En Cinquieme

Something in me,

Dark, that does not fly,

And barks it’s shins on crepuscules,

Makes me mock

The very act of the ballerina,

T.V. rotating with the cliché of a jewelry box,

Whose arms in askance glance

Look like chops

Shorn of fat

And quiver not like birds, but wires.

Yet, then I’m reminded

Of the ghosts of leaves

Whose skeletal uplift of limbs

In translucent grace,

En cinquieme

Make trees of themselves,

And thus strive

To hold up the world.

And I see

Again the dancer

On the screen

And am glad to weep.

“For life is a dream, only slightly less inconstant.”

—Blaise Pascal

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

—Henry David Thoreau

“Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life?”

—Havelock Ellis

Even the most sedentary of us travel regularly. Every night, when we go to bed, we travel to another world–our own world. Many of us don’t recognize our own world when we see it, but those of us who do see a “world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries; a world where anything is possible.”[1] A world where we can fly. A world where we can play with the stars. A world where we can touch the sun. A world where we are God. In a word, a world where we are free.

So whenever you’re having a particularly rough day, or just whenever you are having a bad case of weltschmerz, you can perhaps take some consolation in the thought that, when it’s finally time to switch off the light and let night surround you, you’ll soon be off in your very own world, away from the troubled world into which you were thrown, away from the prison of the real, if only for a short while. All you need to do is to recognize your world, and remember your experiences within it.

Good night, and sweet dreams.

Notes

[1] The Matrix 

I’ve been thinking about the concept of Vairāgya, which Sir Monier Monier-Williams defines as “disgust, aversion, distate for or loathing” or more philosophically as “freedom from all worldly desires, indifference to worldly objects and to life, asceticism”.  This term is central to the thought of many thinkers, so to get to the bottom of it, I decided to turn to poetry, specifically Bhartṛhari’s Vairāgyaprakaraṇa, a chapter of stanzas on the topic.  This poem made my heart stop:

na dhyātaṃ padam īśvarasya vidhivatsaṃsāravicchittaye
svargadvārakavāṭapāṭanapaṭurdharmo’pi nopārjitaḥ |
nārīpīnapayodharoruyugalaṃ svapne ‘pi nāliṅgitaṃ
mātuḥ kevalameva yauvanavanacchede kuṭhārā vayam ||

Here’s my translation, which doesn’t do it any justice:

We did not meditate upon the feet of God

To cut our ties to worldly existence

As is required;

Nor did we acquire merit strong enough

To force open the doors at heaven’s gates;

Even in our dreams

We did not embrace the round breasts of women.

We were only axes

Cutting down the forests of our mothers’ youth.

Plenty In World Weariness

Idea-barren, still she writes.

She reads and contemplates.

A voice that speaks and sings

The way the normal speak and sing,

Seeking the I-don’t-know-

Where-am-I-going needs:

Their essences elusive yet concrete,

Boring, yet so sweet,

The whole, a variation

Within duplication –

Plenty within weariness of plenty;

Drained the disillusion

From experi-

ence,

Plenty In World Weariness 6.10.2012

The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II;

Arlene Corwin

I left home for college more than eight years ago. It was an inexorable day the Chinese protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths would refer to as “day without premonitions or symbols”. Looking back, I sometimes think I should have never left home; I should have just stayed in the province, enrolled myself in a university in the nearby city of General Santos, be with people whose familiarity led me to feel that constant sickening ennui then, and live a life released from complications.

I embarked on a personal odyssey, though to a home I imagined I belonged, and chased Fate in the big city. And that day without symbols changed me forever.

Now I understand the hesitation, a subdued abhorrence, of the character of my favorite novel, Tomas, for symbols. I have chosen heaviness thinking the choice will lend meaning to my curious and starry-eyed 16-year old self then. My search for “something higher” caused this spiritual vertigo, this fear of falling.

And an unconscious desire to fall, says Kundera, “the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves”.

I do not have any intention of letting myself slip down the slope of existentialist rage for I am completely aware I shall never recover from this existentialist hole unscathed. I believe the exercise is not only a complete waste of time but also fatal.

But these questionings, far from being philosophical, are, to me, as corporeal and visceral as corporeal and visceral can get. I am enraged. And being this sensuously enraged is beautiful. It is not mere abstraction.

How I hate philosophizing!

I am in my mid-20s. They say this age places one at the pinnacle of his vitality. But too many times I saw myself irreparably exhausted, dragging myself in doing the things I once loved doing, being on the verge of running amuck. All because of the unfulfilled promises of this vitality.

For too many times, I have feared that those little cracks have already surreptitiously made their way into the dark crevices of my being and have already eaten me from the inside out and that what is left of me now is a mass of bloody flesh incapable of distinguishing the real from the fictional.

Below layers of fictive security our daily routines deceptively make us feel we possess is a reality so shaky, shifting, and unstable. Most people my age would disagree with me, vehemently judging my cynicism as vain, if not selfish, as I am a product of the comforts bestowed upon me by the equally frivolous and elitist institution of higher learning that situates itself in a country in the third world and a premiere state university that touts itself the bastion of liberal ideas amidst the crushing weight of ugliness, corruption, poverty, and hopelessness surrounding it.

One day I shall pack my bags, say adieu to my life in Manila that I used to love and learned to detest (though these diverging feelings of love and detestation, in some very rare moments, converge).

One day I shall redeem myself from the routine and the make-believe.

And go on an odyssey back to my real home.

I think of my situation now as being caught in deep shit. How I love to say this word, shit. It is liberating. It is free of abstraction.

Shit is the highest good so long as one is not caught, deeply, in it.

A week ago, I took a jeepney ride on campus going to Quezon Avenue MRT station when I happened to be seated beside a classmate of mine in grad school who studied Literature in the university where I am teaching the subject now. Our conversation meandered until toward the end of our trip the subject of our talk settled on world-weariness. She related to me how bad it felt to be jobless and added that the stigma of being a graduate of that exclusive school along Katipunan and be unemployed was just too much to bear, and how she felt, during that very moment, palpable weariness of the world.

I guess, she is as deeply entrenched in shit as I, though the fashion of our being entrenched differs. She wants to escape it; I, on the other hand, wallow and linger in it, though maybe not for long.

For some, those who are lucky in the real sense of the word, still have that choice. For most, the choice is not theirs. I am grateful that I can still consider myself to be part of the former group. After all, I am still afforded choice probably because of my education, my age, my ability to use language to my advantage, my meager savings in the bank, my mother’s prayer, or simply because of sheer luck. And this opportunity I am exhausting to the fullest.

I always tell my students that being young gives them enough excuse to commit mistakes and to learn from these mistakes, that failing should not be something to be afraid of because they are at the best time of their lives to commit mistakes without having to face the grave repercussions that adults committing stupid mistakes face. And that they are lucky to be given this choice. And that this choice is theirs.

Although I feel miserable at times, it’s a little comforting to know that this misery is self-inflicted, and that I can choose, if I want, to be happy. That I can choose to end this spectacle, be kinder to myself, and, from a note my favorite professor in university once wrote me, “smell the flowers”.

*a reflection written more than a year ago I unearthed while searching for an old college picture a few minutes ago.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I’m definitely feeling the welshrats today.

I don’t know if it’s the additional work load at the office, the complete stupidity of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (see: the abolition of the gun registry among other follies), the nostalgia that accompanies the Holidays or what, but I feel insignificant today. Powerless towards the hurts of the world.

Annoyance after annoyance piled up, and I feel so fed up with everything I can’t wait for the 3 weeks off coming up. I was so positive lately, totally in the Holiday spirit. I don’t know what happened? Maybe two days straight of working until 8PM did me in.

One awesome thing about today, though?

I’m heading to M.D.’s place to watch (1) the Buffy the Vampire slayer movie and (2) Superman: The movie, while drinking Stash’s Holiday Chai and pigging out on smart food (note: we refer to it as smartpop).

Best night ever? Best night ever.

world-weary

adj

no longer finding pleasure in living; tired of the world

world-weariness  n

It’s a word I never thought to use, but it came to me today and it describes perfectly, the experience of trying to move onwards after losing a child.

I am sad, yes. But I know I am sad. It is ingrained in my life in a way that I know it will never truly go. There will always be a part of me that will be sad, because I lost my son. The heartbreaking, stomach twisting grief has faded somewhat, leaving just this sadness.

And this world-weariness. It isn’t depression, although the symptoms may seem similar. To feel this world-weary, is to feel just so tired, that is the closest word I can think of. Tired with everything.

I am tired of trying to get pregnant. I’ve just had a baby six months ago. If anyone reading this has had a baby, imagine trying to get pregnant immediately afterwards, because your arms are still empty.

I am tired of not understanding why these things happen. Babies die. But they shouldn’t. Babies are just beginning, I don’t understand how they can die. When I hear of another loss, I reach out to them to help, but it makes me even more world weary, I don’t understand why Gideon had to die. But I do understand I will never understand.

I am tired of physical pain too. You wouldn’t think something like physical pain could pull you down so much after losing a child, but of course it does. Simple tooth pain, but every day. And there’s no obvious reason for it, it’s just there and constant.

I’m tired of things happening to me that have no obvious reason. Every time I get ill, no doctor or dentist can give me a reason. No reason for my “flares,” no reason for pPROM, no reason for Gideon’s death, not really. Most babies survive a brain hemmorhage, no one could understand why Gideon was getting worse.

I am “no reason.”

Pain without reason. So the doctors and the dentists make you think you are imagining it, that it’s “in your head” and you start to believe them. So the next time you have pain you ignore it, it’s “In my head” afterall, and then you end up losing your waters or having a tooth pulled. All because you didn’t believe your own symptoms, you didn’t trust what you were feeling.

I am tired of making myself keep going. It is making me world-weary.

I am not angry, I am not bitter. I am just weary of it all.

Because worst of all, I know my life isn’t suddenly going to “get better” there is no reprieve for me. My life has always been this way, maybe I’ll be lucky enough to have a baby one day I can bring home. But I know the weariness of the world will still be there, and I’ll have to fight every day to keep it at bay.

Where once I would face problems with feelings of stress. Oh I have no money, I feel stressed, oh I’m in pain, how stressful. Now, it’s just weariness. Sure. Why not. Life wouldn’t be complete unless you lost a baby, had constant pain AND had no money would it?

World-weary. My word of the day.

And this is the first picture google gives me for world-weary.

World-Weary

(Belonging to this person, hope he doesn’t mind be borrowing it. It’s perfect.)

It’s all in the presentation – a deep and resigned sigh of world-weariness goes a long way – that, and giving in and explaining you position one more time, in even simpler terms, terms even a nine-year-old could understand. You’re not being condescending, of course. You’re just doing what you must in these degenerate times, when so few know anything about anything really. What has the world come to? It’s so sad. But you pat your listener on the head and assure them it’s not their fault.

Of course this is a crass sort of one-upmanship and a bit of a parlor trick. It’s a classic case of passive-aggressive dominance. Master it and you can say the most outrageous nonsense and no one will dare gainsay you. Heck, if they try you’ll just sigh again, even more deeply. You’ve cleared the field. You win.

And you can make a career of this. After all, Sartre and Camus and that crowd did – The Myth of Sisyphus is the classic there. Life is absurd – man’s search for external meaning is futile, and unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values is damned hard. But you have to face it. You’re on your own, so man-up.

What, you don’t think you have to face it? You think there are big and important external and eternal truths? Sartre and Camus would say no, and explain why we have to face it, actually – and explain it with very careful and impeccably logical arguments. But those who later read Sartre and Camus and agreed with them – generally posturing college kids – never had the intellectual firepower to make those arguments. They just sighed. That works too. Just don’t wear a beret and smoke a pipe – people laugh. It’s all the in the presentation.

In vaudeville they use to call this your shtick – a Yiddish term for your gimmick, your hook. It’s an adopted persona. You build your career on it – the loveable tramp or the stingy and bad violin player, or a guy with a stooped walk, greasepaint mustache, a lot of lascivious eyebrow raising and a cigar – whatever works. And these days, if you’re a political pundit, world-weariness is a pretty good shtick.

In fact, Charles Krauthammer – the widely syndicated Washington Post columnist and one of the Wise Men of Fox News. And he’s been around – McGill and then a stint at Balliol College, Oxford, and then Harvard Medical School, where he had that diving accident in his first year that left him a paraplegic. But he got his MD anyway and began working as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General – he’s board certified with published papers on the epidemiology of manic illness.

But he gave that up and became a dyspeptic world-weary political commentator. He coined and developed “The Reagan Doctrine” in 1985 and he defined our role as sole superpower in his famous essay The Unipolar Moment – just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He’s the neoconservative of all neoconservatives, in tight with the American Enterprise Institute and the go-to guy on the post-9/11 world and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. Before that it was Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan. What comes next is anyone’s guess. We have the responsibility to act unilaterally anywhere. We’re all that’s left to do the right thing in this sorry world.

That may seem nuts, but it’s all in the presentation. The others on the Fox news panel rant and rave, and he sits quietly, and then reluctantly drops his own bomb. And all gaze upon him in awe, or that’s the general idea:

Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable – and must be preempted.

Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.

I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time. Nonetheless, I can both understand and respect those few Democrats who make the principled argument against war with Iraq on the grounds of deterrence, believing that safety lies in reliance on a proven (if perilous) balance of terror rather than the risky innovation of forcible disarmament by preemption.

It all sounded so reasonable. It didn’t work out. He said there would be an “Arab Spring” – peace and prosperity and pro-America and pro-Israel democracies springing up all over.

We’re still waiting. On the other hand he is a supporter of legalized abortion and an opponent of the death penalty, and he thinks intelligent design is a crock, as it’s just “tarted-up creationism” – evolution will do. But he is rather fond of torture as policy, in a limited way. And he hates that Coat Factory Mosque planned for Lower Manhattan.

All this must puzzle the folks at Fox News mightily – but he has protected himself. He’s been everywhere and seen everything and thought deeply. The others all around him are mere children – with good intentions and the right instincts (they’re on Fox News, after all) – but they are children nonetheless. But he forgives them. It’s not their fault.

Needless to say they don’t let him anywhere near Glenn Beck. Beck has the opposite shtick – the manic and scattered divinely inspired fool for God who often makes no sense at all and sometimes calls himself a rodeo clown. You don’t put them on air together. You don’t want to confuse your audience. And anyway, Krauthammer is thoroughly opposed to anything Obama has done and might do, and thinks all Democrats are misguided children, so Fox News finds him useful. And his shtick works – he is sad about how things worked out and doesn’t want to be nasty about that man-child Obama or anything, but something must be done. Those who are appalled at Beck’s manic madness get the same thing from Krauthammer – cloaked in that shield of world-weariness no one can penetrate. Beck is just silly – from the German selig – “blessed” and “pious” and “innocent.” Over time the meaning changed to “harmless” and then “pitiable” – but Beck takes the word back to its roots. If you don’t like silly there’s Krauthammer. Either way Fox News has you covered.

But there still is the matter of passive-aggressive dominance, by claiming the mantle of reluctant and selfless melancholy world-weary authority bordering on the maudlin. Yes, master that and you can say the most outrageous nonsense and no one will dare gainsay you. But sometimes they do.

Consider Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post:

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities – often lopsided majorities – oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

And consider Yahoo! News, August 12, 2010:

A new CNN poll has found that most Americans think gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married. … As polling-statistics blogger Nate Silver points out, the margin of error [as well as the poll's status as the first to find majority approval] means we can’t assume that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, but it is “no longer safe to say that opposition to same-sex marriage is the majority position…”

And there will be an Arab Spring.

Glenn Greenwald lined those up and is having none of it:

That particular factual inaccuracy, which I am 100% certain will never be corrected by the Post, is the least of the problems with Krauthammer’s column today. Above all else, he seeks to delegitimize concerns over the Right’s intensifying use of racially and ethnically divisive tactics as nothing more than the last refuge of a Democratic Party which, he argues, espouses unpopular policies and thus has no means of winning an election other than by falsely accusing its opponents of bigotry.

And that’s nonsense:

It requires extreme blindness or extreme dishonesty to deny that our politics is more racially and ethnically polarized than it has been in a long time. Virtually every Fox News/right-wing-talk-radio controversy relies on scaring economically anxious white Americans into ignoring the prime cause of their economic insecurity – plundering by Wall Street bankers, abetted by the government they own – and focusing instead on some manufactured menace from powerless racial and ethnic minorities: black people preventing them from voting (New Black Panthers), stealing their elections (ACORN), and treating them unequally (Shirley Sherrod and Eric Holder’s Justice Department); Muslims who want to conquer their country and celebrate over their Christian corpses (the Triumphalist Ground Zero Mosque); invading, marauding Latino armies coming to steal their property and rape their women while their Marxist allies in Government (led by a black Muslim President) disarm the white victims.

And an example, Greenwald suggest Matt Taibbi on the recent primaries and how the Tea Party crowd took over the Republican Party:

In Arizona, John McCain trounced a Tea Party candidate named J.D. Hayworth by over 30 points in a primary race that was largely interpreted by the media as a repudiation of Tea Party values. I’m not sure they’re right about that. McCain had to spend $20 million to fight off Hayworth – a staggering number for a Senate race – and beyond that, he had to bend himself completely ass-backwards issue-wise in order to maintain what’s left of his cred with right-wing voters. 

McCain’s biggest problem with Republicans has always been his occasional willingness to describe Hispanic immigrants as human beings (remember his “Hispanic immigrants are God’s children, too?” spot in 2008?). That occasionally culturally empathetic McCain got stuffed in a steamer trunk for this primary season, though. McCain always had nuanced positions on immigration, having once helped author the 2006 immigration proposal that would have created a difficult but feasible pathway to citizenship for illegals already here in the U.S.; now he’s not only gone back on that, but has gone 100% caveman in a desperate attempt to hold on to his bigot constituency. Never an advocate of walls and fences, McCain in this race was shrieking that we just need to “complete the dang fence.”

Greenwald is of the mind that Krauthammer is full of crap, and cites Glenn Beck’s pronouncement on Fox News that Obama is a “racist” who ”has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” Someone has unpopular policies and thus has no means of winning an election other than by falsely accusing its opponents of bigotry. Krauthammer has it backwards:

An incumbent Party which has presided over extreme economic suffering has little to offer other than dredging up fear – much of it well-grounded – in the alternative (you may despise what we’re doing in power, but look at those hateful, bigoted freaks over there).

The real problem is that much of the anxiety and anger being cynically exploited by the Right is very real and justifiable. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, one of the more partisan Democratic boosters in the pundit class, commendably acknowledged that today. After accurately condemning Glenn Beck’s despicable wrapping of himself in the legacy of Martin Luther King — as though the angry whites he leads of today are the oppressed blacks of yesterday – Robinson explained:

“But many will attend for other reasons, and they’re the ones I feel sorry for. As the growth of the Tea Party movement clearly demonstrates, millions of Americans feel alienated from their government, distressed about the economy and frightened of the future. Their concerns deserve to be heard. Instead, their anxieties are exploited by hucksters who see fear and anger as marketing tools.”

The full Robison column is here. And for giggles see this:

On the eve of conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s rally at the Lincoln Memorial, a blogger’s assertion that parts of the nation’s capital should be avoided touched off accusations of racism and a sharp response by angry city leaders.

Thousands of tea party supporters were expected at the demonstration Saturday that Beck has called a “Restoring Honor” rally to show support of the country’s military at the site where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years ago to the day. The location and timing prompted civil rights leaders to cry foul.

“They have a right to rally. But what they don’t have the right do is distort what Dr. King’s dream was about,” the Rev. Al Sharpton declared Friday. He called the tea party assembly an anti-government action and has organized a counter rally also near the site of King’s historic speech.

With emotions already high, the work of a largely unknown tea party blogger, Bruce Majors, brought them to a fever pitch on Friday.

The blog, which first appeared last Monday and has been widely viewed and distributed since then, warned conservative protesters visiting the nation’s capital to avoid certain subway lines, suggesting they are unsafe, that certain neighborhoods should be avoided, that the city is populated by the world’s refugees – that taxi drivers are often Arab or African – and that generally visitors should be wary.

It was generally a guide to help you avoid black people and Arab-looking people, and perhaps Hispanics. Be safe out there. You’re an American. They aren’t. Bruce Majors seemed sincere enough. And he was just trying to help. But Bruce Majors didn’t help Krauthammer’s cause. The reluctant and world-weary man who has seen it and can explain it all – the pathetic losers are falsely accusing their opponents of bigotry – is spouting nonsense, as Greenwald sees it:

There’s no doubt that this genuine anxiety is being exploited by the ugliest elements on the Right, but that has happened because the Democratic Party has ceded the field to those right-wing “hucksters.” As much as anything else, this is the great failing of the Obama presidency. Although Obama and his Party are being blamed for the intensifying economic crisis, it is just historical fact that the unraveling took place under the Bush administration. It seems as though it was decades ago, but it was only in October, 2008 – when Bush was still President – that John McCain argued that the economic crisis was so severe that the presidential campaign should be suspended in order to attend to it. That is the same crisis – which exploded during the Bush presidency – from which we still have not recovered, which has progressively worsened.

Greenwald wishes Obama and the Democrats would man-up and call out this nonsense:

That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington – the central promise of his campaign – by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington. Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets.

But, as John Judis argues here they wasted that opportunity – they threw it away. Greenwald:

Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchic thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers – and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding  – possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can’t.

This is madness:

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party – controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country’s vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse – now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party’s failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner – continuing America’s endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living – renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

And Greenwald sees what is coming:

It is indeed difficult to believe that the country will so quickly return to power the same Republican Party – in an even more warped and primitive form – that virtually destroyed the U.S. over the last decade through a mix of extreme corruption, recklessness and lawlessness. But nothing is more foolish than underestimating the dangers that come from this potent mix of economic oppression and the aggressive fanning of racial and ethnic resentments.

But Greenwald is fighting the manic and scattered divinely inspired fool for God who often makes no sense at all, and here, the passive-aggressive world-weary man who has seen it all, of whom one should be in awe. He’s being tag-teamed, as we all are.

The only answer is to think of it as vaudeville. Everyone’s got a shtick. And even if they’re not playing for laughs in this case, you can laugh. With Beck that’s easy. With Krauthammer his world-weariness is rhetorically and socially useful – it’s a kind of a weapon. But it is really is nothing more than crass one-upmanship and a bit of a parlor trick. And once you see how the trick works you move on. Nonsense is still nonsense.

Wonder Boys, the film for which this was written (and for which Dylan won an Oscar), is my coming-of-age film of choice, and this shuffley little number from Bob benefits by association.  It’s relatively straightforward I guess, and arguably unremarkable in the context of Dylan’s oeuvre, but it’s wit and world-weariness get me every time. 

Bonus points: It makes me imagine Bob Dylan in drag, which is a potent image to say the least.

Act 2: A Thin Slice of Experience

Scene 1:

An unkempt playwright sits at his desk glancing at a stack of papers. He is holding a pen in his right hand. It hovers above the pages. He has curly, disheveled hair and his face is unshaven. He is wearing a white button-up shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He looks tired and worn out as if something is weighing on him. While looking over the pages, he begins to read them aloud in his mind. His internal response is voiced aloud. It has a ghostly quality and almost sounds as if he were speaking into a cave; its distinct echo serves to be both otherworldly and, at the same time, very present within his consciousness.

The scene takes place in a small room with two windows. From the perspective of the audience, he is facing to the left. There are two small windows on the set. One window is in front of him at a slight angle allowing the audience to notice its presence while another is to his right. Outside of the window is a red brick wall.

Playwright: I don’t even know why I continue to do this. Theater is dead. All that’s left are musicals and classics. Is there room for innovation? Maybe in some secluded playhouse…I don’t know. Look at these descriptions. What am I really trying to say here? What is there to say regarding this tragedy? Maybe the real tragedy is that no one would show up to see this.

A pause. He glances up and looks through the window in front of him.

Playwright: “…a struggling writer, who knew? Who could foresee the inundation of thought, the inundation of attention grabbing sensation. I try to pursue this art while, at the same time, am appalled by it. I operate within it while trying to rebel against it.” What is this? I have three weeks to finish this, and I feel like I’ve barely started. Half of this has to go. He lifts the pen and places the tip of it on the paper and appears to cross out some lines. What is this? This craft, this show, this sham, this drivel. Three weeks. What pressure…and I can’t seem to put the stress into action. I can’t seem to create. The words and scenes just seem to run off nonsensically. What am I really trying to say here? Who is this character really? Is it me? Is it supposed to be my audience? Is it a caricature? Do people really know how hard this is? Months of work for a two hour show and a day later it is forgotten except for the ‘remember that one time…we went to see that show?’ They go to work, they sip their coffee, as I am, we are the same–only so different. So different. I try to pursue this art, yet it’s consequences seem meaningless if not for the fact that I am trying to capture an audience of everyday people for two hours. I try to draw them into my world, into my creation. Though this too is a generalization…

He pauses.

Playwright: Many of them out in that ocean below are doing the same thing I am doing. ‘Where did I leave my keys? Do I have them on me? They must because they drove here. Did I turn the stove off before I left? What am I going to write for that report that’s due on Monday?’ It begins like this, except it goes deeper. He looks back down to the stack of papers. “It begins as a thought, any ordinary thought. Then something outside of that thought, some force, some rationale creeps in and begins to alter it. The thought is changed exhibiting a fatalistic nature; the fatalism reminds it of its limitations, its brevity, its absurdity, until, finally, the thought is exhausted and worthless. It slides down into the compost heap joining so many other thoughts that have passed through the mind of a person affected by this condition.” Should I add in the fact that this condition is like an incurable illness? It’s as if you walk into a room and come out a changed person, except carrying this seed of suffering within you. From then on, the dread speaks to you. It is like a good friend, someone you can rely on. Someone that explains the universe to you: sums it up, nice and tidy. Should I add that in? I don’t think that will make any sense. Where am I going with this? It’s really coming off the tracks now. Three weeks.

He shakes his head and buries his face in his hands.

Playwright: I wonder…if this is what I’m really trying to say.  How can I explain this concept–if can be considered a concept–to someone that doesn’t feel it, that doesn’t have this force coursing through their veins. The great existential conundrums that we all face and that drip from the experiences that we have. Experiences, I want to say, have layers. One slice of experience can be seen through a lens of sorrow, another of joy, and yet another through an all pervading landscape of something that we choose not to see and that we choose not to acknowledge until that moment creeps along and catches us unawares. That moment when we are forced to look at our condition, question it, feel something from it, or, rather, let ourselves be consumed by it like a member of the audience consuming a scene from a play. “A shadow that lurks behind us, follows us through the business of life. It whispers things in our ear. The apparition of the insane, one might think, but it is a facet of ourselves. We can choose to give it reality, choose to give it a voice or blot it out entirely, chalking it up to some depressive influence. It is our slices of experience that can define us. It is the slices that make up our worldview, that act as the proving grounds for our choices, and that make up my own.” That make up my own…

He glances up again to the window.

Playwright: This existential dread is a reminder to ourselves of where we are in the context of things both in and outside of our control. It places us…yes, I like that. It places us in a world of ephemeral circumstance. It constantly reminds us of ends: mortality, transience, and sorrow. Is it such a bad thing? Must we always be reposing in joy? Where does the joy come from if not from the respite of a burden, a burden on ourselves from without. A long, unobstructed breath after having gotten over a cold; we normally take it for granted until it is denied us. All I know is…this slice of experience could be seen as distracting me from the things that matter, like finishing this thing, or it could be seen as the thing that really matters overall. So, which is it? I am just a playwright, I don’t know that answer…

He glances back down at the sheaf of papers putting the tip of his pen to the paper and begins to write as the lights dim overhead. The curtains close.

Commentary: I don’t feel any commentary is necessary for this particular scene.

Scene 2: Experience as a Consumable Beverage

To be continued…

Characters:

You,

me,

and everyone else.

Act I:  A Common Tale

Scene 1:

The scene is a dimly lit family room. Two children, a girl and a boy both under the age of ten, sit in front of the television unsupervised. Their parents sit huddled over some documents on the dining room table. The image on the television flickers as well as the lights above the table.

Father: I don’t see how we are going to be able to pay this.

Mother: We have to, we don’t have a choice…

Father: But how? I’ve been out of work for five months and you aren’t making enough as a contractor.

Kids (in the background): Daddy, the television isn’t working…it’s acting funny.

Mother: We’ll make it work, we will, we just have to have a little faith.

Father: …and then the mortgage is due in ten days, and I don’t see how we are going to pay for that. Groceries set us back every week. It’s as if everything we have worked for has just been wiped away, as if it was a dirty window.

The television image continues to flicker and begins to change channels between the news and the original family programming that the children were watching.

Television: Eight more dead today in Afg…Mr. Fox, don’t eat me…after recent gunfire in the southern province, known for its…we should be friends.

Father: I just don’t know anymore. I’m tired of this situation. It just dropped out beneath us. A year ago, things were fine. We were getting by; hell, even making it really work. We had money put aside, the kids were doing well in school. The house was getting paid off, I had money invested, and now…now, we do everything they tell us to do–everything I was taught to do–and where does it get us? Marooned, broke, and indebted.

Mother: We can’t start with all this, we need to think of a solution.

Television: Arctic icecaps expected to be gone in…(playful narrative music)…banking executives squander bailout money while homeowners suffer more foreclosures…The owl is in his tree.

The father looks up towards the audience.

Father: What are we supposed to do? It’s as if no one cares, no one gives a damn…about anything.

The mother continues to look at her husband’s face.

Mother: We are just trying…we are trying to look ahead, hoping and wishing that things, eventually, will get a little bit better for us.

The curtains close.

Commentary

And now, I want to pose to you the question: Is this a common tale? I wake up everyday and read the day’s news. I read it with detachment. Not because I want to but because I have to. I, myself, have been a frequent victim of the times as many of you have been. What I don’t understand, what completely boggles my mind about the entire scenario, and what I keep recounting in my mind while hoping and wishing for some sort of answer is not how all of these events came to be, but the more important question: when did people stop really caring about what is going on around them? We’ve had two wars in the past eight years, a financial meltdown, a brutal attack on American soil, a million debates on a million issues, and all we have to show is a bitterly divided, fanatical, and indifferent populace. No one cares about soldiers dying overseas. Yes, they are dying. For what? Some people would say our ‘freedom’. To say this is to lie to yourself and to the memories of so many of these young people who are giving their lives for..what exactly? Why are we in Afghanistan? The Taliban, yes. We are attempting to strike at the root of terrorist groups. We are attempting to extirpate the source as if it were a weed that could merely be pulled out, but, as we all know, weeds grow back and these are not weeds but people. These people have ideas, world views, and the conviction to try and make these ideas a reality. We seem to have forgotten what that means. While the people who represent our ideas are laying down their lives for us on foreign shores, we are bravely navigating our daily commute. We are doing the bare minimum at work. We are hitting up Happy Hour afterward, as if it is the only thing that matters in the day. In other words, we are only thinking of ourselves. We have lost our own conviction, and our own beliefs in anything of value. I’m not talking about the values of ‘Conservative America’, I’m talking about anything of value. We shave off hours in front of the television, distracting ourselves with a six-pack and a football game. We shave off more hours at the bar in a pithy attempt to quell our own loneliness. We shave off more hours chatting online, posting things on Facebook and Twitter–the Internet definitely does give our lives an otherworldly feel, doesn’t it? As if we are operating on our own little plane, the Me-Plane.

The evidence to my claims are simple: if people cared about one another, then why would there be so much debate about healthcare? I’m willing to pay a little more to ensure that others are taken care of, why shouldn’t you? Imagine you are in their situation. You are desperate, broke, and full of anxiety. You don’t know what you are going to do. This country is the only, I repeat, only country in the world that can bankrupt someone simply for getting sick. This isn’t a liberal or conservative issue it is a human issue. When did we just stop caring about other people? What is so ironic to me, and should be to everyone (and not just because I believe it) is that the people out there that claim to be the most religious are the most apathetic. They are willing to throw 40,000 more troops overseas without skipping a beat, they are willing to denounce an option that would provide healthcare to everyone at an affordable rate. “But people fear taxes”, you say. “Money is important.” What a person should say is: “My money is important.” That’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Acquiring a little treasure trove and guarding it against any nefarious wayfarer in the belief that it will be the security that we all seek for the future.

Scene 2:

Two retirees sitting in a common room adorned with an old faded couch, an armchair, a coffee table, and a television tuned to Sixty Minutes. The first is an old man, relatively young in the modern sense, about 66 years old and in good health and the second is his wife, of a similar age, who appears to be vibrant and tranquil. The old man is watching television in the armchair while his wife sits on the couch knitting.

Husband: I can’t believe the news these days.

Wife (humming and focused on knitting): What’s that dear?

Husband: I said, I can’t believe the news these days.

Wife: What’s wrong with it?

Husband: These young people with their video games. Tuning out. I don’t blame them. What is there to tune into these days? An economic meltdown? Two wars? A bunch of thieving brigands that get away with robbing their own banks? In my day…no, our day, when there was a war, there was a real reason for it and not some opaque, ephemeral reason for it. It was clear-cut, legitimate, and had, for the most part, unwavering support.

Wife: Harold…

Husband: Listen to this…

Television: …old computers dumped in a small town in China where they are melted down for precious metals. It is the most toxic place on Earth.

Wife: But that’s in China.

Husband: It might as well be here. This is what I retired to? I spent 33 years to live in a cesspool as if my house were some island amidst a threatening ocean of destruction.

Wife: But, you wanted to retire.

Husband: Retiring was supposed to mean that we would have time to do what we wanted to do. It was supposed to mean that we would have enough money to travel, to see the world, and to finally live our dreams. We barely have enough money to get by. Grocery prices have leaped in recent years: the food crisis, they say. Our house is worth less than half of what it used to be: the housing crisis, they say. Our Social Security is more of a pittance than any amount to live on: the financial crisis, they say. Our health insurance is higher ever since I hurt my knee, and your migraines require frequent X-Rays: the health reform crisis, they say. I mind as well have stayed in the office.

Wife: No, you wouldn’t. You didn’t even like it when you were there. You complained about it, you were tired of the politics and the drama. You used to say that you couldn’t wait to be done with it all, and now you are saying that you wish you had never left?

Husband: If I knew that retirement would mean that I was just counting grains of sand while withering in this chair, then I should have stayed where I would have at least been contributing to something other than empty hopes and dreams.

Wife: Don’t say that Harold…we are happy here, aren’t we? I mean, I wish we could see the kids more, but they come down for the holidays. We have that to look forward to.

Husband: And the rest of the year?

Wife: Well, maybe you should get a hobby. You could write your memoirs or take up golf or something.

Husband: Golf? (he chuckles) And writing…well, I don’t know how well I could write anymore. Maybe a long time ago I could have written something great, but I’ve submerged that ability beneath my understanding of Finance.

Wife: It doesn’t matter if it’s great, it’s just something to do.

Husband: Something to do? Is that all we are supposed to do with our time? Occupy ourselves until we can no longer take care of one another?

Wife: I didn’t mean it like that.

Television: …health care reform and death panels…

Husband: I can’t take anymore of this. Is this all there is?

Wife: We have each other, we have our family, and…we have our health.

Husband: We barely see our grandkids, and I don’t see how you can put up with all my rambling.

Wife: It isn’t rambling. You are right, but what can we do about it?

The curtains close.

Commentary

Ah…retirement. That glorious retreat from the business of waking life. The ability to live your dreams–finally. The longing for time but, not just any time, rather time that is untrammeled and lacking the fetters of our normal economic constraints as working people. I have always been fascinated by the concept of retirement. It is something that my parents speak of often, even long for given recent events that need not be named. What is even more fascinating about retirement is that it is primarily a Western concept. From my travels, I saw people that were long past the age of when they should be ‘properly retired’ that were surprisingly vibrant and still working hard on the things that mattered. Retirement, to me, seems to be a time that we all yearn for and yet it is also a time of giving up or setting aside the idea of putting effort into what we do. It is this glorious break, this 20-year vacation that we can all look forward to having towards the end. Unfortunately, for most of us, it will no longer be a viable option given economic forces nor will it be a time to ‘finally begin to really pursue our dreams’, because, like anything, to pursue our dreams takes time and energy–not to mention good health. If we are on this perpetual weekend of waking up late or just living from breakfast to dinner, it will be hard to put the time and effort into doing things that ‘matter’ like finally getting around to making that around-the-world trip, hiking that distant mountain, lounging along beautiful beaches, snorkeling along the Egyptian coast, writing that book that we always wanted, or maybe just some time to kick back and relax. With the exception of the last of these, to have this capacity presupposes certain criteria: that we will be in good health, that we will have the means (which is often unpredictable), and that we will have the time. Time shouldn’t be much of an obstacle but good health and the means will be. You might have the means but have a knee injury or you might have good health but struggle to make ends meet. There is also another hidden outlier that most people don’t really consider: boredom. After having worked and contributed to something (sometimes exciting, banal, or cruel) for thirty years, it is difficult to merely transition into the business of leisure. After all, leisure is seen as a rarity, a valuable commodity that is both vilified in our working years (out of the guilt of having to be seen as a productive member of society) and venerated. People don’t know what to do with themselves, and they wind up bored and watching too much television. Their health begins to wane due to inactivity and age, and the sunset of mortality begins to approach. The sequence of events that normally follows, as many of you might know, consists in working too much during our younger years in order to have the time and the means to enjoy ourselves later. The seasonal vacations of young people usually amount to excessive drinking and experiences of forced forgetting. One can’t help but see the irony of trying to escape from work in our younger years only to desire to return to it out of boredom in our later years. The logical step, though it is the last possible step that most people would take, is to live your goals in your younger years and work them off later. This decision also fits in neatly with the idea of settling down and having a family, and yet the reverse of this is true. I believe it is due to the financial setup that follows a linear progression of saving: you save up the means for the long term and neglect the short term. This fits in well with investment schemes, the insurance industry, and a score of other investment strategies that are founded on the principle of waiting later to live while working now to die.

“Geez, Ice Age 3 was fun, nkkwala ng stress.”

“Dinner tayo bro.”

“Boring night, sin-o unli da?”

“wud?” (What are you doing?)

“Musta na?”

“Care 2 txt?”

I have this gnawing suspicion that my friends and even those whose numbers are not in my phonebook but who give me unsolicited advices on life, love, and anything they think is worth sending are either subscribed to Smart unlimited text promo or just blatantly declaring to the world how bored they are with their lives, or both.

Twitter might have been invented as a response to our generation’s  itch to broadcast our boredom, and Facebook’s Rock Your World’s  (formerly Wall) reason for being is also this, I believe.

Is this virtual sharing of our common experience with boredom that keeps our generation together? We are a lot of young men and women whose idea of a community is far from what our parents had during their time. We spend our day working and earning for a living then go home every night tired and sleepy. But not wanting to lose our connection with the world and with our friends we log on to Facebook and there, in a futile attempt, we punish the world with our lashing, ranting and banter. There we find a place where we can all be blithe college students again who care less about the inner mechanism that drives the world outside the academe, the reality that we unwillingly trap ourselves in now.

And so we give up our carefree and lighted-hearted character when we were 20, now projecting the sensibilities of an about-to-be jaded corporate slave whose only weapons are witty one-liners we hope others like us will comment on, a 180-character Twitter update of an insipid dinner, a date, or a deadline we die to beat, or a blog article hurriedly written to dislodge the excreta in our minds that has accumulated throughout the day.

We do it every night. As if it is the only time of the day we are allowed to be ourselves. As if only on the pages of Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, or our blog are we allowed to speak our minds. As if these thoughts matter at all.

Everything seems to be losing its old fun, it is like the old jokes Smart sends to its millions of subscribers daily. Jokes that have gone stale a long time ago but which, it seems, its marketing team doesn’t know so they keep on sending as spam SMSs and the equally boring line: Oh sumakit ba ang tiyan mo sa katatawa, marami pa niyan…(did you burst out laughing, we still got more. Send…) If the jokes I’ll get in exchange of my 2.50 pesos are as boring and predictable as those they send us, I’d rather cry.

World weariness.

Before, our idea of the world is as far as the physical expanse we see. We may imagine what is beyond the mountain or the horizon but the world is only as far as our imagination can take us. Our world this time, however, is overwhelming. The web is providing us with so much information that make us feel smaller than we used to feel, hopeless, even negligible. Such is the sad story of our existence.

I may not embrace the comfort of my faith, nor the coldness of my reality, but at least, no matter how wretched it is, I have my existence. When we look for a reason, for a purpose, we humans look to the world for inspiration. But we find nothing but a world obsessed with the superlative, with the extreme. Inspiration does not thrive in the tiring task of running after something that is beyond our mind’s ability to create an image, so we either look for something we are capable of imagining or we imagine the unimaginable and transcend our humanity.

The latter left me weary, the former made me feel I am betraying my self.

Some of the most important choices we make happen during the time we are the most incapable of choosing. I dread making choices and eventually finding out they’re a mistake. A teacher in my fundamentals of chemistry subject when I was still in my undergrad told us that we always have a choice, but what if I choose not to choose, is it a legitimate choice?

I’m world weary.

Weltschmerz was popularized during the German Romantic Nationalist movement of the 19th century, the idea that the German soul has a monopoly on feeling agonisingly out of tune with the world.

This set me wondering why this is? And what is the long-term consequence of it?

What I think it boils down to is that life-experience is an unevenly distributed asset. Furthermore, the ability to make experience meaningful, to turn events or occurrences into life-experience, is not something everyone does well.

An example. You might be working in a team or crew. A drama occurs and everyone experiences more or less the same set of events. But, some people will leave the set of events only to go through them again at some time in the future, because they didn’t actually learn anything. The more cruel among you reading this might think, “well… this is what they call ‘being a munter’.” But I’m suspicious that some people just have the ability to learn more from experience than others, and especially more than people who limit their world-views to static frameworks.

Another example. Someone with a difficult childhood can become far more worldly that someone with a stable, loving family. But the opposite is equally true.

Both these examples suggest that some people learn better than others, and I would accept that this is just a cognitive ability. Doubtless there are psychologists and like out there who are thinking, “old ground here Tibby… read the literature.” To which I would reply, “this is a blog… who the hell prepares for a brain dump?” Heh.

The import of this ability to digest experience becomes more interesting when you start to speak with persons who have a high capacity to do so, and explains why some people have different age and reaction profiles. (And here is where the ‘wacky’ quotient of the blog comes in)

Something I’ve often wondered about is the mythic idea of immortality. If you live forever, when does life just start to get a little dull? I wonder this now because medical science and better nutrition continues to lengthen our lives, with many or most living nearly twice as long as the average person did 1000 years ago. When “old” is 35, then 70 is ancient.

This is again a well-trod path. Plenty of writers have thought this one through and written it into fiction and non-fiction.

Taking this longevity in to account, people who have a limited, “programmed” world-view will likely live their entire lives making the same or highly similar responses to specific events. Meeting someone who makes a particular action, or speaks a particular way will elicit a programmed response, i.e. all poor people are obviously stupid, or they wouldn’t be poor. In this way they are able to filter and manage social interaction in a way that gives this interaction meaning within their established world-view, though without making this interaction meaningful.

However, persons who are highly responsive to interaction, and adaptive, will likely produce a range of different reactions to their social interaction as they age. They might accommodate other peoples ethnicity or gender in a given mise en scene for example, and react accordingly.

That said though, there are only ‘so’ many different mise en scene available to us. Sooner or later an individual, unless they are highly mobile, will eventually encounter the same type of person speaking the same memes or possessing the same concerns, and our reactive individual will in effect experience ongoing deja vu.

And if you live forever, or at least live long enough to feel as if you have lived forever, would that not weary you? Wear you down?

Worse, what if you constantly encounter programmed individuals, with a paucity of reactive thinkers in your society?

In a way, wouldn’t you welcome death when it eventually came? Wouldn’t you accept that the world has little else to offer you, when you have seen what the world is, time and again? If you were condemned to live forever, wouldn’t you in effect be condemned to an endless deja vu of events and people, each mortal learning again what their predecessors had? And perhaps badly?

But this made me think that acceptance of the wisdom this entails, and the willingness to accept that there is sometimes little else that one can contribute to the world, is perhaps a better place to be as a person reaches the end of their life. Immortality is of course a myth, and we must all confront our own end in time, but perhaps having been a realised individual will make that end easier when it comes, and prevent an unseemly clutching to life; a grasping, desperate end.

(image: ‘Weary’ by Sue McNiel Jacobsen)