205. moiety

I did not watch the Oscars last night. Something about watching institutionalized, self-congratulatory narcissism makes me nauseous. Ellen DeGeneres’ quip in her opening monologue about rain in Los Angeles dampening the evening seemed to sum it up. “We’re fine,” she joked. “Thank you for your prayers.”

Frankly, I haven’t seen any of the films that were nominated this year, aside from 12 Years a Slave, which made me feel guilty about having complained about anything, ever, in my entire life. For one, I don’t have the money. When faced with having to pay rent, groceries, phone bill, car insurance, and other essentials, spending what little discretionary funds I have available on what amounts to flimsy, cardboard representations of reality seems pretty ridiculous. Which brings me to the other reason I don’t go, which is that I find most films these days to be formulaic and predictable, as well as shallow and dull, and not worth my time.

Author Carlos Stevens wrote of the role of movies during the Great Depression: that they “offered a chance to escape the cold, the heat, and loneliness; they brought strangers together, rubbing elbows in the dark of movie palaces and fleapits, sharing in the one social event available to everyone.”

I don’t understand wanting to herd into darkened theaters to sit with strangers, or the desire to mingle gregariously. But I get wanting to escape from reality. It’s why I spent so much time with books as a teenager, preferring fictional universes where heroes overcame their demons. But it’s hard to relate to most of the stories presented for entertainment these days. Where movies of the 1930s were meant to give us hope in dark times, movies of the twenty-first century seem purposed only to numb us to the meandering banality of our own times.

Today I came across an article that explores the evolution of the horror genre and its use as contemporary commentary. The author writes of Wes Craven’s 1972 The Last House on the Left:

Scenes such as our female protagonist being raped and executed are meant to remind you of Mi Li or the notorious photograph of a Vietcong suspect being shot in the head outside a Buddhist Temple. Craven is telling us that the cinema is no long a safe heaven from suffering. ‘Look,’ his films seem to be saying. ‘This is what’s happening outside your door. Do something!’

Rather than attempt to hold a mirror to reality, most movies today promise shiny solutions to difficult solutions in fifteen, easy-to-follow “beats” (as per Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat). From opening image to that pivotal “dark night of the soul” at the end of Act 2, these stories promise that everything will be okay, no matter how impossible the situation.

Right now, it’s difficult to find much hope in these stories given my current circumstances. Sure, I’m not in living Russia, Uganda, or Nigeria, in real danger for my life. But I’m still looking for a job, my unemployment insurance runs out this week, and I’m not sure where money is going to come from in the next few weeks. My car is falling apart. I’m not sure how I’m going to force my unscrupulous landlord to return the security deposit without hiring a crackerjack legal team.

So you’ll forgive me if the avaricious characters in The Wolf of Wall Street or the charade of Dallas Buyer’s Club doesn’t assuage my anxieties. Hollywood loves to glorify the myth of the lone hero, the man or woman who overcomes villains and all odds to achieve his/her goal.

What’s so seductive about a story like 12 Years a Slave is that we know how the story ends. Even in its darkest moments, we know from the historical record that Solomon Northup will be freed. We know that Frodo will succeed in his quest. That Harry Potter will defeat Voldemort.

There is mythic truth in these stories. But that truth is only found in hindsight.

We are all heroes in our own narratives, which means that we are constantly in medias res – in the midst of the story. So I don’t know when life is going to calm down for me, and allow me to live a mode other than near-constant crisis management. As I said to a friend of mine today, it feels as if I’m always waiting for something awful to happen or expecting to be disappointed. One could say that this is how self-fulfilling prophesies are written, yet I’m tired of trying to play Pollyanna and paint a smiley face on a bleak situation.

What little hope I have actually comes from my atheism, and my layman’s study of cosmology and natural selection. In a recent NPR interview, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective … leading nations into battle. No, that doesn’t happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there’s this little speck called Earth and you say, “You’re going to what? You’re on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?” … Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

It’s hard to look at the Hollywood elite gathering in Los Angeles to give themselves awards in light of knowing how utterly insignificant we are, especially when there is so much need in the world and so much progress left to make. As Piper Chapman says in Orange is the New Black, “I cannot get behind some supreme being who weighs in on the Tony Awards while a million people get whacked with machetes.”

It could always be worse. And it’s a miracle that any of us are here at all, given how it could’ve gone countless times for our planet throughout its history.

But it’s difficult to stay hopeful or plan for the future when storm clouds seem to be permanently camped on the horizon.

135. agley

Consider again that dot. That’s here.

That’s home.

That’s us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan (1994). Pale blue dot: A vision of the human future in space.

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I don’t know that I really have much to add to Sagan’s words. They were written in response to a photograph taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had just completed its mission to the planet Saturn. Its camera was going to be turned off in order to conserve energy for the remainder of its journey out of our solar system. Its other instruments would still be active as it continued to send back its findings, but Sagan convinced the NASA scientists to turn Voyager around and take one last picture of Earth before it headed out towards what we’d later learn is the heliopause—the beginning of the edge of interstellar space.

With this image, for the first time, we saw ourselves in relation to the whole solar system, and it in relation to the universe as a whole. It’s one thing to know the size of the universe we live in. It’s another thing to actually see it. This world that feels uncomprehendingly huge is indeed a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot. The image was captured at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from earth. The dot is a mere .12 pixels wide, set against the blackness of space. That’s home. That’s here. That’s us.

Given that scale, it’s truly mind-boggling how utterly insignificant we are, and if more people truly understood that and how lucky we are to even be here, things like politics and land wars would end completely. Maybe that’s a bit idealistic, but I’d like to think that hot button topics like gay marriage and women’s reproductive rights wouldn’t even be an issue, because what does it matter? Religion taught us that we’re special snowflakes made in the image of our Creator; and we’re admittedly probably something of a phenomenon in the universe. Sentient life is likely a relatively rare occurrence. Yet here we are.

In this tiny space of time we call a “lifetime,” we are given the improbable opportunity to think, give, feel, love, imagine, enjoy and marvel. It will be another 40,000 years before Voyager 1 comes within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445. By that time you and I will be long gone and forgotten, and the human race may have already made its way out into the heavens. By that point we may have even made the next leap in our evolution as a species. By that point it’ll have been nearly 100,000 years since homo sapiens appeared on the scene. We’re rather overdue for an upgrade as it is. Still… it’s awesome to think about.

Due to the nature of the brains we developed by virtue of the rock and the chemicals we stewed in, we are always learning, always processing new information. Yet some of us insist on living in fear. Life is far too short and too grand to be lived in a tiny box, in a straight jacket, with blinders on and earplugs in. We are explorers, adventurers, and it’s a crime not to take full advantage of every minute we’re lucky enough to enjoy on this pale blue dot.

47. Contact

“You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” – Contact (1997)

Sorry I’ve been away so much… not that anyone has noticed, I’m sure. Other things have taken priority over blogging, like my health, relationships, and life in general. Life has been especially crazy lately, work and teaching being two major factors.

Lately the realisation is growing on me that I’m entering my late 20s as a single man. Still not really sure what that means, but I know at the very least that it means that I’ve set Thanksgiving as a target date for no longer being a single guy.

So I just want to share a couple of thoughts and quotes before bed.

A couple of weeks ago I finally saw Up In The Air, and was rather taken aback at what a perceptive and sensitive commentary it is on modern relationships and the toll that American individualism has taken on Americans who value self-sufficiency and security above all else. Yet the yearning remains for belonging and acceptance. We’re funny creatures.

I was especially struck by this comment by one of the characters, Alex, mid-way through the film:

By the time you’re thirty four, all the physical requirements are pretty much out the window. I mean, you secretly pray he’ll be taller than you. Not an asshole would be nice. Just someone who enjoys my company. Comes from a good family. You don’t think about that when you’re younger. Wants kids… Likes kids. Wants kids. Healthy enough to play catch with his future son one day.

Please don’t let him earn more than I do. That doesn’t make sense now, but believe me, it will one day. Otherwise it’s just a recipe for disaster. Hopefully some hair on his head? But it’s not exactly a deal-breaker anymore. Nice smile… yep, a nice smile just might do it . . .

By the time someone is right for you, it won’t feel like settling… And the only person left to judge you will be the twenty-four year-old girl with a target on your back.

All that really got me thinking about the key qualities that I’m looking for in a future partner; because the older I get, the more I realise that the stuff that seemed vital, even six months ago, really isn’t all that big of a deal. The stuff that matters now is that which will matter over time, as we get older. For example, politics used to be a big deal to me. A staunch Libertarian, it was imperative that I be with someone like-minded. But now, I’d be willing to passionately fight about politics and values, but at the end of the day set it aside because loving each other matters so much more than stupid differences over who we support. I just want to feel a head on my shoulder at night as we fall asleep, because that’s what will matter over time. That’s what it is to be human.

So, remembering that looks fade and life’s a bitch: the stuff that really matter at the end of the day for me come down to about four things:

1. Deep and lasting faith in God.
2. Insatiable curiosity about everything.
3. Unquenchable passion for life.
4. Nice smile. And likes kids.

Sorry, this is heavy stuff for the weekend.