Coronavirus Disease 2019

May 16, 2020

By daylight there’s a semblance. By light of day is when families walk, cars line the street, people push shopping carts into and out of supermarkets. By light of day postal workers double-park and delivery drivers flash their hazards. By light of day the skateboards skid and the motorcycles throttle. Only of note: nearly everyone wears a mask. The sign and signal of this age — our age.

But at night comes the starkness. At night: a solitary light in a window, a solitary car on the road. Buses go by with windows empty except for one framing a single head. Storefronts stand dark. Restaurant windows show upended chairs. Boarded are bars. The homeless curl in doorways plywooded and painted with these words: we are in this together.

It’s the darkness that shows the difference. After dark we no longer pretend. After dark is when we show what we have become: interior beings. Or is this what we have always been: our own singular selves? Do we simply show this now without the human-social reinforcement of colleagues and acquaintances, family and friends? Has our natural state in fact always been inward: just me? And then maybe us? And then maybe us and them?

(Do not misunderstand — this is not universal. Many people — doctors and grocers, firefighters and bus drivers — continue to live and work amid risk and society. Others leave their homes only for need and, when they do, do their best to keep to norms.)

But there are others. Others who barrel through stop signs, carom diagonally across freeway lanes, march down the center of sidewalks while staring at their phone. Those who visit clandestine clubs, throw underground parties, put on public events without regard for safety, guidance, or law. Those who presume license. But based on what? The underlying presence of disease?

Is this us? Have we been exposed? Are we our trap? Are our better angels no more than a foil that, flaking, shows our baseness underneath? Or does this show our better angels require daily striving, that we (at least) attempt to keep up our gilding?

And of those who show such angels (nurses and cashiers, soldiers and janitors), what does it say of us that only now do we sing their praises? When — in many ways — their striving has been a continuity: continuing to go to work day after day? What does such celebration tell? Has our pinhole-isolation sharpened to focus on this: that indeed our substrate is base? When this age passes (as every age passes, as all things must pass), when we wake: what then?

Victorian Nouveau

November 18, 2018

When did we become such a nation of customers? Did this happen this generation or has this been progressing now for some time? Or has this minsdset — our national customer mindset — always been part and parcel of what makes us us? Or is this mindset in fact us: our national psyche?

It seems to me we now live in a reborn Victorian age. As with the Victorians, when their (semi‑)automated manufacturing combined with the creation of enough disposable income to make those (semi‑)automatically manufactured products affordable to a (semi‑)emerging middle class, our new age of (semi‑)automated information technology has created a likewise circle of both income and products to spend said income on.

Which begs the question: what does this pattern prophesize? Does this Victorian repetition also trap us in its Victorian consequence: an industrialized, informational gilded age? And will this likewise trap us in its subsequent consolidation and concentration of such capabilities, luxuries, and wealth in a fractional few? Is this inevitable? Is it determined we have to further and amplify our continuing system of haves and have-nots?

There is an unquestionably practical (if cold-blooded) benefit to this inequality: it begets (at least for some) a societal and/or cultural frisson that leads (at least some) to strive for something. But are these someones (or to what degree) golden or gilded? Are they 24kt or just foiled on top?

Are we simply ordained to relive — as the Victorians did — through their rough correction of unrest and strikes and fears and social turbulence and social lies? Is this our national trap: to pursue like a dog its tail, not actually striving but chasing for naught, since what we actually chase is our own hind end? Is our Victorian duplication only the symptom of our larger disease: our consumerism and navel-gazing oblivion?

Truth in Movies

November 3, 2016

It’s no secret: Gone with the Wind never happened. Not in real life. Except on a soundstage, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn, was never earnestly spoken. And we are fine with this: depicted accuracy with respect to actual reality remains irrelevant to how story and character grips us. Once story and character enter the equation, truth be damned.

For fiction this is normal — this is expected. When it comes to fiction, the unspoken contract is that everyone, maker and audience, knows and agrees it to be a lie. It’s like currency — every day we trade goods and services for printed rectangles of fabric (or their digital, magnetic equivalent) whose value is fundamentally imaginary. But currency works (as fiction does) because, by unspoken contract, everyone agrees to the identical imagination. Suspension of disbelief is a partnership.

For documentaries, a similar contract holds: both maker and audience agree what’s depicted must be honestly represented. And this applies even (and maybe especially) when documentaries include a story element (as many do). And its story must still hold honest to the real world, whether the subject is controversial or not. (Think The Thin Blue Line or March of the Penguins.) This is the documentary contract.

But what of movies in between? I speak of historical renditions “based on actual events” that can adhere so near to historical truth that the names of participants and events may be unchanged. Think U-571 (it was primarily British, not American, sailors who captured Enigma machines), or The Perfect Storm (the final scene between George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg on the sinking Andrea Gail was necessarily invented), or Blackhawk Down (Ewan McGregor’s real-world counterpart, while an admitted coffee freak, certainly didn’t pack a French press into the field). What of these? With these movies, what’s the expected contract?

Philosophical and cosmological questions regarding the nature and knowability of truth notwithstanding, to what degree is this looseness with honesty acceptable? Is even accepting “degrees” of truth okay? What are our ethical obligations regarding the rendering and acceptance of this “truth?” Is not truth in any event ephemeral? Or are our obligations based not on actual truth but on the (honest) process of rendering it as best we can? So in these cases, can any purposeful ornamentation of or divergence from the truth ever be considered morally acceptable?

What aspects in a truthful story can be redefined in the name of entertainment (Blackhawk Down’s French press in the field) or story (The Perfect Storm’s sinking-boat conversation)? Are these acceptable divergences from knowable truth if they don’t substantially change what might be termed “truth’s gist?” Then what then of U-571’s modification of whose nation’s sailors first captured an Enigma machine? Is this substantial? If so, what makes the substance?

Inconveniently, I think, the briar patch lies in what might be termed the impression of truth:

• With U-571, the impression that the American capture of Enigma machines was pivotal to the outcome of World War II is a false impression. Since this allegedly depicts a historical event and its falseness isn't obvious, chances are high audiences will assume this as the truth. History suffers.
• With Blackhawk Down, the absurdity of bringing a French press into the field actually undercuts the believability of the rest of the movie, which does in fact have a number of other more fundamental and controversial concerns.
• With The Perfect Storm, it is of course obvious the final conversation on the sinking boat would have to be fabricated, although given the course of the movie to this point, this scene has a “natural” feel. As a result it does not significantly interfere with the movie's “truthful impression.” However, this might be more dangerous, since this enhanced “believability” might mask other disputes regarding how certain people and decisions were depicted.

So is all historical fiction marked with the skid marks of fraud? Or is it simply that we are “watching it wrong” — that in fact we should consider the fiction more than the history? Or is dispute and controversy simply unavoidable? Is a certain falsehood inherent in any telling?

Does the caveat that a movie is “based on actual events” (with the implication of falseness) somehow free us from an obligation to be honest? Do disclaimers keep these half-truths from becoming deceptions? Or do such disclaimers simply turn such movies into “bad” truths? In the end, how can we judge?

Conversation

September 10, 2016

My father was never a talker. Or maybe, more accurately, a listener. My father would ask about your day and interests, but wouldn’t follow up on your answers. The thread of the talk would stop. And maybe a new thread would begin. Even if you tried to keep to the original thread.

What I mean to say, perhaps: my father was a talker but not a conversationalist. He was not game for conversation — for its depths and unknowns. He would engage in only the charade, the sketch, the maquette. The thing itself was the very thing he avoided: the heart. And how much of this was deliberate and how much of this was inability I’ve never been able to tease out.

If you were to confront him with this, this is the sort of thread he would dismiss and deny. He would sell his own engagement. And in a way not especially sophisticated. But again: how much of this was deliberate and how much of this was inability? How would one tell the difference? How could one expose the truth?

Now that dementia has shrouded my father I’ll never know which of these it was, but then again, given his continuing shroud of denial, I hold the faith I never could have learned which it was. If it’s not volunteered, how can intent be deduced? To what degree can intention be known, even one’s own, since don’t we all (at least to some degree) lie about our own intentions, even — and maybe especially — to ourselves?

Is anyone ever purely, inwardly honest? After all, how many of us, when confronted with a decision, have convinced ourselves, talked ourselves into action, sold ourselves a lie? And how much of our success derives from these lies, from the confidence that success is possible, that hope triumphs, that dreams come true? And how much does this fraudulent thought contribute to continuation, to perseverance, to stick-to-it-iveness?

Has this always been the seed of our progress: our ability to sell to and convince ourselves? Is this what the development of human language was for? And if so, where lies the morality? In the honesty or in the lies? And is the whole notion of morality, ethics, and conscience just one more of those lies? And if it is, are we better off making the sale that it isn’t?

And regarding my father, how much of the fault is mine, that I didn’t engage in the sale instead of the conversation, that I considered the conversation and not its sale the point? Was that always in fact the point: the charade, the sketch, the maquette? Has that always been the point to conversation? Have I been mistaken all this time to think conversation's trappings were only that?

Again

August 2, 2016

Do we still reread? Or has rereading become passé, antiquated, in the same family as fixing one’s car, macramé, or mealtime conversation? Can we no longer be bothered to revisit previous words and thoughts? Has our day-to-day become just a sequence of Now whats? In this age of tweets and emojis, in our Information-geddon, have we lost the capacity to reflect?

I confess — I’m rarely a rereader. Once and done is how my reading usually ends. Not to mention that — at least historically — my rereading generally has not been for reflection. More often it has been for comfort — the familiarity of a previous work. In short, a rerun. In many ways, simply for the ease. The easiness of doing the same thing over again.

But what of rereading with a purpose? Committed and attentive rereading. Rereading not as rote but as new experience. With the opportunity to compare one’s current experience with the one that came before. Does one realize nuances that were missed the first time around? Is one reminded of something they forgot? Does the rereading confirm or contradict memories of that first reading? Since that first reading, what has one forgot? And what does the reminding make one feel — regret, surprise, humor? How does one reconsider?

If we do not reread, is this a symptom of a larger disease, a malady of missing thought? And how much is this a symptom of an even larger disorder: an epidemic of absent reflection? If we only look toward what’s next, how can we decide, how can we judge how to follow? Has rereading and reconsideration become such a luxury? And what are the consequences if we fail to reconsider? And how much of this is up to us to decide to reconsider, and how much derives from the (lack of) opportunity to do the same? In our day and age, should this be so hard? Should rethinking be such a task?

First Words

June 26, 2015

First words shine. Isn’t this first-word nature? First words stand free of question, disappointment, or misstep. First words expose no roadblocks — only futures. First words fire the moment when the idea itself still holds true.

The start of any art is always immaculate. As long as it remains unfinished, it can never turn sour. After all, it’s only after continuation that things go south. Only with trial can follow error. Only with memory can we begin to forget and regret.

My father — who suffers dementia — is reaching a likewise purity. His forgetfulness has grown, and what he remembers is shaded with uncertainty. Myself is an example: he recognizes and calls me by name. But then he asks, “Right?” He’s halfway through his approach to forever beginning.

Given time, practically every one of his recent happenings will fade from view. Now fixed in his mind is that he stands on the cusp of retirement (in “actual” time he retired more than a decade ago). The fact that this retirement would seem (logically) to conflict with my age, the mention of grandchildren, other milestones, doesn’t carry weight. Consistency has lost its necessity — my father’s retirement shines. At this light my father smiles with imminence and excitement. From this moment, his futures have yet to occur. My father’s golden years rise on the horizon. “I want to teach,” he says. “Somewhere close, so I can walk to work.”

Dementia has led my father away from consequence. He has found himself on a desert island free from follow-through. He is no longer yoked — as are the rest of us — to those swarms of next moments when fuck-up can begin. After all, only with continuation can the difference between effort and imagination be realized. Which difference is unavoidable — the thing itself is always destined to fall short of its ideal. Reality is awash in shortcomings.

Faced with memory, we are forced to continue. From what we have done, we decide what deeds to do, what words to write, what thoughts to think. It makes a cage, our memory, our sense of time: a cage of work and effort and trial and error and failure and achievement. Because while memory breeds success, it deducts a fee: with any memory dies the last chance for perfection.

My father’s second words will never be written. No day will pass when he will teach. He has been freed from the strictures of time. No longer need he consider the costs of the future. Of plans unmet. Of gold unreached.

When speaking of his impending retirement, my father turns bright. Steeped for years in his dementia, he seems to be nearing a kind of heaven. His final, remaining memories approach the first. Soon all that will remain will be his ideas. One day his final thoughts may only be of futures unmet.

Imagination.

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