One of the many songs I have floating around in my head half-formed and never really written is entitled "Long Cold Summer." The chorus goes like this:
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
As cold as I've ever known
I could not feel any number
Chills me to the bone
These things I've not outgrown
History has shown
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone
A lot of the songs that come to me never get farther than the composition of a refrain or an initial melody, which I suppose is why I'm not much of a songwriter these days. And maybe that's for the best if I'm going to be producing such forced rhymes in my songs as "summer" and "number" or invoking the grand cause of history to describe something that would be strictly personal.
At any rate, these coming months promise to be a long, cold summer like the one years back that inspired me to come up with the fragment of song. I've known a lot of long, cold summers in my time. That's not to say that the cold is external. Growing up in the desert (even if we try to paint it green with borrowed water), I've known weeks of waking up in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, of having a sheen of sweat burst forth from my forehead the moment I take a step outside with no consideration for the fact that I have miles yet to walk, of having the blood run so hot beneath the skin that it feels like fever even when it isn't, of breathing air that burns the lungs and scorches the throat and seems evacuated of oxygen. And, physically, I expect this summer to be like those other summers.
Internally, though--internally, it will be cold. So cold that I'll be able to sit and sweat and think for hours on loneliness, for want of anything better to do or anywhere else to go.
I've been on a school schedule for most of the years of my life now, and that brings with it a boom-and-bust cycle of socialization. I meet people during the school year, and that's good. I even form something like friendships with those people after many weeks of forced proximity and sometimes forced cooperation on obnoxious group projects and the unforced but still automatic bitching about instructors and their methods after class. But then summer (or the change of a semester) comes around, and before I've managed to build those friendships into ones that would warrant socialization outside of the class (or, alternately, the office), those nascent friendships are lost to me. There's a big difference between being tossed together by chance and unified in the amicable dissing of a common enemy (be he boss or professor) and achieving that point where I could comfortably ask a person "Hey, you want to come over to my place some time and hang out?" By which I also mean to say "We could watch a movie or maybe play a board or card game, if you didn't think that was too socially deviant, but I don't know you well enough as yet to know whether you'd consider that deviant or not. Or maybe we could just talk, because you know, there are times when I need to hear another human voice. I'm trying to minimize the amount of pressure I'm exerting on you here, knowing full well that you'll probably say no, or maybe say yes just to be polite and even feign enthusiasm but that doesn't imply any kind of follow-through. Please? I could really use a friend right now."
I've got a girlfriend now to act as a buffer against these boom-and-bust cycles. Call her social insurance, if you will, though I know that sounds callous and overly-mechanical. She keeps me away from the worst of the loneliness. But when I am otherwise lonely outside of my relationship with her, it shows, and then she gets impatient with my feelings of alienation. Not that I blame her, really. But if I am otherwise lonely, then my relationship with her becomes lonely, too. And anyway, she's going to be gone in Europe for much of this summer. So going to her for some small amount of human contact won't really be an option.
And I have other friends. I have friendships that I have cultivated for years, which is the normal course of things for me. It takes me probably one or two years to feel fully comfortable around another person, and to reach that aforementioned level where it's okay to ask for some kind of intimacy beyond the casual interactions that occur when disparate persons are placed essentially haphazardly into close physical proximity (maybe the sorting is guided with respect to intellect and social class, whether at work or in an academic setting, but the factors of emotional compatibility and personality are still essentially random). I form friendships but slowly and carefully, and I can only maintain a few at a time. And when those carefully-laid friendships begin to crumble, as they are for me now, I have no immediate other recourse.
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
Previous summers such as these have given me ample opportunity--no, more like need--to write, and to read. In the silence that comes from a dearth of human voices and the stillness that comes from a dearth of human interaction, I am clacking away at my keyboard, trying to populate my barren universe with fictional characters. Or I am glutting myself on books or films or video games, trying to invite those characters into my desolate life, allowing their stories to take over my own, which is sad and boring. But it doesn't really work. The characters I create are all fragments of me, and I know it, and they can't provide me with real company any more than I can pretend that the person in the mirror is a friend rather than my own reflection. And while other peoples' works can be a balm for a time (see the entry on WoW), I can't allow hide my mind behind other peoples' fictions indefinitely, any more than I could ask another person to dream for me. None of it, really, is a replacement for real human contact. The history of literature has shown that lonely men like me have tried, throughout the ages, to replace the volatility of relationships with the constancy and predictability of books, and it's never really worked. We've got exponentially more media now to distract us from that loneliness than Dante did when he wrote verse for dead Beatrice or Catullus did when he said love is like being crucified. But media can only mask loneliness, it can't really take it away. It's a change in appearance, not in essence.
So maybe I should be grateful for a summer that will demand that I write even if only to keep emptiness from crashing in on me, but it's hard to feel grateful for that.
Another fragment gestated into a full song:
I'm going nowhere
And no-one's waiting there for me
Oh, I will have time this summer. I will have time in abundance. And when I am socially-integrated, I am always regretting the loss of that time I have when I am going nowhere and no-one's waiting there for me. Time to think, and reinforce the same dark tracks of my thinking until they are so deep that I do not know how to extricate myself from them.
The therapist tells me that a painting shut away in a dark cellar where no-one can see it still has value. He tells me that a flower blooming on a distant and desolate mountainside where no-one will ever find it and where it has no chance of producing seed still has value. That these things are not to be disparaged for their lack of connectivity and value to others, but still cherished in and of themselves. He tells me that even if a man should alienate his friends and his love, he still has value. Maybe he's right, but what he says seems damn alien to me a lot of the time.
I know I hate feeling like I can go anywhere or do anything, because nobody really cares what I do, and nobody is waiting for me or wanting me to come back.
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
On The Eating of Vermin, etc.
This past weekend was Easter Weekend, and for the past three years that has meant that I go on up to Julian in the eastern part of San Diego county for the O.C. Friends' Easter Retreat. I could go on about the kindly company of my fellow Quakers or the merits of Camp Stevens, but I will limit myself to one of the highlights of this years' excursion; namely, the eating of worms and scorpions.
There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.
One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.
I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.
I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).
When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.
John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.
The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.
I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.
I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.
Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.
Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.
Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.
So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.
Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.
The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.
I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.
And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."
There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.
The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.
Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.
Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.
My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.
The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.
The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.
I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.
Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.
I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf
And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226
There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.
One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.
I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.
I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).
When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.
John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.
The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.
I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.
I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.
Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.
Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.
Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.
So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.
Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.
The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.
I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.
And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."
There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.
The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.
Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.
Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.
My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.
The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.
The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.
I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.
Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.
I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf
And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Path in the Jungle
Imagine you are cutting a path through a jungle. Your tool is a machete, and with it you begin to hack your way through the vines and bushes and branches of trees.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And yet you press on.
You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.
But it is something, isn't it?
After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.
The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.
And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.
Or maybe you do.
Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.
Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.
And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.
You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?
And yet you press on.
You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.
Is that sufficient?
There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.
Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.
And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.
And yet you press on.
Or maybe you don't.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And yet you press on.
You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.
But it is something, isn't it?
After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.
The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.
And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.
Or maybe you do.
Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.
Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.
And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.
You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?
And yet you press on.
You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.
Is that sufficient?
There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.
Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.
And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.
And yet you press on.
Or maybe you don't.
Once An Addict, Always An Addict
Facing the imminent possibility of the break-up of my D&D group, or the necessity of my leaving it on account of my having made everybody feel too bad about things too often, I've been feeling intensely the desire to return to World of Warcraft--or World of Warcrack, as my boss is given to calling it.
I hate WoW. But I love WoW.
WoW (and EQ before it) is wonderful in providing me with a sense of purpose. "Here's a quest, go do it!" says WoW. And, unlike in other MMORPGs, many of the quests are actually doable. And there are a lot of them. Many hundreds of hours' worth of quests. And in addition to the quests that I could ever actually do, there are a great many more that were contingent upon the assistance of other players, and these always hung just out of reach, like a fruit on Tantalus' tree, and they kept me interested even if I was barely ever able to satisfy them.
The so-called "real world" is very bad about providing me with a sense of purpose. Most times, when I complete a task, the reward is vague or long-term. If I motivate myself sufficiently to do my push-ups and sit-ups in the morning, do I get fanfare and a monetary reward and a sense that the world is right again and an observable increase in my capabilities? No, no, no, and no. If I write a piece, what is the reward? A brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by agonizing doubt, followed by nothing at all, as the piece lingers and dies on my hard drive. Or else goes to a workshop where my fellows pick it apart and show it to be the ugly and ungainly thing it is. That feels like more of a punishment than a reward.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of purpose. Even if I achieve maximum level--a feat which takes about a hundred hours of gametime, if not more, which equates to several weeks of real-world life spent doing nothing other than experience grinding--the finish line recedes away from me. "Oh, you're level 70," says WoW, "That's cute and all, but do you have a thousand gold for an epic flying mount? And you don't have any Tiered gear from the dungeons. So you need to start at the bottom of the level 70 instances and run each one between five to ten times (each run taking several hours to complete, and more hours to initiate and arrange, if it ever gets off the ground at all; most of them don't), and then work your way up until you have the gear you need to go see the biggest and baddest and most exciting dungeons." And all of this participation in the "uber" end-game is contingent upon other people to go into these dungeons with you. So that means that groups fall apart, or that if I am not up to an elite hardcore standard set by people who *only* play WoW in terms of gear or damage per second or knowledge of the intricacies of every little aspect of the dungeon, I am open to extreme and mean-spirited criticism at any time.
WoW is wonderful in providing me with a sense of discovery. Every new quest and new zone is an opportunity to see something new. And I like exploring. Not physically, so much, but intellectually, absolutely. There was so much to see in WoW--I don't know how many virtual miles of terrain actually exist in the game, but it's a lot. There are caves, and marsh channels, and purple-leafed forests, and cities built atop colossal mushrooms, and floating islands, and all kinds of interesting things to check out. And all of it filled with ore deposits and rare herbs and treasure chests and other exciting things to find, as well as strange beasts. And there are a number of classes to try, each with its own different playstyle.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of discovery. With all those pressures to get more gold and get better gear, now now now now now, many times it's difficult to actually appreciate exploring the virtual world. And with all of the pressure on being uber, the pressure is always on to copy somebody else's approach to playing one's class, or to be open to such comments as "You suck" or "You fail at life" or "Learn to play" if one does not. That, and it becomes abundantly clear after a while that the game rewards certain classes and builds (i.e., the ones that do a lot of damage) and punishes others that might have utility but that utility is too limited in solo play. But I know there are some people who always have groups and for whom this is not an issue; I've just never been one of them. You want to be a healer, or a warrior who uses a sword and shield? Tough shit, unless you're already level 80 with tier 8 gear (or whatever it is these days).
That, and over the course of leveling up many characters in both the Horde and the Alliance, I've been there and seen that. The world doesn't change--or if it does, the change is slow in coming. There are no seasons and no weather. The quality of light is constant. NPCs stand in the same place all day, every day--unless they walk a predictable and prescribed path. If I kill a monster, a few minutes later it will be standing in exactly the same place where it fell, sometimes even looking over its own corpse. If I complete a quest, that same crisis will still be unresolved if I take another character to the same place. The world is persistent--which means that there is nothing I can do that will have any lasting effect on the game world. How could it, if it were to mean that one character gets to do something and then it is closed off to all of the thousands of other players on the server? I guess some Chinese or Korean MMORPGs have such things, but that is a large part of why they are terrible.
I love WoW because it makes me feel like I'm not alone.
I hate WoW because it makes me realize how alone I really am. The other players in WoW--they don't tend to be people who appreciate quality fantasy literature, or epic poetry, or even tabletop RPGs. They approach WoW from the perspective of a FPS (i.e., a first person shooter). To them, WoW is like Halo. What matters is score, kill count, and superiority. If they meet you in battle, they will kill you and then humiliate your corpse by an act of virtual rape, and then they will probably hang around for ten or fifteen minutes just to prevent you from getting back up and playing again. If they are in your group, they will constantly be checking damage meters and bragging about their primacy and criticizing those on the bottom. I'm not like that. I care about story and feelings and setting. And when I take all kinds of criticism because I'm not hardcore enough, it only serves to hurt me. A lot.
Or when the other players do want to discuss things, it tends to be television shows, or abrasive and uninformed political commentary, or how work sucks, or such things. It's generic, uninteresting, unstimulating, impersonal.
Or when the other players do want to engage in the actual "role-playing" elements of an MMORPG, it's even worse. They manufacture crises for themselves, and play out such dramas as though they mattered. They play at being nobles, or vampires, or great heroes (greater than the other heroes who are all around them), or tragic scions of extinguished families, and other such insufferable narcissistic bullshit. They have feuds and duels and factional wars, for no other reason that to generate conflict and resentment and opportunities for irrelevant antics.
Compounding all this is the fact that people tend to be extremely unpleasant while playing WoW. Much of this unpleasantness is attributed to foreigners and teenage boys, but I don't think all of it can be attributed to them. There is the bragging and verbal abuse and humiliation mentioned above. Then there are those people who engage in price gouging by purchasing all the items at auction and re-selling them at higher prices. Then there are the people who incessantly beg for money. Then there are those people who slander Horde or Alliance players in terms that would be hatefully racist, if they weren't referring to virtual identities. Then there are those people who overreact with threats or profanity at even the slightest of mistakes (or non-mistakes). Then there are those people who abandon your group for no reason at all. Then there are those people who refuse to help out with even the smallest of tasks, even when such an alliance would clearly be of mutual benefit, and instead insist on working at cross-purposes.
Two of my books now have been about the failure of the virtual world to sustain interest and a sense of self-worth. My current novel, After Life, describes an MMORPG that is so immersive that the characters have forgotten that they are characters at all, and they play out all of the racism and greed and meaningless agonistics that choke the real world, believing all the while that these tendencies are "perfection" in their virtual utopia. But, of course, it's all crap, isn't it?
All this...and it draws me back. Like the need of a clean junkie for just one last needle, WoW tries to pull me back in. It gets worst whenever I experience a fit of depression; then it seems most soothing to submerge my consciousness in a virtual world for a while, and so afford my soul a chance to regenerate. Until, of course, the injuries I sustain in WoW hurl me back out again.
I don't want to go back to playing WoW. I don't want to get back to those days when I begrudged the 30 seconds it took to go to the kitchen to get a cereal bar or to go to the bathroom to urinate before plunging back into playing again. I don't want to feel that intense sense of inferiority to those cruel bastard braggarts who enjoy making others feel bad about themselves, and so often feeling as though I am failing at life.
But there's an entire continent I've yet to explore, and a class I've yet to try. And I have been very depressed lately.
Fuck.
WoW is haunting my thoughts right now; recurring every thirty to sixty seconds or so. It won't be much--just a slight sting, an ache, a pang; a screenshot, a memory, a "What if" moment.
We shall overcome.
I hope.
I hate WoW. But I love WoW.
WoW (and EQ before it) is wonderful in providing me with a sense of purpose. "Here's a quest, go do it!" says WoW. And, unlike in other MMORPGs, many of the quests are actually doable. And there are a lot of them. Many hundreds of hours' worth of quests. And in addition to the quests that I could ever actually do, there are a great many more that were contingent upon the assistance of other players, and these always hung just out of reach, like a fruit on Tantalus' tree, and they kept me interested even if I was barely ever able to satisfy them.
The so-called "real world" is very bad about providing me with a sense of purpose. Most times, when I complete a task, the reward is vague or long-term. If I motivate myself sufficiently to do my push-ups and sit-ups in the morning, do I get fanfare and a monetary reward and a sense that the world is right again and an observable increase in my capabilities? No, no, no, and no. If I write a piece, what is the reward? A brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by agonizing doubt, followed by nothing at all, as the piece lingers and dies on my hard drive. Or else goes to a workshop where my fellows pick it apart and show it to be the ugly and ungainly thing it is. That feels like more of a punishment than a reward.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of purpose. Even if I achieve maximum level--a feat which takes about a hundred hours of gametime, if not more, which equates to several weeks of real-world life spent doing nothing other than experience grinding--the finish line recedes away from me. "Oh, you're level 70," says WoW, "That's cute and all, but do you have a thousand gold for an epic flying mount? And you don't have any Tiered gear from the dungeons. So you need to start at the bottom of the level 70 instances and run each one between five to ten times (each run taking several hours to complete, and more hours to initiate and arrange, if it ever gets off the ground at all; most of them don't), and then work your way up until you have the gear you need to go see the biggest and baddest and most exciting dungeons." And all of this participation in the "uber" end-game is contingent upon other people to go into these dungeons with you. So that means that groups fall apart, or that if I am not up to an elite hardcore standard set by people who *only* play WoW in terms of gear or damage per second or knowledge of the intricacies of every little aspect of the dungeon, I am open to extreme and mean-spirited criticism at any time.
WoW is wonderful in providing me with a sense of discovery. Every new quest and new zone is an opportunity to see something new. And I like exploring. Not physically, so much, but intellectually, absolutely. There was so much to see in WoW--I don't know how many virtual miles of terrain actually exist in the game, but it's a lot. There are caves, and marsh channels, and purple-leafed forests, and cities built atop colossal mushrooms, and floating islands, and all kinds of interesting things to check out. And all of it filled with ore deposits and rare herbs and treasure chests and other exciting things to find, as well as strange beasts. And there are a number of classes to try, each with its own different playstyle.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of discovery. With all those pressures to get more gold and get better gear, now now now now now, many times it's difficult to actually appreciate exploring the virtual world. And with all of the pressure on being uber, the pressure is always on to copy somebody else's approach to playing one's class, or to be open to such comments as "You suck" or "You fail at life" or "Learn to play" if one does not. That, and it becomes abundantly clear after a while that the game rewards certain classes and builds (i.e., the ones that do a lot of damage) and punishes others that might have utility but that utility is too limited in solo play. But I know there are some people who always have groups and for whom this is not an issue; I've just never been one of them. You want to be a healer, or a warrior who uses a sword and shield? Tough shit, unless you're already level 80 with tier 8 gear (or whatever it is these days).
That, and over the course of leveling up many characters in both the Horde and the Alliance, I've been there and seen that. The world doesn't change--or if it does, the change is slow in coming. There are no seasons and no weather. The quality of light is constant. NPCs stand in the same place all day, every day--unless they walk a predictable and prescribed path. If I kill a monster, a few minutes later it will be standing in exactly the same place where it fell, sometimes even looking over its own corpse. If I complete a quest, that same crisis will still be unresolved if I take another character to the same place. The world is persistent--which means that there is nothing I can do that will have any lasting effect on the game world. How could it, if it were to mean that one character gets to do something and then it is closed off to all of the thousands of other players on the server? I guess some Chinese or Korean MMORPGs have such things, but that is a large part of why they are terrible.
I love WoW because it makes me feel like I'm not alone.
I hate WoW because it makes me realize how alone I really am. The other players in WoW--they don't tend to be people who appreciate quality fantasy literature, or epic poetry, or even tabletop RPGs. They approach WoW from the perspective of a FPS (i.e., a first person shooter). To them, WoW is like Halo. What matters is score, kill count, and superiority. If they meet you in battle, they will kill you and then humiliate your corpse by an act of virtual rape, and then they will probably hang around for ten or fifteen minutes just to prevent you from getting back up and playing again. If they are in your group, they will constantly be checking damage meters and bragging about their primacy and criticizing those on the bottom. I'm not like that. I care about story and feelings and setting. And when I take all kinds of criticism because I'm not hardcore enough, it only serves to hurt me. A lot.
Or when the other players do want to discuss things, it tends to be television shows, or abrasive and uninformed political commentary, or how work sucks, or such things. It's generic, uninteresting, unstimulating, impersonal.
Or when the other players do want to engage in the actual "role-playing" elements of an MMORPG, it's even worse. They manufacture crises for themselves, and play out such dramas as though they mattered. They play at being nobles, or vampires, or great heroes (greater than the other heroes who are all around them), or tragic scions of extinguished families, and other such insufferable narcissistic bullshit. They have feuds and duels and factional wars, for no other reason that to generate conflict and resentment and opportunities for irrelevant antics.
Compounding all this is the fact that people tend to be extremely unpleasant while playing WoW. Much of this unpleasantness is attributed to foreigners and teenage boys, but I don't think all of it can be attributed to them. There is the bragging and verbal abuse and humiliation mentioned above. Then there are those people who engage in price gouging by purchasing all the items at auction and re-selling them at higher prices. Then there are the people who incessantly beg for money. Then there are those people who slander Horde or Alliance players in terms that would be hatefully racist, if they weren't referring to virtual identities. Then there are those people who overreact with threats or profanity at even the slightest of mistakes (or non-mistakes). Then there are those people who abandon your group for no reason at all. Then there are those people who refuse to help out with even the smallest of tasks, even when such an alliance would clearly be of mutual benefit, and instead insist on working at cross-purposes.
Two of my books now have been about the failure of the virtual world to sustain interest and a sense of self-worth. My current novel, After Life, describes an MMORPG that is so immersive that the characters have forgotten that they are characters at all, and they play out all of the racism and greed and meaningless agonistics that choke the real world, believing all the while that these tendencies are "perfection" in their virtual utopia. But, of course, it's all crap, isn't it?
All this...and it draws me back. Like the need of a clean junkie for just one last needle, WoW tries to pull me back in. It gets worst whenever I experience a fit of depression; then it seems most soothing to submerge my consciousness in a virtual world for a while, and so afford my soul a chance to regenerate. Until, of course, the injuries I sustain in WoW hurl me back out again.
I don't want to go back to playing WoW. I don't want to get back to those days when I begrudged the 30 seconds it took to go to the kitchen to get a cereal bar or to go to the bathroom to urinate before plunging back into playing again. I don't want to feel that intense sense of inferiority to those cruel bastard braggarts who enjoy making others feel bad about themselves, and so often feeling as though I am failing at life.
But there's an entire continent I've yet to explore, and a class I've yet to try. And I have been very depressed lately.
Fuck.
WoW is haunting my thoughts right now; recurring every thirty to sixty seconds or so. It won't be much--just a slight sting, an ache, a pang; a screenshot, a memory, a "What if" moment.
We shall overcome.
I hope.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Reflections on Battlestar Galactica
The BSG era has come to a close. There might be subsequent spin-offs, but BSG in its essence has ended.
I only started getting into the series last September or so. For a long time I was inclined to lump Battlestar Galactica in with the rest of the drek on the Sci-Fi channel (or the SyFy channel as it is soon to be known, which goes to show how very little the channel's executives actually care about science fiction). Oh, a remake of that sucky Star-Wars-coattail-riding Battlestar Galactica show I saw as a kid? Yeah, let me get right on that. It can't be any worse than the Stargate spinoffs. I'll definitely schedule my Friday evenings around the watching of such a show.
Hell, I thought the original BSG was stupid when I was five. And I was a lot more forgiving of stupidity when I was five, as long as it was stupidity with space ships and robots and lasers.
But last fall, after hearing good things about it from people whose opinion I respect, I began looking more into the show. I noticed that it had scored emmys for writing; for *writing*, of all things. That's not something I'd expect from a show that was of the caliber of the Star Gates or any of the more recent Star Treks.
You see, gentle reader, when science fiction and fantasy and horror are at their best, they are some of the best fictions we have. People with small imaginations--the kind of people who use phrases like "truth is stranger than fiction" or "you can't make this stuff up" or "I was disappointed to find out that it didn't actually happen like it did in the movie" or "with so much interesting stuff going on in the world, why would you want to make anything up?"--refuse the validity of that which strays too far from their perceived reality. If it doesn't speak to their own particular reality--that of being a liberal middle-class caucasian around thirty years of age and living in 21st centurty Southern California or WHATEVER--it has no meaning for them.
And you know, I think those people are not entirely unjustified in dismissing speculative fiction. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror *does not* speak to any kind of reality. Certainly, there are the fantastic elements, but more critically, these forms usually do not speak to the realities of personal experience and personality and psychology. The speculative fictions indulge in a fetishistic worship of the conventions of genre, forgetting that stories--in whatever form--are supposed to be about people. Not about gods or emotionless monsters or sword fights or giant ships crusing between the stars. If the people in a story are not interesting and conflicted and complicated and complex, then the rest of the story is not interesting, no matter how much you cram it full of laser-spears or seven-foot tall bald dudes with weird tattoos or bad-ass mutant zombies or what have you. And that is why, even speaking from the point of relative ignorance whereby I have only seen scattershot clips or single episodes of the Star Gates and the post-TNG Star Treks and Babylon 5 and any number of other fantastic shows I can say, with confidence, that they all fucking suck.
But when science fiction or fantasy or horror *are* good and *do* have interesting characters, then they can serve to show us our own reality in a new light. They can explore possibilities, both psychological and scientific, in a way that straight fiction simply can't. Just as dreams can show us things about ourselves that literal, expository dialogue never could. The trick is to bring it back from that dislocated reality and socket it back into place with our own literal realities. The trick is to wake up from that dream (or vision or nightmare) of raw imagination and put it into context with experience. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror never bothers to do so. Maybe horror is justified in getting away with it sometimes, as horror is about the exploration of what happens when reality breaks down, but I'd still posit that horror is most interesting when its characters have a psychological reality--R.J. MacReady or Kirsty, instead of an utterly fungible twenty-four year old breast-augmented and already-faded starlet.
So when I went to watch BSG, I was watching it for the characters. I wanted the special effects to be good, of course--and they are. The CG space battles are as good as anything I've seen, and the CG cylons are honestly terrifying (at least in the first season). More telling, though, was the fact that all the enemies *weren't* CG; the pilot introduces cylons who look exactly like humans. It also shows a city with trees and fountains and streets. People aren't decked out in silly silver spacesuits or heavy robes or body paint, but wear clothing that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary city. When the soldiers pull their guns, they have pistols and assault rifles, not laser weapons that fire beams of animated light (that perversely travel far slower than projectiles, such that you can actually see them go across the screen; go figure). It's as if the science fiction elements--the robots, the spaceships--were dropped directly into a contemporary or very-near-future society, and nothing else is changed. There's no Trek-like utopia. There's still racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, economic strife. The better to allow the characters to be real. And the conflict between the humans and cylons is ultimately a metaphor for such things as racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, and economic strife. It's not an easy battle between good and evil. Very soon, it becomes clear that these cylons are not your daddy's (and certainly my own father's) easy-to-hate Others who have no conscience and no identity outside of being evil.
Still, I wasn't sold on the show. At the outset, the characters were more interesting than those of most science fiction shows. But I didn't know if they were interesting enough. Commander William Adama, as played by Edward James Olmos, is a father figure who sometimes struggles to balance his personal feelings with the responsibilities of his post. He strives to keep control over his ship and the remnants of the human race, and that control often slips. It's an interesting character, and certainly more interesting than the kind of benevolent paternal authority figure who is always right about everything (see Lorne Greene in the original BSG), but it is one that I felt I had seen often enough before. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, as played by Katee Sackhoff, is a rebellious hotshot who has trouble with authority. I *knew* I had seen *that* character before. But Colonel Saul Tigh, as played by Michael Hogan, is an alcoholic who experiences no miraculous recovery in the course of his character arc. He is abusive, both with himself and with others. And yet he is utterly dedicated to his job and gives as much as he can to the honor of his office, and he is lost without his uniform and his position to define him. Now this was something I had not quite seen before.
I was still dubious about BSG for the first half of the season. I appreciated the changes between the pilot and the first actual episode: the ship got darker, tighter, and the shots were more close-ups shot at cramped angles. The show was becoming more intimate, and more intense. But I didn't yet know if it really had characters--and so stories--that would keep me interested.
I wasn't completely sold on BSG until episode 1-8, entitled "Flesh and Bone." In it, Starbuck goes to interview a Cylon prisoner about a bomb threat. And by interview, it is understood that she is planning to torture him for information. When this was starting out, I was expecting something along the lines of 24, wherein the bad guy is put through excessive and gratuitous pain before he caves and tells everything he knows, and then the good guys rush off to save the day. I was thinking this was where BSG was going to lose me, even as 24 has lost me.
And that is how things start. But the Cylon is not spiteful or defiant. He doesn't condemn Starbuck or humankind, indulge in racial epithets, or do anything that would invalidate him or justify the torture. Instead, he questions Starbuck on her own morality and spirituality. Starbuck is unnerved by this intimate contact with the hated machine enemy, and ceases to be an effective torturer.
The episode resolves with the President of the surviving humans, who had up until that point been an almost too-sympathetic character, lying to the cylon and promising him his safety if he reveals the location of the bomb. The cylon reveals that there is no bomb, and the President has him blasted out of an airlock.
Now this was something I definitely hadn't seen before at all.
The characters are further made interesting by their struggles to define their own humanity. Some of the "humans" are revealed to be cylons, and have to reconcile themselves to this knowledge in some way. Others come to love cylons, or at least think cylons have some claim to be free from persecution.
In the end, there is no difference between man and machine. The creator is not divorced from his creation. What we do is who we are. Our essence is not divisble from our actions.
Good and evil--human and cylon--are labels applied after the fact to try to simplify beings with limited capabilities who are compelled to make choices in a complex world. And these labels are ultimately shown to be bereft of real meaning.
Having spent most of my life feeling excluded from humanity, it's natural for me to sympathize with the monsters in a piece of fiction, and so this kind of thing is right up my alley. My own personal issues aside, I do believe that the exploration and examination of what makes us human is a worthy one. I think it's too easy to assume that "personhood" is restricted to only living, organic humans. Or, better yet, that it's restricted to people of a certain race or creed, and that everybody who is not a member of a certain in-group has no right to life. I think speculative fiction, when it is at its best, challenges our narrow definitions of what it is to be "human." BSG certainly does that.
Maybe the reversals are too facile in some cases, especially in the last season. I felt like a lot of the shows towards the end, after the false duality of cylon and human has largely been deconstructed, try too hard to show that cylons have feelings, too, and are sad when they have miscarriages or when they lose a loved one or when they are unloved. But I'm still glad that those reversals exist at all. Again, good speculative fiction challenges the assumptions of its characters. Immature and fetishstic speculative fiction (and most video games, and most fan fiction) doesn't ever challenge the characters' beliefs in any serious way. And while I don't always like the way BSG handles these developments, and there were times when I felt like I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Space for all of the overwrought drama, I would say that BSG does hit the mark at least as often as not in creating meaningful and defining moments for its characters.
So I am going to miss BSG. It is the kind of sophisticated, intelligent speculative fiction that I always want and so rarely get.
Unless I write it myself. Which I try to do.
I only started getting into the series last September or so. For a long time I was inclined to lump Battlestar Galactica in with the rest of the drek on the Sci-Fi channel (or the SyFy channel as it is soon to be known, which goes to show how very little the channel's executives actually care about science fiction). Oh, a remake of that sucky Star-Wars-coattail-riding Battlestar Galactica show I saw as a kid? Yeah, let me get right on that. It can't be any worse than the Stargate spinoffs. I'll definitely schedule my Friday evenings around the watching of such a show.
Hell, I thought the original BSG was stupid when I was five. And I was a lot more forgiving of stupidity when I was five, as long as it was stupidity with space ships and robots and lasers.
But last fall, after hearing good things about it from people whose opinion I respect, I began looking more into the show. I noticed that it had scored emmys for writing; for *writing*, of all things. That's not something I'd expect from a show that was of the caliber of the Star Gates or any of the more recent Star Treks.
You see, gentle reader, when science fiction and fantasy and horror are at their best, they are some of the best fictions we have. People with small imaginations--the kind of people who use phrases like "truth is stranger than fiction" or "you can't make this stuff up" or "I was disappointed to find out that it didn't actually happen like it did in the movie" or "with so much interesting stuff going on in the world, why would you want to make anything up?"--refuse the validity of that which strays too far from their perceived reality. If it doesn't speak to their own particular reality--that of being a liberal middle-class caucasian around thirty years of age and living in 21st centurty Southern California or WHATEVER--it has no meaning for them.
And you know, I think those people are not entirely unjustified in dismissing speculative fiction. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror *does not* speak to any kind of reality. Certainly, there are the fantastic elements, but more critically, these forms usually do not speak to the realities of personal experience and personality and psychology. The speculative fictions indulge in a fetishistic worship of the conventions of genre, forgetting that stories--in whatever form--are supposed to be about people. Not about gods or emotionless monsters or sword fights or giant ships crusing between the stars. If the people in a story are not interesting and conflicted and complicated and complex, then the rest of the story is not interesting, no matter how much you cram it full of laser-spears or seven-foot tall bald dudes with weird tattoos or bad-ass mutant zombies or what have you. And that is why, even speaking from the point of relative ignorance whereby I have only seen scattershot clips or single episodes of the Star Gates and the post-TNG Star Treks and Babylon 5 and any number of other fantastic shows I can say, with confidence, that they all fucking suck.
But when science fiction or fantasy or horror *are* good and *do* have interesting characters, then they can serve to show us our own reality in a new light. They can explore possibilities, both psychological and scientific, in a way that straight fiction simply can't. Just as dreams can show us things about ourselves that literal, expository dialogue never could. The trick is to bring it back from that dislocated reality and socket it back into place with our own literal realities. The trick is to wake up from that dream (or vision or nightmare) of raw imagination and put it into context with experience. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror never bothers to do so. Maybe horror is justified in getting away with it sometimes, as horror is about the exploration of what happens when reality breaks down, but I'd still posit that horror is most interesting when its characters have a psychological reality--R.J. MacReady or Kirsty, instead of an utterly fungible twenty-four year old breast-augmented and already-faded starlet.
So when I went to watch BSG, I was watching it for the characters. I wanted the special effects to be good, of course--and they are. The CG space battles are as good as anything I've seen, and the CG cylons are honestly terrifying (at least in the first season). More telling, though, was the fact that all the enemies *weren't* CG; the pilot introduces cylons who look exactly like humans. It also shows a city with trees and fountains and streets. People aren't decked out in silly silver spacesuits or heavy robes or body paint, but wear clothing that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary city. When the soldiers pull their guns, they have pistols and assault rifles, not laser weapons that fire beams of animated light (that perversely travel far slower than projectiles, such that you can actually see them go across the screen; go figure). It's as if the science fiction elements--the robots, the spaceships--were dropped directly into a contemporary or very-near-future society, and nothing else is changed. There's no Trek-like utopia. There's still racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, economic strife. The better to allow the characters to be real. And the conflict between the humans and cylons is ultimately a metaphor for such things as racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, and economic strife. It's not an easy battle between good and evil. Very soon, it becomes clear that these cylons are not your daddy's (and certainly my own father's) easy-to-hate Others who have no conscience and no identity outside of being evil.
Still, I wasn't sold on the show. At the outset, the characters were more interesting than those of most science fiction shows. But I didn't know if they were interesting enough. Commander William Adama, as played by Edward James Olmos, is a father figure who sometimes struggles to balance his personal feelings with the responsibilities of his post. He strives to keep control over his ship and the remnants of the human race, and that control often slips. It's an interesting character, and certainly more interesting than the kind of benevolent paternal authority figure who is always right about everything (see Lorne Greene in the original BSG), but it is one that I felt I had seen often enough before. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, as played by Katee Sackhoff, is a rebellious hotshot who has trouble with authority. I *knew* I had seen *that* character before. But Colonel Saul Tigh, as played by Michael Hogan, is an alcoholic who experiences no miraculous recovery in the course of his character arc. He is abusive, both with himself and with others. And yet he is utterly dedicated to his job and gives as much as he can to the honor of his office, and he is lost without his uniform and his position to define him. Now this was something I had not quite seen before.
I was still dubious about BSG for the first half of the season. I appreciated the changes between the pilot and the first actual episode: the ship got darker, tighter, and the shots were more close-ups shot at cramped angles. The show was becoming more intimate, and more intense. But I didn't yet know if it really had characters--and so stories--that would keep me interested.
I wasn't completely sold on BSG until episode 1-8, entitled "Flesh and Bone." In it, Starbuck goes to interview a Cylon prisoner about a bomb threat. And by interview, it is understood that she is planning to torture him for information. When this was starting out, I was expecting something along the lines of 24, wherein the bad guy is put through excessive and gratuitous pain before he caves and tells everything he knows, and then the good guys rush off to save the day. I was thinking this was where BSG was going to lose me, even as 24 has lost me.
And that is how things start. But the Cylon is not spiteful or defiant. He doesn't condemn Starbuck or humankind, indulge in racial epithets, or do anything that would invalidate him or justify the torture. Instead, he questions Starbuck on her own morality and spirituality. Starbuck is unnerved by this intimate contact with the hated machine enemy, and ceases to be an effective torturer.
The episode resolves with the President of the surviving humans, who had up until that point been an almost too-sympathetic character, lying to the cylon and promising him his safety if he reveals the location of the bomb. The cylon reveals that there is no bomb, and the President has him blasted out of an airlock.
Now this was something I definitely hadn't seen before at all.
The characters are further made interesting by their struggles to define their own humanity. Some of the "humans" are revealed to be cylons, and have to reconcile themselves to this knowledge in some way. Others come to love cylons, or at least think cylons have some claim to be free from persecution.
In the end, there is no difference between man and machine. The creator is not divorced from his creation. What we do is who we are. Our essence is not divisble from our actions.
Good and evil--human and cylon--are labels applied after the fact to try to simplify beings with limited capabilities who are compelled to make choices in a complex world. And these labels are ultimately shown to be bereft of real meaning.
Having spent most of my life feeling excluded from humanity, it's natural for me to sympathize with the monsters in a piece of fiction, and so this kind of thing is right up my alley. My own personal issues aside, I do believe that the exploration and examination of what makes us human is a worthy one. I think it's too easy to assume that "personhood" is restricted to only living, organic humans. Or, better yet, that it's restricted to people of a certain race or creed, and that everybody who is not a member of a certain in-group has no right to life. I think speculative fiction, when it is at its best, challenges our narrow definitions of what it is to be "human." BSG certainly does that.
Maybe the reversals are too facile in some cases, especially in the last season. I felt like a lot of the shows towards the end, after the false duality of cylon and human has largely been deconstructed, try too hard to show that cylons have feelings, too, and are sad when they have miscarriages or when they lose a loved one or when they are unloved. But I'm still glad that those reversals exist at all. Again, good speculative fiction challenges the assumptions of its characters. Immature and fetishstic speculative fiction (and most video games, and most fan fiction) doesn't ever challenge the characters' beliefs in any serious way. And while I don't always like the way BSG handles these developments, and there were times when I felt like I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Space for all of the overwrought drama, I would say that BSG does hit the mark at least as often as not in creating meaningful and defining moments for its characters.
So I am going to miss BSG. It is the kind of sophisticated, intelligent speculative fiction that I always want and so rarely get.
Unless I write it myself. Which I try to do.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
On Johnny Cash, Existentialism, and Self Esteem
Today I was reading a text concerning co-dependence and self-defeating behavior. In it, the author says that people with low self-esteem rely on what she calls other-esteem; that is, that they define themselves in terms of how others see them. They evaluate themselves based upon their actions and the reception of those actions, rather than believing that a person has inherent worth and value, as imbued by a creator (a "Higher Power," as she calls it). She makes a distinction between "human beings" who have a sense of self-worth independent of their actions and "human doings" whose self-worth is dependent upon their interactions with others.
I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.
I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.
It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.
I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.
I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.
I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.
I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."
I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?
Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.
My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.
What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.
Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.
Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?
I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.
I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.
We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.
History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.
How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.
Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.
All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.
The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.
The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.
But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.
She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.
I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.
To wit:
"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"
There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry
His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob
His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop
He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop
In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face
Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least
They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast
He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain
Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried
On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died
Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm
His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out
Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought
See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.
But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.
The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.
My God, I love tragedy.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8
Arete.
If I am not excellent, I am not anything.
I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.
I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.
It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.
I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.
I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.
I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.
I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."
I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?
Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.
My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.
What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.
Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.
Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?
I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.
I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.
We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.
History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.
How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.
Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.
All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.
The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.
The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.
But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.
She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.
I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.
To wit:
"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"
There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry
His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob
His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop
He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop
In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face
Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least
They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast
He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain
Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried
On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died
Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm
His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out
Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought
See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.
But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.
The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.
My God, I love tragedy.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8
Arete.
If I am not excellent, I am not anything.
San Diego Radio is the suck
Imagine my excitement, gentle reader, that first time I was driving down to San Diego and was cycling through the FM frequencies and discovered a hard rock station. This is not to disparage the rock radio stations in Orange County, except that KROQ mostly plays music that appeals to seventeen year olds (adolescents, forgive me!) whose musical appreciation does not reach back past Nirvana's Nevermind and, thus, whose opinions of music have been entirely informed by the popular products of the past ten years which are, I can say without reservation, pretty crappy. So I do mean to disparage KROQ. KLOS is not bad, but after listening to that station (and KRTH before it) for years, every single song of the limited setlist was so burned into my brain that I could conjure up a memory of that song from beginning to finish, lyrics and melody and guitar solo and drum line and bass line and all. At some point, even such classics as "Interstate Love Song" and "Sweet Home Alabama" grow tedious for want of a leavening of new material. So, when I stumbled upon KIOZ and heard "Closer" on the radio--"Closer," gentle reader, "Closer!," with half the song being modified into scratchy sounds where all the f-words are supposed to be!--you can imagine my delight. You can also imagine my delight when I found, only .4 up the dial, San Diego's XLNC 1 classical station. Synergy! When I grew tired of the hard rock, I could listen to the Beethoven and Mendelssohn that I have been coming to love, which are not unlike metal in their own rights.
I maintained this enthusiasm for a week. Then went through a phase of pleased acceptance. That gave way to disinterest, which ultimately degenerated into out-and-out disgust.
KIOZ friggin' sucks. As little as I like Korn or the Offspring, I find myself longing for a song by these bands to save me from a spare of uninspired "new" garbage (Saving Abel, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Papa Roach, et cetera). It's a sad day when I actually think that a Slipknot or Linkin park song is the best song I've heard all day, or when I can at least concede that Disturbed has a good sense of rythm even if their melodies are trite and their lyrics are stupid and David Draiman still sounds like a grunting chimpanzee to me ("Ooooh wa-ah-ah-ah! Get up, come on get down with the sickness!"). Every so often, there'll be this weird inclusion of a "L.A. Woman" or "Castles Made of Sand" or "Paranoid," which just serves to highlight how rock has degraded in the present age, weak as men are now. Even the music from the mid 1990s has merit; I enjoy bands like Pearl Jam, Sublime, Alice in Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. But if you are trying to tell me, as KIOZ does, that these songs with lyrics like "I'm so addicted to / All the things you do / When you roll around with me / Inbetween [sic] the sheets" that play over boring acoustic riffs and then play over hyped-up crunchy power chords are real *music*, then dammit, I will call you out. How dare KIOZ play Jimi Hendrix in conjuction with such crap.
That, and the little tags they play between songs are offensively stupid and unfunny. "Sex is like bridge: if you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand (squishing noises)." What, are we all in sixth grade again (no offense to real pre-adolescents intended!)? "Now for a long block of uninterrupted--(cell phone ringing) Hey, dude, I'm going to have to call you back, I'm busy--a long block of uninterrupted rock." "Now for a big stankin' nugget of your music, bud." Does KIOZ think these puerile antics help to sell their station in any way? Ugh.
There are times when I grow disgusted with KIOZ and turn on the local classical station, XLNC 1, but I find it to be very much inferior to Orange County/LA's KUSC. The station seems to be completely automated during the day, such that there's no knowledgeable DJ giving an introduction and context for each piece as there is on KUSC. That, and XLNC 1's selection tends towards the kind of breezy, inoffensive classical music that made me hate classical music for so long and that I've only in the past year been able to overlook in order to find music that has power and depth and drama. I mean, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is cute and all, but can we get some Beethoven's Third or Fifth or some Spanish guitar or some Stravinsky or some Gustav Holst all up in here? No? Alright, fine.
O San Diego radio, how you have let me down. I had such high hopes. Our relationship started off so well.
I maintained this enthusiasm for a week. Then went through a phase of pleased acceptance. That gave way to disinterest, which ultimately degenerated into out-and-out disgust.
KIOZ friggin' sucks. As little as I like Korn or the Offspring, I find myself longing for a song by these bands to save me from a spare of uninspired "new" garbage (Saving Abel, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Papa Roach, et cetera). It's a sad day when I actually think that a Slipknot or Linkin park song is the best song I've heard all day, or when I can at least concede that Disturbed has a good sense of rythm even if their melodies are trite and their lyrics are stupid and David Draiman still sounds like a grunting chimpanzee to me ("Ooooh wa-ah-ah-ah! Get up, come on get down with the sickness!"). Every so often, there'll be this weird inclusion of a "L.A. Woman" or "Castles Made of Sand" or "Paranoid," which just serves to highlight how rock has degraded in the present age, weak as men are now. Even the music from the mid 1990s has merit; I enjoy bands like Pearl Jam, Sublime, Alice in Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. But if you are trying to tell me, as KIOZ does, that these songs with lyrics like "I'm so addicted to / All the things you do / When you roll around with me / Inbetween [sic] the sheets" that play over boring acoustic riffs and then play over hyped-up crunchy power chords are real *music*, then dammit, I will call you out. How dare KIOZ play Jimi Hendrix in conjuction with such crap.
That, and the little tags they play between songs are offensively stupid and unfunny. "Sex is like bridge: if you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand (squishing noises)." What, are we all in sixth grade again (no offense to real pre-adolescents intended!)? "Now for a long block of uninterrupted--(cell phone ringing) Hey, dude, I'm going to have to call you back, I'm busy--a long block of uninterrupted rock." "Now for a big stankin' nugget of your music, bud." Does KIOZ think these puerile antics help to sell their station in any way? Ugh.
There are times when I grow disgusted with KIOZ and turn on the local classical station, XLNC 1, but I find it to be very much inferior to Orange County/LA's KUSC. The station seems to be completely automated during the day, such that there's no knowledgeable DJ giving an introduction and context for each piece as there is on KUSC. That, and XLNC 1's selection tends towards the kind of breezy, inoffensive classical music that made me hate classical music for so long and that I've only in the past year been able to overlook in order to find music that has power and depth and drama. I mean, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is cute and all, but can we get some Beethoven's Third or Fifth or some Spanish guitar or some Stravinsky or some Gustav Holst all up in here? No? Alright, fine.
O San Diego radio, how you have let me down. I had such high hopes. Our relationship started off so well.
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