And I shall be buried in Spain

In the café where I'm sitting there are always little slogans that are supposed to make "you" feel good. Today's is

Счастье - это когда тебя понимают...по-твоему.

["Happiness" is when (everyone) understands you in your own way]

At first I thought: "Sentimental crap." And then I thought: "This really upsets me."

Break it down: "тебя понимают" - there's another voice, the author's "I" - that doesn't figure into this at all. As if that one could teach "you" exactly how to be happy.

"They" - an unquantifiable, general, external, collective. And to put the meaning of the whole adage in just a slightly different cast: "You'll be happy as long as you've conformed to everyone's wishes."

I no longer want the superpower I earlier said I wanted. Now I want to edit and revise my writings to the point where I can say

1. I understand everything that I was trying to say there.
2. I could never say it a better way.

Nevermind whether they understand or not. I will still be happy.

In the Candy Shoppe

I had meant to write this post when I became distracted by Avatar and perceived disconnects. The jump, as it were, was bad writing. I was prepared to compare the script writers for Doctor Who with Anne Rice, who is famous for her disdain of editors and their publishing industry, as discussed here. That site led me to the pseudo-contests mocking individuals Storm and I very much admire and - dare I say - hero worship, such as the 1998 "Bad Writing" award winner and runner up, Judith Butler and Homi Bhaba, and I couldn't resist commenting.

If the drunken revelation I underwent in Avatar regarded the disconnect between various parts of my life, the end of David Tennant's run as the eponymous Doctor, The End of Time,* suffered from the exact opposite - from too many allusions to Tennant's, Davies's, and others' exit too strongly affecting the plot.

When I go book shopping, I go around and around the store, and pick up all the items that catch my attention. When I want to go, I find a quiet spot with the ten to fifteen titles in hand, choose a maximum of three, and put the rest back. I thus know I really want the books I've chosen; I economize; I am happy.

Someone needed to sit Russell T. Davies down and say: "You need to look through the fifteen plots you are doing poorly in this rough draft, choose three, and then edit and revise them."

-Drunk
* 2009, BBC One. Directed by Euros Lyn. Written by Russell T. Davies.

She Blinded me with Economics

There's a financial analysis program that's on the morning news. The anchor-analyst looks at data charts and riffs, entirely impromptu, off of them. The quadruple-Windsor knot around his throat seems to rob his brain of necessary oxygen, and he fails at the formation of complete sentences.

Sometimes he has a female commentator, sort of like a weatherman, who sits in front of a different camera. The analyst prompts her with scripted questions and she reads the answers off a teleprompter. She is so pretty.

The male analyst sounds like an idiot for all of his stuttering, used as we (I) am to the careful polish and script of newscasting. The female, in contrast to him, and with the Russian proclivity to read things as fast fast fast as she can, is a marionette whose strings are clearly visible.

I find myself comparing it to Anchorman*, and sadly realize that even such a movie as Anchorman does more to query the gender binary than this farce of equal-opportunity televidenie.

*2004, Dreamworks. Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Will Ferrell and McKay.

Not-conveyed in carrying-across-language

"...Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, 'What the hell do you mean by that?' And he said, 'He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn't understand me; you're an idiot." That's the terrorism part.'..."
-John Searle

(full interview here)

Even if we reject solipsism (so there is a world-environment we share, and I can somehow convey my impression of that world-environment to you), how can I make my thought so clear that you will, if not agree, see the forms and functions of my argumentation as I perceive them? How can I “check” that you’ve, in fact, “got it”?

I can’t. But we go on speaking and writing, trusting that the amount lost will be imbalanced by the amount conveyed - hoping, praying. Even though Derrida will say, “You misunderstood me,” even though Joan Scott will differentiate between her physical self and the construct of her that has been extrapolated from her writings, even though Judy Butler will disassociate from the fields that arise out of her works.

There are checks and balances, discussions and reviews, edits and comments. Understandings can become mutual, and our precises can resemble one another.

Even then...Three people read a treatise. Two agree with the general thesis: even if there is inherently an ‘objective’ world, as soon as humans begin to represent it {in stories, news, art photographs, histories…} the world-signs become signifieds. They assimilate connotations and compile constructs like poison quicksilver moving up a food chain.

But then the third opens his mouth. And he says, “As we see in this treatise on mythology, there can be an objective representation of the world.”

And I want to deride him for saying this; I want to storm and rage; but at a certain point I can’t break past the solipsism that is an individual’s interpretation of the text. Besides. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong.

A fortune; an interpretation

Creatures of the air
creatures somehow at odds with the world
[humans ought not to fly
the atomic bomb splits what should be whole
the vampire as a stereotyped Jew
the face that launched a thousand ships]

Creatures that have an outer shell
easily guess and qualified
a slight hesitation, only, that the sign
might be misinterpreted

Layers of interpretation
direct, synchronous testimony bears no might
nor does the long and weighty night
of retrospective, earnest contemplation
sometimes we don't have enough information

To solve the puzzle.

I'm Sorry

Most of the ways we apologize in English are pretty insincere if you really look at them:
1. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
2. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
3. “I can’t express how sorry I am.”
4. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
5. “Will you forgive me?”

1. I refuse to commit to the fault of my action.
2. Your faulty perception is the source of your sorrow.
3. I’m not going to apologize because it is hard.
4. I’m clearly not thinking hard about this because I’m quoting a saying [“oh my God”]
5. I’m only saying this because I expect you to get over it [it’s a meaningless ritual].

My question: does this mean we should start apologizing more actively [“I’m sorry for what I did. It was bad because…”] or is the entire premise of an apology un-fixable? Is an apology some kind of Catholic confession, where if you say what you did and then add the magic words [“I’m sorry”] the guilt and drama will just go away? [Which means that an apology will always be ritualistic and goal-oriented].

Perhaps we should re-orient to a new model of accountability, free of “I’m sorry” and “it’s okay,” where we try to figure out the effects our actions have had on others and try to understand why we did not predict or consider them originally.

Through the Looking-Glass

Heath Ledger's swan song, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,* explores a possible union of a shadowy Eastern philosophy (closer to Buddhism than anything else) with the Western Devil-as-Great-Tempter. The titular imaginarium is a gateway Parnassus creates, through which audience members can travel into their own imaginations.

Within their world-construct, the e'er-smoking and smooth-talking Devil offers the temptation of the audience member's most-desired material possession {alcohol, sex, normalcy} while Parnassus offers a transcendental Nirvana. The path to Parnassus's option is often hard {in the distance, up a ziggurat, in the clouds} but the Devil's choice immediately implodes, taking the soul with it.

Heath Ledger smooth talks the souls into taking Parnassus's option, which results in their renunciation of material possessions - which they then give to the troupe. The Order of the Imaginarium thus show the paradox of their position: while attempting to save people from the illusion of samsara, they are themselves trapped on the outskirts of society by their rickety show, by their appearance as stereotypical carnies/gypies, by their carnal desires.

What's more, the film emphasizes the modern vanity - the supreme importance of a singular choice that will forever trap the soul in samsara, or release it to nirvana, when human experience is never so clean, never so easy to encapsulate in the run-time of 120 minutes. Even if the soul chooses the "arduous" journey, it receives instant gratification, and we are meant not to ask just what happens to the individuals who have given up all of their credit cards and furs and riches. They presumably have wrought themselves into a state of poverty and suffering, but we should rejoice because they have reached, in the "A-B-C-s" of enlightenment, "z"?

* 2009, Sony Pictures (et al). Written and directed by Terry Gilliam.