Today something happened in our world that may easily appear trivial. On one level, I would quite like to ignore it; to go to work tomorrow and think about all the things coming next around the bend. I rather expect most would; perhaps the outwardly cruel among us who did not ignore it would choose instead to laugh about it, and the inwardly cruel - at one time or another almost all of us - might divide it away from themselves into that mental compartment where the entirety of the rest of the world is kept, and tended to with a different standard than we hold for ourselves.
Our cat, Rocky, was neutered today, a few days short of our estimate of his first birthday. If I have been thinking about it a lot - and had, indeed, thought about it a great deal in the months leading up to now - it is not because I need to, but because I have grown obsessed with certain principles. I am not a perfect person but there are principles I know to be true, principles that are incontrovertible to me, and a person is only self-actualized when they find themselves acting, unquestioning, upon the application of their own principles. Ethics is in doing always and everywhere what you are certain to be right.
He didn't deserve to get neutered, for he has only acted always and purely like a cat since the day we brought him home. He has been - I hope beyond hope - happy, and comfortable, and fulfilled of his needs. The toys we buy for him often have a wheel of "pet's needs" on the back, with pie slices for emotional and physical and health needs of all kinds. I did not see the need to procreate listed on a pie slice. But that is what a cat is built to do before everything else. Is it possible for a cat to be happy who cannot fulfill that need?
I suppose there is a lot that goes into answering that question, and I do not dismiss it, but I digress regardless, because I do not know how to answer it. We give him a lot - attention, consideration, and care. He is a member of our family. It hurts us when he is hurt, such as today, when he was so scared, and later, when he was withdrawn. The nature of cat contradicts the nature of a domestic home and a family around the edges, at such times as when he claws and bites me as I reach out of bed in the night, when he often hurts me.
And I suppose neutering is a compromise, an opportunity cost. We, the epitome of evolution, who created the wheel and God and the Quad Stacker, can be so brilliant as to assess overall emotional fulfillment with a formula of clinical and precise logic. The opportunity is that we will be happier, and he will be calmer, and we will need spray him in the face with water less often, and we will need clean off urine-soaked items less often, and our family will feel like a family practicing the human social theory of mutual respect.
Besides, it becomes academic without any good alternatives. I would always be too afraid - of myself, more than anything - to release him into the wild, although I have wandered through those thoughts in my mind more than once, wandering whether his fulfillment years from now, a life of uncertainty and fears and fleeting comforts and so many moments where he can be what he truly is, would have outweighed the happiness we feel with him by our side and equipped with all the measures of our safety, insulated in our world, and of course, his happiness, too, which we hope he feels here with us.
We love him, and he will have a good home, but it is simply and practically impossible to improve upon something's inherent nature, and he is deserving of that, and I wish it could have been his.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
To Learn
It occurs to me now, eons too late, having read a thousand tired internet blog posts, that affectations are a waste of time to both reader and writer when the writer's purpose is not aesthetic. This tired nature is contagious to us; affectations are memes.
When one is writing with aesthetic intentions, affectations can be used in creative ways, most, exactly once, and with limited replay value. If there is a literary equivalent to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, this is it. Sooner or later, your reader is flattened into a disinterested pancake, complete with googled eyeballs.
If there is a lesson, it may be that the purposes of writing are better facilitated by eliminating - always and everywhere - the use of affectations. Try to write only the truth, and eliminate everything, everything, everything else.
Can a meme be the truth? Yes, in its own, localized place, it is as real as anything else. A meme is the active, infected mind that conceives it, and likewise the vulnerable mind that receives it, and the medium traveled, and the past and future. But it is not the feelings it simulates.
It took me a terribly long time, too, to realize that great writing evokes feeling precisely by avoiding memes. Perhaps that told me the true nature of memes - that they are all that we already know. Nothing more, nothing less. Writing that evades memes teaches us - neurologically, it teaches us - and at that level, to teach and to change cannot be divorced. They are the same mechanism.
If I have spent my life until now tilting towards information and objectivity, then I wish to spend the rest of it tilting towards art and aesthetics and subjective truth. I have never believed that a person is too old to change, so long as they carry with them an awareness, a paranoia - or better yet, a superstition - that their own vibrant and changing consciousness will some day wither away.
When one is writing with aesthetic intentions, affectations can be used in creative ways, most, exactly once, and with limited replay value. If there is a literary equivalent to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, this is it. Sooner or later, your reader is flattened into a disinterested pancake, complete with googled eyeballs.
If there is a lesson, it may be that the purposes of writing are better facilitated by eliminating - always and everywhere - the use of affectations. Try to write only the truth, and eliminate everything, everything, everything else.
Can a meme be the truth? Yes, in its own, localized place, it is as real as anything else. A meme is the active, infected mind that conceives it, and likewise the vulnerable mind that receives it, and the medium traveled, and the past and future. But it is not the feelings it simulates.
It took me a terribly long time, too, to realize that great writing evokes feeling precisely by avoiding memes. Perhaps that told me the true nature of memes - that they are all that we already know. Nothing more, nothing less. Writing that evades memes teaches us - neurologically, it teaches us - and at that level, to teach and to change cannot be divorced. They are the same mechanism.
If I have spent my life until now tilting towards information and objectivity, then I wish to spend the rest of it tilting towards art and aesthetics and subjective truth. I have never believed that a person is too old to change, so long as they carry with them an awareness, a paranoia - or better yet, a superstition - that their own vibrant and changing consciousness will some day wither away.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Melody and Moonrise Kingdom
The other night, I felt compelled to watch the 1971 British movie, "Melody", after hearing Wes Anderson reference it in an interview regarding Moonrise Kingdom, and before I went to see just that movie today. I'm glad I watched it first. This is one of those times when you can comprehend and appreciate how an artist has "played jazz", as they say, with an existing work, both thematically as well as in the details.
Melody is fascinating all by itself. It is very unique - an oddity, though I am unable to identify how much of that is due to the age and mediocre production values of the movie. The movie creates a world filled with cultural degeneration permeating everyone and everything. The children in school smoke, drink, more often than not act like wild animals (these could be the cast of Animal House some years earlier); the parents are vain or caddy, all colossally flawed human beings; the teachers are caricatures; the two principal kids can only be products of their environment - Daniel lights his father's newspaper on fire and attacks his best friend, though it is clear he is a victim of upbringing and environment, and that underneath this he is mostly predisposed to kindness. In any case, if the movie allows a miracle, it is that any sanity is possible in such a world. In this case, Melody and Daniel have survived parents and teachers and all the rugrat peers they are constantly surrounded by to become [mostly] sane human beings against the odds.
Despite the notes of satire in the portrayal of the teachers, when order finally breaks down into anarchy, it mostly feels like it had been inevitable. Though Ornshaw's tumult with Daniel follows a wonderful arc, they are sanity among insanity (Ornshaw more sane even than the others), and the force and momentum of the larger groups (the students, the teachers and parents) never cease pushing forward the events of the story.
The resolution of Melody and Daniel's impasse is a formalist choice of theme over the constraints of reality, no matter how chaotic the reality of the movie is portrayed to be. It is the only possible way to play out the romantic and redemptive trajectories of the story. Where else can two 10-year olds in love go but aimlessly into the wildness? That their final mode of transportation is both self-powered and absurd is perhaps a more careful choice than it may initially seem. And, with that, they pass into that transcendent movie-magic space composed of equal parts bliss and oblivion.
By my judgment, Wes Anderson has borrowed many of the right details from Melody, both central - the familial alienation felt by the leads, the delay in showing them together, the 180-degree change of heart among the peers - and smaller - the boy unabashedly enjoying painting nude models, their absurd home lives. Further, the strongest characteristics of Melody that he did not borrow are the ones that contradict his storytelling "toolkit" - the open-book ending, the overwhelming sense of ambiguity, of looking for sense among nonsense. It is also worth noting that the order of inspiration is evident (even if the 40-year gap in release dates wouldn't make it obvious) and I do not believe that a read in reverse would produce similar insights.
Fortunately, Anderson is strong enough with his own tools that a different, also outstanding movie results. The style is its own thing and yet enhances the movie - frames packed with details, the wonderful idiosyncrasy and juxtaposition (the kid on the trampoline when Uncle Ben makes Sam and Suzy talk over the idea of marriage). The music is much more varied than in Melody, though it may be surprising to find the strongest irony in the soundtrack to Melody ("Teach Your Children Well" playing as a kid's homemade pipe bomb destroys a convertible and the kids relentlessly attack the adults). Wes Anderson's music choices are not dissimilar to Tarantino in artistic intent - to embellish a scene, to add a brushstroke to scenes that, when successful, gives them a transcendent quality. The introduction to Moonrise Kingdom, especially, is as integral and interesting and fun as I can remember a movie intro being.
I think it was the best decision of my week to watch these essentially back to back.
Melody is fascinating all by itself. It is very unique - an oddity, though I am unable to identify how much of that is due to the age and mediocre production values of the movie. The movie creates a world filled with cultural degeneration permeating everyone and everything. The children in school smoke, drink, more often than not act like wild animals (these could be the cast of Animal House some years earlier); the parents are vain or caddy, all colossally flawed human beings; the teachers are caricatures; the two principal kids can only be products of their environment - Daniel lights his father's newspaper on fire and attacks his best friend, though it is clear he is a victim of upbringing and environment, and that underneath this he is mostly predisposed to kindness. In any case, if the movie allows a miracle, it is that any sanity is possible in such a world. In this case, Melody and Daniel have survived parents and teachers and all the rugrat peers they are constantly surrounded by to become [mostly] sane human beings against the odds.
Despite the notes of satire in the portrayal of the teachers, when order finally breaks down into anarchy, it mostly feels like it had been inevitable. Though Ornshaw's tumult with Daniel follows a wonderful arc, they are sanity among insanity (Ornshaw more sane even than the others), and the force and momentum of the larger groups (the students, the teachers and parents) never cease pushing forward the events of the story.
The resolution of Melody and Daniel's impasse is a formalist choice of theme over the constraints of reality, no matter how chaotic the reality of the movie is portrayed to be. It is the only possible way to play out the romantic and redemptive trajectories of the story. Where else can two 10-year olds in love go but aimlessly into the wildness? That their final mode of transportation is both self-powered and absurd is perhaps a more careful choice than it may initially seem. And, with that, they pass into that transcendent movie-magic space composed of equal parts bliss and oblivion.
By my judgment, Wes Anderson has borrowed many of the right details from Melody, both central - the familial alienation felt by the leads, the delay in showing them together, the 180-degree change of heart among the peers - and smaller - the boy unabashedly enjoying painting nude models, their absurd home lives. Further, the strongest characteristics of Melody that he did not borrow are the ones that contradict his storytelling "toolkit" - the open-book ending, the overwhelming sense of ambiguity, of looking for sense among nonsense. It is also worth noting that the order of inspiration is evident (even if the 40-year gap in release dates wouldn't make it obvious) and I do not believe that a read in reverse would produce similar insights.
Fortunately, Anderson is strong enough with his own tools that a different, also outstanding movie results. The style is its own thing and yet enhances the movie - frames packed with details, the wonderful idiosyncrasy and juxtaposition (the kid on the trampoline when Uncle Ben makes Sam and Suzy talk over the idea of marriage). The music is much more varied than in Melody, though it may be surprising to find the strongest irony in the soundtrack to Melody ("Teach Your Children Well" playing as a kid's homemade pipe bomb destroys a convertible and the kids relentlessly attack the adults). Wes Anderson's music choices are not dissimilar to Tarantino in artistic intent - to embellish a scene, to add a brushstroke to scenes that, when successful, gives them a transcendent quality. The introduction to Moonrise Kingdom, especially, is as integral and interesting and fun as I can remember a movie intro being.
I think it was the best decision of my week to watch these essentially back to back.
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