My goal was to aim for higher things with this blog, for deeper philosophies, for things that people will think are worth reading some day. I'm dropping all that tonight, because I hate Dick Vitale and he's gone and pissed me off again.
If you are amongst the blissfully ignorant of college basketball -- or, more pleasantly, if you live in a more enlightened time when there is no more college basketball -- you may be unaware of Dick Vitale. He is a majordomo, a shouting man who stands in front of the attraction and promotes it, a professional commentator and attention-getter. He's a hundred and seventy years old (okay, Wikipedia says he's 75, but that's not always reliable), and he has a funny sound to his voice when he shouts. He invariably shouts. It's a put-on -- I've heard several times that people call him at home and he'll answer, sounding like a normal person -- but it's an invariable one; if Vitale's going to talk, he's going to shout.
His field, college basketball (and moreover, all of college athletics), is at an odd juncture in society today. There aren't any other cultures in the world, possibly in history, where institutions of higher learning are expected to provide entertainment for the masses, but they do here, and they make a metric butt-ton of money doing it. It creates several odd juxtapositions -- college students who don't study college, but hone skills to become professional athletes; a college culture (traditionally liberal and subversive) having to include an athletic locker-room culture (traditionally neither of those); deans and college presidents disciplining students based not on academic record or potential but earnings potential. Maybe most jarring, you have top-rank coaches -- men driven to win, to earn championships, to earn money, and to produce elite athletes -- dictating policy to deans, provosts, presidents, and academicians. The effectively illiterate dictating policy in the temple of education.
Most of them have not abused that trust; for every Joe Paterno, there are many, many Pat Summitts. But I don't want to kill the coaches -- after many years in the business of management, I am hesitant to blame someone like Jimbo Fisher for the repeated shenanigans of Jameis Winston; if one of my employees shoplifts crab legs in his spare time, I don't want to be held responsible. (Paterno is different -- he could have called the police when told about a man raping children, and he didn't, allowing the baby rapist to rape again. There's no room for debate on that one.) For the athletes' inappropriate behavior, I don't think you can blame coaches; you have to blame the athletes. It'd be nice if the culture told them that their behavior was unacceptable, but culture's not always great at communicating.
It communicates through its icons and idols, mostly -- if I want to know what the culture that I live in thinks about a topic, I can look up what Lady Gaga thinks, or maybe Jay-Z. President Obama speaks for part of it, for the academics and the elites. Sarah Palin tries to speak for the anti-intellectuals. Fonzie speaks for the ultra-cool (maybe he doesn't anymore and I'm dating myself a bit -- I've been wracking my brain over here, though, and I can't think of anyone else who is in second place, so I'm leaving it the Fonz for now).
Well, ESPN speaks for the sports community, and the highest-paid voice at ESPN is Dick Vitale. And tonight, on live television, he kissed a clearly unwilling and unable-to-escape Ashley Judd, joking that it was for "good luck" for a team about to play a game. Ashley Judd, who was probably too embarrassed to punch him either because of the cameras, the crowd, or the fact that he's an embalmed mummy, has not been reached for comments.
Spoiler alert: Kentucky won. Arkansas, Ashley Judd, the very ideal of consent, and every woman who thought she had a choice of whose lips were smooshed against hers lost, no contest. Kentucky and the sexual assault identity of college sports remain undefeated.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Lilo and Stitch and Good and Evil
Traditionally, I think, in most children's storytelling, you gotta have a bad guy, and it helps if you have at least one or two good guys. I mean, traditional narrative only allows for four basic conflicts:
So Zoe has been on a Lilo and Stitch kick lately, and I hadn't seen that one before the past few weeks. (I still haven't, strictly, seen it. Most of my exposure to it has come while I was driving and she watches in the backseat. I've probably missed an awful lot of visual stuff.) It's struck me as a very odd Disney movie in a lot of ways, and I figured out why today: There are no bad guys. More than that, there is arguably no one in the whole movie who does anything actually bad even once.
The closest counter-argument to both of those assertions is Dr. Jumba, the mad scientist whose illegal genetic experimentation creates Stitch, a creature immediately identified as an "abomination." But as to whether he's bad, I would point out that he sees a little girl in danger toward the end, and doesn't even hesitate to be persuaded to help her out. His other arguable sins are pretty easily explained away, too -- he lies before the court, but he does that to save his skin; anyone would do that. He creates an abomination, but the abomination is not exactly Frankenstein's monster; it's a mischievous little cuddly guy. He tries to shoot and possibly kill the abomination -- but killing an abomination is usually not considered a bad thing, and he was ordered to do by his lawful government regime.
Stitch does some naughty stuff, but is it really stuff that can be considered bad? He attacks and damages a few people, but generally those people are causing trouble for him in the first place, and his attacks are not debilitating. He's a baby, he's superpowered, and he's got a posse chasing him down; some collateral damage seems pretty likely. He breaks some stuff -- but he does not damage Lilo's precious picture of her mom, and he only physically attacks other aliens.
That's a significant point, too, and I'll bring that up to excuse the actions of Captain Gantu and the Grand Councilwoman -- as soon as they found out that the escaped abomination was going to Earth, they asked their expert about the planet, and he described Earthlings as both unintelligent and extremely delicate ("Every time a meteor hits the planet, they start over from scratch"). They choose not to gas the planet because they don't want to hurt an endangered species, and they at no point damage any earth people. They batter each other, and at a few points discuss their comparatively denser molecules; which Stitch chomps on the skull of one alien or throws another through a wall, it's not actually terribly violent behavior. Gantu was a little fierce -- but he was never more or less than a cop, following his orders to capture a fugitive.
The ridiculously named Cobra Bubbles, of course -- the CIA agent-turned-social worker -- is the same way. He's a little gruff and ridiculously intimidating, but his motive is to protect a little girl from a clearly unsafe home. You can't blame him for that. You can't blame Nani for the house being unsafe; she's just a big sister trying to carry on after her parents were killed. You can't blame Lilo for being a godawful kid; she's just a little girl trying to adjust to her whole world being taken away.
Every single character in the entire movie, as far as I can tell, is a person trying his or her best to live up to his or her responsibilities. No bad guys. No bad intentions. And ridiculous amounts of violence and explosions. And, despite the suspension of disbelief you need for some of the sci-fi and fantasy elements, the characters all ring pretty true.
It's important to remember stories like this when you have violence, explosions, resentment, anger, or fights in your own life. Even when some sonofabitch is trying to wreck your shit, even when you're tempted to call him your worst enemy, even when you're trying to do the best you can and you're being frustrated at every turn, you have to remember that the bad guys aren't trying to be bad guys. In their own heads, they are very likely seeing you as a sonofabitch trying to wreck their shit, unable to see you aren't a bad guy. From their perspectives, with their objectives, they're probably just doing the best they can.
Communicating changes perspectives and objectives, and that, along with the hokey-pokey, is really what it's all about. When you're surrounded by bad guys, sometimes it's a good idea to try to drop as many barriers to communication as you can, then try to align your objectives... and, you know, sometimes it's a good idea to pull out a baseball bat. Listen to your conscience; go with what feels right.
- (Man vs Man
- Man vs Society
- Man vs Nature
- Man vs Self)
So Zoe has been on a Lilo and Stitch kick lately, and I hadn't seen that one before the past few weeks. (I still haven't, strictly, seen it. Most of my exposure to it has come while I was driving and she watches in the backseat. I've probably missed an awful lot of visual stuff.) It's struck me as a very odd Disney movie in a lot of ways, and I figured out why today: There are no bad guys. More than that, there is arguably no one in the whole movie who does anything actually bad even once.
The closest counter-argument to both of those assertions is Dr. Jumba, the mad scientist whose illegal genetic experimentation creates Stitch, a creature immediately identified as an "abomination." But as to whether he's bad, I would point out that he sees a little girl in danger toward the end, and doesn't even hesitate to be persuaded to help her out. His other arguable sins are pretty easily explained away, too -- he lies before the court, but he does that to save his skin; anyone would do that. He creates an abomination, but the abomination is not exactly Frankenstein's monster; it's a mischievous little cuddly guy. He tries to shoot and possibly kill the abomination -- but killing an abomination is usually not considered a bad thing, and he was ordered to do by his lawful government regime.
Stitch does some naughty stuff, but is it really stuff that can be considered bad? He attacks and damages a few people, but generally those people are causing trouble for him in the first place, and his attacks are not debilitating. He's a baby, he's superpowered, and he's got a posse chasing him down; some collateral damage seems pretty likely. He breaks some stuff -- but he does not damage Lilo's precious picture of her mom, and he only physically attacks other aliens.
That's a significant point, too, and I'll bring that up to excuse the actions of Captain Gantu and the Grand Councilwoman -- as soon as they found out that the escaped abomination was going to Earth, they asked their expert about the planet, and he described Earthlings as both unintelligent and extremely delicate ("Every time a meteor hits the planet, they start over from scratch"). They choose not to gas the planet because they don't want to hurt an endangered species, and they at no point damage any earth people. They batter each other, and at a few points discuss their comparatively denser molecules; which Stitch chomps on the skull of one alien or throws another through a wall, it's not actually terribly violent behavior. Gantu was a little fierce -- but he was never more or less than a cop, following his orders to capture a fugitive.
The ridiculously named Cobra Bubbles, of course -- the CIA agent-turned-social worker -- is the same way. He's a little gruff and ridiculously intimidating, but his motive is to protect a little girl from a clearly unsafe home. You can't blame him for that. You can't blame Nani for the house being unsafe; she's just a big sister trying to carry on after her parents were killed. You can't blame Lilo for being a godawful kid; she's just a little girl trying to adjust to her whole world being taken away.
Every single character in the entire movie, as far as I can tell, is a person trying his or her best to live up to his or her responsibilities. No bad guys. No bad intentions. And ridiculous amounts of violence and explosions. And, despite the suspension of disbelief you need for some of the sci-fi and fantasy elements, the characters all ring pretty true.
It's important to remember stories like this when you have violence, explosions, resentment, anger, or fights in your own life. Even when some sonofabitch is trying to wreck your shit, even when you're tempted to call him your worst enemy, even when you're trying to do the best you can and you're being frustrated at every turn, you have to remember that the bad guys aren't trying to be bad guys. In their own heads, they are very likely seeing you as a sonofabitch trying to wreck their shit, unable to see you aren't a bad guy. From their perspectives, with their objectives, they're probably just doing the best they can.
Communicating changes perspectives and objectives, and that, along with the hokey-pokey, is really what it's all about. When you're surrounded by bad guys, sometimes it's a good idea to try to drop as many barriers to communication as you can, then try to align your objectives... and, you know, sometimes it's a good idea to pull out a baseball bat. Listen to your conscience; go with what feels right.
Rockin out on bath salts
I have an epsom problem; admitting it is the first step. I stayed up late tonight, reluctant to go soak in a bath full of the stuff, but knowing it would help if I did. I did. It helped.
I put myself in the unnatural position of having abused my physical corpus too much today entirely because of a defect in my character, which actually pleases me in a perverse way -- I think a lot of the time, our intellectual patterns and personalities, the way we think, has an effect on our actions that is less than you'd expect. Most people think they're brave; most people in battle freeze up and never fire a shot. Most people think they're generous, but they ignore panhandlers and think the cops should do something about them. I think I'm an egotistical showoff... so, when a chance came to show off, it's a little gratifying that I actually dove in over my head.
There's a boy named Jake who was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago -- I don't know the lad; I've only seen his father a few times, never exchanged a word with him. However, his father is a senior instructor at the kung fu school I have been studying at for more than two years now, and I have a lot of mutual friends with him -- more specifically, I have a lot of people that I really respect that really respect him. Last time I saw him (the father), he was earning his third degree black belt, and part of his test was breaking a cinder block. With his forehead.
Why do you study kung fu? So you can do stuff that looks cool. Breaking cinder blocks with your forehead, as absolutely ridiculous and impractical a skill as it might be, looks pretty darn cool. So, without having met the guy, I'm a fan.
I live in one of the world's more backwards countries, unfortunately; we have a system here where, if you get sick, the culture would like to see that drive you into total bankruptcy and ruin your life. The legal system is set up so that, if you have a kid that gets sick, not only do you get to deal with the massive nervous breakdowns that are the logical result of that, but you get the massive nervous breakdowns that come with being massively in debt for the rest of your life, as well. Every other country in the world, of course, has figured out that this is no way to live, but here in cavemanland, I mean Amurrica, we're still working on it. So the kung fu school has come together to help out, and part of that is running some fund-raising events. And one of those was a board-breaking marathon.
Donate ten clams, break five boards. Donate twenty clams, break ten boards. And my old friend Mike said that he'd top anyone else who bought boards... when I heard about it, he had donated seventy and was planning to break thirty-five boards. So I had to do him one better.
So, skipping some back and forths, today Mike, me, and a bunch of other board-breaking enthusiasts got together to break some boards. Most people had pledged for five or ten boards. I had seventy. Mike, persistent to the end, had seventy-five. Which is, I want to point out, kind of a lot.
I have been told there are some cool pictures out there somewhere, one of me kicking through one board with each foot simultaneously, and maybe I'll get a copy of those eventually. I also did some speed breaks (which are breaks where the guy isn't holding the board tightly -- he just sort of has two fingers on them, and you have to hit them with a lot of speed and force or they'll go flying away), and one from a dive roll, and another from a half-backflip. Mike did a couple of cool things I don't know how to do -- including, yes, a forehead break, and he also did a cinder block, although he used his hand for it. He also did a Bruce Lee-like zero-inch punch -- the one where you put your hand solidly against the board, then break it without pulling it away, with total disregard for all laws of physics. Importantly, we looked super-cool in some pictures; more importantly, the school raised a significant amount of money for Jake.
And I have bruises on both elbows, my hands, my knees, and my feet. I soaked in the tub an alarmingly long time -- from about 1.45 to almost 3.30, which is less alarming when you realize daylight savings time happened tonight. And I drank about a bottle of wine while I was in there, so I'm drunk as a wheelbarrow now, so this whole entry is probably full of rambling and typos.
But it was a good day, a productive day, and I learned how to do some things that I couldn't before. And I looked cool doing it. And I drank a lot of wine. Hard to have a better day than that....
I put myself in the unnatural position of having abused my physical corpus too much today entirely because of a defect in my character, which actually pleases me in a perverse way -- I think a lot of the time, our intellectual patterns and personalities, the way we think, has an effect on our actions that is less than you'd expect. Most people think they're brave; most people in battle freeze up and never fire a shot. Most people think they're generous, but they ignore panhandlers and think the cops should do something about them. I think I'm an egotistical showoff... so, when a chance came to show off, it's a little gratifying that I actually dove in over my head.
There's a boy named Jake who was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago -- I don't know the lad; I've only seen his father a few times, never exchanged a word with him. However, his father is a senior instructor at the kung fu school I have been studying at for more than two years now, and I have a lot of mutual friends with him -- more specifically, I have a lot of people that I really respect that really respect him. Last time I saw him (the father), he was earning his third degree black belt, and part of his test was breaking a cinder block. With his forehead.
Why do you study kung fu? So you can do stuff that looks cool. Breaking cinder blocks with your forehead, as absolutely ridiculous and impractical a skill as it might be, looks pretty darn cool. So, without having met the guy, I'm a fan.
I live in one of the world's more backwards countries, unfortunately; we have a system here where, if you get sick, the culture would like to see that drive you into total bankruptcy and ruin your life. The legal system is set up so that, if you have a kid that gets sick, not only do you get to deal with the massive nervous breakdowns that are the logical result of that, but you get the massive nervous breakdowns that come with being massively in debt for the rest of your life, as well. Every other country in the world, of course, has figured out that this is no way to live, but here in cavemanland, I mean Amurrica, we're still working on it. So the kung fu school has come together to help out, and part of that is running some fund-raising events. And one of those was a board-breaking marathon.
Donate ten clams, break five boards. Donate twenty clams, break ten boards. And my old friend Mike said that he'd top anyone else who bought boards... when I heard about it, he had donated seventy and was planning to break thirty-five boards. So I had to do him one better.
So, skipping some back and forths, today Mike, me, and a bunch of other board-breaking enthusiasts got together to break some boards. Most people had pledged for five or ten boards. I had seventy. Mike, persistent to the end, had seventy-five. Which is, I want to point out, kind of a lot.
I have been told there are some cool pictures out there somewhere, one of me kicking through one board with each foot simultaneously, and maybe I'll get a copy of those eventually. I also did some speed breaks (which are breaks where the guy isn't holding the board tightly -- he just sort of has two fingers on them, and you have to hit them with a lot of speed and force or they'll go flying away), and one from a dive roll, and another from a half-backflip. Mike did a couple of cool things I don't know how to do -- including, yes, a forehead break, and he also did a cinder block, although he used his hand for it. He also did a Bruce Lee-like zero-inch punch -- the one where you put your hand solidly against the board, then break it without pulling it away, with total disregard for all laws of physics. Importantly, we looked super-cool in some pictures; more importantly, the school raised a significant amount of money for Jake.
And I have bruises on both elbows, my hands, my knees, and my feet. I soaked in the tub an alarmingly long time -- from about 1.45 to almost 3.30, which is less alarming when you realize daylight savings time happened tonight. And I drank about a bottle of wine while I was in there, so I'm drunk as a wheelbarrow now, so this whole entry is probably full of rambling and typos.
But it was a good day, a productive day, and I learned how to do some things that I couldn't before. And I looked cool doing it. And I drank a lot of wine. Hard to have a better day than that....
Friday, March 6, 2015
Closure
I wasn't really sure what it meant to heal from grief until I took some time to think about the word "closure." What does that even really mean?
It doesn't have to mean anything; lots of words don't; that doesn't make them bad words. How many times has someone told you about a rough situation and you've answered, "It is what it is"? Or, the one I like even better, "Life's like that sometimes." You want to talk about two sentences that mean less than nothing? I used to think that whenever I heard a sentence like that said aloud, I should find a tree and apologize to it for wasting the oxygen it had worked so hard to provide me on such a ridiculous sentence.
But meaning is kind of overrated. Words don't have to carry a lot of meaning to bind people together -- or to serve any number of other purposes. My favorite on-screen romance that I've seen lately is a really ridiculous one -- Mike Wazowski and Celia, from Monsters, Inc. They call each other "schmoopsie-poo" and "googley-bear." Serves a purpose without being encumbered by a lot of meaning, doesn't it? Sometimes we use closure like that, in news casts or play narrations where, for pragmatic purposes, we're going to close that segment or movement and move on to the next thing. Hurricane Katrina moved in and crushed hundreds of thousands of lives, but FEMA came in, so now we'll start to find closure on that story -- now, sports!
After an injury, on a superficial level, you'd think closure meant healing. But injuries, real ones, usually don't heal all the way -- they heal to the point of literal closure sometimes, which is to say, they aren't spewing internal bodily fluids on the floor, but a serious injury doesn't get really resolved for years. I sprained my thumb last summer; I still can't close my right hand as tightly as my left. In the most literal sense imaginable, there's still no closure to that.
But closure serves a purpose for people on the outside of the situation, because at some point, they'd like to treat you again like the most important thing wasn't how damaged you were. So they talk about closure, congratulate you on your healing, and on some level, expect you to get back to normal.
Especially from grief, because we don't teach people what to expect from grief in life, it can be a little disorienting. I say a little, because grief itself is so massively disorienting, it's hard to imagine much more confusion on top of that. Having people expect that you're going to get better sometime eventually, that you're going to reach closure, that's just the cherry on top of the WTF sundae.
You do heal -- the way that a guy with an amputated limb heals; eventually, the imminent threat of death by blood loss is alleviated, and he learns to cope without the missing limb. Maybe he gets a wheelchair or a cane, or he gets a hook or a prosthetic, or his buddies start calling him Lefty, but somehow he figures out how to adapt. Not like a guy with a broken finger heals, where eventually he can type again -- like a guy with a missing limb heals, where eventually he learns to face every situation in his life while at the same time coping with missing his limb.
Closure. That particular situation doesn't close, does it? And it's only bearable because, when it happens to you, you realize that it puts you in an exclusive club of everyone whose ever lost someone he or she loves forever -- welcome to the entirety of the human race for all time. After a moment or two, you realize that it's a much more exclusive club that comprises the people who haven't known that kind of loss, and you want to hug one of them, because you know what they're almost inevitably going to have to go through soon enough. You'll find them pretty easily -- they're the people who are waiting for you to find closure.
Unrelated: I finished CS Lewis's The Great Divorce earlier, and I was really fascinated by some conversations about hurting and pity. Sympathy, etymologically, means feeling someone else's pain, and there's some philosophy about how there can be no joy while any yet suffer. It's a cool idea, because people do seem nice when they're sympathetic, but ultimately, Lewis felt sympathy or pity had to have its limits. If you've found great joy, how can you ignore that joy because others -- from foolishness, weakness, or determined attachment to their misery -- haven't joined you yet?
I grieved for B when I lost her; in my heart, I wondered often if she grieved for losing me, too. Lewis would suggest that she couldn't, that she wouldn't have had time -- she was too busy being immersed in the holiest joy and the purest love, the True Things of which the love and joy that we shared in life were just pale reflections. It's an ineffable question; no one can ever really know till you get there, of course, and then you've probably got other stuff to worry about.
Maybe that's the best way not to grieve -- you put aside the hurt because you've got other stuff to worry about. It would explain a lot of the decisions I made instinctively; I threw myself into bad decisions so that I'd have other stuff to worry about. I don't remember spending a lot of nights staring into the abyss; I mostly remember having stupid problems and getting drunk at bars. If it ever happens again, God forbid (sorry, Kimmy... I'm punching out first this time; you're going to have to outlive me)... well, if it does, I'm going to spend a lot less time anesthetizing myself over it. I'm too old to abuse my innards that much again...
It doesn't have to mean anything; lots of words don't; that doesn't make them bad words. How many times has someone told you about a rough situation and you've answered, "It is what it is"? Or, the one I like even better, "Life's like that sometimes." You want to talk about two sentences that mean less than nothing? I used to think that whenever I heard a sentence like that said aloud, I should find a tree and apologize to it for wasting the oxygen it had worked so hard to provide me on such a ridiculous sentence.
But meaning is kind of overrated. Words don't have to carry a lot of meaning to bind people together -- or to serve any number of other purposes. My favorite on-screen romance that I've seen lately is a really ridiculous one -- Mike Wazowski and Celia, from Monsters, Inc. They call each other "schmoopsie-poo" and "googley-bear." Serves a purpose without being encumbered by a lot of meaning, doesn't it? Sometimes we use closure like that, in news casts or play narrations where, for pragmatic purposes, we're going to close that segment or movement and move on to the next thing. Hurricane Katrina moved in and crushed hundreds of thousands of lives, but FEMA came in, so now we'll start to find closure on that story -- now, sports!
After an injury, on a superficial level, you'd think closure meant healing. But injuries, real ones, usually don't heal all the way -- they heal to the point of literal closure sometimes, which is to say, they aren't spewing internal bodily fluids on the floor, but a serious injury doesn't get really resolved for years. I sprained my thumb last summer; I still can't close my right hand as tightly as my left. In the most literal sense imaginable, there's still no closure to that.
But closure serves a purpose for people on the outside of the situation, because at some point, they'd like to treat you again like the most important thing wasn't how damaged you were. So they talk about closure, congratulate you on your healing, and on some level, expect you to get back to normal.
Especially from grief, because we don't teach people what to expect from grief in life, it can be a little disorienting. I say a little, because grief itself is so massively disorienting, it's hard to imagine much more confusion on top of that. Having people expect that you're going to get better sometime eventually, that you're going to reach closure, that's just the cherry on top of the WTF sundae.
You do heal -- the way that a guy with an amputated limb heals; eventually, the imminent threat of death by blood loss is alleviated, and he learns to cope without the missing limb. Maybe he gets a wheelchair or a cane, or he gets a hook or a prosthetic, or his buddies start calling him Lefty, but somehow he figures out how to adapt. Not like a guy with a broken finger heals, where eventually he can type again -- like a guy with a missing limb heals, where eventually he learns to face every situation in his life while at the same time coping with missing his limb.
Closure. That particular situation doesn't close, does it? And it's only bearable because, when it happens to you, you realize that it puts you in an exclusive club of everyone whose ever lost someone he or she loves forever -- welcome to the entirety of the human race for all time. After a moment or two, you realize that it's a much more exclusive club that comprises the people who haven't known that kind of loss, and you want to hug one of them, because you know what they're almost inevitably going to have to go through soon enough. You'll find them pretty easily -- they're the people who are waiting for you to find closure.
Unrelated: I finished CS Lewis's The Great Divorce earlier, and I was really fascinated by some conversations about hurting and pity. Sympathy, etymologically, means feeling someone else's pain, and there's some philosophy about how there can be no joy while any yet suffer. It's a cool idea, because people do seem nice when they're sympathetic, but ultimately, Lewis felt sympathy or pity had to have its limits. If you've found great joy, how can you ignore that joy because others -- from foolishness, weakness, or determined attachment to their misery -- haven't joined you yet?
I grieved for B when I lost her; in my heart, I wondered often if she grieved for losing me, too. Lewis would suggest that she couldn't, that she wouldn't have had time -- she was too busy being immersed in the holiest joy and the purest love, the True Things of which the love and joy that we shared in life were just pale reflections. It's an ineffable question; no one can ever really know till you get there, of course, and then you've probably got other stuff to worry about.
Maybe that's the best way not to grieve -- you put aside the hurt because you've got other stuff to worry about. It would explain a lot of the decisions I made instinctively; I threw myself into bad decisions so that I'd have other stuff to worry about. I don't remember spending a lot of nights staring into the abyss; I mostly remember having stupid problems and getting drunk at bars. If it ever happens again, God forbid (sorry, Kimmy... I'm punching out first this time; you're going to have to outlive me)... well, if it does, I'm going to spend a lot less time anesthetizing myself over it. I'm too old to abuse my innards that much again...
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Till We Have Faces musing...
I've been reading a lot of CS Lewis the past few days. When I was a young lad, maybe thirty years ago, he was my favorite author because the Narnia books were among my favorite books. (Side note: I remember thinking at one point that all the loser writers probably took pen names that started with "L" so they'd be next to Lewis and L'Engle on the racks, because the discriminating readers would start their trips to the library there -- I had a pretty limited idea of how marketing worked back then. But it seems like it worked for that hack, Robert Ludlum, anyway.)
He aged well alongside me -- in my teens, the science fiction trilogy rocked my world, although That Hideous Strength was definitely too hard for me until I got a little older. His non-fiction works, starting with Mere Christianity, came within reach, and I devoured them as I grew old enough to understand them, and finally I picked up one that looked scary, fictional, and exciting -- maybe a fantasy to match the sci-fi of the trilogy. It was called Till We Have Faces.
Somewhere near Oxford University, there's a pigeon sitting on a gate, looking in, admiring some of the pretty trees and flowers that probably grow there. And within the university gates, there's a greater beauty, minds growing and conversations flowing and philosophy blossoming; there's magic that is completely beyond that pigeon's scope of understanding, even beyond his perception. When I read Till We Have Faces, I felt like that pigeon. It's rare that you can read the words of a book, be completely aware that it is talking about stuff that is utterly beyond your grasp, and still be fascinated by its beauty.
I re-read it again in my twenties a few times, and I've been re-reading it again this week. But this time, I'm coming into it with an education, with a background in literary criticism, and with some miles on my tires -- some actual life experiences, some knowledge of grief, some small amount of emotional maturity. I'm starting to see some depth to the shadows of this book, some dimensions that I wasn't able to perceive before.
The second hardest trick in writing that I'm aware of -- and probably the hardest one that people actually have the guts and skill to pull off regularly -- is probably the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is the one where the person telling the story doesn't tell you all the bits of it, but the author intends you to be able to piece it together and at least suspect it yourself. The trick that is one step harder than that, the one that only true masters even attempt, is the ignorant narrator. The ignorant narrator is the one where the writer knows something and he communicates it to you, the reader, but the narrator through which he communicates it remains unaware. Nick in The Great Gatsby doesn't ever come out and tell you, in so many words, that he was gay and in love with Gatsby; he probably never even suspects it of himself. (Some people think that he's an unreliable narrator and he just tells you that he's straight -- I prefer to read it that he really likes Jordan and his other girlfriends; he just never realizes why it doesn't work out, and he thinks Gatsby is just a really admirable friend, a Great Man.) The ignorant narrator is a story told through allusion and implication; it's a message encoded for the reader, a more sophisticated person than the protagonist.
I think Orual in Till We Have Faces plays that role, the ignorant narrator, on at least a few occasions, and the thing that really tipped me off was the multiple times she almost directly quoted Lady MacBeth. I don't know if you've read MacBeth lately -- I sure as hell haven't -- but Lewis, an Englishman who lived on letters, wouldn't have alluded to her accidentally. I don't know of any character in literature who comes to mind when a powerful woman cries to be un-womaned, to have the qualities of her gender removed from her, faster than Lady Mac. "Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty."
So Orual had that in common with Lady MacBeth. When you read the book, the mood is desperate, crushing sadness, bitterness, anger at the gods for having mistreated her -- and the mood is those green trees that even the pigeon on the gate can marvel at; it lingered with me from the first time I read it, haunting for years. But Lady MacBeth is not a victim; she's a killer. And, through that allusion, I can see Orual in a different light as well... and, as any good literary critic can tell you, when you first start to see a really good theory idea, you find that the supporting evidence for it starts leaping off every page.
I've seen Orual as a sympathetic figure for like twenty years. It's crazy now, reading the book with the new perspective of years, education, and imagination, but I think she was the monster all along.
The guy wrote like a dozen fiction books, at least half of them targeted for children. And I think this book might be one of the best of all time -- I've read some great ones, but never one with more levels, with more threads woven together, with more literary craftsmanship than this. I'm going to have to re-read it another three or four times just for the literary characterizations, I think... without even looking at the theological narratives he was trying to weave, because that's the easy target. You know how the easy target in Gatsby is the Marxist theory, the narrative about materialism and how no one is really motivated by anything other than money and the joy in waving it in front of other people's noses? The easy target in Faces is about religion -- you are brought up to love a god, you find disappointment and blame a god, then you discover what you are in comparison to a god and how silly it is to rage at them, like throwing celery at volcanoes. That's just the surface layer -- only the easiest of the themes (and even that one eluded me when I was trying to read it as a younger guy). There are at least three or four others that I can see from here, and the deeper I delve, the more I think I'll find.
I probably ought to do a critical paper on it, if I ever write one of those again... I bet most of the theory on it has been on theology in it or the mythology in it, and I think there's a lot more ground to cover. Marxism. Shakespeare. Racism. Queer theory. Maybe I should do three or four critical papers on it...
I've been reading some of The Great Divorce, too, and I feel like I've been shortchanging it, but it's an overt response to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I read part of and don't ever want to read again. Reading Lewis is like being a pigeon on the gates of Oxford; reading Blake is like being a pigeon transfixed in the hypnotic eye of a snake. That way, they say, lies madness. I feel like he's the literary Joker in the comic book world of English Romanticism -- much more brilliant and horrifyingly insane than anyone ever had any right to be. I wanted to write a thesis project on his creation mythos at one point, before I remembered that I liked being happy. The Great Divorce will be a pleasant read, less fiction and more parable, and I think I'll enjoy it. But I won't dive deep into it; I certainly won't delve into William F. Blake again for it. There are universes hidden in fiction, and as far as I'm concerned, hidden is a good place for some of those universes to stay.
He aged well alongside me -- in my teens, the science fiction trilogy rocked my world, although That Hideous Strength was definitely too hard for me until I got a little older. His non-fiction works, starting with Mere Christianity, came within reach, and I devoured them as I grew old enough to understand them, and finally I picked up one that looked scary, fictional, and exciting -- maybe a fantasy to match the sci-fi of the trilogy. It was called Till We Have Faces.
Somewhere near Oxford University, there's a pigeon sitting on a gate, looking in, admiring some of the pretty trees and flowers that probably grow there. And within the university gates, there's a greater beauty, minds growing and conversations flowing and philosophy blossoming; there's magic that is completely beyond that pigeon's scope of understanding, even beyond his perception. When I read Till We Have Faces, I felt like that pigeon. It's rare that you can read the words of a book, be completely aware that it is talking about stuff that is utterly beyond your grasp, and still be fascinated by its beauty.
I re-read it again in my twenties a few times, and I've been re-reading it again this week. But this time, I'm coming into it with an education, with a background in literary criticism, and with some miles on my tires -- some actual life experiences, some knowledge of grief, some small amount of emotional maturity. I'm starting to see some depth to the shadows of this book, some dimensions that I wasn't able to perceive before.
The second hardest trick in writing that I'm aware of -- and probably the hardest one that people actually have the guts and skill to pull off regularly -- is probably the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is the one where the person telling the story doesn't tell you all the bits of it, but the author intends you to be able to piece it together and at least suspect it yourself. The trick that is one step harder than that, the one that only true masters even attempt, is the ignorant narrator. The ignorant narrator is the one where the writer knows something and he communicates it to you, the reader, but the narrator through which he communicates it remains unaware. Nick in The Great Gatsby doesn't ever come out and tell you, in so many words, that he was gay and in love with Gatsby; he probably never even suspects it of himself. (Some people think that he's an unreliable narrator and he just tells you that he's straight -- I prefer to read it that he really likes Jordan and his other girlfriends; he just never realizes why it doesn't work out, and he thinks Gatsby is just a really admirable friend, a Great Man.) The ignorant narrator is a story told through allusion and implication; it's a message encoded for the reader, a more sophisticated person than the protagonist.
I think Orual in Till We Have Faces plays that role, the ignorant narrator, on at least a few occasions, and the thing that really tipped me off was the multiple times she almost directly quoted Lady MacBeth. I don't know if you've read MacBeth lately -- I sure as hell haven't -- but Lewis, an Englishman who lived on letters, wouldn't have alluded to her accidentally. I don't know of any character in literature who comes to mind when a powerful woman cries to be un-womaned, to have the qualities of her gender removed from her, faster than Lady Mac. "Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty."
So Orual had that in common with Lady MacBeth. When you read the book, the mood is desperate, crushing sadness, bitterness, anger at the gods for having mistreated her -- and the mood is those green trees that even the pigeon on the gate can marvel at; it lingered with me from the first time I read it, haunting for years. But Lady MacBeth is not a victim; she's a killer. And, through that allusion, I can see Orual in a different light as well... and, as any good literary critic can tell you, when you first start to see a really good theory idea, you find that the supporting evidence for it starts leaping off every page.
I've seen Orual as a sympathetic figure for like twenty years. It's crazy now, reading the book with the new perspective of years, education, and imagination, but I think she was the monster all along.
The guy wrote like a dozen fiction books, at least half of them targeted for children. And I think this book might be one of the best of all time -- I've read some great ones, but never one with more levels, with more threads woven together, with more literary craftsmanship than this. I'm going to have to re-read it another three or four times just for the literary characterizations, I think... without even looking at the theological narratives he was trying to weave, because that's the easy target. You know how the easy target in Gatsby is the Marxist theory, the narrative about materialism and how no one is really motivated by anything other than money and the joy in waving it in front of other people's noses? The easy target in Faces is about religion -- you are brought up to love a god, you find disappointment and blame a god, then you discover what you are in comparison to a god and how silly it is to rage at them, like throwing celery at volcanoes. That's just the surface layer -- only the easiest of the themes (and even that one eluded me when I was trying to read it as a younger guy). There are at least three or four others that I can see from here, and the deeper I delve, the more I think I'll find.
I probably ought to do a critical paper on it, if I ever write one of those again... I bet most of the theory on it has been on theology in it or the mythology in it, and I think there's a lot more ground to cover. Marxism. Shakespeare. Racism. Queer theory. Maybe I should do three or four critical papers on it...
I've been reading some of The Great Divorce, too, and I feel like I've been shortchanging it, but it's an overt response to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I read part of and don't ever want to read again. Reading Lewis is like being a pigeon on the gates of Oxford; reading Blake is like being a pigeon transfixed in the hypnotic eye of a snake. That way, they say, lies madness. I feel like he's the literary Joker in the comic book world of English Romanticism -- much more brilliant and horrifyingly insane than anyone ever had any right to be. I wanted to write a thesis project on his creation mythos at one point, before I remembered that I liked being happy. The Great Divorce will be a pleasant read, less fiction and more parable, and I think I'll enjoy it. But I won't dive deep into it; I certainly won't delve into William F. Blake again for it. There are universes hidden in fiction, and as far as I'm concerned, hidden is a good place for some of those universes to stay.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Old blogs
I guess that title is a misnomer. A blog that no one else reads isn't a blog; it's a diary. So old diaries would be a better name, but they were made on software called "blogger," and it's such a ridiculous word that it's hard not to use it under any pretext, no matter how flimsy.
I wrote blogs on blogger before, back in olden times when I was in a period of transition and self-discovery. (Spoiler alert: all of life is a period of transition and self-discovery.) I was pretty regular about it, several entries a week. Not every day -- I'm trying to stay every day with this blog, at least for a start, because I read somewhere that if you do something twenty-one days in a row, it'll become a habit, and I'd like to get back in the habit with this one.
Finding those old diaries, though, have really encouraged me, because they've attenuated my expectations a bit. I was younger and probably more immature then -- I didn't use phrases like "attenuated my expectations," in any event -- but there was real value in that writing, sometimes even something that looked like wisdom. And there was garbage, too, lots of absolute junk.
And the junk is inspiring, too! A lot of days, I entered lyrics from whatever song was going through my head, whatever my favorite song was that day, recorded for all of history. Why would I do that? Did I think I was the only chance U2 had for the lyrics of their "New York" song to be preserved for posterity? Some of the old poetry I posted was absolutely unreadable -- and that's valuable, too, because it tells me who I was.
You don't remember "New York," do you? No reason why you should. It wasn't a great song; it didn't get a lot of airplay, and it only had one or two clever turns of phrase to prevent it from being utterly garbage. "In New York freedom feels like/too many choices..." is a great line, though, because isn't that what writing is all about? Probably there are 800,000 words in the English language; you can start the next sentence with most of them. Even if you can only start it with a tenth of them, isn't that an intimidating choice? If you want the sentence to be really good, to be epic, it has to start with the right one, not any of the other half million....
but then you hear "New York," and you remember All That You Can't Leave Behind was a pretty good album. But it wasn't a greatest hits album; every second on the album wasn't the best day they ever had. Some of them were great days; some of them were okay days, and they all added up to a pretty good album. A blog can be like that, too.
Maybe I'll have some really good hits here. Maybe I'll have some okay days, too. The only really unforgivable sin will be if I stop having days altogether -- if I give up and walk away from it without trying anymore. Life's like that, too... the important thing is that you keep on living it.
I wrote blogs on blogger before, back in olden times when I was in a period of transition and self-discovery. (Spoiler alert: all of life is a period of transition and self-discovery.) I was pretty regular about it, several entries a week. Not every day -- I'm trying to stay every day with this blog, at least for a start, because I read somewhere that if you do something twenty-one days in a row, it'll become a habit, and I'd like to get back in the habit with this one.
Finding those old diaries, though, have really encouraged me, because they've attenuated my expectations a bit. I was younger and probably more immature then -- I didn't use phrases like "attenuated my expectations," in any event -- but there was real value in that writing, sometimes even something that looked like wisdom. And there was garbage, too, lots of absolute junk.
And the junk is inspiring, too! A lot of days, I entered lyrics from whatever song was going through my head, whatever my favorite song was that day, recorded for all of history. Why would I do that? Did I think I was the only chance U2 had for the lyrics of their "New York" song to be preserved for posterity? Some of the old poetry I posted was absolutely unreadable -- and that's valuable, too, because it tells me who I was.
You don't remember "New York," do you? No reason why you should. It wasn't a great song; it didn't get a lot of airplay, and it only had one or two clever turns of phrase to prevent it from being utterly garbage. "In New York freedom feels like/too many choices..." is a great line, though, because isn't that what writing is all about? Probably there are 800,000 words in the English language; you can start the next sentence with most of them. Even if you can only start it with a tenth of them, isn't that an intimidating choice? If you want the sentence to be really good, to be epic, it has to start with the right one, not any of the other half million....
but then you hear "New York," and you remember All That You Can't Leave Behind was a pretty good album. But it wasn't a greatest hits album; every second on the album wasn't the best day they ever had. Some of them were great days; some of them were okay days, and they all added up to a pretty good album. A blog can be like that, too.
Maybe I'll have some really good hits here. Maybe I'll have some okay days, too. The only really unforgivable sin will be if I stop having days altogether -- if I give up and walk away from it without trying anymore. Life's like that, too... the important thing is that you keep on living it.
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