Versus Text

Text is inclusive. It cannot be without a reader. This separates books from movies and forms of music to which we unceasingly listen. Movies and music are two of my favorite things, by the way.

But books and text altogether contain truer art, in the way I think of the thing right now. Also, paintings and other static visual art forms (architecture, photography, etc.) share with text the beauty of the participant.

I live by pressing “play.” Well…In reality, I don’t even press “play” anymore; I only must turn the players “on.” I turn my truck on, and the stereo starts playing music. I turn my television on, and a movie or show plays onscreen. And my attention wanes. It wavers. I look at other cars or the road while the music is ignored. I look at my phone or I write on the computer while this movie gets played. In its presentation, I (the listener; the viewer) am given the power to ignore, to absent the art.

Books disallow this. A reader must be active; if he isn’t, the text doesn’t exist. Sure, you can listlessly leaf through a book and find yourself at the end, even with a sense of accomplishment. But that text didn’t speak to you if you didn’t engage.

Reading makes you engage. It makes you attentive. (And you don’t have to look too far down the postings to see what the word “attend” means to me.)

You cannot open a book and halfway pay attention or let it lay open while you receive some here and there. Books don’t play. With audiobooks, this is now somewhat possible. But text is text, and it isn’t made to miss.

Attendance

Attend/Tend: “to direct the ears, mind, energies to anything; to turn one’s ear to, listen to; to give one’s presence.”

Please, this talk will not work without your help. Contemplate the two words. What do they mean to you?

From them, we get the noun attendance: “1. The action or condition of applying one’s mind or observant faculties to something; 2. The action or condition of turning one’s energies to; assiduous effort; 3.The action or condition of waiting upon, accompanying, or escorting a person, to do him service; ministration, assiduous service. in attendance: waiting upon, attending.; 4. The action or condition of an inferior in waiting the leisure, convenience, or decision of a superior.; 6. The action of coming or fact of being present, in answer to a summons, or to take part in public business, entertainment, instruction, worship, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary).

Look at the evolution closely (OED numbers by chronological use). That fourth one is my favorite.

I think words can lose their flavor after they’ve been chewed and chewed, eventually swallowed according to our numbness. The word love has done this; we hear it too much. It isn’t the fault of the word, the sayer, or the real referent of the word that exists outside of language; it is, however, the fault of the hearer. Love is a slogan, an emblem, only a word, a blank stare maybe.

Perhaps learning a new word for a real truth will enliven the dead truth.

Go attend a stranger. Go attend a friend. Go attend a lover. Go and attend. Or, just attend.

Go attend God. Again, if one believes he isn’t attending God, that’s the fault of the listener. God can’t help but be attended. He is all that is. Be here now, in the only place one can be–the present.

Venture through that word evolution again, with the thoughts of your life in mind. To live is to attend. If one is always attending, he is living forever. This is eternal life.

“Change your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is now.” — Matthew 4: 17

“Mere words have something of quicksand about them. Only experience is the rope that is thrown to us.” — Georges Bataille

“15 Days to Experience Love”

I have been thinking about this for a few days, but now that I am writing, two initial worries spring up: it may sound like common sense (or at least something that has been mulled over, in different words) or it may sound like a waste of work and breath to get to a simple thing.

Now, I’m thinking: I’ve spent almost the entire summer working out a way to navigate, communicate, and realize truth. And I believe writing around it is the best way. You can’t write to it, or even write it, because it can’t be two things–words and the real.

A first thought was to devise a plan. I thought I would be clever and call it something like “15 Days to Experience Love” or something equally distasteful. The “plan” would consist of little ways to exhibit love through a generic daily routine (i.e., Monday: Buy your lunch today, but give it to someone who needs the food. In the time that you had set aside to eat your lunch, spend that time meditating, contemplating what your position is. [There'd be a hint or tip here too. Something like this: Try to say the least amount of words to this person. The smile on their face will teach you how weak words truly are.] ; Tuesday: In every conversation today, do not volunteer any unasked information of yourself. Ask clear, caring questions to the other person in your dialogue. Truly listen to what they’re saying. Get into their life, their answers. Attend them–here and now; this is love.) And after the titled fifteen days, there would be a surprise 15a or 16th day, and it would only say: start back at day one. I thought this would be ingenious.

The hope was that it would spotlight the inadequacies in a number of areas–namely, that you’re never done loving, that fifteen days is an arbitrary number, and committing to limitless love is almost a prerequisite to truly loving. I also think it would be one of the only ways to discuss acts of love in a truthful manner, because the person trying out the (ingenious) “15 Days to Experience Love” plan would have these actual experiences with which the text could dialogue. There would be questions at the back of the book like, “How did you pick the person who was in need of food?” ; “Where did you meditate? And why was it so hard to keep one single line of thought in your meditation?” ; or, “Why did you stop giving people food on Day 2, when you told all your friends how good it felt to give food to people in need on Day 1?”

I have since chosen to forgo this sort of exploration, but I have progressed to a couple of other things that I believe will work better. One of them was what I planned on talking about in this letter, but I digressed to something worthwhile to see the process through which I thought. So if the first two paragraphs seem a little disjointed or even ominous, they are mostly talking about what I hope to get at in my next posting. It will be a conversation on attendance and love. My idea for it involves some research and things that may not interest some readers (I’ve described it to myself as a sort of “linguistic journey”), but the thing around which I plan to write has been one of the most pleasant things I’ve learned. And again, these things have been said; I just hope to say them differently, maybe give new breath to dead words or a lifeless thought.

Yours in Love,

ts

I is for Interface

This is a paper I wrote for an American Fiction class. In an easy way, I can display some current thoughts on fictions. The books referenced are The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, White Noise by Don Delillo & Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger.

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You don’t know about you, without you have read a book by the name of…. You are a fiction that has all but lost its original sense—or trace—of self. Your fiction is your key to survival; the hero, the good guy, always wins. Dumbing yourself down to the third-person and denying awareness of self allows you to operate in this world of third-persons; you are everyone else, reduced to a few qualities. You act like a person. However, becoming aware of the fictive quality of this egotistical expanse you call life might kill you because you can’t reconcile the reality of death. So where do you go to find out who you are? You take stock in the narratives supplied by books and people you trust. If a narrative starts to fall apart, you look for a new one—anywhere but in. Everything you know has some sort of story, and stories can be reread; you think they never end. But what if you start taking what I, another blank space with black letters, am saying seriously? Isn’t that just succumbing to this narrative?

Living third-person is a constant act, a constant setting up of props. About Denise’s green visor, Murray says, “It’s her interface with the world” (White Noise 37). This is the literal representation of the things you do to live in this world—the fallacies that render that pronoun “I” you use to refer to yourself—Jack Gladney’s dark glasses and robe giving him the proper prestige for a professor. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn plays with this idea of acting as well. Mrs. Judith Loftus accuses Huck of doing a bad job enacting a young girl; she says, “You do a girl tolerable poor” (70). Also, Huck acts as a member of the culture with the infamous “No’m. Killed a nigger” (230). This is the same boy who just decided to do “wrong” and help Jim; he isn’t being himself. In the narrative, he must act within culture—to fool them. But just a little later Huck falls right back into the fold under the spell of Tom Sawyer, who is living his own fiction supplied by what is “in the books.” The mischief Sawyer invokes becomes his own little interface with which plays his part in his fictional world.

Living fictively demands that the story be kept alive; if it isn’t, you aren’t. The man in The Road constantly peddles this narrative of “the good guys” to the boy. They keep this narrative going while this destitute landscape surrounds them. The fiction keeps them alive. “Stories are supposed to be happy” (268). McCarthy forces the reader to see the arbitrary naming of things as good. It’s a meaningless title really, but the man depends on telling himself and his son the narrative to get through an unacceptable, real situation. Jack Gladney illustrates the same need to resuscitate a fiction, even attempting to appropriate a new fiction that might fit better as reality approaches him. Upon being exposed to Nyodene D, he’s told, “You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that” (141). He then assumes he’s dying, and that becomes his new fiction. That becomes the thing that brings him prestige now, his near-deathness. “We kept inventing hope,” he narrates (147). And he does exactly that through the narrative; he must to stay alive. Once your life is a fiction, it must remain that way. You sentence yourself to living falsely, and as reality—in death—approaches, you will grasp for anything that can be reassembled into a fiction that means you’ll live. The good guys always win.

Understanding that you’re fake faults the entire world. You see everyone else in their fakery, and you will hate it; ask Franny. She can’t stand the way people are living their little fake worlds, making everything about them. And the worse thing is that she sees that same faculty inside herself, blaming her ego. Zooey laments this: “’God damn it,’ he said, ‘there are nice things in the world—and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos’” (152).

Understanding this fictive nature of man won’t help discerning yourself. That’s the last, unfortunate truth. Not even Zooey was exempt. Directly following the above passage, the next page accuses his hesitations as specious, “the way the other children on the program did” (153). Zooey cannot even make sense of himself—neither could Seymour. “For all I know, I may be a little jealous” (159). Zooey couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Maybe it takes practice, or maybe it is unknowable. Either way, it takes something more than understanding the secret. You will tell yourself a lie to get through life. You’re killing yourself, and you can’t help it. If you think you’re outside of this quality, you’re doing it again—thinking you’re somehow better than the others. There is no winning here. You are a lie. “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

Before You

Before you, I didn’t know me. In fact, you and I make us. And half of us is me. I couldn’t have known us, nor myself, before you. Before you, there was no math. Not the way we learned or understand it.

Before you, you tell yourself, there were no fights. You think: they were happy, they’d be better off without you. But what you don’t know is that they stayed together for you—and that they’ll be together forever. Because of you.

Before you, Robert told me not to be scared. He meant for you. Before you, I never knew what to expect. I know now, because of you, that expectations are just an invisible line I make for you to crawl over. You’re beautiful, and I won’t be scared for your coming brother.

Before you, there was no happiness. Yeah, your parents lived in a different house, but that house doesn’t have a life. They don’t, without you.

Before you, there was no language. There was no Theresa. Your name didn’t exist. Not the way your mother says it. Not the images she sees in her mind while the sounds of your name play out of her mouth—the music you two make.

Reading Women

At the impetus of my girlfiend–she bought me the books–I read the stories of two women that opened my eyes. Both books are considered Modern Classics, moreover Modern American Classics. In April, I read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for the first time. And through this, I met Edna Pontellier and Hester Prynne respectively.

The books were different, but they were the same. But maybe this could be blamed on the temporal proximity in which I read them. Whatever the case, they were each rewarding and deserving of my interest. Where TSC possesses a plot that will pull the reader in because it delivers a mystery that demands an answer, TA moved with the character of Mrs. Pontellier.

Edna Pontellier lived in Lousiana in the late 19th century, and Hester Prynne lived in Boston in the 17th century. But both women faced the same problems; neither could claim freedom at the beginning of their stories. In Pontellier, we see the critique of the institution of marriage, and in Prynne, we see the critique of the institution of religion. Perhaps these are the most powerful social institutions still today?

As I discussed with a friend of mine last week, I believe Hester Prynne’s story would greatly serve a group of believers who were willing to study it. The main themes in it are the main themes of my faith–simply, guilt and grace. To dovetail this point, I don’t know what could be more exciting than a book club. I wrote a paper on book reviews this semester that continued with thoughts on how reading promotes community. Is literature performing its function if it only lives when a book is open? Of course not. I want to read, and I want to read together.

In the same way, I would recommend Chopin’s story of Edna Pontellier to every married man supremely. But of course, every woman could enjoy it, and any reader should. Not only does the reader learn about the inequality of American marriage at this time but also where joy and life is found here on Earth.

From these two women, I moved to Brandy Alexander… Being a creation of Chuck Palahniuk, s/he certainly couldn’t share this space with Hester and Edna.

Places I

From the dry heat of Phoenix, drive north, uphill, for something close to four and a half hours. The escalation is so slight that it becomes almost unnoticeable most of the way, but somehow when you arrive at Grand Canyon National Park, you’re over a mile higher than you were. To get into the park, you must stop a half mile before the gate and purchase tickets inside a gift shop/movie theatre/information center. You could spend a whole day inside here—learning. Once inside the park, you park in a lot assigned to a couple of viewpoints on the canyon; this is the South Rim.

The road to the lot doesn’t yield one view of the canyon, so you don’t know exactly what you’re missing. You join in with the droves plodding through a walkway that leads to a viewpoint. You’re almost there. Take a turn in the path; there are voices, but none of them mean anything. These are the only words being said: awesome, amazing, ridiculous. Letters, no matter how many there are together, cannot hold a meaning that portrays what you’re seeing. The closest I can get to descibing the scene is this: _______. “The pictures don’t do it justice.” “You have to see it to believe it.” These phrases would not exist if language—text, words—could function as sight does. I can’t bring you the Grand Canyon, no matter what I do. I was there for one afternoon, about 5 hours, but weeks would be spent getting to see it; months to learn it; a life to know it.

Ok, I’ve told you that text can’t accurately portray a place and that I haven’t fully seen or know the place I’ve chosen to write about. Where do we go from here?

The place—the Grand Canyon—had an effect on me. From it, I did learn something. Maybe what I learned wasn’t exactly about that particular place, but it was about all places, or my relationship with places—my place. I’ve never felt smaller, as insignificant, in my life. It was a good insignificant though: the kind that god-fearers experience as a comfort. My thoughts, my plans, my problems and my life are no bigger than I am. And I am unnecessary. I think “sobering” is a word that people commonly use to describe what I’m trying to say, and I don’t think it’s a bad choice.

Places change us. It’s easy to see in such an extreme example; the Grand Canyon is the most fascinating thing I’ve ever witnessed. But we are to some extent fashioned by our surroundings, altered by our environment. People are different in different places. People are different because of different places.

I Can Make Time

I’ve decided to interrupt my previous plan with an apparent, but purposeful, tangent.

Best Season of Television, and Subsequently Best TV Show of 2009. Lost: Season 5

***STOP READING IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED***

Glimpsing what I believe to be the Black Rock, Jacob claims, “It only ends once – anything before that… just progress.” My first assumption, from the tone and words of the conversation between Jacob and the loopholing stranger, developed along this pattern of thought: Jacob, to prove to Mr. Loophole that choice can win at least once, mildly guides the course of the island’s history as we have seen it so far. His first move was luring the Black Rock, in a way that is not particularly clear yet. From the ship’s presence alone came every event we know – Hanso, Dharma, Rousseau, Flight 815, etc… Jacob’s obvious hobby of tapestry becomes the literal weaving of the lives of his chosen (I realize this seems to eliminate the supposed aim he claims–to prove his end by the means of free will–but his goal is to prove that choice wins specifically on the island, on which he seemingly has never physically changed [to argue against him even forcefully changing anything, he makes Hurley's capacity for choice evident off the island]). Accepting this, they’ve apparently revealed everything but some minute particulars – we still don’t know Jacob’s nemesis is nor the conditions of his loophole or what becomes in the story we’ve been experiencing. But that’s ok.

I read this online: if you physically drew out a timeline with a concrete beginning, then shifted many realities tangentially, then converged into a concrete end, that timeline would take the shape of an eye – a prominent motif throughout the series. I’ll explain this thought more, a little more tangibly.

There is a certain beginning that we’ve seen: This is Jacob and Mr. Loophole inhabiting the island by themselves.

There are many different realities after this: This would include everything we’ve seen as one history. It would also make room for the supposed shift in reality that Farraday’s plan (which was assumedly enacted by Jack & Juliet) where they never met. Jacob’s quote (mentioned earlier) leads me to believe that he’s tried to produce the end before, but had to rest on his own, or the stranger’s, governing powers instead of their players’ choices. He continues to try, changing one or two things perhaps, until he can finally prove to Loophole that he’s right.

There is a definite end: we have not seen this to my knowledge.

It’s a fun theory to think of, but I will not subscribe to it.

My reasoning: explaining time travel by tangent universes is too easy, and J.J., Damon and Carlton do not settle for easy to my knowledge. This explanantion of time travel allows for every possible course of action from every individual to happen at once, creating an exponential amount of tangent universes every moment.

Also from the internet – LOST = Living Outside of Space & Time

I sincerely hope this isn’t the long-awaited explanation.

I apologize if this stream of conscious is insufferable or too difficult to follow. Thanks for reading; I generally do not solicit responses, but this kind of thread thrives by your thoughts.

2009: My Year In Review (We All Win)

This has been a wonderful year on many levels of entertainment for myself. For all platforms of entertainment which I take part in, I’m declaring the best of each category.

This declaration will take into account my relative year (so what if I didn’t get around to The Deathly Hallows until 2009, it belongs here) and the actual year (Aim & Ignite was the only desperately awaited album which came out this year, and it belongs here as well). Also, I’m splitting it into two entries.

Without further ado, I’ll start with videogames!

I play on two different platforms religiously: one like an Evangelical who can’t rest knowing he met someone without sharing his faith and another like a Buddhist who’s religion governs his whole existence, even away from himself sometimes. Because of this, there will be 3 categories–2 for the first platform, 1 for the other.

I trumpet the Xbox 360; if you know me, you know this. The winner of the category for Game Which Came Out In Some Other Year, But Was Enjoyed is…. Call of Duty: World at War. Benefitting from a sturdy foundation of predecessors, COD:WaW took me back to mid century and forced my reliance on inferior guns. Multiplayer is why I love gaming, and this was the pinnacle. It was really the only game I played a ton that debuted on a different calendar. And it almost didn’t count; it was released in 11/08.

Next up: Best Xbox 360 Game of 2009. There were two other considerable titles in this category: Beatles Rock Band and Madden 10. Both built on existing frames, but significantly upgraded in any way I could imagine (evidence of why I’m not a programmer). This was my favorite Madden, but in fairness, you’ll probably hear me say that for Madden 11 in a year. They continue to step forward with the franchise, so we all win. Also, The Beatles(!) in Rock Band(!) is an embodiment of “can’t miss”, and it didn’t. Apart from the massive amount of entertainment sat the unforgettable experience and education. (I mean, I could hear Paul’s bass while I played Paul’s bass.) (Note: Beatles RB serves as the epitome of the much praised 3 E’s Theory {Education, Entertainment and Experience}. See? It’s possible)

Really though, without rival, the most anticipated game became the one I poured the most hours into: easily, the Best Xbox 360 Game of 2009 –Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I’d tell you more, but I’m writing this in the sixty seconds of intermission between games…

Worst Game, But I Played Often Because I Wished It Was Awesome: That’s right, Tim Lincecum graced the cover. MLB 2K9, you sucked.

“What is the other platform on which he plays video games?” you’re asking. The iPhone! iTunes houses tons of great games, but if you like the Tower Defense genre, The Creeps is an Experience. Noteworthy additions: Battleship, Robocalypse and Scrabble.

Best Movie of 2009 is a sort of convoluted category, but it’s my year so… we all win. There was one possible answer and one underrated Honorable Mention. Of course, Inglourious Basterds was the best movie of the year. Living up to it’s hype, IB produced on a level which no other movie has in two years. It was just as good, and mostly better, than No Country and There Will Be Blood. BTW, this all happened with Eli Roth in a predominant part, proving the genius of Tarantino brilliantly shines through the scuffed glass of terrible actors. I wish they weren’t friends…

Runner-Up: The Informant.

Honorable Mention of 2009: District 9 was quite possibly amazing enough to save Peter Jackson’s abysmal-in-everyone’s-eyes career. It was a commentary on conspiratorial government and racism, with a love story streaming throughout. Set in South Africa, it was the smartest Sci-Fi since… (I don’t particularly like Sci-Fi’s).

Best Movie That Didn’t Come Out in 2009, But I Saw This Year: Michael Clayton. George Clooney, playing Winston ‘The Wolf’ Wolfe from Pulp Fiction dancing within a corporate conspiracy, makes me too happy.

Fill This In: New Moon.

Don’t worry; the next entry is literature and music.

The Pants of Choice – Part 1

Needlessly relentless, this girl I don’t know brings me pants I don’t own in a place I don’t particularly like. Presumably, she wants me to purchase them, but  I can’t be too sure.  I try them on, dislike them and try to sneak out of the store before being accosted by another retail demon. Me and my girlfriend just decided to go to the mall for new pants, but I’ve only remembered why I don’t do this. These commission chasers only serve as one-third, at most, of the problem. The primary predicament in the the process arose earlier when I chose to go shopping today.

“Where do I buy pants?” turns into “What kind of pants do I want?” into “What am I willing to spend?” into ”What other sizes do you have these in?” into “I look scene.”  In this mall, there are approximately 29 stores where I’ll consider purchasing pants; in each store, I’ll consider at least 3 different styles; in each style, I’ll consider 2 different sizes. The simple math has me trying on 6,000 pairs of pants today.

I don’t think I’m (boot)cut out for this. I don’t (modern)fit into the consumer culture littered with the hatchet of happiness: choice. This might seem paradoxical, with this question soon following “How can freedom (to choose) impair (my capacity for) pleasure?”  The first person to address this was Barry Scwartz, with his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. His thesis rests on this claim: “The culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.” Dissatifaction derives from “choice overload.” All these pants on the racks and shelves demand that I stand in the store doing the ‘Thinker’, contemplating all my choices–”I like the grey ones, but they don’t fit”;” I really wish these didn’t have a ‘fashionable’ hole in them”; “$80!?”; “No, I’m not going to ‘just try on these jean shorts’ for you!”

And this is why I decided to purchase the last pair I tried on. You probably will too.

Next, for ‘Part 2′: TPoC illustrated in Music (Why there will NEVER be another Beatles)