"Gone with the Wind" casts a long shadow

I am a big cinephile. And while I have never been a huge fan of GWTW, I have to admit it is a great film. I stumbled on it last night on Turner Classic Movies, and I found myself feeling sorry for Scarlett O'Hara at the end. But I also found Rhett Butler sympathetic in ways I hadn't previously considered - a businessman with low expectations from life, he is surprised by the depth of love he grows to feel for Scarlett, largely through his love for her daughter.

Nevertheless, I find the story on the whole hokey, soap-opera stuff. But as an epic, I can't help but be impressed. Last night, I also watched most of a documentary on the making of the film, and seeing all the lengths that David O. Selznick went to in getting the film made, I am even more impressed. It's fascinating watching the screen tests for the various parts with the different actors and actresses.

Watching the movie and the documentary made me think more about the two main characters and the actors who played them. Clark Gable was the hot actor of the 30s, and of course he went on to make films up to 1961, but I don't see him as a great actor on the level of his contemporaries like Gary Cooper or Cary Grant. His range was very limited. I know most of the actors of his day to our eyes seem to be playing the same character in every movie, and that's what people went the movies to see, but that's not what I'm talking about. You very rarely get to Gable showing any range of emotion - he's tight, in control. GWTW stretches him more than most of his other films, but in the end he returns to his comfort zone. He speaks his lines with typical Gable sarcasm and condescension, and he's off, not to be controlled by any mere mortal.

People speak about Vivien Leigh with such hallowed tones, and I am at a loss to really get that. Would she have gotten half as far as she did if she were not married to Olivier? Probably not. But getting ahead through marriage is something that is still practiced to this day in Hollywood (Nicole Kidman's marriage to Tom Cruise being the one that comes most readily to mind). Again, within the style of what acting was like in those days, I suppose she did well. But put her up against Bette Davis - I mean, where is Leigh's Now Voyager or Of Human Bondage? Maybe if George Cukor had succeeded in finishing GWTW, giving the movie a tone more sympathetic to the women characters, I would have a different view of her.

Dancing around the eternal flame, part one

Two people rather close to me died recently, and in the course of mourning their passing, I find myself encountering the difficult questions once again. For example, "What happens when we die?" and "what do you believe?" Especially since one of these people was a retired Episcopal priest, and God and spiritual matters was never far from the center of our conversations.

To get to answering these questions satisfactorily, I find that I have to back up a bit. Not that I want to avoid the questions and the answers, but there is a context that needs to be expressed. The stage needs to be set before the actors can come on and move us with their story.

First of all, I have never felt there to be incompatibility between science and religion. When I was nine years old, a classmate who I also knew from church questioned me on how I could believe in evolution when the bible tells us about Adam and Eve. Her question annoyed me - I simply told her "it's not the same thing." I still feel that way. I'm sure we will talk more about this later.

Second, I don't believe that God has much use for religion, or religions. Those are human institutions, that we have established for our own comfort, to suit our needs. They reflect all that is good and bad in us. They can be vehicles for great progress and profound good. They can also be weapons of horrific destruction and ignorance. How we use our religions, how we use all our man-made institutions, shows us where we are as a species, whether we are small-minded barbarians or truly evolved creatures using our power for progress and compassion.

But before I can talk about how I feel about religion, about what I believe, I have to talk about how I feel about my position as a member of the human race. Our race exhibits many kinds of behavior that distinguish us from other species. And while other species may behave in similar ways, when you put the whole set of behaviors we exhibit together, we are fairly unique.

Three things about us that I find noteworthy are that we are social creatures with a great capacity for imagination and curiosity. I will elaborate on this last point in my next post.

Adulthood? Who needs it!

Growing up in the late 1960s definitely had its good points for me. For one thing, it felt like we were on the verge of a major do-over. As in, scrap all the bullshit that has collected in American culture over the last so many decades and start from scratch with something true, alive, and worth living for.

There was also the sense that for once the focus was on the youth of the country. Instead of everything being built for the convenience of, and giving all the credit to, people middle-aged and older, the importance of all that those of us on the way up have to offer - energy, imagination, lack of pre-conceptions, passion - was clearly evident. The shoe was finally, for at least a few moments, on the other foot.

Now, it's hard to sustain the kind of excitement and sweeping the closet clean feeling that existed then. And we didn't. In the last 30 years especially, the status quo has reasserted itself with furious indignation. But I personally retained a lot of what I found so valuable way back then. And foremost, I think I have continued to hold a strong suspicion of adulthood. A resistance against all the hurry people are in to grow up.

I'm not trying to be some kind of Peter Pan. I'm not trying to hide from *shudder* responsibility, or pass my burdens onto someone else's shoulders. But for as long as I inhabit this earth, I will continue to be skeptical of the truths that I am fed by men and women who talk in hushed tones, eventually escalating to shrill grating diatribes. And among those things about which I will be, about which I am, skeptical the most has to be the importance of becoming an adult.

There is nothing more dull, slovenly, false, pretentious, self-satisfied... need I go on? than an adult desparately asserting that everyone around them needs to become as mature as them, which really means just as dull, slovenly, etc.

I saw my fellow college students - bright, eager, humorous, full of wonder at life - graduate, and within a couple of years, most of them were paying car loans and mortgages, wearing navy blue and muddy brown, losing their hair, pushing baby strollers, telling jokes they heard on "the Tonight Show". Their lives were over before they had hardly begun. They'd gone from 21 to 51 overnight. They had been more than happy to give up the precarious and exciting position of being on the verge of adulthood, for the security and comfort of imitating their parent's version of adulthood.

How can we avoid it, anyway? How can we not become our parents? How can we not give up our morals, our ambitions, our resistance against settling for less, and become everything we have always hated? Well, to the extent that I am able to resist settling for the dull and drab, a key is having an unremitting awe for everything that is NOT adulthood.

Therapy helps. Also staying free of debt. And watching as little television (or at least commercial television) as possible. The most prevalent media through which the evil world of the oldsters programs the rest of us to want to join their lot is, yes, the media.

Oh, I'm not saying there aren't some wonderful things about being, let's say, over 25. I personally enjoy more than a few creature comforts. I have access to more amazing things - artistic, cultural stuff - than anyone ever has thus far in the history or prehistory of this planet. I have friends who live all over the United States and in countries around the world, many of whom I've met through this glorious invention, the Internet.

And I have a free will and the gumption to use it. Which tells me that not everything that everyone tells me I should be doing is so damned wonderful. You want an example? OK. iPods. Wait a minute, you say, lots of kids have iPods and live through the things. How can you say that the iPod is a poison inflicted on the population by the mature?

I will tell you. And I will try not to sound like a crank as I do. Which is not easy.

We are being taught with increasing stridency to fill every moment with something, to never be idle. This means, among other things, to have some noise, some sound blaring at you every second. What is the constructive purpose for doing this? Do we really derive that much pleasure from being able to listen to, say, Prince's Purple Rain on a train from New York to Baltimore?

Well, one thing that comes of never having a moment of silence is that it is hard for us to think. To really think. Not "what's for dinner?" or "where are Sheila and I going on our next vacation?" but "what is really important?" and "where is my life going?" Now I know many people would rather not think those things. They've been bombarded ceaselessly since they left the womb with messages telling them not to think those things. So they gave up wanting to think those things, and were rewarded with pats on the head, extra helpings of ice cream, admission to Ivy League universities and late model sports cars. But some of us nevertheless persevere in putting our brains to some use now and then. And some of the rest of us would like to have that chance as well. Our best chance to do that lies in stepping away from altar of adulthood now and then, recovering our aimlessness, passion, open-eyedness and respect for being just a tiny bit like a kid.

Hanging on to that weekend...

Well here it is late Sunday night again, and I should be going to bed but I have neglected my blog soooo badly that I just have to write a little something. Otherwise I will just feel that I am a slave to the soul-crushing routine of the workweek. And I may be a slave but that's not all I am. There's a glimmer of a free being with something to say still alive in there somewhere! I swear.

So ok I have to lose weight. I mean I've been wanting to do it for several years now. But I've been slowly gaining instead. But now that I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea, one of the best things I could do would be to lose some weight. Besides it will make me feel better about myself, more attractive to the opposite sex, etc.

It's just something I've never done on purpose before. I used to lose weight every summer from all the sports I was playing, and then during the winter I would gain some. That was never a lot - we're talking less than 5 pounds. I have recently had a little of experience with losing. I went on vacation for 2 weeks to Chile for a friend's wedding festivities, did a ton of walking every day, and when I returned was shocked to discover that I had lost 5-7 pounds! Crazy - I was like eating steak every day, sleeping a ton. But I was mainly drinking water because I was having trouble with my throat and ears (and taking medicine for the same), and like I said, I was walking a ton.

So my strategy is to start walking regularly. I used to do that anyway. And for starters, cut softdrinks and desserts out of my diet. No more desserts after pretty much every meal, and snacks in between. The next step will be to look hard at what else I am eating, and start eating better; but first I've gotta get the other stuff out of my body. Then I'll have some confidence that I can actually make things better for myself.

Maybe what I'll do is leave for work half an hour earlier than usual, and get off the subway a few stops earlier. I don't like riding the train anyway. Then as time goes on I can increase the distance that I walk to work. I like doing the same on the way home, and when I'm not doing anything after work, I can always walk a bit.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Sleep, glorious sleep!

Tuesday night, I reported to the NY Eye and Ear Hospital for a sleep study. I was referred by my ENT and Allergist - I've had chronic dry scratchy throat and clogged ears for many months, and also woken up every now and then during the night feeling my throat kind of clogged also. Indications are that I may have apnea or something, so I was eager to do the study.

The technician showed me to my room - a nice big comfortable looking bed with my own tv and small bathroom. Before she hooked me up to the EEG and such, she gave me a 4-page questionnaire to fill out. Now, anytime something major is going on in my life, I think about it with more attention to detail than I normally would. So I'd already been focusing on my sleep habits. Do I really feel well-rested when I rise in the morning? Is my regular napping a sign of a healthy response to the normal cycles of energy and sleepiness throughout the day, or a sign of a pathology?

So the questionnaire added to my suspicions about what is going on, but in a way that was frustrating. Most questions just allowed for a yes or no answer, and I would have liked to give a more nuanced response. Yes, I get sleepy during the day, but my corporate job requires me to rise in the morning earlier than I would like to - that's why I tire by late morning or early afternoon. However, the technician had warned me about the questionnaire, telling me more than once to fill it out as best as I could. So I didn't stress over it.

Then she went to work on me. When she was done, I felt like I had wires and tubes covering my entire head. There was even a tube that sort of went into my nostrils. How was I supposed to breathe through my nose with that crap in there? The nice thing was that she left traces of her perfume on the tubes and other pieces of tape, so for the first couple of hours I smelled that, which was nice. There were also bands around my chest and abdomen and a tube taped to my index finger to monitor my breathing and movement. She told me to lie back, got me all situated on my pillows, covered me with a sheet and blanket, and left me to my task: to try to sleep.

I never sleep well the first night I'm in a strange place, even without tubes and wires on me, making me itch and preventing me from moving easily. So the answer is no, I didn't sleep well, but I slept some, hopefully enough for them to make a good assessment of what is going on while I sleep.

I cleaned some of the gunk out of my head when it was over, and walked through the still-dark streets of Manhattan back to the subway. In a few weeks I will see my ENT and we'll go over the results, and decide what the next step is.

This being the weekend, I had a glorious sleep last night, only getting up when I felt like it. I may not need a nap today, which shows that when I don't have to get up at an unreasonable hour to work for the Man, I sleep adequately. But if I did need a nap, I would have no problem with that. Occasionally, you read about studies that show that a huge percentage of the adult population is sleep-deprived, even people you would like to be well-rested like doctors and airline pilots. And many people get through the day only through the wonders of caffeinated beverages and other stimulants.

Well, I stay away from caffeine for the most part. And when I feel tired, I give in to it as is convenient, and I sleep. And when I get up after a 10-minute nap, I feel more alert. Yes, I have no doubt that I may have a sleeping disorder, and I look forward to getting treatment for that so my throat and ears will hopefully feel better. But whatever happens, I reserve the right to sleep anywhere and at anytime I feel necessary. It's what I've always done, and noone has yet convinced me that is anything other than a very healthy habit.

A thought

On the Saturday after September 11th, I was grateful to be asked to sing with a pick-up choir organized by Gwen Toth for the funeral at St. Francis Church of Father Michael Judge, the Fire Chaplain. At that service the homily was given on the passage from John's Gospel, "Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends." For the rest of my life, whenever I hear that verse, I will think of that day, that week. Of the sadness, the sorrow, the horror, the outpouring of feeling. Of the sacrifice of those who died, who were our neighbors, our friends.

My heart belongs in another century?

Tonight I am getting all ready to attend the New York Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo tomorrow. I may go on Labor Day, Monday, also. I will be clothed in replicas of 15th century garb, including shoes and hat and shoulder bag. I can't wait - I'm an excited Faire geek, what can I say?

As a child, I fell in love with Renaissance art, particularly that of Michelangelo after reading Irving Stone's "The Agony and the Ecstasy" many many times. Then in college I fell whole-hog in love with Medieval and Renaissance music, so much so that I majored in music, to the point of getting a Masters degree in music as well.

Now I knew Faire lovers back then, but I kept my distance from them. It seemed to me that they were a hedonistic lot who only got involved in Medieval and Renaissance re-enactment so they could set aside modern mores and ethics and engage in decadent peasant-ish rolling in the hay. I felt some contempt for them, and stayed rooted in the modern day, even as I made an emotional connection to the music and art that I loved so well.

And then just 18 months ago, all that changed. I made some new friends who regularly attend Faires, especially their home fair in Tampa, Florida. They invited me down to attend the Faire with them, it sounded like it would be a fun escape from wintry New York City, so I went. And it was fun. How much of it had anything to do with the Renaissance I leave to another person to work out. It is silly, childish, but also fun and yes, escapist. But I guess my life in recent years, after going through divorce and starting over, allows for some things I would never have previously considered.

Last weekend I was in Washington, DC, and so I spent a few very enjoyable hours walking through the galleries of our National Gallery, looking at art from the 13th through 17th centuries. As I looked at various paintings of the Virgin and child and adoration of the Magi, I found myself noticing the clothing of the background characters especially, getting more ideas for what kind of outfits I would like to wear at future Faires.

I may not really be leaving my century behind for another when I immerse myself in this play-acting, and the music-making I do. But there is something there that speaks loudly to me, that feels true. I can lose for a few moments the cardboard assemblage I have called myself all these many years, and begin to build a new character out of real cloth.

Melancholia

I remember one night during college sitting in my friend M's car as she drove me back to campus. We had a nice chat along the way, and even when we got there, she let the car idle while we continued talking.

We found we had quite a kinship - similar personalities - similar dispositions. Under the right circumstances, we treasured responding to life with a certain melancholy. It was rather a romantic thing, as if we had learned it from the Bronte sisters and Dickens. When things got overwhelming, the proper thing was to succumb to the darkness, until such time as it abated and we could return to the world of light, sound and activity. There was a certain bittersweetness to being afflicted this way.

And in society, there is an expectation that people of artistic temperament are prone to spending time wallowing in the darkness. That seems to be where the insights into the human condition that so ennoble the resulting creative work come from.

I never gave any credence to this last idea. I felt that if people of creative genius were afflicted with mental disorder, they created in spite of the disorder, not because of it. And I always felt that the people who came up with this theory of the suffering artist could not be artists themselves.

Well I emerged into adulthood still prone to occasional bouts of this melancholy. I never thought to call it depression, but eventually people began to appreciate that depression was a serious thing and should be treated as mental disease just like other debilitating mental diseases. But I did begin to wish that I could escape having to go through these episodes in the darkness. You know, there were days and sometimes even weekends when I lay on my bed unable to move. That was not good.

Treatment in the way of psychotherapy followed, and changed my life in an infinitely positive way. At one point I even followed a regimen of anti-depressants to help put my brain back in solid working order. Thank God for these drugs, and woe that the great geniuses of days gone by could not have been saved by them, and had to suffer as they did.

Am I still melancholy? Do I still take pleasure in a good stanza of gravestone poetry? Are walks in the rain still one of my favorite things? Do I have a deep understanding of what it means for tears to be my meat? Yes, my friends, there is still much that is bittersweet for me. But one of the great mysterious things is how melancholy and happiness can co-exist for me. Sometimes more of one than the other, but these two mood pugilists are in there slugging it out, happily battling for dominance of my demeanor.

Dance like noone's watching...

I don't care if it was Satchel Paige or a girl named Paige who said that. The point is that the struggle to shed my timid boy's rags and don the mantle of the hero-savage-noble of my dreams, who runs naked through people's backyards with the name of a woman on his lips, being chased by molten lava flow, this battle is ongoing.

So here Sunday night is nearly gone, and in the morning I have to shoehorn myself into a blandified persona for the benefit of my bank account, just as I have done nearly every week of my so-called adult life. I told myself that if becoming a stooge was part of adulthood, I wanted no part of it, but I have so long lived a joke and charade, that having a pie thrown in my face or getting poked in my eyes would be an improvement.

Not that I "undervalue" my hours in the saltmines, sport fans. It's all about the people, and I honestly like the people I work with. We occasionally crack a joke, but it's often something noone outside of our world would comprehend much less think funny.

And I do want to scream sometimes. Not like go postal, but just alert people to the fact that there's this thing going on all around them called their life, and they're spending it believing in things that make the Toothfairy and the Easter Bunny look quite profound. Hours, days, years, centuries, millenia go by, and the human race is more concerned about who uses hand sanitizer than who is actually using their brain. Our brothers and sisters who killed Mastodons used their brains as much as the average person does nowadays. OK, this is starting to sound bitter, so let's move it along. Nothing to see here. Thank you.

I don't know where I'm going with this. If you see me walking by, with a teardrop in my eye, look away, baby, look away. All I can tell you, human subjects, is that this caveman is gonna do more than carve stick figures into deer antlers. Somehow or other I am gonna don that mantle.

Master of Lists

A. Do Laundry
B. Read "Dead Until Dark"
C. Stretch
D. Balance checkbook
E. Compose new blog entry
F. Trim fingernails

Hmmm, this list is a rather typical one for me, I would say, but it lacks something. There's just not enough fun in there. Unless you consider stretching fun. I find it satisfying, but not exactly fun. No, the fun is the reading and writing the new blog entry (yes, that's what I'm doing right now...). Well, if I stick in there "Watch movie on AMC while eating dinner" which is what I did, I guess that evens things out.

So yes, I keep lists. How long have I been doing it? I have no idea. I remember making lists of things in college back in the 1980s. But those were lists of favorite Kansas songs, possible titles for poems (I wrote a ton of poems during high school and college), snacks I wanted to buy to restock the tiny refrigerator I shared with my dorm roommate. And then during the summer when I had a job in a warehouse packing summer lunches for the public parks, my lists would be of what rock albums I wanted to buy, what novels I should read that I had drooled at during the school year when I saw them at my work-study job in the library.

Some time in the 90s, in one of my law-firm jobs, I discovered that Microsoft Word included among its many little quirky symbols two kinds of boxes that you can put a check in - one you can actually check, and the other you can put an "x" in. That x box revolutionized my list-building. Suddenly, I could make tables of lists: one column in outline form listing my proposed tasks, and another column to the left of it filled with x boxes that I could check off once I started finishing these tasks. Oh, the sense of accomplishment I received when I could check off something. It might be "eat breakfast". Or it might be "iron shirts for the week." But large or small, simple or complicated, mundane or profound, pleasurable or arduous, putting an x in a box was a marvelous thing.

I had not really traveled much, but several years ago when I started to take traveling more seriously, I discovered a whole new use for my lists: planning my vacations, building itineraries. I would study travel guides, look up details on the Internet, and slowly a plan would emerge. All the steps taking me from packing in my room to checking into the airport to checking into my hotel halfway around the world, and then the same thing reversed at the end of the trip. It gives me a feeling of security, to have an idea of what comes next. And I don't have to ask anyone else, "what comes next?" In fact, when there is someone else with me, I'm the one they ask "what comes next?" and I know the answer, and if I don't remember the answer, I just look at my itinerary. I look at my list. I go down the list to the next unchecked box scan across, and that is what is next.

Getting to this level of fastidious list-building may sound rather anal-retentive, or at least unimaginative. But in recent times I have discovered another beautiful thing about lists. Once I have gathered all the things that could possibly happen, I am free to toss all those things aside and do something completely different. Or maybe just do one thing, or two things, out of 5 or 10 on the list. The list gives me all the information I need at my disposal, just in case I can't think of what to do at that moment. It's a safety net. But when I do have the presence of mind to make something up on the spot, I can forgo my safety net. My boxes, at day's end, may remain woefully unchecked. And I will still have a feeling of accomplishment, of having lived a richly satisfying day.

Molding my dreams

Often with the last dream of the night, when the dream is over and I slip into semi-consciousness, if there was something intriguing going on in the dream, I will deliberately continue the dream and coax it into a direction I'd like it to go in. In that half-dreaming, half-awake state, my imagination is absolutely fluid, and I can see clearly in the dream whatever it is that I construct for myself.

For example, this morning my last dream was about travelling in an exotic European town, where a notorious criminal was going to be executed. I was hoping to do some shopping, but I was also curious to learn more about the execution. I was also a little nervous about my travel plans, and wanted to make sure I made it to the train station on time to get to my next destination.

In a souvenir shop in the train station, I met an Englishman and we started talking. He convinced me that I should fly with him back to England, leaving earlier than I had intended to. He wanted to introduce me to his girlfriend. I said I would and we agreed to meet later that day to head to the airport together.

Then I took the viewpoint of a third person, and I witnessed one of the two other men - I'm not sure whether it was me or the Englishman - changing his mind and not wanting to travel to England together. Returning to myself in the dream, as the time approached to meet the Englishman I wandered around near the train station, anxious as to whether he was going to show up. I saw a plastic bag being blown around on the breeze, which I surmised must be him, and I chased the plastic bag as it blew high beyond my grasp. Finally I was able to grab it, and I felt sure I would convince him to honor his commitment to travel with me. But how could I communicate with a plastic bag? How could I make him turn back into a person? That was the end of the dream.

In the after-dream, I decided to explore the question of why the Englishman wanted me to travel with him. I didn't like the idea of spending time alone with him and his girlfriend - there have been many times of late when I have spent times with couples, and grow tired of being the odd man out. So I decided that his girlfriend must have a girlfriend that they wanted to fix me up with. I imagined what she would look like, how old she would be, and what sort of personality she would have. I imagined how magical it would be to meet her when we arrived at the airport in England.

And then I woke up finally, feeling very happy.

We begin in the middle...

There's no good place to start but the middle. That's where we are anyway, right? We've all been around x number of years already, so many things have happened, there's nothing to do but just jump in.

So who am I and why am I writing and why is my blog called "spaghettification"? Well, it's something about the fleeting nature of life. It will all I'm sure develop as I go. Very few, if any, creatures will ever experience the horror of having the matter of their existence torn in every direction at a monumental speed by the very force of the universe itself. But many of us will experience the pain and confusion and shock of having essential elements of our lives change irrevocably instantaneously.

Years ago, someone told me that these kinds of experiences produce contrition. Faced with our helplessness to prevent these monumental changes from taking place, we feel in a very real sense how small we are. And it's humbling. Some people don't want to experience contrition of that sort, because it is just too disturbing. It means letting go of the myth that we are the center of any universe, and questioning whether anything that happens to any of us means anything in the grand scheme of things.

But my friends, I know it's Saturday night, in the middle of the summer, and nobody should get too bummed out about anything at such a time. It's a good night for a romantic comedy, or an action movie. Not a good time for examining my place in the universe. Maybe there's never a really good time for that. But I'll cut to the chase and tell you that in the macrocosm, on the big stage, I feel pretty secure. I'm not always good on the small stage, dealing with people, handling my feelings for the people who mean something to me. But put me in front of the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls, and I feel pretty good. We live in a beautiful country, even with whatever has gone wrong or continues to go wrong around us. Events are unfolding just as they are supposed to.

There's a block party on my block here in Brooklyn, and luckily my bedroom is in the back of my building, because the party is loud! I'm at that crucial moment of the evening where facing me is the decision: do I stay in and have a quiet evening, or get ready and go out somewhere for dinner, etc. (maybe see a movie or what have you). It's warm and sticky out, but my room has air conditioning. Anything could happen.

So here I am, in the middle of summer, the middle of my life, the middle of a thought. Happy to meet you.