Five Annoying Things in “THE TWIILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON”

So I went and saw The Twlight Saga: New Moon, and I’ve read all the books. Not just because I have kitschy taste (although I often do), but because when I’m speeding down the 405 and a cop car with lights flashing starts weaving back and forth in front of us to slow down the flow of traffic, I tend to think it’s foolhardy to just keep motoring along like nothing’s happened. I keep an eye out for the car wreck that I would otherwise have slammed into.

I can’t say New Moon was very good.  Parts of it annoyed me.  Here’s some of them.

1. Jacob’s teeth.

It’s an old, old convention: the vampires are the aristocrats, the werewolves are the working-class salt of the earth. Seen Underworld? It’s just that in most versions of the convention, both are white folks and so it’s a class thing more than a race thing. I’m shocked that everyone went ballistic over the racial stereotyping embodied by Jar Jar Bing in that George Lucas movie but no one remarks upon how the poor, slovenly Redskins play the canine protectors of the white girl and her kin. With their little disheveled shacks and fixer-upper cars and trash everywhere, they’re like the janitors or security guards of the Monster world.

It’s weird, how the movie essentializes these roles. Vampires are made, but werewolves are born. And while vampires are refined and deft at self-control, the werewolves can only barely discipline their natures—they’re more like animals, prone to erupting into fur and teeth whenever they lose their tempers. “Don’t make me angry! You don’t want to see me angry!” In both the book and the film, too, one of the conflicts between Bella and Jacob emerges over his inability to tell her he’s a werewolf because Alpha Dog (Sam) has forbidden it . . . and werewolves can’t defy Alpha, even when they want to. While you’ve got a slew of Cullen bloodsuckers who elect to go vegetarian and, miraculously, succeed, those poor Indian werewolves can’t elect to do anything. That’s just their nature.

In any case, poor Jacob—too uneducated and culturally innocent to know he doesn’t have a chance against privileged, refined white boy Edward. The rich kids always get the girl (or boy). Always. It’s a marriage plot, after all, this whole Twilight saga. And we all know from our Jane Austen novels that the pretty people will marry the rich people. No matter how smart or spunky or iconoclastic Bella may be, she’s going to go for the owner of the nice big house on the hill. With loads of money. And nice cars. And good taste in music. She may play around with the red boy in the white boy’s absence, but when old whitey returns then red boy is history.

Stephanie Meyer tries to mute this classicism/racism by making Jacob younger (thus the cougar jokes), giving him bleached teeth (because without cosmetic dentistry the class divide is too obvious), and playing up the mythic love element of Edward and Bella’s fated chemistry, but still . . . she chose to make the “wet dogs” (which is what Alice calls Jacob at one point) impoverished Injuns. It’s kind of creepy.

2. Cullen family politics.

Bella demands that the Cullens vote on whether or not she should be made into a vampire. When it’s time for Carlisle to weigh in, he announces patronizingly, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lose my son. Edward, I will not have you suicidal again over the possible death of Bella. I vote yes.” The wise Carlisle has spoken. Fine. The thing that makes me crazy about this dynamic is how inconsistently the movie portrays the maturity of its vampires. Is Edward 109 or not? And if he is – why is Carlisle talking to him and about him like he’s a teenager?

At casa Cullens, all these 100+-year-old vampire “children” revel in acting obnoxiously immature.  The big one—Emmet—wears a sideways baseball cap, for goodness sake! He’s about 80 years old and wears a sideways baseball cap like to the manor born. I don’t buy for one minute that it’s a self-aware stab at fooling mortals into thinking he’s only 18. He wears it like he means it.  And coven politics aside, I think at about 80 you should start acting and thinking like a bona fide grown-up no matter how much older than you your father is. Carlisle and Esme are not parents, even. They’re just older vampires, like 200 years older. At what point is age just a number? Only when the 109-year-old Edward wants to bed an 18-year-old girl, I guess.

3. Bella’s grief.

It probably says more about me than Bella, but my favorite part of the book was her grief. It fascinated me. I’ve been through the ringer, and while at one point (or mor than one), I may have worried that I wasn’t going to make it, deep down I knew I would.  And I’m talking about major loss—like years and years of intimacy down the tubes, child-rearing together, or being so connected to somebody that I can’t breathe without thinking about him.  And yet in each case, I dealt. Not Bella. Nope. She’s been with Edward (without sex, mind you!) for all of, what, 1.5 years, and upon his departure she collapses in the woods in order to die of exposure until one of those redskin canines finds her and carries her home to Daddy. Then she sits in front of the window for months—literally, months, the subtitles read from September to February–staring into space like she’s just not going to make it. What a cheap way to convey love and grief. Complete immobilization. Why not have her read some poetry?  Take up painting? Drinking? Talk to a friend? Learn something, anything, from the experience? Something a little less passive? Nope. There she is, bottomed out with grief, waiting to die.

Until she discovers that by actually courting death she can “summon” Edward’s voice. Cut me a break. It’s the unhealthiest, most self-indulgent fantasy of grief I’ve ever seen: “I’m going to suffer so deeply and be so suicidal that my ex-lover will sense my proximity to death and therefore try to recall me back from the brink, because in truth he really does still love me, even though he threw me away.” As if. Somebody needs to make a satire wherein when Bella goes racing headlong toward a tree on her new motorbike, there’s a spectre of Edward beside her not pleading with her to stay safe, but laughing his ass off at how pathetic she is.

Oh, wait, I forgot: Edward abandoned Bella because he loves her so damn much. Right. Never mind.

4. Bella’s rebound.

I’m not a huge fan of Jacob—his teeth are too white and, until he crops his hair, his extensions are too annoying—but he deserves better than this rebound shit that Bella pulls on him. In effect, she uses Jacob to get over Edward, then dumps Jacob as soon as Edward reappears. And we’re supposed to think it’s cool because it’s in the name of Mythic Love. Which may be it is. And, okay, so maybe she and Edward belong together. But somebody, somewhere in the movie world should at least acknowledge that using your best friend in this manner is not cool. She should at least apologize. Instead, it’s all part of the vanity game: oh, look how cool and irresistible Bella is, what with TWO monsters in love with her. And Stephanie Meyer has the gall to represent Bella as completely unaware of this vanity game. “Who, little old me with the cutely arched eyebrows, adored by not one but TWO monsters? I just don’t know why or how that happened!” I’ll tell you why and how, Bella. You spent every afternoon of the week with the boy you know has had a crush on you since you were ten, all the while perfectly aware that he had a crush on you, but also all the while choosing to ignore this fact because you were too absorbed in your own pain to give a shit. The fact that you’re pretty and act super-nice, with that self-deprecating false modesty where you shrug your shoulders all the time, does not entitle you to cause unnecessary heartbreak.

5. Werewolf transformation.

Watch closely when Jacob becomes a werewolf. He’ll be running along in his cut-offs and then suddenly he’s a naked wolf. What happened to his clothes? Like I said, watch closely: they disintegrate into a cloud of little blue denim bits that hover around his face for a second like a swarm of indigo flies before evaporating into thin air. Annoying. And we never do get to see Jacob when he returns to human form without shorts on. It’s a rip-off. And that’s not just a pun.

Courage in the wake of cows

The following is a true story about courage and cows that I remembered as I pondered the word courage.

First, this is what I learned this week about my favorite of virtues.  The word courage descends from the Latin cor, for heart — courage quite literally means of, from, pertaining to the heart.  So unlike bravery (which comes from bravado, Italian) or valor (which shares the same root as value, or worth), courage is a boldness of feeling and action that manifests all that the heart implies: sincerity, moral truth, faith, emotion, intuition, passion, genuineness.  Its difference from bravery and valor says a lot.  As their etymologies suggest, bravery (bravado) is about social performance or conformity to expectation (thus soldiers are brave in battle); and valor (value) has an aristocratic assumption of social sanction (as with knights).  Bravery and valor are inevitably self-interested at some level, because they have to do with social image and identity, reputation.  Courage, meanwhile, requires those pre-rational virtues of feeling and spirit that we link metaphorically to the heart, the seat of love and faith, grief and longing.

Ok.  So.  When I was about 30 years old, I went to Ireland with Kevin.  He had a show in a gallery there, so we had an expenses-paid trip to Dublin and we went.

Dublin is a great city and we had a great time, drinking, hanging out with the locals, dancing, eating well.  And while we were there, our friends Erik and Grey from Oakland joined us. The four of us rented a car and together we drove across Ireland to the Western coast.  Through bog fields and farm fields and forests, over hills and dales, through flocks of sheep and, once, a herd of cows.

Grey and I were sentimental animal lovers.  I was at a funny point in my life where, if you showed me a baby, I would probably glaze over, but show me a dolphin or a puppy or a pretty cow and I was all oooooohs and aaaaaaaaaaaahs.  I used to watch Animal Planet religiously.

So we’re in this minivan suddenly amidst a sea of gentle, brown, black and white spotted Jersey cows.  Grey and I clamor for Kevin to stop the van.  He drives about a quarter of a mile past the herd, slows, and brakes.  Erik gets out and goes over to the hood of the van to look at a map.  Grey stands there getting her camera gear together.  Kevin steps out of the driver’s seat, swings open the passenger door, and motions for me to follow him.  I do.  I follow him in the direction of the cows.

He’s about a stone’s throw ahead of me as we’re closing in on this herd of beautiful Jerseys, with their big brown eyes and satiny fur.  Seen from this proximity, they’re bigger than I would’ve expected.  And more muscular.  No one said cow-gazing would be easy.

As we’re getting nearer to the cows, suddenly the biggest one — let’s call her Daisy Cow — Daisy Cow turns her head in our direction, looks us up and down, and doesn’t like what she sees.  She glares at us with her big, beautiful brown eyes.   She scrapes her hoof against the pavement a couple times like a pitcher at the mound.  She lets rip with a remarkably loud “MOOOOOO!”

The moment that the MOO breaks our awestruck silence, Kevin startles and jumps several inches into the air like a (how apropros) leprachaun who’s trying to click his heels together.  Apparently, Kevin interprets Daisy’s vicious moo as a warning sign that a charge is imminent, like we’re in the ring with a wild bull. Except she’s a cow.  A spotted Jersey cow.  With big chocolate eyes like a labrador retriever’s.  And the killer instinct of, well, a cow.  A really cute cow.  Did I say she was a really cute cow?  When the hoof scrapes pavement, Kevin’s done with cow-gazing.  He does a mad twist in the air, pivots back in the direction of the van, and breaks into a run.  He’s racing the cow, now, for the safety promised by our vehicle’s wide-open door.  The cow’s not moving.

Problem is, I’m directly in Kevin’s way.  I’m frozen to the spot, trying furiously to remember if cows possess some commonly known killer instinct that I’m blanking on.

Kevin sees me, I would’ve thought, but looking into his stricken face I soon realize he doesn’t see anything at all except the threat of dismemberment.  He’s running on pure instinct, presumably because his genes recall the primal forest memory of being an unarmed cave man attacked and mauled to death by a herd of prehistoric bovines.  And Kevin does what any prehistoric caveman in those same circumstances must have done.  He shoves his woman aside and keeps right on running.  I suddenly find my arms are pinwheeling crazily as I attempt to keep my footing so as to avoid being trammeled to death by the cows which, if Kevin’s reaction is any indication, are about to stampede.

Next my man’s within leaping reach of the backseat, so leap he does.  Catapults, in fact, like a human arrow through the air and through the door of the van—or maybe more like superman in sudden flight, arms outstretched before him as he flies up and over the threshhold of the vehicle and lands on the back seat, stretched out full length on his belly.  Now only his feet remain vulnerable to cow attack as they protrude still from the open door.

Erik, Grey and I burst out laughing.  Daisy Cow hasn’t moved an inch.  In fact, none of the cows have.  They’re just standing there methodically chewing their cud and thinking what drama queens we humans tend to be.  Then—and I’m not kidding—then Daisy Cow shakes her head in disgust at the scaredy-pants she terrified with a single moo and signals to the gang it’s time to blow this joint.  She leads the herd across the rest of the road and they head on down into the pasture, presumably to scare the pants off of some unsuspecting sheep or ponies.

“What do you expect?” Kevin said as we laughed.  “I’m a city boy.”

And that’s how I got thrown to the wolves for the first time.  I mean, to the cows.  Thrown to the cows.

Courage from Latin cor, for heart.

Cowardice from Latin cow, for rampaging bovine.

“Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin

Playing with bad boys who like you

“Just ignore him.”  Girls, do you remember getting that advice as a kid?  

I do.  I also remember how hard it was to abide by.  The idea that non-retaliation was the best retaliation just didn’t fly with me.  Ages 6 & 7, I was a scrappy tomboy on a rural street with only two neighbors: Paul, two miles down the road, and Craig, who lived on the horse ranch between Paul and me.  We three were wild childs, crawling around in the woods and riding our bikes as fast as we could down dirt roads.  

Paul and Craig would do things like tie me to the big oak in my backyard and fling Indian arrows in my direction, seeing if they could hit the tree without hitting me.  How do you ignore that?  I guess when they untied me I could have walked away silently, in a dignified manner, but my feelings felt like they would bubble over if I didn’t do something.  So, I flew at them.  They loved it.  Soon enough, I’d find myself tied to that tree again.

Age 8 my mother enrolled me at a new school for the third grade, and there I met Ian Budwick.  Ian reminded me of Egghead Jr., in temperament as well as appearance.  He was accustomed to being the smartest person in the class.  I reduced him to being only the smartest boy.

So one day I was running around on the playground, doing my own thing, when Lawrence walks up to me and informs me that Ian would like a word with me, “over there,” says Lawrence, motioning toward the blindspot behind the kindergarten wing.  Lawrence is a nice boy.  They’re all nice boys.  So I’m game, I walk over there with Lawrence.  And as soon as I turn the corner and can no longer be seen by the yard teachers, the boys pounce.  Lawrence takes my right arm, pulls it wide; another boy takes the left arm, pulls it wide.  A couple other boys stand around.  I look like a miniature, much plainer version of Faye Ray bound and poised for King Kong, who soon emerges from the shadows in the form of Ian Budwick.

Ian begins pacing back and forth in front of me in a leisurely manner as he recites the Gettysburg Address to no one in particular, to everyone.  At every pause, he rears back with his shoe and kicks me in a shin.  ”Four score and seven years ago,” he starts–KICK!–”our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”–KICK!.

How do you ignore that?  No, I howled like a banshee, one voice among the din of the playground.  Then I stopped yelling.  Then I just squirmed to be free.  Then I stopped squirming.  Then it got boring and they released me.  All I had left to ignore for the rest of the school year were the random punches Ian would throw to my stomach when the teacher, Mrs. House, wasn’t looking.  ”It’s because he likes you,” they all said.  

I didn’t see Ian again until I was 18, at college freshmen orientation.  To my horror and surprise, there he was, still wearing a vacant spooky look in his eyes.  He was expelled a few months later for pulling a knife on a girl in her dorm room.  I guess he liked her, too.

When I was 11 years old returning to rural New Jersey after our family’s stint on Guam, I had no idea how things were done amongst sixth-grade mainlanders.  I didn’t know about bobos and falling into the Gap, feathered hair and colored plastic combs in back pockets.  

One week into school, I got off the bus and cut through the woods to get to the rundown apartment complex my father had us living in.  A boy named Gary was laying in wait for me there.  He was my age, but bigger, a scrawny guy with wafty blond hair.  He pushed me down into the leaves.  ”Bobos!” he hissed at my Kmart-brand tennies.  ”I will stab you with this if you wear them again.”  And with that, he showed me his pocket knife.   How do you ignore that?  I just walked away. What else could I do?  Yes, I was learning.

Gary, sad to say, kinda typified my neighborhood’s ambience.  Then there was school.  Boys with names like Louis, Billy Ramp, and D’Ondre teased me incessantly about being from Guam, which to them may as well have been Narnia or Timbuktu.  They’d circle me on the playground, pulling at the outside corners of their eyes with their index figures, parodying my slightly (oh so slightly, but maybe less so when I was 10 or 11) Asian eyes.  They’d pull their eyes up and down, up and down while chanting in that annoying sing-song way, “I’m from GUAM!  I’m from GUAM!”

 ”You don’t know anything about it!” I’d yell.  Or, “Stop it!  That’s mean!”  But of course that just made them more enthusiastic.

Then one morning I decided to try a different tactic.  I put on my “Guam” baseball jacket–royal blue satin, with my name embroidered over one breast and the entire island of Guam emblazoned on the back, beneath which stood the letters “GUAM U.S.A.” With that jacket on, I walked into class with my head held high.  At recess, the boys came around and started in again.  ”I’m from GUAM! I”m from GUAM” they chanted.

I just looked at them and then disdainfully rolled my eyes at their childish ignorance.  ”That’s GUAM U.S.A. to you morons” I stated, turning around to show off the image emblazoned on my jacket.  ”I’m from GUAM U.S.A.” I announced.  ”And darn proud of it.”  I said this calmly, matter-of-factly, like they were beneath the likes of a girl from such an amazing place.  Then I walked away.  One month later Billy Ramp asked me to be his girlfriend.

What a strange year that was.  In my rough neighborhood, there lived two boys who I will never forget.  There was Troy, maybe one year older than me, who was handy on a dirt bike and wore white all the time, white against his chocolate skin and the white of a puka-shell necklace nestled against his collarbones.  Then there was Bruce.  Bruce was a very sick boy.  Bruce was about fifteen years old, gargantuan to us sixth-graders, and we were terrified of him: he was unpredictable, sadistic, sexually charged.  When I wore my sky-blue one-piece swimsuit to play in the sprinklers, he brought over his posse of fellow teenage hoodlums and pointed out to them that you could see my “titties” through the suit.  ”You cock teaser!” he’d said to me–I was all of 10 or 11, remember.   I had no idea exactly what he meant, but I knew he was trouble.

His attentions made me very uncomfortable.  I tried to ignore him.  The more I ignored him, the more hostile he became, the more aggressively he threatened me with words whose darkness I didn’t understand until later in life.  All I understood at ten was that Bruce was to be avoided at all costs, and especially when one was alone.  But once he found me walking across the front woods to my apartment building–I saw him, he saw me, we both measured the distance to my front door, and we both started running.  I was 10, he was 15, what do you think my chances were of outrunning him in time to push open my door, throw myself inside, and lock it behind me?  Not very good. Ignore him?  Didn’t trust that strategy here.  Panic started to set in–

And then suddenly, almost magically appeared before me a knight in shining armor.  Troy on his dirtbike, braking so quickly in front of me that his back tire skidded out in a semi-circle.  He breathlessly threw two words over his shoulder at me: “Get on!”

I did.  We were off.

Bruce gave chase, but he was no match for Troy on a dirtbike, never mind that Troy was only 2/3 his size and carrying the weight of a girl on his black and red Huffy.  A couple times, it looked like it might have been almost a close call–when Bruce would find a way to cut through a building or between cars that we had to take the long way around, being on a bike and all.  But eventually Bruce gave up, screaming expletives as we rode off into the distance.  Troy rode me to the landfill behind the complex, where a huge hole had been dug once upon a time for the foundation of an apartment building that never happened.  Mounds of dirt and ramps and abandoned appliances made it the most thrilling dirtbike ride of my life.  

Then Troy brought me home.

Soon my father, sister and I were set to move to an even more rural part of Jersey, closer to the Pine Barrens.  I had not hung much with Troy since that fateful day–we made eye contact at the bus stop, nodded at each other on walks home, but he was too shy and I was too awkward to have any idea of doing anything else.  Plus, Dad worked until six and the rule was, no playing with boys unless he was home.  So there you had it.  Star-crossed 10- and 11-year-olds.  One day a moving truck was loading up all our stuff.  The next day, the day it was time to leave, there was a knock at the door.  I answered it.  Troy stood there, all in white.  He held something in his closed fist.  ”Here,” he said, motioning for me to hold out my hand.  Into it he dropped his puka shell necklace.  He gave me a kiss on the cheek, and he left.  I never saw him again.

The Missing

I miss Grandma and Grandpa and Baba, says Djuna.

I miss Lucy, says Poppy.

I miss Djuna and Poppy when they’re with their father.

I missed their father for a while once upon a time, but rarely anymore.

Missing someone.  I got to thinking about the word “to miss.”  I looked it up in the OED.  Miss is a word of failure, of error: it comes from the 13th c. German missen, to fail, to err, to be without, to lose or feel the loss of, failure to.

Such a sad word, a word about frustrated intentions regarding things: you miss a target, miss the boat, miss seeing a shooting star.  You miss your chance.  You had intended to hit, or catch, or see, or seize and instead find yourself empty-handed.  Not just absence, but lack: it’s not a question of there being nothing there.  If that were all, then you wouldn’t be aware of having missed it.  No, to miss a chance (for example) contains the intention or hope of catching it.  It’s not that the chance never existed, or that it came up and you were indifferent to it.  That’s why missing always, even when referring to things, carries a sense of regret.  What should have been or could have been never came to be, and you are left wanting.  If you randomly shoot an arrow any which way straight up into the air with no concern for where it lands, then when it accidentally impales your friend, you’re not going to say, “I missed the bullseye!”  No, you only say you missed the bullseye if you were aiming at the bullseye and hoped to succeed.  Missing a target registers the failure to hit it and acknowledges that effort was exerted.

That’s why you can miss a target or miss your chance but also a puzzle can miss a piece or a button go missing from a shirt.  Something is not there that should be, that needs to be there for everything to be as it should.  Incompleteness.

Here’s where missing somebody comes in.  If you miss somebody, that means there’s a sense of incompleteness without them around, if even just for that moment you’re missing them.  You’re suffering a loss, as the etymology implies.  You can’t lose what you never had, or found, or possessed, so to miss somebody means that something was taken away or left.  When they were here, something was complete.  But now they’re not, and you wish they were: if you didn’t wish they were there, then you wouldn’t miss them.  So to miss is a verb that, when its object is a person, carries longing inside it. That’s why the root, missen, also means to err, as in error: when you’re missing somebody, there’s a sense of error or wrongness.  “This isn’t the way it should be.”

You stop missing somebody when the sense of wholeness returns.  It’s like they were never a part of you, like their being essential to you was an illusion.   In fact, when you stop missing somebody, you begin to prefer yourself without them.  You do not miss them anymore.  They are not missed.  They are not missing.

Some people, though, should they go away, you will miss forever.  Like your children.  Your family.  Or certain friends.  As long as you love them, you miss them.  Their departure may thus leave behind a permanent hole or a tear in the tapestry.  But gradually, very gradually, because you love them, you start to see the tapestry in a different way, you get used to it.  It begins to seem natural and complete to you as is.  You accept it.   And then it starts to seem beautiful.  Something’s missed, but nothing is missing.

The experience of giraffes before, during, and after the Age of Photography.

There was a recent article in The Week about researchers who have reason to believe, from mapping brain chemistry, that, as we use GPS more and more, the location in our hippocampus responsible for spatial orientation will gradually go away.  Eventually most of us (and not just me) will have a sorry-ass sense of direction.  We shape technology and then technology shapes us.  It’s not a one-way relationship.

This, combined with the new Avatar teaser, got me to thinking about the technology of photography and how it, too, shaped us.  Imagine the world before photographs were even thought of — a world where no one has any notion of a moment in time being captured for the later re-experience of it.  A world without the idea of snapshots or preserved images of things.  There were paintings, sure, but paintings took a long time to make, were contrived, and very expensive. So paintings don’t really count.  So imagine you’re living in a world without photos, without any thought of photos, with no idea whatsoever that photography will ever exist.  How would you experience time differently?  How would you experience people differently?

Now tell me this: in this world without any photography whatsover (and no zoos), what would pop into your mind when I said the word, “Giraffe”?

You’d have read about them, maybe, and so you’d have a picture in your mind’s eye.  Have you ever wondered how you would imagine a giraffe to look if you could only go on discursive representation?  “Like a horse with golden-colored, spotted fur, only much larger, with a neck so great in height that it comprises 2/3 of his total size; horns protruding from near the ears; and very intelligent eyes. “  Maybe, if you were rich, you’d have a woodcut or a book that contained hand-colored drawings, made by explorers to distant lands, that attempted to illustrate the whole concept of this strange thing they call a giraffe.  Here’s what you might see:

This:

Woodcut of giraffe, 1486

Or this:

1551

Or maybe this:

1551

Or, finally, maybe like this:

18th century

(Images from www.strangescience.net)

Check out the scale, the musculature, the defiant-looking expressions and poses.  In shape as well as (or maybe because of) vibe, these specimens look considerably different from the giraffes walking around in our heads as the consequence of trips to the zoo or photos we’ve seen.  And don’t think they weren’t trying, these artists, to draw exactly what they saw.  It’s not like they knowingly misrepresented the giraffe. They probably believed that they were making kick-ass true-to-life renderings of the animal they saw.  Which would mean that when they looked at a giraffe, they saw something different from what you or I see when we look at a giraffe.

How could that be, you ask?  A giraffe is a giraffe no matter who’s looking at it, right?  Not exactly.  Our minds, as the Romantic poets said and as Goethe proved, half-create and half-perceive.  The power of the human imagination over the perception of reality–what we see and how we see it–is not to be underestimated.  There are lots of philosophical arguments to this effect, but the main thing is: what we see is constituted by how we see it, and how we see it is a function of what we’re used to, what we pay attention to, what we find beautiful or scary, what details happen to surprise us, our sense of our own bodies in relation to the thing seen, etc. . . . all kinds of unconscious factors affect how you would see this giraffe.

We feel like we know better, don’t we?  Because we have photographs, we think we know what things really look like, objectively.  Take a photograph of a giraffe, and there’s no way you’re going to ever be fooled again into believing that they have huge antlers growing out of their heads.  Along these lines, photography has become for us an index of accuracy, of versimilitude, of realness.  It is the photograph of the person/moment/animal/scene against which all other forms of representation will be measured as truthful or not.

So I wonder what’s going to happen as the truth-status of the photograph erodes with technological advances that make it possible to duplicate photorealism.  I’m fascinated by Avatar, for example–by the technology that enables Cameron to shoot the movie in three dimensions, literally: his camera sees and moves through the fictional world he’s created.  This makes the “animation” look much more photorealistic, as does his innovative capture technology.  Seeing the trailer for Atavar, one glimpses a future where digital animation may look just like photorealistic film.  We won’t be able to tell the difference between a 3-dimensional scene that’s been recorded and a 3-dimensional scene that’s been fabricated from scratch.  How will that change the way we experience the world?

I love to think about how the invention of photography in the early 19th century changed how people experienced each other and their environments.  For one thing, photography created a new relationship to time.  Before photography, this moment, right now, was lost as soon as it passed.  The only remaining visual evidence of how anything or anybody appeared in that moment was memory.  But photography means that, for the first time in history, you could experience a single moment in time over and over again, ad infinitum, if it was captured in a photo.   And not just the big-time events like Waterloo that painters recreated, and not just celebrated individuals or families (in painted portraits), but everyday occurences happening to ordinary individuals.  Baby pictures.  Wedding pictures.  Important “firsts” in a person’s life.  No longer lost to time, but captured forever.

Second, once photography picked up steam over the course of the nineteenth century, it inundated us with images.  We went from no photos to having photos of everything, everywhere.  Calling cards, for example,were often replaced by photographs: where once you left your business card when you visited a friend, now you left a photograph captioned with your name.  Photographic pornography emerged.  We started taking “mug shots” of criminals.  We started classifying, to ourselves and to each other, an object or event as “new” and photographed it accordingly.  The first car.  The Crystal Palace.  The first elephant brought to London.  These images were published as prints to hang on the wall, as calendars, as advertisements, as cards, as posters, as souvenirs.

And as we became overwhelmed with images, we had to begin organizing them in our heads, to categorize and classify images in order to judge what kinds of attention to devote to them and how much.  As a Victorian, you might walk right past a photo of a commodity, but you’d maybe stop and glance at a photo of a commodity being held by a girl.  You’d decide something about that commodity based on the girl’s appearance–is she posh and elegant?  a factory worker? –which means you’d draw conclusions about that girl based on a visual code you’d unconsciously adopted, a code of meanings extrapolated from purely visual signs, from other images of other girls. We started to look at what images of people had in common with other images of people: sameness more than difference.  The unique one-of-a-kindness of each us, the little details that set us apart, faded behind the categorical interpretation of the bigger idea.

Which brings me back to our present-day visual technologies.  How will fabricated, photorealistic, three-dimensional imaging change our relationship to time?  How will it change the way we read images, signs, visual cues, people’s appearances?  I wonder how the complete loss of truth-value for seemingly photographed moving images, images that are made up but in fact look “real,”  will change our perception of ourselves, our world, and our reality.

Until our lifetimes, every photograph had a referent in the real world–it was a visual signifier that referred to something that had “actually” happened or existed.  And generally, we are a society that likes to believe that most signifiers have a referent–that words mean what they say, that this rock empirically exists, that what I see is actually what’s present out there in the world beyond my skin, that there is “true” and “real” versus “untrue” and “false.”  Being an inordinately visual culture, we tend to use photography to help us distinguish between those qualities.  What will happen when the signifier doesn’t necessarily have a referent?  When photo-realistic footage doesn’t necessarily refer to something or somebody that actually happened?

Who knows.  Maybe it will change how we experience “realness.”  Maybe other senses will become important again, more important than sight.  Maybe we’ll start to value the sense of touch more than sight, or hearing, or smell . . . Maybe we’ll define “realness” or “truth” in new (better?) ways.  Maybe we’ll figure out a new sign system that is as of yet unimaginable to us, as did the Victorians.  Maybe our brain chemistry will evolve in a different direction than we expected.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  The word says it all.  Perhaps the following will happen: rather than visually dividing the world into “true” and “untrue,” we’ll divide it into “possible” and “not possible.”  To the options of what is and what is not, we’ll add a third option: what may be.

My Body Is a Cage, My Eyes Are the Windows

 MY BODY IS A CAGE 

The word window comes from the Middle English windo e, itself derived from the Old Norse vindauga.  Vindauga was a compound of vindr, for wind, and auga, for eye.  WIND-EYE.  Built into the history of “window” is the idea of the eye becoming like the wind: a window represents the ability for vision to be like a wind and cross or transgress a boundary.  Interestingly, before the Old Norse came along, the Old English word for this was eyethurl — thurl meaning hole or aperture, eyethurl being a hole or aperture for the eye.  But it’s vindauga that won out in the end and gave us the word we use today – window — as if it was decided somewhere along the way that eyethurl was too passive, too still for what a window psychically allowed one to accomplish.  

 My computer screen is a window–it’s the shape of a window, framed like a window, and like a window it enables my sight to transgress an imagined wall and visually enter the space on the other side of it.  Through this window, I can tour Keats’s house in Hampstead Heath;  learn lots about Pablo Fiere and Claude Levi-Strauss; read the collected works of William Carlos Williams; commune instantly with you through chat; find out what at this very moment is going on with friends all over the country; Skype my client in Costa Rica; watch any movie I want to; examine a store front on Helms Avenue right now, in real time.   Through this window, I can experience the whole world.

A window, but so much better than the window on a house.  Because while I remain stationery, the views through this particular window can change ad infinitum and at will.  This 11″ x 13″ window frame is quickly becoming the only window I need.   

POV video games and Wii are windows, too, windows that become my eyes in that other world.  Were I walking around in that virtual world, my eyes would see what’s seen through the window of the monitor.  I’ve played games where I hide and duck, run for cover, shoot through bushes—and on a television big enough for it to be actually life size. In my mind, I was on the move.  It’s like I am in the house from the Wizard of Oz, spinning through space while seated safely and comfortably before this window, through which I watch so many things go by.  Or more accurately, like I am in somebody else’s body, in a different space, looking through his eyes.

A body as a vessel, as a contained space one looks out of.  If this monitor is a window that I look out of, then that makes me a building, an architectural space to be looked out of, a house.  My body is a house, or a cage.  My subjectivity lives in it, looking out this window. 

It’s not conscious, but the metaphor informing my experience of myself is that my subjectivity, my consciousness inhabits an architectural space, is inside of something and looking out from it, inside a structure out of which it perceives the world through a window.  This has always kind of been true—lots of us think of souls inhabiting a body, or of the body as a cage—but never as true as now, when this window, the computer monitor, rules the world.  I’m kind of addicted to looking out of it, in fact.  It’s like the compulsive gazing of the back-seat passenger in car.  When you sit in the backseat, do you stare at the upholstery, the back of the seat, the dashboard?  No, you stare out the windows, of course.  You can’t not stare out the windows at the passing views.  That’s what this computer is like to me sometimes.  I can’t not stare out of it.

The monitor is a window and I am a location or an address rather than a 3-dimensional flesh and blood creature grounded in corporeality.  Or more accurately, my body is an architectural space with an address.  I am only a resident here, in this location, at this address.  Does that mean that my house is no longer integrally part of my identity?  Am I no longer defined by this body?  Can I move or relocate?  Maybe: the body can be transformed far beyond what nature intended.  I can redesign my very self if I have enough money.  I can go to an architect–a plastic surgeon, a trainer, a Pilates instructor–and renovate this house.  Would I still be me in a different house?  We believe that I would still be me in a different shape, because we’ve gotten so accustomed to thinking of ourselves not as bodies, but as inhabitants of this architectural space called a body.  The body is just a house.  Paint it a different color, add an extra bedroom, but the same family still lives in there.  That’s what we believe, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.

This monitor is my window.  Through it, I see you.  By Sunday afternoon, I looked through this window and saw what costume you wore for Halloween the night before.  I knew what parties you had attended, and who with.  I saw whether or not you had children, and, if you did, what they dressed as–and all this without talking to you directly.  I see you as a series of images and sets of words, not as a body with which I come into contact physically or even aurally.   I can know you well without ever even meeting you, touching you, dancing with you, eating with you.  So what do I think of when I think of you?  You are abstract: “Withdrawn or separated from matter, from material embodiment, from practice.”  You are an abstraction: not actual corporeal presence, not action, not movement in real-time, but a constellation of ideas, words, emails, images that together constitute “you.”   

If I’m teaching a lecture hall full of undergraduates who are all staring at their laptops -chatting and IMing, emailing and observing–than are these undergraduates present, i.e., with me, or absent, i.e. somewhere else, projected like wind through that window?  Physically present, yes, but emotionally and mentally absent. . . I’m not sure which is more important.  I’m not sure which one qualifies their experience of our shared reality as participation.

I wonder what this means for how you and I interact.  I wonder if it makes us more ethical or less so.  More honest or more deceptive.  Grounded in a truer reality that makes this life a better place, or seduced away from the blood-and-guts reality of our effects upon others.   Does it bring us together, or draw us apart? 

My body is a cage

That keeps me from dancing with the one I love

Maybe not so much, anymore.

Wuthering Heights – It’s “gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind “

This time of year makes me think of Wuthering Heights, probably because for huge parts of my life I read it every autumn; or taught it; or wrote about it.  Nights getting cold, wind knocking around the trees and leaving a scoured-blue sky for morning, and all the usual intimations of immortality visited upon us by the season get me longing, longing to take the special kind of voyage inward that is the experience of Wuthering Heights.  Lots of people I love don’t much care for the novel, but for me it’s one of the most powerful ever, ever.  Anyone want to do a Wuthering Heights book club?  I promise I can make you love this novel and show you how it will change your life.

Twin souls – doomed Cathy and Heathcliff.  Courage and Passion were not abstractions to Emily Bronte–they were Forces of Nature.  They were our only means of accessing the Divine, a Power which exceeds social and intellectual understanding (see “No Coward Soul is Mine”, her most famous poem).  When our courage and passion falter, we suffer accordingly and bring others into suffering with us.

The most famous passages:

These are from Chapter 9 (I think it is), when Cathy is explaining to her family’s household manager, Nelly Dean, how she feels about Heathcliff and Edgar.  Edgar’s a good man, a good provider, and has proposed to Cathy, whereas Heathcliff has been so mistreated by her brother that his future looks grim.  So Cathy’s in a conundrum.  She confides in Nelly that she had this dream the night before . . . .

I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind . . .

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

. . . .My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath–a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind–not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

Unbeknownst to Cathy, Heathcliff was eavesdropping but only to the point where she said it would be degrading to marry him.  He takes off before he hears the rest, and isn’t seen or heard from for years.  In the meantime, Cathy marries Edgar as planned and lives the life of a lady . . . until she dies giving birth (get the metaphor?) to Edgar’s progeny.  On her deathbed, Heathcliff says to her:

You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why do you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they’ll blight you – they’ll damn you. You loved me–then what right had you to leave me? What right–answer me–for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart–you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

If you’ve ever read the novel and if you’re not hopelessly ironic, then you  know what I’m talking about.   Some of the most wrenching, archetypal love-truth in the English language.  But then again, as a former Romanticist/early Victorianist, I live for this shit.

When I hear Stephanie Meyers say that WH inspired her to write one of the Twlight novels, I want to throw up in her lap.

Your permanent record.

Remember your horror as a kid at the idea of getting caught doing anything that might go down on your — gasp!– “permanent record”?  Now with email, text messages, and FB, it’s all on your permanent record.  All of it.  Every word you share might be even more permanent than you, since it’s theoretically possible that all the online chats, drunken texts, status updates, blogs and emails you’ve authored will outlive you and achieve immortality in cyberspace.

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I studied Victorian Autobiography for a brief spell.  The challenge there was that only a specific subset of the population–the middle and upper classes–possessed the education, means, and time to write anything down, much less publish what they’d written.  As a consequence, most of our ideas about England in the 1800s came from the middle class, and what we knew of working-class life, by contrast, was only what could be put together from the discovered stash of rare letters in an attic somewhere.  That’s won’t be the case for future scholars of the 21st century.  Everyone writes  everything down anymore.  Imagine: far into the future, a UCLA musical scholar will seek to investigate the twenty-first century preponderance in Los Angeles of bands named after locations.  He’ll simply google “Just Off Turner” or “Astra Heights,” then cross reference the band members’ names.  Et voila.  This scholar will know instantly that Bryan Mounce dated this great chick who did improv, that Phil Metzler wished he had an afro like Jeff Lynne’s, that James Morales mostly wore black and Timmy Morales like to imbibe the $1 beers at Crane’s every Monday night.  That’s a lot of information, compared to what I was able to learn in the archives about 19th-century buskers, which would’ve been nada.

Everything ever known about you now will be known about you forever.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Imagine yourself liberated from the past.  That’s what a truly permanent record does: it says to you, you can’t hide from what you’ve done, you can’t distort it, you can’t put it on anybody else.  It is what it is.  Deal with it.

So you do.

I once read there’s a very good reason memory fades: to ease pain and to make room for new feelings and ideas.  I don’t believe it.  There is no good reason for memory to fade.  Well, I take that back–maybe it’s healthy for emotional memories to fade.  But not the historical record, the things you write to other people that are supposed to mean something.  To the contrary, it’s better to have a record of everything you’ve ever written or that’s ever been written to you so that you can hold the world and yourself accountable ad infinitum for the words that have been committed to paper.  That’s sort of what’s meant by transparency and honesty.

I mean, it’s fine to change your mind, and sometimes what you emailed a week ago is no longer emotionally true for you today.  But if it’s in an email or text message, at least there’s empirical evidence of that emotion having been experienced (unless you’re a liar,  in which case there’s evidence of its at least having been expressed).  And if there’s evidence of that emotion floating out there in the world, it’s much harder to pretend it was never said, or that it doesn’t exist, or that you didn’t involve another person in it.  Somehow or another, even if only internally, you have to acknowledge it and decide what to do with it.  You have to deal in uncomfortable truths.  You have to remain accountable for your permanent record.

We’ve always been told that words are weapons, that they’re so powerful that they can change things.  Use a different word, create a different world.  Maybe in this new era , we’re going to start living like that’s actually true, because all of our words can come back to haunt us.  Either that or treat everything with the gravity of an emoticon.  Said today, gone tomorrow.  A world of meaningless words, where nothing’s ever really as stake.  That’s what politics feel like, right?  Blech.

More personally, I labor under the belief that feelings never really go away, they just get lost.   The permanent record helps you to find them again for a little while.

Which is why I have a gmail address for the girls to which I send things every once in a while: links to the blogs I’ve written about my daughters, outpourings of love typed out late at night, and lots of the emails sent between her father and me the first couple of years. The gmail account was born of the impulse to keep a historical record, in all our original words, of a confusing time in our lives, the time when Djuna’s family underwent cataclysmic transformation. I knew enough from my own experience as a child of divorce–and, granted, I could be projecting here–that one of the most frustrating things about having your life divided in that manner is the mystery that shrouds it.  My thought was this: if someday Djuna and Poppy want to puzzle through the narrative of their parents’ marriage and separation–and they very well may not, and that’s fine, too–then better to draw their own conclusions from the historical record than leave it to the distortions of their parents, the adults too screwed up to keep our shit together and too proud to part amicably on their behalf.

I’ve always been a pack rat, anyway, so even without the gmail account there’s be a lot permanent record.  I kept a daily journal from January to August 1992, which began with Kevin and me first hooking up after a late night at the 500 Club in winter and ended with us moving in together into a little apartment off of Melrose and Fairfax in the autumn. Love letters their father sent me, Mother’s Day cards, birthday cards, photo album after album, boxes of ticketstubs, postcards, brochures, and flyers from all the things we did together.  I’m told it’s important for children to know they were conceived in love, whatever else followed their conception, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in this stash I’m saving for them.  But I’ve often wondered what Paige and Kevin will make of this historical record.  The one time recently I was at Dick and Julie’s house, I noticed that all pictures of me were gone and replaced with pictures of Paige.  Which makes sense, I guess, it just gets me curious. Will that side of the family present to our daughters a history from which my relatives and I have been erased, a history that didn’t begin until September 2006, 15 years in? (Draw your own conclusions from Paige’s account here of how she and Kevin met: http://www.oncewed.com/17437/real-weddings-blog/once-wed/kevin-paige/)

Ah, historical revisionism.  The fine art of scapegoating, of erasing, of distorting to save one’s own ass.  You have to pretend that X never happened, so you replace it with Y.  But it’s a fetishizing game, which means it’s a losing game: the substitute only commemorates the thing it’s meant to hide.  The more zealously you forward the Y, then the more anxiety about X that you betray.  That’s what happens with Paige’s blog.  The old scapegoating version they told was that I drove Kevin nearly to suicide, until Paige rescued him from our marriage.  In this new version, they weren’t even married anymore when they met.  Mark and I have been vanished.  But I would guess from this revisionism that Paige is ashamed of what really happened; which, weirdly, makes her blog an unintentional acknowledgment of guilt even as she’s trying to whitewash it.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.  I’ve begun to wonder if guilt isn’t an even more powerful emotion than love.  I’m sad to say I’ve seen a lot of love thrown away in service of guilt.  In that regard, I acknowledge Kevin’s courage: he loved Paige and so he chose her, despite the social pressure to be a good boy and in spite of the burden of guilt he’d have to struggle with afterwards (or, sadly and less heroically, displace to my shoulders in classic scapegoat fashion).  I’m not sanctioning anything, I’m just saying: they’re obviously happy together, and maybe they belonged together, maybe more than either Kevin and me or Mark and Paige . . . who am I to say what God’s will is for any of us?   But the guilt  . . . it makes people do ugly things.  It’s so painful that it makes them desperate to spread the guilt around, to parcel it out, to bury it, or to pretend it away.  So they start revising history.  And all revisionist history needs a scapegoat.

So I know a thing or two about being scapegoated, or at least about being scapegoated in love triangles.  It’s not a pretty feeling.  A shrink during the divorce explained it to me like this.  In a love triangle, one must choose between the other two and, in order to do so with a clean conscience, he must throw one of those two to the dogs in order to place the other on a pedestal.   So two gang up on one and begin the scapegoating process.  Whether by projection, or blame, or through solidarity, the majority project all the guilt and shame upon the minority, who (ideally) accepts the burden.  Then the scapegoat gets outcast, exiting the triangle and taking all the guilt and shame with them so that the remaining two are temporarily liberated from it.  If the minority won’t accept the burden, if the outcast won’t voluntarily exit the triangle, then there’s an intermediate step, and that’s where revisionist history comes in.  It’s a form of violence whereby the majority in essence forces the scapegoat out of the triangle–by bullying the scapegoat, by isolating the scapegoat, by brainwashing the scapegoat, or by (symbolically) killing the scapegoat.   One way or the other, the minority has to be scapegoated and symbolically sacrificed in order for the remaining majority to live in peace.

It’s a never-ending cycle, because the guilt and shame projected upon the scapegoat have only been symbolically eradicated .  In truth, the causes and symptoms of the guilt can never be magically vanished.  So scapegoating is a vicious pattern that repeats each time the guilt and shame creep back in (which they inevitably do), and one that will continue to repeat until we recognize in ourselves the mechanisms of denial, projection, and psychological violence that necessitate it.   Jesus was the only scapegoat able to break this cycle.  That’s because his resurrection proved something to his community that most scapegoats can’t: “Look at me, here: see, I am entirely innocent of everything you projected onto me.  No arguing with me on this one, is there?  I’ve been resurrected, that’s how innocent I am.  So that means you better take a good look at yourselves, instead, for the real cause of all that guilt and shame.”   And they do, and they see it, and they are reborn.  And the cycle of violence that culminates in a scapegoat is broken.

Maybe a permanent record can serve in a parallel manner, if we pay attention to it.   Because we now have detailed written accounts of so many of the emotional transactions that we engage in on a daily basis, it becomes more and more difficult to creatively revise that record down the line.  Therefore it becomes more difficult to successfully execute the mechanisms of distortion, projection, and denial that scapegoating requires.  The permanent record smacks us upside the head with undeniable evidence of our own accountability, and we are therefore liberated from the temptation to go into denial, to hide from the truth, or to project guilt and blame onto anybody else.  Imagine that.  Ongoing atonement that keeps your slate perpetually clean.  Real honesty.  Real transparency.

So next time some I see some ugly conflict coming down the pipe, or face a big choice, or simply feel I’m misunderstanding somebody, I’ll pull out the emails and text messages and wall postings that we exchanged.  I’ll glance at my status updates on Facebook.  I’ll take a long gander at what was said to get me to this point.  I’ll be true to the moment I’m in, for sure.  I won’t live in the past.  But I won’t hide from it either.  I can’t anymore.   It’s on my permanent record.

Bye bye Lucy.

So Lucy had to go last night.

On Sunday, she busted through the screen door to get at a dog walking by, one of two aged pointers this older woman walks regularly.  I went out and separated Lucy from them.  Put Lucy in the house so I could speak to the owner.  While I was speaking with the owner, Lucy busted through the window screen and attacked the same dog, again.  I put Lucy back in the house and, as I was again approaching the owner, Lucy came from I-don’t-know-where to go at this poor dog a third time.  I tackled her midstream and locked her in the bathroom to apologize to this woman and her poor dogs.  There was blood all over the dog’s throat, all over Lucy’s face, all over the window pane she’d jumped from.

Oh, the Vet’s bills.

Lucy was fine.  The girls were shaken up.  I was devestated.  This was the umpteenth dog Lucy had attacked.  We don’t have a yard and, everytime somebody walks by, she tries to pop open the screen door in the hopes of getting out and getting even.    If she can’t get the door open, she headbutts the screen or scrounges around for a window to bust out of–three times she’s  jumped through a window after we’d thought we’d successfully blockaded it.  She’s gotten out half a dozen times, each time attacking a dog, and I’ve been bitten twice ripping her off the throat of some unsuspecting passing canine.  When we walk her, she’d lose her mind if she saw another dog–screaming, strangling herself on her choke chain, blind with anxiety.  I got afraid that she’d kill a dog eventually, or get killed, my daughters witness to some bloody canine trauma.  Or worse, that while in the zone she’d turn on them and snap.  (She’d get those wild, crazy eyes.)

So Monday I called around and found a breeder who also rescues aggressive Frenchies.  This breeder came to pick up Lucy last night.  Poor Poppy, her face cradled in her hands as she watched out the front window while we put Lucy in the car and said goodbye.  I came back into the house and Poppy started to cry.

“I don’t want Lucy to have to go!  I love Lucy, Mama!  I don’t want her to go!”

She started to wail.  I bundled her up in my lap and held her.  Djuna, meanwhile, sat beside us chattering about how it was all for the best, because Lucy was trying to kill every dog that went by the house.  And it’s true.  Lucy spent most of her time worried sick that she’d fail to fulfill her obligation to kill any dog that came within 75 feet of us.  Out walking.  From the front door.  In the car.  At night, at 3 am.  , when a distant dog barked somewhere.  She had a reputation around the neighborhood for being nasty and loud.

But she wasn’t, not when it came to people.  With us she was sweet and very affectionate and playful.  She slept with Poppy every night and let Poppy push her around and followed Poppy through the house.  Lucy chewed the black plastic eyeballs off of all of Poppy’s stuffed animals and pooped in the bathtub rather than have an accident on the floor.  She gave hundreds of kisses every day with her warm, soft flappy bulldog mouth, and escorted me like a shadow, her claws rat-tatting on the wood floors, when the girls were with their father.

I feel like I failed Lucy and, worse, I feel like I failed Poppy. 

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, folks.  We’ll miss her.  It’s going to be a rough week, still.

Life, Love, and Lies in the Age of Emoticons.

Life, Love, and Lies in the Age of Emoticons.

Lying fascinates me. It’s a form of acting, the performance of an un-truth. Profligate liars are profligate performers, people who divide themselves into different roles for different people. When they are lying, they are pretending to be something that they are not.

But to look at lying as a performance is to assume that the opposite is true: that in opposition to the performance, there is a genuine individual, a genuine subjectivity that exists that’s not only different from the performance you’re getting, but also better than the performance because it’s more real. This view of lying sees it as a departure from what is real. When you discover, say, that your partner has been two-timing you, one of the reasons you’re so outraged is because that means they were only performing monogamy and all the feelings that monogamy entails. The assumption then follows that the real, which is by necessity different from the performance, is something else: is not monogamy and is not all the feelings that monogamy entails. This takes away the ground beneath your feet. “Who are you?” is a question that the betrayed often find themselves asking of the betrayer over and over again. “I don’t know you anymore.”

So the discovery of deception is shattering to the Romantics among us. Romantics are deeply invested in the whole idea of “I”, which is not at all to say that Romantics are necessarily self-obsessed (although they can be), but that Romantics believe in the idea of a unified, consistent consciousness in each of us. The “I” is an identity, and it identifies the same subjectivity across time. Who “I” am now is a product of who “I” was in the past; there’s supposed to be a relationship between the two, and a teleological one at that, evolving over time like an arrow pointing heavenward. Past, present, and future selves are all just different points on the same arrow, all contributing to the same trajectory. Do something–like lie, or deceive me–that places a point anywhere but on the imagined arrow, and the entire arrow must shift direction to accomodate it, because to me it’s not conceivable that somebody’s arrow might be crooked or, more shocking yet, not an arrow at all (maybe, say, a constellation instead, or a pure choas of dots).

I think we are most of us Romantics.

The tricky part is this. It’s not that Romantics believe in this view of subjectivity because of how they feel about themselves, their loved ones, or the world at large. Romantics feel the way they do about themselves, their loved ones, and the world at large because they believe in this view of subjectivity: they believe in arrows. I tell somebody I love them in January, and in February one of the reasons I’ll feel as I do about them–still loving them–is because I feel in my very bones that what I said in January is unquestionably related to who I am in February. My belief in the connectedness of emotional experience is what generates the feelings I have right now (in relationship to what I felt before) and the feelings I’ll have tomorrow. My accountability to who I was and what I said in the past is so deeply ingrained, it becomes the unconscious programming that conditions how I process information, feedback, and my own emotions. Put another way, my belief in the unified, consistent and linear nature of subjectivity is my hard drive. My feelings and perceptions are the software. They seem to have a life of their own, but in actuality what they are capable of is determined by what the hard drive allows them to do.

Who knows where Romantics get this linear view of themselves and human consciousness. Being a literature person, I would say that they get it from the way in which they’ve seen narratives structured over the course of their lives. Television dramas that presented them with the same characters week after week, year after year, interminably: character consistency reinforced by the regularity with which it is was consumed. Movies with conventional linear narratives that you encountered not in a dialogic way (like we do now–we walk into a movie with a well developed set of preconceptions & opinions derived from massive marketing compaigns and press junkets, and we put these into dialogue with the film itself as we watch it), but rather as a single, monolithic narrative unfolding in the darkness. An assumption that realism was actually a reflection of the way the world operates, rather than an awareness that we think of “realist” as such because we’ve read and watched so much realism.

But this view of our feelings and ideas is considered deeply sentimental by Postmoderns. For the Postmoderns among us, the illusion that the present is evolved from the past is just that–an illusion; a dishonesty; a lie. For example, the Romantic might remain loyal to a lover because of their shared history, because of a horror of throwing it all away, because of a vision of the future evolved from that history to which the Romantic remains attached. To the Postmodern, this is sentimental and nostalgic claptrap. If you’re with somebody right now for any reason other than in this very moment you want to be with them, then you’re not being genuine–you’re performing. You’re lying, whether to yourself or to them, in an effort either to heroize your emotions or to return to a known past. To the Postmodern, this is not only ideologically conservative (how radical can you be if you feel chained to something you said or felt in the past), but cowardly. Live in the Now.

Because the past is dead, according to the Postmodern. It is an illusion seeking to control us, to make us behave in certain ways, to keep us obligated to the status quo. The idea of an arrow keeps us all pointing in the same tired direction, when in fact we are a mess of unpredictable dots, our consciousness in actuality unfolding over time more like a supernova or a school of jellyfish than like a rocket or a tree. Romantics think of the past as our teacher: if you don’t learn from it, you’ll repeat its mistakes. That, in spite of the popularity of this Romantic belief, we all keep repeating the same mistakes–genocides, wars, plagues, environmental disasters, relationships–suggests that learning from the past can’t really be done. That maybe the Postmoderns are right. That whatever we believe sentimentally, the past teaches us nothing that substantially changes the present or the future. The past is an illusion, a representation of an idea that keeps us from becoming truly liberated into the Now.

That’s the Postmodern way.

So for the Postmodern, there is no personal metanarrative to which this moment’s desires must answer and no past self to which this moment’s impulses must reconcile themselves. There is only now. But what happens when one is liberated from a teleological view of subjectivity?

One answer: irony prevails, and that has been the Postmodern norm in our culture for a couple decades now. There is no teleology, no utopic endgame for us as individuals or as a society, so we may as well have a good laugh and make fun of ourselves for being so earnestly idealistic. But on a more personal level, I’m asking this question about Romantic versus Postmodern subjectivities because I’ve noticed, in my limited world, a shift in the value and meaning of words as the expression of genuine emotion. I’ve noticed a shift in the perception of what it means to lie.

Think of each communication you’ve had with, say, your partner as a single word. Over the course of a relationship, for us Romantics, these words comprise a sentence: the significance of each word is affected by its placement in relation to other words in that sentence. Again, the idea of continuity, linearity, unity. For Postmoderns, however, there is no sentence. There is only a series of isolated utterances, each independent of the other in its claim to truth status. No one utterance in that collection of utterances owes any debt to to any other utterance, nor to the sentence of which it is imagined to be a part.

So what is a lie, in this view? The Romantic believes: if a person says today, “I believe in God,” and then the next day says, “I don’t believe in God,” then that person is lying on one day or the other. The Postmodern believes: that person just believed different things on different days.

Which, strangely enough, gets me thinking about text messages & emoticons as epitomizing this different, Postmodern attitude toward emotional metanarrative and, by extension, truth and lying.

When I go to write a letter to somebody I like, I craft it carefully. Whether because I’m a Romantic, or of a certain generation, or an ex-literary scholar or a writer, I believe words have substance, weight, consciousness — that they represent a current self to which my future self will be responsible, and therefore I better speak only the “truth.” By implication, the truth is thus a contract with myself, and with my audience, regarding the future: what I say I feel now now will be something I need to take into account in a minute, a day, a week, a month.

But text messages are of the moment, and only this particular moment. They are not expected to imply an obligation to any kind of sustained metanarrative of emotion. They are drafted on impulse, in drunkenness, in the heat of emotion, to make a quick plan (The Abbey at 8!!!!). You can text somebody a proposal at 1am on a Friday night ["Come over now "]; by brunch on Saturday morning, it is completely acceptable to act as if the text never happened. In fact, it is gauche to take text messages too seriously — in certain social circles, you never discuss a text exchange after the fact. It is almost as if text messages liberate you from responsiblity to any sustained emotional history beyond this moment, and everybody knows it.

Thus the now-ubiquitous emoticon. Emoticons are the embodiment of emotional ephemerality. Nothing conveys the 4-second expiration date of my current feeling like the emoticon. When I you, do you really worry that I might have learned I’m terminally ill? just lost my job? lost a friendship? Of course not. If I were, then I wouldn’t you. Likewise, if you were informing me of your engagement to Larry, you wouldn’t text me because that would be silly regarding such an important emotional event. We use emoticons to organize our emotional utterances into snappy, lightweight, easily consumable, of-the-moment units.

Innocent enough, right? Used judiciously, emoticons are harmless until you wonder: which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do you only emoticon when you have a light feeling, or do you have lighter and lighter feelings because you’re so busy texting and emailing and chatting that you find yourself expressing yourself all the time with emoticons? I tend to believe that representation informs consciousness–that we understand ourselves through the tools our culture gives us. Therefore, equipped with emoticons and text messages and online chatting, we come to understand our feelings as of the moment, fleeting, ephemeral, rarely worth getting hung up on. We are all becoming Postmodern. No wonder The Power of Now (which I haven’t read, by the way) was a bestseller.

Back to the issue of truth and lying, and especially in relationships. How do you know you love somebody? For the Romantic, this question pertains to an entire history of shared experience. What the Romantic feels about a person now is the culmination of everything that came before. To be in love is to give this history a name and a future: a “relationship,” a “love affair,” even a “marriage.” All these names we apply to committed relationships share the quality of unifying moments spent with another person into an entity with a history. They organize moments from the past in relationship to the present. After all, that’s kind of what’s meant by “I’ve fallen in love with you” — that I realize now how, all along, our time together has been building toward this moment, a moment which changes my idea of what your future and my future will be: our future.

That’s a Romantic. But take away the emotional metanarrative, take away the idea of consciousness as teleological, and to what sense of history can a “relationship” appeal? What can it mean to “fall in love”? If your cultural or ideological lexicon doesn’t include a conception of an emotional narrative with a linear, teleological trajectory, then how do you conceptualize a longterm, committed (monogamous) relationship? It shifts things. A relationship becomes a collection rather than an evolution: a collection of good times and getting along, rather than an arrow leading away from one thing and toward something else. Thusly the absence of teleological relationships — Californication, Hung, Don Draper (who is he, anyway?) — or of creatures incapable of teleology (vampires , zombies, and technological surrogates).

Which may be a more accurate reflection of how human nature and the heart truly work. I was in a long partnership. I know that the ebbs and flows of a relationship mean that at times one is lying when one says “Yes, I’m in love with you.” From this perspective, commitment is a choice, an agreement between two people to share the hallucination that their being together is an entity unto itself, a Romantic entity, with its own past, a present and a future. It is a hallucination that obligates you to the performance of consistency, whether you feel it or not. The Real me loves you, whatever this one lousy day or week may feel like.

Take that away, and perhaps you are living more honestly: time is an illusion, after all, and the past and future don’t actually exist. What is your responsibility now to the thing you turned into a truth yesterday by saying it aloud? You don’t have any. You told the truth then, and you’re telling the truth now, and they no longer need to refer to the same thing. Beyond the Now there is no Real Me for you to know, no Real You for me to grow old with.

Makes the Now seems kind of lonely, though, doesn’t it?