2x3x7

Dream Interpretation

2009-11-16T23:58:00.002-05:00

I blame the New Yorker. It's all their fault for printing articles about nightmares and screwing around with impressionable minds like mine.

So, last night I have this dream. The details are a little hazy now, but it's a sort of Alistair Maclean meets Lost scenario involving a scuttled ship that may or may not have been carrying nuclear weapons and a handful of survivors who find themselves trapped on a remote tropical island without either communication devices or firearms but a fairly impressive collection of medieval swords. There are a whole bunch of subplots (none of them erotic, in case you were wondering) but the main story revolves around four people, who I shall call Good Guy, Bad Guy, Scientist Lady and Mystery Girl. After a whole set of clues and at least three dead bodies (that I can remember) Scientist Lady figures out that the ship was wrecked deliberately, for reasons that are never explained but that are immediately clear to everyone involved once the discovery is made. Suspicion falls on Bad Guy and Mystery Girl, who are nowhere to be found, mostly because Bad Guy has lured Mystery Girl into the jungle to poison her so he can have all the prize (whatever that might be) to himself. His greed and treachery prove to be his undoing, however, because when he returns to the group his is confronted by Good Guy, and, not having Mystery Girl by his side, is killed after a protracted and fast-action sword fight. Needless to say, all this happens in full-blown Hollywood action flick mode.

But that's not the disturbing part.

Apparently dissatisfied with the way the dream plays out, my subconsciousness decides to run the whole scenario again. Again the ship runs aground, again the crew starts to die mysteriously, again Scientist Lady does her thing and figures it out. Only this time when Good Guy confronts Bad Guy, Bad Guy gets the jump on him and wounds him badly. Things are looking pretty bleak for Good Guy, until Mystery Girl suddenly appears and proceeds to defeat Bad Guy in hand-to-hand combat (again with the Hollywood action flick effects), before handing herself over to Good Guy and Scientist Lady. Has she had a change of heart? Was she secretly on the side of the righteous? No, it turns out that she learnt about Bad Guy's plan to betray her because she dreamed about it, and decided it was more important to her to get even with him, even if it meant her own undoing.

And no, that isn't the disturbing part either.

The really disturbing part is that the next dream I have involves me lecturing on the underlying themes and motifs in the last two dreams - the central thesis being that the trinity of the Good Guy, the Bad Guy and the Mystery Girl is really a reference to the Holy Trinity (or is it Peter Paul and Mary, with the ship as Puff the Magic Dragon?), or that the whole thing is really a political allegory, with the ship being the ship of State, the Good Guy being capitalism (because of his 'invisible' hands), the Bad Guy being socialism (look, his sword is really a sickle) and the Mystery Girl being fascism. (I swear, my dream self was actually trying to explain this to other people.)

I need help.

Portrait

2009-11-15T23:10:00.003-05:00

I could never be an artist. I think I always knew that. Or at least suspected. It wasn't that I didn't have talent. Though there were days...no, it wasn't that. I just wasn't brave enough, tormented enough. Not enough to be great. And if you're not great as an artist what are you? A craftsman, an entertainer. The silhouette of an artist, all shape and no substance. What Dylan Thomas would call his sullen art. Sullen art. Such a beautiful phrase, that. The kind of phrase I could never...No, I was never meant to be an artist.

They used to tell me all I needed was to have faith. In my talent. In myself. As though faith were ever anything more than a lack of imagination. As if I didn't already have something more important - doubt, and the need to disprove that doubt, the endless circle of frenzy and disillusion, like a dog chasing its tail. And what a tale it was, this unwritten story, the life I once imagined but could never bring to life. All over now, of course, all impossible.

But wasn't it always impossible? Wasn't this the way I always knew it would be? Not a failure of fiction but a fiction of failure? And wasn't that what drew me to it in the first place, the romance of not being good enough? To believe in the impossible. Not to pretend to believe, you understand, but to believe truly, irrevocably, and in the certain knowledge that what you believed could not be true. The passion and the certainty locked together, feeding on each other, like darkness and light. Oh, how foolish the young are, and how heroic. And could it be there is an art to this? To falling short beautifully? But no, I was never an artist. Look at me. If I were an artist would I be sitting here like this, whining and whinging, when really, what has happened to me? Nothing.

No, nothing has happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to me.

Damaged Goods

2009-11-15T11:15:00.001-05:00

Afterwards, God sat under the tree, weeping. Mourning the damage to his most precious fruit.

Identity without ideology

2009-11-14T22:55:00.002-05:00

"But, if feminism becomes a politics of identity, it can safely be drained of ideology. Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals, like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with other members of a group—Irish, Italian, women, or whatever—and try to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists."

- Ariel Levy, Lift and Separate, New Yorker Nov 16 2009.

Exactly.

Identification without ideology means power without purpose; you end up with a louder voice, but with less to say.

The really treacherous part of this is that the impulse towards identity politics is generally well-meaning. It's tempting to be inclusive; after all, there's strength in numbers. But that strength can only be used to achieve the lowest common agenda, and every new constituency you include diminishes the scope of that agenda further, so that in the end you're left with a mass that is all gravity, and no force. In a sense, identity politics is a local optimum - any movement from the status quo comes with an immediate cost and an uncertain (though potentially significant) benefit.

United we stand for nothing, and very still.

Grazing

2009-11-14T00:07:00.001-05:00

Little by little, he takes possession of language. His lines like barbed wire stretched tight across the page.

The mind, blown, passes to where dreams graze like cattle on greener grass.

The Strongest Link

2009-11-13T23:14:00.002-05:00

The way sometimes the poem turns
on a single verb.

My entire happiness comes
from seeing you

smile.

The Malignant and the Maligned

2009-11-13T00:14:00.003-05:00

In other news, you may have seen this story about how couples are substantially more likely to get a divorce if the wife gets cancer than if the husband does, which has been doing the rounds.

What I find interesting about most of the discussion surrounding the story is how there's an implicit assumption that the 'proper' state of things would be for the partner to stick around. Personally, I'm a lot more shocked that more women don't leave, and can't help wondering if the difference isn't so much that men are that much more evil or selfish, but that women are that much more likely to be financially dependent on their spouses and therefore less able to walk away, or just that much more socialized into seeing themselves as doormats. In a truly gender equal world, would more men stay, or more women leave?

Transcendence precedes comparison...and other arguments to watch out for

2009-11-12T23:24:00.002-05:00

It's been a heady week for reading here in Falstaff-land, what with me feverishly alternating between the new Amartya Sen and Alison Bechdel's glorious, glorious Essential Dykes to Watch Out For [1].

Anyway, I'm only a third of the way through the Sen, but I figure if I wait till the end before I blog about it, then I'll end up needing to write a 5,000 word essay and given that I no longer do long posts (or hadn't you noticed) I may as well jot down my thoughts as I go along. What follows may seem a little cryptic if you haven't read the book. Then again, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably like cryptic.

So at one point in the book Sen is making a comparison between what he calls the transcendental view of justice (what is a just system?) and the comparative view of justice (which of two given systems is more just?), his agenda being to champion the comparative view over the more well-established transcendental view. Sen argues that the two views have little to do with each other, and that, consequently, the general preoccupation with transcendental theories is not particularly useful to solving real world problems of justice. In particular, that a description of what constitutes a truly just society (the transcendental question) is neither necessary nor sufficient to enable a comparison between two available alternative societies (the comparative question).

In making this argument, Sen spends a lot of time showing why a description of an ideally just society is not sufficient to make a comparison between two alternate societies - a point on which I'm in total agreement. The problem being, of course, that comparing two less-than-perfect options requires us to make a judgment on which option is more imperfect (or less perfect, but I don't dislike double negatives), and knowledge of what perfection looks like alone does not tell us how to make that judgment.

When it comes to arguing that an answer to the transcendental question is not necessary for an answer to the comparative question, however, Sen essentially hand-waves his way through, arguing that there's no reason why we need to discuss what a third best alternative might be in order to compare the two alternatives in hand. It seems to me, though, that this is only partly true. While we may not, strictly speaking, require a clear description of the best possible alternative to undertake a comparison between two less-than-ideal alternatives, we do need some agreed upon dimensions or criteria on which we shall evaluate these alternatives, and it's not clear to me how we would arrive at these criteria without first attempting to answer the transcendental question. Every comparison involves some kind of measurement, however imprecise; and every measurement involves some kind of theory, however imperfect. Of course, defining the dimensions or criteria of justice is not, strictly speaking, the same thing as describing what a perfectly just society would look like, but the distinction strikes me as trivial, and it could be argued that with something as inherently complex as justice visualizing a perfectly just society may, in fact, be the best way to isolate and identify the relevant dimensions. In short, while a complete answer to the transcendental question may not be essential to an evaluation of the relative justice of two available alternatives, the process of asking and trying to answer the transcendental question would seem to be a necessary prerequisite of any meaningful comparative exercise. In that sense, then, transcendentalism does seem to be necessary for comparison.

It's possible, of course, that Sen has an answer to this problem and I just haven't got to it yet (as I said, I'm only on Chapter 6). Still, it'll be interesting to see where he comes out on it. Stay tuned.

[1] It's not just that I like being eclectic. It's also that spending two hours chuckling my way through a book called Dykes to Watch Out For while my students sat and dutifully worked their way though their finals seemed a little too outrageous. After all, it's a business school. We're supposed to be dyed-in-the-Brooks-Brothers suits conformists, not same-sex loving subversives.

A life together

2009-11-10T23:47:00.001-05:00

I know that closure is not death, and death not closure.

But is it so wrong if your ghost and I get along?

Bread and circuses

2009-11-09T22:52:00.002-05:00

What does a king do
in the republic of pain? Give them
bread and circuses like any king,
the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting,
bread and nostalgia.

- Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld), from Open Closed Open

***

Bread and circuses. Memory and forgetting. What makes life possible and what makes it worthwhile.

I too would believe in the trapeze of oblivion, if I could only forget the dry taste in my mouth.

Humpty Dumpty Revisited

2009-11-08T23:19:00.004-05:00

In memory of Nov 9, 1989

All the king's horses and all the king's men
Brought down the wall in a show of their strength
And when they were done breaking and hauling
They paid their respects to those who had fallen
Each one secretly wondering whether
What was broken could ever be put back together.

See also

Desdemona

2009-11-08T01:38:00.002-05:00

A light put out for putting out too lightly.

Doubt's output proves heavy when it comes to light.

Indulgence

2009-11-04T17:59:00.001-05:00

A little selfishness is a guilty thing.

Alien Exchange

2009-10-28T00:38:00.002-04:00

Gravity as greed. The Earth holds on to us as though we were money. Intelligent life the most precious commodity in the Universe.

A giant leap for Mankind, a tiny loan to the Moon.

Somewhere out there is a planet with a currency all its own. The challenge, if they ever make contact, will be figuring out the exchange rate.

Eurydice

2009-10-26T00:31:00.003-04:00

I should have looked back more often.

I don't know where I lost her. She was there five minutes ago. And now she's gone.

Did she get stuck at a light, maybe miss a turn? I told her to follow me. It should have been easy. There isn't even any traffic going this way. Maybe I should have gone slower? I don't know.

What do I do now? Wait? Go back? But where to? Better to keep going. She'll make her own way, I guess. Maybe ask someone for directions. Though it's late, and there's no one on the streets.

It can't be helped, I suppose. I keep glancing in the rear view, hoping to see her headlights, hoping it's all a mistake and she's still coming up behind.

Built or driven

2009-10-25T23:54:00.003-04:00

Not a pilgrimage, but a migration. Grief you revisit but may not return to. The desire more instinct than constancy, more intuition than belief.

Suffering like a nest you line with fresh memories. The weight of the unspoken set down on every branch.

Note: Title taken from here.

A series of small deceptions

2009-10-20T22:55:00.002-04:00

"I'd always thought art
was a series of small deceptions
performed in the service of the truth."

- Jude Nutter, 'The Last Supper', from The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press 2007)

All these performances. The way we turn possibility into consolation, imagining what might be.

The truth, but not the whole truth. Anything but the whole truth.

The mindlessness of strangers

2009-10-18T17:31:00.004-04:00

You know, the more time I spend in the company of strangers, the more I despair for the future of the species. There's just no getting away from it - people are weird.

Take the woman sitting next to me at the concert on Friday, who sat through Anthony Ross' encore with a scissor in hand, trimming her nails. Yes, actually trimming her nails while the cellist was playing [1]!

Or the woman at the ballet yesterday [2] who decided that since her ticket said Row 20 Seat 4, she was obviously in the first seat in row 24 (because 20+4=24, see!).

Or the person sitting behind me in the bus this afternoon, saying this to an acquaintance she ran into on the bus (and speaking, needless to say, really, really loud):

"I have to confess I keep going back there just for him. I can't help it. I really want him. He's so delicious. I know it's silly. I know I have to stop. But, I mean, I'm not doing any harm am I? I mean, it's not like I'm stalking him or anything. I just keep showing up there to see him. To be honest, I've known for some time that he's into boys. You know. And that just makes me sad. I keep thinking maybe he'll get over it and notice me. I know it's silly. I really have to stop, don't I?"

[acquaintance, who has been maintaining an embarrassed silence through this outpouring, says something noncommittal]

"Yes, I know. I will. It's just that I've never felt the kind of passion I feel for him for anyone else. But then, passion can turn bad too, you know. But I don't think that's happening to me. I just need to stop myself from going there. But he's so attractive..."

I'm NOT exaggerating. Promise.

[1] Okay, said encore consisted of a fairly uninspired rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow [3], so it wasn't exactly the highpoint of the evening, but still.

[2] The Royal Winnipeg Ballet premiering their new ballet - Moulin Rouge. All in all, an exquisite performance. The fact that it kept slipping into bathos probably has more to do with the fact that I'm not a big fan of traditional ballet than anything else.

[3] Which is a nice enough song, but playing it after Schumann is like serving Hershey bars after a wine tasting.

Signifying nothing

2009-10-18T16:09:00.002-04:00

The stillness of man amid the dance of his distractions. Like the beam of the spotlight that, falling on nothing, holds the stage together.

Neu Roses

2009-10-16T23:13:00.002-04:00

Taming the lion was easy. Getting the mirror to disobey him impossible.

Hercules lifts the orchestra on his shoulders. The air expands to let the music through.

Beauty is never predictable.

Narcissus in a cage trying not to maul himself.

***

Ever since I've moved to Minneapolis, I've been trying to wean myself off my beloved Philadelphians and bring myself to the Minnesota Orchestra, a task made particularly arduous by the latter's insistence on playing inordinate amounts of Tchaikovsky [1].

Tonight, however, the Orchestra made up for it all, with a concert that featured a splendid rendition of Schumann's Cello Concerto followed by an almost note-perfect performance of Shostakovich's Fifth under the baton of Stefan Sanderling. Glorious stuff.

[1] One does not like being made to listen to Tchaikovsky. It's like listening to a wimpier version of Brahms. Plus I can no longer listen to the first Piano Concerto without thinking of this.

Ladder

2009-10-13T22:31:00.002-04:00

A ladder left leaning against a wall, as though someone had eloped with the window.

White rungs like the moonlight practicing scales.

An uneasy bridge between the vertical and the horizontal.

The way the lack of an object turns ascent into transcendence, something to aspire to, a grasp exceeded only by its own reach.

Beforewards

2009-10-12T10:48:00.003-04:00

I long to see you in an old light. In your first rain. In the dance you wore to monsoon communions. In a time before the taking of photographs or the invention of tears. See you as you were before the flashbulbs of beauty, in an age of crooked teeth and stringy hair. You standing there, in the shadow of who you would become, like a girl beneath a billboard, trying to light a match.

A short short (love) story

2009-10-08T15:05:00.002-04:00

Overheard on the bus:

"You mean he didn't tell her he slept over with you on his birthday?"

Beyond an uncertain point

2009-10-06T22:55:00.003-04:00

It's not that you wish to die. On the contrary, you no longer feel the need for a reason to live.

Somewhere there is a world where everything you no longer believe has proven true. What remains is both less probable and more necessary. The way a sealed window is an invitation to look down at the city, to look up at the sky.

It's not that you wish to die. It's just that above a certain height you have to consider the possibility.

But a whimper

2009-10-05T19:38:00.003-04:00

"Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm."

-Tracy Letts August: Osage County

People are always saying how when one door closes another opens. Which is bullshit. When a door closes you look for a fucking window and if you're lucky enough to find one you jump straight out of it without bothering to look.

And you hope you aren't too high.