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Onwards!

What happened to the idealist? The writer? The dreamer?

I can feel my conscience slipping, in exactly the way I predicted.

To push myself from this, I am going to make something beautiful tonight.

*****

Points for empathy. And what do I think? I think I am still trying to understand a part of my life this brings back.

I understand that I was a part of a system that pressed youth into military necessity,

I understand that I became a foundation to carry those particular doctrines and discipline forward, tradition regardless of right or wrong,

I understand that my words and actions inspired generations of recruits,

I understand that the same doctrines glorified the potential of pushing the biochemical, biomechanical boundaries torwards death,

I understand that principles of imposition are a remnant of the same ideological desperation that spawned the Hitler Youth of the Allied world and

I understand now, so clearly why

I just can’t be a soldier anymore.

A Google search for “robots” turned up this.

Wow!

…the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was noencouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on the disappointment of false (unrealistic) hopes

*****

The folly here is that when suffering, a man sets his soul for ultimate self-destruction. Resistance can always be heightened, as Nietzsche writes, and even indomitable for a time. But where one sets the endpoint for suffering, the expections by which suffering will end can be easily disappointed, and if so then even time itself can bear the fatal attack on his shoulders.

Charlotte is a Harvard-graduated newlywed with too much time on her hands. In her own way, she has also fulfilled the dreams of youth – a philosophical dreamer elevated beyond the rat-race of establishing a career (unlike her husband).

Bill Murray plays a successful man, an actor who reaches around the world by virtue of his individualistic skill. In reaping his capitalist entitlements (food, women, a suite with luxurious facilities) the foreigness of Tokyo brings him to realize that simply learning the rules of the world is not enough to fulfill him. No amount of waking up on time, working enough to support a family and lifestyle could prevent this.

Given a second chance in Japan, he barely makes an effort to adapt or even explore, as Charlotte does.

The scene of him at the bar allowing the bartender to pick money from his hand shows that he doesn`t has not taken any time to learn about Japanese money. He deliberately makes fun of the locals’ English, despite their best efforts to adapt to a foreign American culture.

He keeps himself comfortably isolated in a context that is as familiar to him as possible – that of either the pampered hotel, or the film studio.

Bill and Charlotte never truly exchange names onscreen; the basis of their relationship is simply that they understand each other’s position, and find something common. Islands in a strange sea.

Sometimes I give up on analyzing movies. When I allow my mind to simply assimilate the them as experiences stochastically, constraining the analysis to the bounds of the cinematic world.

Garden State is one of these, and to a greater extent Lost in Translation.

There is no set path to life. We live, moment by moment, in a reflection of the past journeys of others, however systematized.

In Garden State, a predictable outcome would be that boy meets girl. Boy sleeps with girl. The end. In Lost in Translation, man would meet woman. Slowly, a friendship would turn to a romance forbidden. End of story would show mixed feelings about the simple duality between two lives, that of America and the isolated romances of the Pacific. No, it is not that predictably simplistic.

I enjoyed Lost in Translation for the realism that allowed me to reflect on how normal it is to feel awkward with life, how naturally there is so little to guide consequence that often we resort to craving the simplicity of the hyperreal. An episodically structured-and-framed world of hyperreal action or romance.

Experiencing the movie, my mind was entirely rooted on subjectivity of the director’s vision of the movie as an art piece, of expressionism in the context of the world stage. How does a tourist understand an environment? By re-realizing objects as novel in their foriegn context or meaning.

Here, silk prayers tied to a tree. There, neon advertisments for incomprehensible purposes.

Sometimes it is the foreigness that allows us to see every step of an artist’s journey. Sometimes, it is the artist that shows us this foreigness in the everyday mundane.

The Dalai Lama knew how divisive his role and position could be, and utilized it for political gain.

It’s commendable that he understands the need for peaceful demonstration, but we’re still finding a threshold, finding what priorties are the right step forward.

The Western world really does need to leave China, among other nations, alone to sort out its own problems. how can you accelerate the developing world on the same track as the west, through centuries of colonialism, civil war and industrialization, in mere decades? Sustainability is the objective, fighting poverty and crime. Making a spectacle of human rights is wasteful when it is a luxury to be enjoyed after the people don’t have to worry about carving out their own survival.

What the Dalai Lama should do is to keep the political ideologies alive, but weigh his actions for the long term, if separation and self-determination of Tibet truly is his goal. that way, it won`t bring about the downfall of the Mainland. That way, it`s no skin off Beijing to allow a gradual, low-key separation.

Maybe someday. But not now, and not this.

“When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.”

“I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid.

“I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I heard in the distance Mr. Akao’s voice reverberating from the loudspeakers—a half tone higher.”Then I went down into the basement where my friend—the maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet; the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of ‘things that quicken the heart,’ to offer, or to erase. In that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the ‘zone.’

“He writes me from Japan. He writes me from Africa. He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.

“Will there be a last letter?”

- Sans Soleil at 01:33:42. Director: Chris Marker.

* * * * *

It takes breathtaking simplicity to reveal the west in a single stroke. It takes an experience to understand the movement.

The communal existence is an established fact. So much of the Eastern mentality is a sociological response of overcrowding, of acknowledging competition, in the most sustainable way possible. At this point in history, the natural world has simply showed its teeth to our ancestors, not the bare ribs and carcass of its previous incarnations in which it fights its retreat. Our ancestors had only each other to deal with, each other and those that never descended to the level of our years. Each other and one another that needed timeless anticipation of a balance for mutual survival, reducing the psyche’s uninterruptable space of existence by the close compact of others. When I think of my ancestors I think of the warrens in an artificial underground, sweat and sewage in the precarious balance of biotic survival skewed to minimalist procreation after survival.

So what is the result? What is left unsaid in the commune is because of the privacy lost between the relations of one another. Only living in a hive of a family, forcing the sameness of a flavour in interactivity of those members forced to live cramped quarters, allows enough contrast for objectivity, allows the luxury of having a telephone conversation with, exclusively, another. Allows privacy of a relationship between the self and only one other, to allow it to develop and grow, without noticing or guarding against the unavoidable pretensions of uninvited observers. Our irreduceable psychological space is confined, then, to striking the best balance between existence to socially approved self-determination, and…what? What else is there to understand?

“My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past.

“He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine’s world the ‘zone,’ an homage to Tarkovsky.

“What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn’t share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

“I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

“As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they ‘trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.’

“They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That’s why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.”

- Sans Soleil at 00:39:49. Director: Chris Marker.

To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber [or how concentrated the suffering is itself]. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative…it also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.

- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on Suffering

* * * * *

Human nature will cause us to wallow in what we interpret as suffering, such that we will subjectively construe this suffering as much more severe than justified on a scale of absolute human tolerance. It remains a noted ability of the human mind to distort the limits of “tolerance,” unfairly stretching or truncating this moral continuum, by use of its framing ability.

If such a diametric opposition of “happiness” and “suffering” does exist in any absolute statistical sense, then this analogy only fits by connecting the two along a single, linear dimension of human tolerance (as opposed to what is surely a multidimensional view of the human experience).

What is the point of objectivity here, of even understanding this distinction? Frankl’s intention was clearly subjective, for the reader to understand and take comfort that whatever one might feel as “suffering” is not truly unbearable in any absolute sense; it is simply the mask of human subjectivity that prevents one from understanding that survival of the living mind CAN be appreciated.

Such a scale can exist in theory, but a scientific charting of subjective determinations of suffering cannot be proven and ethically, never should be. What form might this take, if one could paint an accurate picture of what is in a person’s mind? On a large sample, perhaps a statistical charting of what, by and large, will terminate the living mind. What, more often than not, will eradicate a person’s will to live or, by extension beyond that, what will push the living mind to adopt those self-destructive patterns of foolishness that inexorably pushes the ultimate downfall of the individual.

But I cannot, in striving for objectivity, neglect the individual within this milieu. Each data point on a normative curve, on a scatterplot, is a narrative; each is a lifetime construction of an enduring story that is preserved not by any record, but in that absolute instance of time after which the spark of consciousness no longer exists. We must suffer first before we can ask questions to be objective, lest the distinctions fall to the merely academic.