Persona and Chess

It's Saturday night where I am, and I'm going to watch a Bergman film

This afternoon I was listening to the audio book Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia on Scribd. Paglia entered my field of vision when I saw the very funny dramatization of a feud between Paglia and Susan Sontag on Dis Magazine. It is now behind their paywall and I cant find it, but I included links above and here is a link to the whole affair. If you can find the dis video, I suggest watching it.

So, after some Paglia research, I do find her a bit reactionary and do not share many of her opinions on critical issues, like feminism. She reminds me of perhaps a proto or alternate version of Jordan Peterson. And Paglia might even agree with that assessment. She does say that Sexual Personae is an attempt to fuse Frazer with Freud and to chart the pagan influences on art to contemporary times to refute the notion that western art is a hegemonic Christian structure fractured by modernism. Beneath this notion is the idea that perhaps civilization is not as dynamic as we think and that biology is destiny.

These are opinions I do not share. However, I ascribed to the Robert Anton Wilson practice of regularly entering different reality tunnels to understand how different people see and experience the world, and to remove my own cognitive biases. And, pov aside, Paglia’s book is quite good and well written. I enjoy the analysis of particular works of art and of different historical moments, even if I do not agree with the conclusions.

‘Personae” in the title of Paglia’s book refers to the film Persona by Ingmar Bergman.

When I think of Persona the film I think of montages. It has been a while since I have seen the movie, although I am happy for this prompt because I have started rewatching it. It is a bit more experimental than Bergman’s other films. In many ways the film a meditation on the Jungian notion of the persona, which the mask that a person wears to function with in society. Persona was never my favorite Bergman film, and I don’t imagine that will change after this rewatch. My favorite Bergman film is either the Hour of the Wolf or The Seventh Seal.

Persona also pops in in BTS, the K-Pop band. BTS has an album called, Map of the soul: Persona, which is a reference to the eponymous tbook on Jungian Psychology by Murray Stein.

Just now I was about to leave this newsletter to play a game of chess, because all I can think about is death playing the knight a game of chess in the Seventh Seal. Why is that such an iconic scene? Why is it referenced in so many other films? We wonder if computers have human intelligence, we wonder if humans can become post human (become cyborgs or computers themselves). For artificial intelligence, and programs like deep blue, chess represents human intelligence, for Bergman chess represents overcoming death and perhaps transcending being human. Unlike deep blue the knight loses his game (spoiler).

Eve Babitz plays Marcel Duchamp – 1963

Thanks for reading!

x

Meredith