Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:

The best defenses against the terrors of existesnce are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary happiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

From G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form:

Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as traveling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.

Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing.

Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question. However it may appear, if such desire, ability, and sufferance be granted, the state or condition that arises as an outcome is, according to the laws here formulated, absolutely unavoidable. In this respect, at least, there is no mystery. We, as universal representatives, can record universal law far enough to say

and so on, and so on you will eventually construct the universe, in every detail and potentiality, as you know it now; but then, again, what you will construct will not be all, for by the time you will have reached what now is, the universe will have expanded into a new order to contain what will then be.

In this sense, in respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us. The snake eats itself, the dog chases its tail.

Damn I knew it!

Well, add A History of Violence to the list below, somewhere in the middle, probably after Munich. It's mostly just funny to me, not really worthy of the self-important seriousness many critics want to attach to it. It's a cartoon version of America and probably says a lot more about how we accept and use violent stories of innocence and corruption (see the two justly lauded sex scenes) rather than any sort of statement about violence and America itself. If you want that shit, just read Richard Slotkin....

1. The New World


This was the best film of 2005, and perhaps the best film of the decade so far. I saw two different versions, and while I preferred the dreamy abstraction of the longer cut, the shorter one has its virtues as well. Malick, more than any other working filmmaker, uses film language for amazingly expressive and intelligent ends which never sacrifice emotional weight. I guess some find his films distant and academic, but I've never been able to see that. For me, Malick's films are so emotionally wrought and felt that this is almost a flaw. What's the point of his films? Perhaps it's just the film itself, and I mean this in a sense that gets to the very basic wonder inherent in art. Our world is reflected back and made new to us, made strange or beautiful. A great film can pull us out of our world, out of ourselves, and hint at a greater whole. This is not a strictly happy or sentimental observation. Evil demonstrates it as much as good. But at the very basest level this film is a testament to the beauty of a life, and as such all life, all Being itself. It's all reaching skyward...

Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

--Emerson, Experience

Malick finds the filmic language to express Emerson's words. When John Smith and Pocahontas fall in love, we see the world itself beginning to swell and bloom, and when he betrays her we see that it has begun to rot. The point, however, is not that the world is reflecting the feelings of the lovers, but that the lovers are part of the world, that their love itself is a creation of the world. The moving final minutes of this film show us our transformation, our connection with the Universe and the Ideal and even Heaven, like the sun peaking through a crowded canopy of trees, light which graces us only momentarily before succumbing to darkness. "All things shining...." as the final words of The Thin Red Line remind us.

2. Brokeback Mountain

Another love story on a slightly different register from The New World. I have the suspicion that this film is admired and disliked for similarly bad reasons, namely political ones. Yet the film itself is apolitical, more concerned with human interaction on a personal level than the fundamental political structures which dictate those interactions. I guess that's my fancy way of saying that this movie is not really a Liberal movie, not to say Leftist. In fact you could make an argument that the very fact that the film concentrates so much on the personal at the expense of the political, it includes narratives of redemption and damnation, that it's closer to a conservative film than a liberal one. If those labels really mean anything.

With that out of the way I can say that this film is one of the best depictions of the sheer silence and loneliness of the American west of any film I've seen. Or to use more up to date terms, "fly-over country." It remains true to its characters in a way that refuses political utilty. Ennis is not gonna move to San Francisco with Jack. He does not consider it an option, it's just not done. He accepts his thwarted desire, stuffs it down and silences it, in a way that Jack can't. This film is more about the problem of masculinity than being "gay" as such (and it's clear to me anyway that Ennis is not really gay, though Jack is): the codes of silence and work that slowly erode a person's spirit to the point where they can't talk anymore, and the pain is, as it were, stuffed in the closet. When men take on the part of being "masculine" we give up a part of ourselves, force it to be silent and hidden. Because the work has to be done, it's not as if one can evade responsibilities, as we so often casually do these days. This film is the tragedy of being gendered as "male," and as such it's movie about something a lot more important and fundamental than being gay. Ennis' one moment of anguish is so very subtle but it carries enormous emotional force. If you can feel the isolation present in every frame of this movie from the opening shot on, the terrible distance and beauty of nature which infuses everything, then your human, and you can certainly empathize with these characters.

3. The Weather Man


As a friend told me, this movie hits pretty close to home sometimes. Essentially about growing up and becoming and adult, which simply means accepting that life is limited and imperfect, but you've got to focus anyway. It's darkly funny, and the running subtext about fast food is a pretty profound critique of the way most of us lead our lives in a sort of shallow distraction. The final scene between father and son is filled with much unsaid pathos, and Nicholas Cage plays it perfectly. The father's advice to his son, one curt sentence, is brutal but also emancipating.

4. Munich


Sort of sickeningly terrifying and yet compelling. The film charts the journey through the moral wasteland of the 20th Century as a endless search for Home. The ethical deadlock strikes me as despair rather than hope, but it's equally powerful nonetheless.

5. Grizzly Man


Funny and weird, and sad of course. It strikes me as being about how we often refuse to see what's in front of us, for the sake of continuing a fiction which we need to survive, even, ironically, to the point of dying for it.

6. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin


Nasty and funny, but it's also on here for the no-so-subtle suggestion that the title character is only one who can have a normal, healthy, happy relationship because he doesn't care about sex as an end in itself.

7. War of the Worlds


Spielberg's other tour of 20th Century horror, this time on the ground, away form the decision makers.

8. 2046

Hollow and fruitless where as the first one, In the Mood for Love, held out an expected promise. Desire is flawed here, too real, too accessible.

9. Wedding Crashers


This just cracked me up. Subtext is pretty clear though: they are too in love with each other to really commit to a woman. It's at least as gay as Brokeback!

10. Kung Fu Hustle


Hey, I needed 10 and this will do! Funny, inventive, a bit too cartoony for my taste, but I was never bored.

So here's my top ten, as promised. I've decide to just post the list now and add comments later, hopefully soon. As for relative quality, take number 1 as a "great" film and 2-3 as "very good" and the rest as just "good."

1. The New World
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. The Weather Man
4. Munich
5. Grizzly Man
6. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin
7. War of the Worlds
8. 2046
9. Wedding Crashers
10. Kung Fu Hustle

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

— Franz Kafka

Well it's been a while, hasn't it? I'm gonna start this puppy up again, and hopefully keep at it more regularly. I'll probably being posting a movies and music round up of 2005 in the next few weeks as I catch up on what the year had to offer.

In the meantime, check out Matt Zoller Seitz's blog "The House Next Door" added on the sidebar. Seitz is one of my favorite critics and one of the few to notice just how great The New World is. (I guess I just gave away my best of 2005 there, oh well!)

See you soon.

FarSideDogCartoon, originally uploaded by rawhite.

Courtesy of Tim, from the Buddha:

"With birth as condition, aging and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair come to be. Such is the origin of this whole mass of suffering."

I live a life of such ease that I only suffer when I desire; when I feel the anxiety of self that a knowledge of death brings. Was Nietzsche right that Buddhism is the religion of a decadent culture?

Emerson's Experience

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, -- neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.

Do yourself a favor and read the rest here. This passage is probably my favorite (though the entire essay is a whirlwind really, one of the great achievements in American literature). Emerson's overwhelming grief at the loss of his son manifests itself here as a loss of grief. Even that, his great loss, falls away and compounds the injury, leaving not even a scar. The loss of his son takes the whole world away with him.

I'm of two minds. It's amazing to look at, most of the time, but perhaps there is less to the visual style than it seems at first. Why copy so slavishly the comic book when you can copy the actual film noir that the comic book is itself a near-parody of? The visual richness of those films cannot be denied I think. But what's at stake in this really? Something like depth? Something as shallow as depth? It would appear so. The visual flatness of the film, it's crude black and white stylings, coincide with the flatness of the content itself. They are not here attempting to depict the darker aspects of human nature or a world devoid of hope, they are skimming the surface, often gloriously so.

Read a poem! You won't regret it. Here's a favorite, Arnold's Dover Beach, a monumental poem:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I like this notion of love as a form of holding true in a world of suffering, confusion, and sadness. Love as solidarity when the beauty of the world hollows itself out, grows dark. But no illusions here, as the final word of the poem makes clear how it turns out.

E.M. Cioran on Nietzsche:

All his hatreds bear indirectly on himself. His weaknesses he proclaims and erects into an ideal; if he execrates himself, Christianity or socialism suffers for it. His diagnosis of nihilism is irrefutable: because he himself is a nihilist, and because he avows it. A pamphleteer in love with his adversaries, he could not have endured himself had he not done battle with himself, against himself--had he not placed his miseries elsewhere, in the others: on them he took revenge for what he was. Having practiced psychology as a hero, he proposed to the enthusiasts of the Inextricable a diversity of stalemates.

We measure his fecundity by the possibility he affords us of continually repudiating him without exhausting him. A nomad mind, he is good at varying his disequilibriums. In all matters, he has championed the pro and the con: this is the procedure of those who give themselves up to speculation for lack of being able to write tragedies--to disperse themselves in many desitinies. Nonetheless, by exhibiting his hysterias, Nietzsche has spared us the shame of ours; his miseries were salutary for us. He has opened the age of "complexes."

You know, things like this have almost convinced me that there are people in the world who will not be happy until they make everything suck.

One of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (it may help you to know that "merde" is french for "shit"):

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less that I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies--my only talent--smelling merde from every quarter, living in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall--on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

It's funny to read that again, and to leaf through my old copy, and see how much of that book in permanently imprinted in my memory. I wish I could re-attain that level of impressionability again, when every book changed my life just a little bit. Something's been lost in the meantime, it seems like nothing can touch me anymore. Is this maturity? If so, what good is it?

Just what I always suspected...

One can open Pascal's Pensees almost at random and find something wonderful. Here's a few that are particulary important for things I have been thinking about:

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life half-way, the most fragile thing in the world.

And:

Neither an abasement which makes us incapable of good nor a holiness free from evil.

Perhaps cynics like me would do well to remember the first part of that sentence, but we would all benefit from remembering the second part. Religion in my mind is an invitation to humility, not self-righteousness.

Schopenhauer:

There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity.

Yes. But what do we do when our loneliness begins to feel vulgar too?

A note on page 8 of the Cambridge edition of The Gay Science:

Plutarch reports that in a temple in the Egyptian city of Sais, there was a veiled statue of the goddess Isis with the inscription: "I am everything that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has ever rasied my veil." In his Critique of Judgement Kant says that this inscription is the "perhaps most sublime thing ever said."

To say the sublime is to attempt to say the unsayable, or, more properly perhaps, to indicate that the unsayable is unsayable. Wittgenstein:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

!!!