  Even in the supposedly progressive shows, the standard misogyny and sexism applied.  This is especially evident in the character of Counselor Troi on Next Generation.  Initially serving as pure eye candy, it took years for the writers room to catch on to what makes the character of Deanna Troi so intriguing.  As detailed by Nana Visitor, once an actress is placed in one of the very few “boxes” allowed for them, it was nearly impossible to escape.  Once a “beauty” always a “beauty.”  Once seen as a plucky and sexless “friend,” it is always thus.  These simplistic tropes continue on television to this day.  Shit don’t change.

While all of this is extremely interesting to me, my favorite parts of this book are where Nana Visitor discusses her own life and career.  She is blunt and honest in describing the many transgressions she endured by either changing herself, altering her mannerisms, or just behaving in the way that male society seemed to expect.  Each time, a little part of her died within her, but she endured it as the costs of the life she chose.  It is impossible to see just how callous and predatory those around you are until you get some distance from it, both emotional and physical.  In one of the most moving and disturbing sections, Nana discusses how she was kidnapped and assaulted sometime between seasons 2 and 3 of DS9, how she forced herself to testify against her attackers even though she was warned that bad publicity would ruin her career, and how it took her over twenty years to come to grips with the events of that horrible night. It is a testament to her willpower and life-force that Nana Visitor rebuilt herself, something many of the women she spoke to have had to do, some more than once. 

It is also a testament to Nana Visitor that, in the decades following the airing of Deep Space Nine, she has become something of a den-mother, or a loving aunt, to many Star Trek fanatics.  This is something that mirrors the character Kira Nerys’ arc on the show.  At the end of DS9, we see Kira Nerys and Jake Sisko staring out of a window at the wormhole outside.  She is left in charge of the station, and life goes on. In the DS9 documentary, What You Leave Behind, the writers posit a future where Kira Nerys grows wiser and becomes a spiritual leader for the Bajoran people, Nana Visitor also grew wiser and became an emotional and spiritual leader for us Trek fanatics.  It is a beautiful thing and I sincerely hope that Nana grasps the amount of care and love people have for her, and for the character she brought to life.  Her care for us, as fans, is evident in this amazing book. 

There is nothing easy about being a woman in this world, which makes it all the more admirable that Nana, and all the women she interviews, created characters and stories which honestly and permanently affected the audience.  Countless women went into science because they saw Lt. Uhura kicking ass on the bridge of the Enterprise.  Countless women saw Dr. Crusher as a great example of how to be a success and a great mother, without sacrificing her ideals.  Countless women saw the strength, resiliency and leadership inherent in Kira Nerys and found a role model for survival.  Even more women saw Captain Janeway lead a crew into and out of the wilderness, and felt inspired by her confidence and capability.  Representation matters.  We believe what we see.  For all the faults a TV show like Star Trek can and does have, the merits are beyond measure.  In 1966, Star Trek showed us a post-cold-war world where Russians and Chinese shared in the adventure, where women served alongside men, where people of color were portrayed as Admirals!  It was and remains one of the finest bits of television out there, showing the world that our shared humanity is a far greater thing than our perceived differences.  Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.  IDIC is the prevailing theme of all Star Trek, and I am very glad that Nana Visitor took the time and effort to craft this great tribute to the women of Star Trek and the characters they brought to life.  It is a beautiful book.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Star-Trek-Open-a-Channel-A-Womans-Trek/Nana-Visitor/Star-Trek/9798886633016 )

Marilyn Bridges Shares a Bird's-Eye View of Sacred Landscapes in Beautiful B+W Photography

 

Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes – Marilyn Bridges (1986)

            What a gorgeous photography book!  The “Library Angels” were kind once again, guiding this amazing book into my hands.  Reader of the Book Journey will note my long-standing interest in ancient megaliths, earthworks, and the civilizations that created them.  Marilyn Bridges, an outstanding photographer, took it upon herself to take to the skies over Peru in the 1970’s to better experience the “Nazca Lines” her indigenous guides described.  The sense of awe engendered by what she saw led her to seek more opportunities to fly and photograph the ancient works of humanity.  Facing her fears, Marilyn Bridges learned to fly small airplanes, allowing her to dictate exactly how she would photograph the overwhelmingly complex lines, images, and ruins left behind by our ancestors.

            In the classic documentarian style of photography, Bridges utilizes stark black and white film, all shot from far above, to showcase the ruins and burial sites better seen from the sky.  This is the “view of the gods” as she describes it.  Her impeccable eye for detail, lighting, framing, and composition make each single image a work of art, regardless of the subject matter. 

            This book begins with an informative and poetic preface by one Haven O’More, detailing  Marilyn Bridge’s methods and the magic she creates.  O’More describes to us to the four sections of this book, each with an engrossing introduction.  The first section details Bridges’ photography of the famous Nazca lines and geoglyphs, some of the first images to draw the attention of the world at large to perhaps the most mysterious and massive earthworks and drawings ever created by our human species.  The stark images perfectly capture the inherent emptiness of the Nazca landscape, contrasted by the almost overwhelming amount of lines and drawings and shapes left behind by the creators, a people we call “Nazca” but of whom we know almost nothing, not even the name they chose to call themselves.   They communicate with us and for all time through their artworks.

            The second section of this book explores the remnants of the greatest non-European, non-Asian, non-African civilization in our human history, the Mayan Empire of Central America, which the book states encompasses “…what is now Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, El Salvador, and the southern Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and eastern Chiapas.”  Going back to 2,000 BCE, and existing until around 900 CE, the Maya culture flourished in the middle of some of the harshest tropical forest climates around.  In the 1840’s, a traveler and writer named John Lloyd Stephens explored the area and his two seminal books were integral in bringing the knowledge of the Maya empire to the wider world.  Marilyn Bridges’ photographs capture both excavated buildings and cities and completely overgrown pyramids and temples alike, lending the images an otherworldly quality, as if the jungle was erasing our human history, which it most certainly does cover up!  The Mayan language, the only complete written language ever created in the New World, is still nearly indecipherable.  Because of this, and because the fucking ignorant and psychopathic religious fervor of Spanish Roman Catholic priests “forced” them to burn every Maya text they found, much of Maya culture remains decipherable solely through their earthworks and architecture.  Such a pity.  I firmly believe the world would be a far better place today if every single Bible in existence had been burned up around 400 CE, but I digress.

            The third section details the many prehistoric geoglyphs and burial mounds found throughout North America.  From 500-year old figures carved out of the Mojave desert in California, to the ceremonial centers of the Mississippian people, to the effigy mounds of the Adena people who lived in what is now Ohio between 1000 BCE and 30 BCE, North America is littered with evidence of ancient culture and people, far removed from the lies told by white colonists of a barren, history-less landscape given to them by their white god.  What these ignorant assholes called “Indians” and “savages” were a people with culture, cities, agriculture, temples, burial sites, and an involved society.  Marilyn Bridges’ photographs help us remember this fact.

            The final section describes the truly ancient earthworks, henges, and artificial hills created by the ancient people of what is now England.  The most famous of these is Stonehenge, and rightfully so, but my favorite is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a figure created by removing the sod and topsoil above a chalk hill in Dorset.  A 180 foot tall figure, with a massive 30 foot long erect dong, represents either the Celtic god Helith, or his Roman counterpart Hercules.  Either way, the dude is an obvious ass-kicker with his massive war-club held high overhead.  Not discussed much is the fact that in England exists a human built earth pyramid rivaling the size of the pyramids in Egypt, but created maybe one thousand years before.  INSANE!  Silbury Hill , as it is called, was first constructed around 2500 BCE and remains the largest man-made hill in all of Europe.  Our ancestors were mighty, inventive, intelligent bad-asses of the highest caliber!

            Books like this fill me with awe, with a feeling of overwhelming unity and love for my fellow man, and for all our ancestors trying to make sense of a seemingly random and violent world.  Humans understand pattern better than almost any other creature on Earth.  Because of this, through careful, extended observation, our ancient forebears realized that the seeming permanence of the night sky, along with the solar and lunar cycles, allowed us to experience the passage of time without fear, for we could predict when the rains would come, when an eclipse happened, when the winter solstice came, etc. In all parts of our world, different humans looked at the same skies and came up with the same realizations, creating calendars, observatories, and other tools to measure our world and the passage of time.  To know that this was mostly done by people with no means of writing, no alphabets or glyphs to record information, humbles me greatly.  We stand on the shoulders of every single human that came before us, and every human after us will stand on our shoulders.  This is a responsibility that most of us ignore.  I am deeply thankful our ancestors did not, and that people like Marilyn Bridges, through her insight and emotion, saw the importance of capturing these images and sharing them with the world at large.  I am eternally grateful, as we all should be.

(This amazing book can be purchased used here: https://www.abebooks.com/9780893814236/Marilyn-Bridges-Markings-Sacred-Landscapes-0893814237/plp )

Michael Benson Shares The Awesome Beauty We Create When Art and Science Meet

 

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time – Michael Benson (2014)

            Rarely do I come across a book such as this, one that brings together two of my greatest loves and creates something fabulous.  Author Michael Benson shows us how the worlds of Art and Astronomy are, and have always been, connected and complimentary, and the way he does so is so beautiful, informative, and clever that I am left in awe.  I love this book!

            The objects in our sky, the gorgeous night with its twinkling stars, shiny planets, comets, and meteors, and the beaming sky of day with the Sun and sometimes the Moon visible, have been our companions throughout the whole existence of life on our planet.  Ancient man not only saw, but understood, that the view afforded from Earth allows us to see the passage of time, and the cycles described by the motions of the heavens.  Using just plain, careful, repeated observation, and before the invention of written language, humanity catalogued stars and constellations, predicted eclipses, and calculated the Moon’s cycles.  We also created art to help us describe what we saw, from cave paintings to petroglyphs to carved or molded sculptures.  This is how we know that ancient man understood the cosmos in a deep and meaningful way, something which has been sadly lost to much of our modern human population.

            Cosmigraphics collects some of the most amazing images and artwork created by us to describe the heavens above and our Earth below.  This book captures the artistic legacy of the visual explorations of our cosmos, and provides wonderfully descriptive and informative text with each image.  This book is divided into sections exploring the idea of Creation, our Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the structure of the Universe, etc.  Each chapter is so gorgeous and so indicative of the immense genius required to not only grasp infinitely complex ideas but to also portray them in a visual manner, that they allow for the dissemination of information and the spread of wisdom.  These images tell a million stories.  They are beautiful in their own right, and worthy of the appreciation we rightfully lay upon masterpieces by the likes of Michelangelo or Picasso.

            We marvel at the heavens, and have always done so.  As our scientific knowledge grew, our ideas of the universe grew.  Whereas ancient man had deduced that the Earth is spherical, it was accepted doctrine that the Earth was the center of all creation (Bible bias, always), and that, according to early Greek philosophers, what we see in the sky corresponds to sequential “shells” with each carrying different denizens of the sky.  It was accepted belief that the Moon rotated around the Earth in its own sphere, then the Sun, then each known planet.  At the time, this was Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond the planetary “spheres” was a celestial sphere containing the stars in heaven, all fixed and immovable.  It took centuries of human observation, and the perfection of lenses and the telescope, for us to understand that there are no “shells”, that the heavens do move, that our Sun is the center of our solar system, that the planets all rotate around the Sun and not Earth, and that the stars themselves are ridiculously far away from our personal solar system.  Even so, it was assumed that the whole of existence fit within our galaxy, a self-contained universe we refer to as the Milky Way.

            Astronomers and other scientists improved on the initial telescopes, and with the new-found clarity of vision, were able to discern that many of the objects in our night sky were not nebulas internal to the Milky Way, but actually their own island universes, located an inconceivable distance from our own galaxy.  Each new discovery shrunk the old world dictated by religious dogma and human make-em-up, and increased the scope of vision allowed to a human being.  As our knowledge of the universe, its galaxies, and the overall structure of it grew, the idea that humanity was the single reason for everything to exist also dissipated, much to the chagrin of every deluded, brain-dead, dogmatically religious idiot whose entire world-view is based in blind belief and obedience to thousand-year old make-believe. 

            With every new discovery, with every new tool we create to explore our universe, we find more wonder and weirdness than we could ever have imagined. There used to be just one Sun.  Now we know that our galaxy, the cloudy band of light in our night sky called the Milky Way, is composed of billions of individual stars.  We know that outside of our galaxy lie countless trillions of other galaxies, each with their infinity of suns and planets. Hell we even know that everything we can see in the sky above is just a small part of the entire universe.  Estimates now posit our Universe is on the order of 13-15 billion years old, and nearly unimaginably vast, but we can only observe about 36 billion light years distance in any direction.  In its early stages, spacetime itself expanded faster than light, causing much of the Universe to remain occulted from our vantage point.  Any observer on a planet over 36 billion light years away from us would not be able to see Earth either.  It is these type of realities that, while factually and verifiably true, crash against our ideas of “common sense.”  Common sense stated that, if the Earth were actually rotating, all plants, animals, and water would be flung off the planet! (They did not know about gravitation, just as humans in the 1800’s did not know about radiation.  Who knows what all-encompassing truths of the Universe we remain ignorant of today in 2026!)

            Many of my intellectual heroes utilized both Art and Science in their work.  Leonardo da Vinci fused art, science, and engineering in ways we are still coming to grips with today.  Even Richard Feynman, physicist extraordinaire, created a visual and artistic way of describing particle interactions with diagrams named after him still used today to explain quantum processes.  Galileo’s observations of Jupiter and his discovery of its visible moons would not have had the impact they had without his daily drawings of the gas giant and it’s satellites.  These beautiful drawings are included in Cosmigraphics.  An image is truly worth a thousand words and Galileo’s drawings helped to simplify the results from exceedingly complex visual observations, allowing the rest of us to grasp his discoveries. 

            Science, the scientific method specifically, is how we understand the basic truths of our existence.  Art is how we communicate those found truths, whether personal or universal.  In Cosmigraphics, Michael Benson catalogues and examines the confluence of Science and Art, and expands our collective minds in doing so successfully.  This is a masterpiece of artistic and scientific exposition, and I hope someday to find a copy for my own collection.  Almost nothing that we humans do is isolated.  Every field of human endeavor touches every other field, and we are better off for it.  The specialization of humanity’s explorations have led to amazing discoveries, but it is the space between the specialists, the diffuse and vague areas between concrete ideas, where the true synergy of life occurs.  We would all be better off if we recognized this fact and lived our lives accordingly.  If you know of anyone interested in science, art, or the history of humanity’s exploration of our universe, this is the book for them.  It is highly recommended.

(This amazing book can be purchased here: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/cosmigraphics/author/michael-benson/ )

David Hockney Shines a Light on the True Methods of Master Painters

 

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters – David Hockney (2001)

 

            Sometimes it takes an artist to understand another artist.  Oftentimes, it takes an artist with an inquisitive mind to penetrate another artist’s methods and techniques.  As an artist myself, I know how other artists view art.  We look at the work itself but we are also deeply concerned with how the work was created.  This is similar to how normal people can appreciate a beautiful car, but it takes a trained mechanic to understand the beauty inherent in the interior workings of the vehicle, something not evident to the casual fan.  David Hockney, a world-famous artist, and one of the few modern creators still obsessed with drawing, used his artist’s eye to penetrate the obscurities and purposeful deflections of master painters, realizing, after careful study, that the revered classic painters, figures such as Ingres, Vermeer, and Caravaggio, among many others, were not drawing their subjects free-hand.  Instead, it was plain to Hockney’s modern eye that these magnificent draughtsmen utilized mechanical aids such as lenses, mirrors, and the camera obscura, to perfect their paintings and drawings. Once this idea entered Hockney’s mind it would not leave, sending him on a years-long course of research, practice, and study.  The fruition of the idea is this amazing book.

            Hockney understands that an artist lives within the means allowed during the times they happen to live in.  For Hockney, this means that he has color reproductions, printers, and material readily available.  It is this availability that allowed him to compile his amazing “wall,” a collection of images sorted chronologically on a long studio wall, which allowed him to first “see” the enormous influence exerted by the technologies of the looking glass, the mirror, and the camera obscura on the great master painters.  This is critical to understanding how Hockney arrived at his idea, and it leads into the first section of the book, showcasing the visual evidence he gathered over a decade, helping to illuminate his thesis.

            Seemingly overnight, sometime in the 15^th century, the images change.  Gone are the flat, carefully observed, painterly images of the old masters such as Poussin or Reubens. Instead, we have Van Eyck’s incredibly rich and detailed Arnolfini Wedding, or Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes, works so detailed and seemingly exact, as to feel ultra-realistic, as close to an exact reproduction as art could get until the advent of chemical photography.  The only way this could be achieved would be through the use of a camera obscura, originally just a darkened room with a pinhole on one wall, allowing the bright sunlight from outside to enter the room and shine on the opposing wall, showing a reversed and upside-down image of whatever was outside the room. This was as close to magic as humans ever got!  They were able to see the full range of color and light, as well as seeing the motion of the scene in question.  Imagine it, in a world where images were few and far between, where a master artist worked for years to learn to capture likeness, shape and form, to have a simple contraption display a magical light show must have seemed pure fantasy. 

            Hockney’s suggestion that the old master painters utilized such mechanical aids shook the art and art history worlds.  The art dogma proclaimed loudly that the true genius of artists such as Vermeer lay in their uncanny ability to capture likeness without anything as pedantic and common as a lens, mirror, or other such device.  To imagine their use of a camera obscura would only detract from their esteem.  This is a deeply rooted fallacy, which Hockney points out exists solely because most art historians are not creators of art.  In the intervening quarter-century since David Hockney released this book, his observations have gained much traction, especially among his fellow artists.

As Hockney states several times, the paint does not apply itself.  The marks created by a painter using a camera obscura serve as points of departure, allowing an artist to achieve very close likenesses of a human sitter, for example.  Free-hand drawing, what artists call “eyeballing,” is a process whereby the hand of the artist seeks the proper contours and spatial relations of the scene he is painting.  X-ray photography of such works can show how an artist moved an element of the painting, adjusted a position, or completely removed an aspect of the image.  These markings and underdrawings are not found in the highly detailed images from Vermeer, Ingres, Caravaggio, or any of the other artists using a camera obscura device.  Instead, there are basic scrapings or markings, detailing the main points of a figure, or the relation of the nose to the face in a portrait.  This makes the finished work seem as if it was created whole out of thin air, with little to no preparation!  This was only possible with the use of a mechanical aid.

The first section of this book details the visual evidence discovered by Hockney.  From spatial distortions, only producible by the use of a lens, to issues of relative size between the heads of sitters and their bodies, to the flatness created by such projections, which became a stylized flatness in the works of the major artists, Hockney points out countless examples of each, in vivid color, and invites us to make our own observations.  As an artist myself, once seen, these examples cannot be unseen. 

Hockney describes the progress of the mechanical aids and how, using a lens and mirror, the camera obscura allowed for more complex paintings.  For example, in Hans Holbein’s masterpieces, Hockney shows how each section, exquisitely detailed, was composed individually, using the tolls mentioned above.  This gives the paintings a cohesive, focused nature very pleasing to the eye, but close reading by a trained eye can see the perspective shifts, and the diverted angles which come from such technique.  Another “sign” of the camera obscura is the rise of chiaroscuro, or the treatment of bright light and deep shadow within paintings.  Before the use of the devices, paintings did not use shadow to mold the shape of the subjects, instead using color and line.  In fact, most pre-1400’s European painting matched what we see in Indian or Chinese paintings, a focus on form and color, with no shadows portrayed whatsoever.  It is these shadows that Hockney intuited arose from the bright light (essentially full sunlight) needed for the proper functioning of a camera obscura.  Painters were now obsessed with light and shadow, and capturing near-perfect likenesses of people and nature.  It was not until hundreds of years later, when the chemical photograph managed to capture light and form for posterity, that the painting world retreated from pure representation, moving into wild new fields such as Fauvism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, attempting to do with paint what could not be done with the camera.

The second part of this book deals with the textual evidence gathered by David Hockney to support his claims.  The older examples can be a bit vague, for each artist and craftsman was deeply suspicious of others and would never share the secrets of their trade with anyone for fear it would be stolen or used erroneously.  Roger Bacon, artist and scientist extraordinaire, wrote in Of Art and Nature that,

“The cause of…concealment among all wise men is the contempt and neglect of the secrets of wisdom [sic] by the vulgar sort that knoweth not how to use these things which are most excellent.” 

This is as true now as it was in the 13^th century when Bacon wrote it.

The third part prints out much of the correspondence between David Hockney and fellow artists, historians, etc., all discussing the ideas found in this book, from conception to publication.  It gives a great timeline, and allows the reader to travel along with Hockney as he gains certainty and wisdom concerning his idea.  It is a great coda to this amazing book.  Hockney also shares an extensive bibliography, perfect for people like me, seeking more reading material.

This may be the single greatest art history book I have ever read.  It reads like a mystery and the images are perfectly chosen to elucidate Hockney’s writing.  Perhaps we need to return to a time when art history was written by actual artists, instead of historians.  The insights found by David Hockney may only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Once our preconceived ideas about how “artistic genius” functions are discarded, we can better see how these magnificently creative artists captured our world in their art.  To demean an artist for using a tool says more about the person laying judgment than it does about the creative individual.  No mechanical aid can teach how to lay down paint, or how to draw, or how to create mood and feeling in an artwork.  Those things come directly from the artist themselves, their hard work, and their imagination.  David Hockney has done all artists a great service.  This book should be required reading for anyone studying art or art history. 

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/secret-knowledge-david-hockney/1112571044 )

Julian Jaynes Has Blown My Mind Apart, and Put It All Back Together Again

 

The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes (1976)

 

            For weeks now I have been lost in the pages of this amazing book, one which came to my attention through the bibliographies in several of my previous reads.  One of my favorite literary experiences is when I finally find a seminal book oft quoted or referenced in other books. Such a book is The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  Author Julian Jaynes has accomplished something outstandingly original and beautiful, providing what is perhaps the best explanation of what we modern humans call “Consciousness,” how it came to be, and how we can track that development.

            Books like this contain so much within their pages.  It is difficult enough to absorb all the information and ideas shared by the author, but discussing it intelligently is another matter entirely. In the over 11 years I have kept this book-review blog I have enjoyed countless books, but very few have coalesced knowledge and wisdom in my brain like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has.  It is a masterpiece of insight and research.

            Jaynes divides his work into three “books,” the first one dealing with consciousness itself, what it is, and where it comes from.  This alone is enough material for a great book.  The first great insight that the author shares involves consciousness itself.  We modern humans assume that our brains work in the same manner as all early humans.  We have an internal “I,” designating an interior head-space that exists outside of time and place, and which us modern humans see as our true selves, our internal monologue.  Jaynes central proposition is that this internal “I, this sense of individual consciousness, only arose in humanity after the invention of written language.  Before this time, humans lived in what Jaynes terms a “bicameral mind.”

            To explain what “bicameral mind” refers to, I must go into a bit of neurology and brain structure.  We humans have essentially two separate brains, connected through several channels, (the corpus-callosum is the main one, a bundle of nerves which allow signals to be sent from one brain hemisphere to the other), allowing them to communicate with each other, and to control different aspects of life.  For example, our left hemisphere contains Brocka’s and Wernicke’s areas.  These are two parts of our brain that handle language, with Brocka’s area controlling speech production, allowing our physical mouth and tongue to create meaningful words, and Wernicke’s area handling the other end of speech, that being language comprehension, the mental understanding of the auditory signals received by our ears through spoken language.  In patients who suffer from traumatic brain injuries, strokes, or other such conditions, these areas are sometimes affected, which was the initial impetus for understanding the various sections of our brain. 

            Julian Jaynes posits that, before the advent of the written word, humanity lived in a very different state of mind, the bicameral mind, a consciousness completely unaware of itself, quite the opposite of our current view of consciousness which we feel exists independently of our physical being.  For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in groups led by a “king.”  These kings dictated how the people of a said group would live. The truly great and long-lived kings would be remembered long after their death, their words still echoing in their follower’s heads.  This was not seen as an aberration.  Humans found it perfectly logical that a dead king would continue talking in their heads, as if still alive. The greater the king, the longer the voice would live on in his followers.  As evidence of this, Julian Jaynes discusses how for over ten thousand years, human burials followed the same pattern.  The deceased was not seen as dead, in the way we modern humans see things.  As long as their voice could be heard the king was alive. Because of this, the dead were buried with food, clothing, tools, and all sorts of items that would be useful to the dead person’s continuing “life.”  The high culture of the Egyptians was the pinnacle of this thinking, with Pharaohs buried alongside dozens of sacrificed slaves, wives, animals, etc.  Their isolation in northeast Africa allowed them to maintain their bicameral culture the longest, even after the advent of written language.

            Julian Jaynes posits that the first gods were the dead kings whose voices and commands could still be heard in the people’s heads.  This makes a lot of sense as ancestor worship is the oldest spiritual practice still found among us humans.  Many of the oldest tribal cultures in the world today still observe a lengthy period between when a person’s body stops breathing and when they feel the person is truly dead and ready to be buried/cremated/etc.

            This same bicameral structure is evident in Mesoamerica, where dozens of city states sprung up, flourished, and died over millennia.  These cities are all remarkably similar, containing a large central pyramid of structure housing the king, and in later times, the statue of the local god.  Everything about their lives was dictated by the king/god-king/god, and sometimes the entire city-state would revert back to the jungle after the death of a prominent king.

            Sometime around 2,500 years ago, everything changed.  In Mesopotamia, a writing system was created which altered our entire world and, according to Julian Jaynes, altered our brain’s structure.  This was cuneiform, a method of writing which involves pressing a wooden stylus into wet clay, leaving triangular marks.  Cuneiform is not a language, but a system of writing, and due to this, it was used to write down things in Assyrian, Emetic, Akkadian, and many other languages.  Essentially, once a remote king found that his proclamations could be written down and shared without him needing to personally deliver the information, he then asked his scholars to use cuneiform to write down his proclamations, history, etc.

            In this sense, writing was not what we think of today, words which, when read, create a narrative in our minds.  Much like ancient temples, statuary, and religious artifacts initially did, writing allowed ancient humans to hallucinate words and instructions, keeping the king’s voice alive well past his death.  It was an immensely valuable tool for social control in a time before individual consciousness.  For millennia, humanity passed down its accrued knowledge verbally, with specific people in each tribe/group designated to be the memory carriers, reciting long poems and stories from memory in order to share wisdom and instructions with the next generation.  These bards would not specifically memorize a text, for there was no texts back then.  What they did was remember the salient points of a tale, concerning an old god-king perhaps, and then add in connective language as they reiterated the story in question to a new audience. This way allowed the important points to be learned by the audience, while also allowing the storyteller to shape his stories, adding and subtracting parts as they saw fit to. 

            The written word changed all of this.  Julian Jaynes recounts a very dark era in the history of our developing consciousness.  The period of time, around 500-1000 years after the initial breakdown of the bicameral mind, sometime around 500 BC, was a time of dissolution, fear, and mass-violence.  Before the written language, civilizations lived near each other in relative peace, trading goods and food items, but generally just leaving each other alone.  It was understood that other human groups followed their own gods/kings, and that was good enough for them.  Once writing appeared, the “voices” of the gods/kings no longer reverberated through the people’s minds, causing chaos, and uncertainty.  The idea of an individual “I” was unnecessary before this, for everyone knew what their role was, what they were expected to do in life, and why they did it.  The god-king’s proclamations were followed without question, for he spoke directly from the gods.  The bicameral mind did not seek explanations.

            The written word quieted that internal voice that repeated the gods/kings proclamations.  City states became too large for easy control of the population.  It was at this time that specialists came into being, people whose breeding, training, or social status prepared them to be interlocutors between the god and the people.  These were the beginnings of the sacerdotal sects that we all currently deal with.  Even these methods were not enough to hold the homogeny, and the cities slowly fell into ruin and disuse, as people moved back out into the wilds to make their own lives.  Because of this, there was an extreme rise in violence and warfare.  Without the god’s voices keeping everyone safe, neighbors were seen as violent, evil, “other,” etc., and the need to exterminate them arose.  During this turbulent period, it is estimated that in both the western and eastern worlds, nearly 90% of the human population was exterminated.  This was wholesale genocide on a planetary level.  Humans are our own worst enemies.  It is a sad reminder that, even two thousand years later, our collective humanity can be quickly erased or forgotten when we end up seeing our fellow beings as less than human because they do not believe what we chose, or are told to, believe.

            Julian Jaynes traces the development of consciousness in man through our written works, the oldest ones such as the Rigveda from what is now India or the Iliad, from Greece being written at a time when the bicameral mind was still the norm among us humans.  In these tales, the human protagonists do not share their internal monologues.  They had no internal monologues.  Their actions are not self-decided.  Instead, all the actions in the Iliad, for example, are a result of a command or a suggestion by one of the many gods. Achilles does not choose his actions.  They are dictated by the gods.  The same holds for the characters in the Rigveda.  Bicameral man did not self-assess, self-doubt, or self-analyze.  He lived, breathed, and acted in accordance with the instructions provided him by the gods and spirits, voices we modern humans would describe as our internal monologue.

            In the follow-up to the Iliad, the Odyssey, the protagonists do make their own decisions.  They worry and fret and flip-flop without any certainty, something lacking in the heroes of the Iliad.  They still do not have what we would call a consciousness, however.  It is their own constituent parts that make demands.  Parts of the human, such as phrenes, nous, and psyche, were the ones dictating action.  Odysseus’ nous might demand that he feel jealousy, or his phrenes might state that the gods do not agree.  Ancient man did not think of the brain itself as the seat of our minds.  They saw different parts suited to different things.  Sometimes these would still be associated with specific gods, or spirits, but they were internal to man, not external.  Jaynes explains how today, we judge psychosomatic responses in people that would have been very familiar to the people of the Odyssey.  When we are stressed out, our stomachs feel curdled, bile rises in our throat, and we get the “butterflies.”  To ancient man, just developing the faculty of consciousness, this made sense.  When scared, our heart starts beating faster.  Our blood pressure rises.  Our skin gets cold and tight.  Ancient man saw this as evidence that the heart controlled certain emotions, much as the stomach controlled others, and the bowels controlled even others.  There is a wide gap between the mentality evident in the Odyssey and the mentality seen in the Iliad. 

            The second section of this book details the progression from the Bicameral Mind to our current consciousness, tracing the history of our gods, temples and rituals associated with bicameral thinking. Jaynes describes how Mesopotamia was the first example of modern consciousness, something which must have been very strange for those few humans who innately accepted their internal “I”.  Even the tales in Genesis describe this transition from bicameral thinking to our current sense of self.  The author traces the story from the ancient Greeks down to the nomadic tribes which were prevalent after the mass genocide period.  It was these tribes which practiced a new monotheism, replacing the pantheon of gods with one deity, and which led to our current Abrahamic religions and their strict morality, most of which is based on refuting the old bicameral gods and our ways of communicating with them.

            The last section of this masterwork seeks out the vestiges of the bicameral mind within our modern world.  Humanity went from each one of us hearing the gods’ voices directly, to the gods only speaking to select priests and oracles, and then to the gods becoming totally silent, letting their desires be known solely through omens, or the revelation of “prophets.”  Julian Jaynes backs up every one of his observations with rigorous science, and explores the role that our bicameral mind still plays in the creation of poetry, art, and music.  Many creators describe how a piece of art, or music, or poem came to them unbidden, as if the universe was speaking to them directly.  This is an example of how our two brains communicate, with one side dominant, and the other not so.  Jaynes explores hypnosis and the mechanisms used to incite it, mechanisms and techniques extremely similar to those used by ancient priests when selecting new oracles.  Basically, the less self-aware you are, the easier it is to be hypnotized.  The same goes for deeply devout religious belief. 

            This book blew me away.  I wish I could cover everything that Julian Jaynes discusses in greater detail, but that would take an entire other book!  It is a humbling thing to understand that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, lived for over a hundred thousand years in the bicameral state.  It is only in the past 2,500 years that what we call human consciousness came to be.  There is no guarantee that our individual conscious selves will continue into the future.  It may be that a bicameral mind is better suited for long-term survival on Earth, and we will all soon revert back to that state.  There are no rules stating that evolution is a progressive, directional force.  Animals and plants evolve in all directions, both “forwards” and “backwards.”  It is our ego that makes us believe we are the epitome of life, that we are the best living creature created in our Universe.   That very ego may destroy us all.  I look forward to acquiring this book for my own personal library, and jumping back into its amazing pages in the future.  It is books such as this one that made me a book lover, and keep me a book lover.  What a glorious achievement.

(This book can be downloaded from the Internet Archive here: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes )

Dr. Irving Finkel Speaks on Dead Languages and the People Who Study Them

 

The Future of Dead Languages: Dead Languages, Living Stories – A Lecture by Dr. Irving Finkel

 

            In a bit of a detour from the usual path followed by RXTT’s Book Journey, this review will cover a lecture given by the pre-eminent Assyriologist and Curator of the Middle East Department at the British Museum, Dr. Irving Finkel.  On November 3, 2025 Dr. Finkel spoke at the University of Houston’s Dudley Hall, on the subject of dead languages, the difficulty of translation, and the history of this most human endeavor, trying to understand our ancestors through the written texts they left behind.

            Dr. Finkel first came to my attention through the videos posted by the British Museum, specifically a series titled “Ask a Curator.”  As the pre-eminent expert on Assyrian language, cuneiform, and all sorts of topics relating to ancient and dead languages, I found him to be a kindred spirit, someone who seeks to understand big things, and to absorb vast amounts of information in order to do so.  Upon hearing that he would be visiting and lecturing, I geeked out and signed up for the lecture.

            As a child I was fascinated with the story of the Rosetta Stone and its importance in allowing us modern humans to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was achieved because on the Rosetta Stone the very same text is repeated in three different writing systems.  The top is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.  The middle section is written in Demotic script, the “everyday” form of Egyptian writing, and the third section is written in Ancient Greek, the one language we knew how to read and translate.  Because of this, the whole world of the Egyptian written word opened up and it increased our knowledge of the ancient Egyptians exponentially. 

            Dr. Finkel discussed the importance of the Rosetta Stone, and the differences between Egyptian writing systems and the cuneiform writing system used in Mesopotamia.  Whereas in hieroglyphs, individual symbols stood for whole words and ideas, and in modern English the letters stand for individual sounds, in cuneiform the individual marks held many concurrent meanings, making it super difficult to translate.  Cuneiform is a writing system, NOT a language, and it was used to write down many ancient languages, all with the same wedge shapes.  Much like one can use Arabic letters to write words in German, English, French, or Spanish, cuneiform was originally used to write in Sumerian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia, and then other concurrent languages, such as Akkadian, Elamite, Assyrian, and ancient Persian.  Because the same symbols were used for different languages, translation of cuneiform was and remains a most difficult endeavor.

            An important point made by Dr. Finkel stated the importance of wide-ranging knowledge, hard work, and dedication to the art of translation, especially as it applies to long-dead languages.  The intellectual giants who made progress on deciphering cuneiform were intellectually brilliant humans, people who devoted decades of their lives to reading, researching, exploring, and analyzing ancient clay tablets, all with the hope to one day translate them and open up the ancestor’s world to our modern humanity and understanding.  Dr. Finkel stated his belief that, while computer programs can help translate already known languages, they are unable of thinking creatively, which is what is required to translate ancient dead languages.  This is a job for the human brain, not a machine algorithm.

            Dr. Finkel delivered an amazing talk.  It is a testament to him and his powers of oratory.  It is a rare thing to hear one of your intellectual heroes speak on their chosen field of study in the flesh.  I have been very fortunate to hear such idols of mine as Stephen Hawking, Art Spiegelman, Paul Mooney, Buzz Aldrin, and now Dr. Irving Finkel, speak in person.  To see this intellectual vigor in a septuagenarian is an inspiration.  Dr. Finkel stated that he started working at the British Museum in 1979 and is the longest-tenured member of that organization.  He said his secret is not answering emails or phone calls, which, as he joked, means his supervisors think he already left!  Hilarious!  I was unable to personally greet Dr. Finkel but hearing him speak has been one of the intellectual highlights of my life.  Here’s to dead languages and the people who love them!