Quote 13

"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States."
- attributed to Porfirio Díaz

The Future: An Exercise in Pessimism (13.1)

Hopefully I can channel this momentum into something permanent. Writing is something I’m constantly coming back to, rediscovering, falling in love with all over again, becoming disgusted by and leaving. When I come back, and I always do, I don’t know how I ever existed without it, how I managed to sludge, tromp, struggle through the endless days without turning them into something, anything. And then I realize that these shifting, twisting shards of reality and memory that I am attempting to capture are beyond the fixed, unyielding words that I insist on using. Like trying to build a brick and mortar model of a cloud. Here it is, perhaps the same basic shape, but none of the consistency, the beauty, the indescribable lightness. And I leave.  For political science, history, languages, once, in a misguided fit of rebellion, for economics. But I always come back in the end to try to build models of clouds with bricks and cement. And I worry that I will never have a normal relationship with writing. That I will live the rest of my life avoiding it and wishing it was there, coming back to it and realizing it’s no good. “Spare me the pangs of love requited”. And what, what can I possibly do with my life? That’s the real question. Because modern life has taken the soul out of the rigorous humanities, has compartmentalized them beyond recognition, has made it impossible to be a politician and still take the self and art and writing seriously. And who did this? Or when did it happen? And more importantly who wants to be an unemployed author? Jesus fucking Christ not I. Better to be part of the army of undead bankers wandering around. But maybe that’s just it, isn’t it? I have no courage. None what so ever. Or maybe it’s this deeply-held belief of mine that if something really makes you happy it has to be unfeasible somehow. Work is work. Where is the rigor in something you love? I don’t even consider film, not really, because the only thing worse than an unemployed author is the fucking unemployed Cinema Studies major. And so here I am, setting out, knowing that I want to, secretly, covertly, want to write, be a writer, a great writer, but that I won’t allow myself to be one. Because, as Rainer Maria Rilke said, we fear our own greatness. Or maybe I know, subconsciously, that I can’t be one, don’t have the capacity to, and all this anxiety prevents me from discovering that awful truth. But anyways I don’t want to make a bet like that, a risky bet, a bet that might end up with me being fucking destitute and powerless and unimportant somewhere in a shitty apartment. I guess I’m just risk averse. Those economics classes have really clarified my thinking. I can’t bring myself to take the risk necessary of great artists and so on to history and politics and statistics and all sorts of mediocre, safe bets, and languages and translation, but I do love writing. But here I go and at this point I can’t really stop myself anymore.

***

I am confident that I will witness, in my life time, the triumph of information. For thousands of years livelihoods have been steadily whittled down to specialized occupations. There are no more Renaissance men or women, or very few. Specialization has finally conquered that great ocean of knowledge and wisdom and compartmentalized it into innumerable puddles of information. This next era will be the era of science and technology, of ones and zeros, of unbounded access to facts.  This access, which is instantaneous and cheap, has begun to erode the need for mental filters, to chip away at the faculties that distinguish between important and unimportant information. When all facts are available at all times we no longer need to scrutinize. And this means, as Leonard Cohen rasps in his song the Future that “your private life will suddenly explode.” It already has, into a mushroom cloud of inane details. All the intimate, crushingly boring minutiae of your life, my life, of the lives of others has been brought into public by Facebook, by Twitter, by Foursquare, by the internet. We have lost our judgment and with it any notion of privacy or mystery. And I’ve begun to realize how boring and pedestrian we all are. Hell is being forced to pay attention to the inane details of someone else’s existence. Hell is a Facebook feed. In the future we will browse a vast digital waste land where all information, public and personal, will be but a mouse click away. Privacy and with it intimacy will dissolve into the tidal wave of monotonous exhibitionism. It is the coming of the information apocalypse.

***

It is easy to convince ourselves that we are at the crux of some great historical moment. The last decade has been a litany of disasters; the suspected electoral fraud in the 2000 election, the fall of the twin towers, the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, the collapse of the levies in New Orleans, and the housing market bubble have all built up an incredible prophetic pressure in the national imagination. Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Atheists have hunkered down in their respective cable news channels, readying for the final battle in the culture wars. We are on the verge of something. But this pervasive feeling of historical import has existed for as long as recorded history. Conservatives have always seen apocalypse looming on the horizon as liberals have always seen glorious revolution. It is an illusion, a delusion of grandeur. History in its slow, inevitable grind towards nothing in particular does not have crucial junctures, just series of absurd moments. This is the human condition, chaotic, bizarre, and spangled with moments of unimaginable horror and joy that are as inescapable as they are unexplainable. The future is as bleak and meaningless as the present. We are mad as hell but we're still going to take it because we have grocery shopping to do and bills to pay. There will be no decisive battles. History grinds on.

***

In thousands, maybe hundreds of years vines will reclaim the asphalt jungle and this brief, elaborate, fragile world of ours will collapse into a riot of life. The rusting, crumbling proof our existence will turn to dust. And nature in its inevitable march towards nothing will obliterate humanity, which for all its awful permutations is beautiful. And this, the ultimate destruction not only of our selves, but of civilization, is beyond the ability of the mind to process. Who can understand, truly understand in more than an abstract, passive way, that our most enduring institutions are but ephemeral whispers in the raucous screaming of time? We are but a brief struggle forward into the light, a temporary escape from the heart of darkness. There was nothingness before us and there will be nothingness after. Our inevitable return to the rot of the jungle would strike most as a horrifically pessimistic thought, the kind of thought that seeps into your mind at night and keeps you awake with a nameless fear. But it is this very return that makes our momentary reign so beautiful, so priceless. The economics of the universe dictate that it is the scarcity, the heart-breaking, mind-troubling fragility, of civilization that makes it invaluable. Inevitable death and ruin give our world meaning. And they have given me an atheist's love for civilization, a desperate, vivid, intoxicating love for the precious and fragile, a love that is impossible if one believes in forever.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Special Edition (12.5)

Close Encounters is awesome, and not in the teenage slang conception of the word, but in the original, romantic conception; it is a beautiful, grand film that inspires both fear and child-like wonder. It begins with five lost World War II planes reappearing, unscathed in Mexico during a sand storm and shifts to Middle America where a small town has a series close encounters with a set of brilliant, gyrating, colorful UFOs. As a handful of awe-struck individuals attempt to make sense of their experiences, a team of government scientists race to understand when and where the UFOs will next appear. But the plot is secondary to the dazzling, other-worldly special effects, executed expertly by Spielberg himself.  The elegant spaceships and surreal lights are even more wonderful and frightening when contrasted with the cluttered aural and visual human world. In a particularly nerve-wracking scene, Barry, a small child opens his front door onto the vivid orange glow of the space ship. He stands there, silhouetted in the doorway while the psychedelic fire burns outside and a dark room crowded with furniture waits inside. The mundane comfort of the living room can only highlight the beautiful, intoxicating, frightening display that swirls outside the door. Likewise the human world is filled with garbled dialogue, background noise and snippets of foreign languages but the space ships emit only a graceful, five-tone melody. It is this exquisite contrast that creates a sense of overwhelming terror and wonder, of surprise and admiration and dread, in short a sense of awe. The final climax reveals a bit too much and lasts a bit too long, diffusing some of the built up tension, but this is a minor sin in an otherwise great film. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the perfect family film, a science fiction masterpiece, and a special-effects miracle; it is a must see movie. (3.5/4)

Eliot, Soderbergh, and Didion on Memory (12.4)

Near the end of The Waste Land, after wandering through a dissonant collection of allusions, memories, and thoughts, T.S. Eliot writes “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. This is what memories are to me, lost fragments sprinkled over the desert landscape of time. They are small shards stripped of context and detail that I gather and arrange in order to construct meaning, in order to shore them against the ruins of my identity. They have no meaning of their own, which is why it is so difficult to write about, to try and create a narrative for these memories of mine. I feel as Graham did in Sex, Lies, and Videotape when Ann asks him to explain why he is who he is. He replies, “Am I supposed to recount all the points in my life leading up to this moment, and just hope that it’s coherent, that it makes some sort of sense to you? It doesn’t make any sense to me and I was there”. My memories do not comprise any meaningful narrative and instead are like the glimpsed scenes of a vivid dream, unexplainable and overwhelming. And any act of writing, of storytelling is a lie, as it converts the ephemeral and nonsensical into the permanent and ordered. In recounting my memories I betray them, everything about them: their texture which is unexplainable, their context which is lost in time, and their content which is too powerful. How can Graham possibly explain himself to Ann and how can I possibly write memoirs? Any non-fiction piece about my own life is an inspired invention, a polished hallucination that I have created in order to give the reader and myself what we truly we want, what we need, that is narrative, reason, cause and effect. As Didion explained, “We tell ourselves stories to live”.

ADD (12.3)

A week ago, at the age of 15, my brother Diego was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and put on medication. And now the mysterious, intractable problems of his childhood are gone.  The detentions, demerits, failing grades, and fits of frustration are gone. Have vanished. At least according to my mother, who called me to recount everything in breathless tones. When she described his improved work ethic and new sense of intellectual confidence, I cried. My brother is, for the lack of a better cliché, my favorite person in the world. He is a sweet, brilliant, fragile, brooding kid with an always sharp, sometimes absurd sense of humor. When our uncle’s dog was dying Diego stayed up all night with him, holding him and singing him hushed lullabies until the dog faded away in his arms. His encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and inherent understanding of its comedic elements have made him more popular than I could ever dream of being. And he is always in trouble. With my mother, with his frustrated teachers, with his tired coaches. For the last ten years not a week has gone by without my mother receiving a detention notice, an email from a concerned teacher, a complaint from his councilor, or a report card studded with Ds and Fs. And this had become the very center of his identity. Maureen Doyle has two kids: the one who got into Yale and the one who doesn’t do anything right. When I heard that his academic problems had evaporated I cried because now, finally, Maureen Doyle can have two kids: the one who got into Yale and the one with the penetrating humor and Mother-Teresa-sized heart, the one who writes cutting short stories and plays a mean game of ping pong, the one who for fifteen years was the most underrated human being I knew.

On the Moral Life of 8 -Year-Olds (12.2)

When I was young enough to wear overalls unashamedly I decided to steal a pair of barrettes from Gymboree, the children’s clothing store. It could have been anything. It was the exhilarating act itself. It required courage, cunning, composure and a detached disregard for authority that is and always will be the very essence of cool. And even if I couldn’t understand the meaning of the phrase corporate franchise, I understood that Gymboree was, in its vast abstractness, not a victim in the same way a person could be. So I stood under the electric white of the fluorescent lights and quietly slipped the pair of barrettes into my pocket. As I waited there, adrenaline shooting through me, I imagined becoming a professional thief and detailed a regimen in which I would steal progressively larger items to hone my skills. I would become the best thief, a thief’s thief, a world renowned sleight of hand pick pocket, slipping in and out of well guarded museums and stores with impossibly large treasures. An outraged employee caught me. And all my elaborate dreams came collapsing back into reality. She dragged me to my mother, who had been shopping an end of year sale on the other side of the store. I had never felt so afraid, anxious, idiotic and ashamed in my life and haven’t since. Tangled up in fantasy, I had wandered into doing something awful and absurd. My mother, who had been raised a Catholic and who at heart will always be one, told me I had committed a sin. Even then I did not believe in God, but I understood that the 8^th commandment was the stuff societies were built on; it was rooted in our very deepest, ancient sense of fairness. Worse, I had not succeeded. I was not even competent enough to steal a small pair of barrettes. Afterward, furious and embarrassed, my mother made me write and deliver a letter of apology to the store manager explaining why I had decided to steal. At that point, I no longer knew. I didn’t even wear barrettes. All that remained were clouded fragments of fantasy that I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe. For years afterward when we walked past Gymboree’s colorful façade in the mall my intestines felt as if they were being twisted into a tourniquet.

Barrettes (12.1)

When I was young enough to wear overalls unashamedly I tried to steal a pair of barrettes from Gymboree, the children’s clothing store. I stood under the electric white of the fluorescent lights and quietly slipped the pair into my pocket. As I waited there, adrenaline shooting through my mind, I imagined becoming a professional thief and detailed a regimen in which I would steal progressively larger items to hone my skills. I would become the best thief, a thief’s thief, a world renowned sleight of hand pick pocket, slipping in and out of well guarded museums and stores with impossibly large treasures.  I don’t remember how I was caught or who it was that caught me. What I do remember is my intestines being twisted into a tourniquet. I had never felt so afraid, anxious, idiotic and ashamed in my life. Tangled up in fantasy, I had wandered into doing something awful and absurd. Thou shalt not steal. Even then I did not believe in God, but I understood that the 8^th commandment was the stuff societies were built on; it was a rooted in our very deepest, ancient sense of fairness. Even worse, I had not succeeded. I was not even competent enough to steal a small pair of barrettes. My mother, who had been raised and at heart will always be a Catholic, was furious and threatened to make me write a letter of apology to the store manager explaining why I had decided to steal. At that point, I no longer knew. I didn’t even wear barrettes. What I did know was that I was a terrible, stupid, fundamentally indecent human being and would be for the rest of my life.