Tag: importance

Book Review: The Line Between

[The Line Between]
The Last Unicorn is one of my Favorite Books, but Beagle's other works haven't really struck a similar chord in me, until the final tale in this collection of short stories: "A Dance for Emilia." I was quite literally crying my way through the whole thing. Jake is a second-rate actor who spends his life working small theaters and bit parts; his friend Sam is a dancer who gave it up when he realized he would never be good enough, and became a theater critic instead (he refuses to review dance, noting that he's too bitter). There's no judgement (or at least none that I sensed) between these two choices. But the unspoken grief Sam feels over this choice haunts the entire narrative, up against Jake's lesser sadness of mediocrity.

I heard some reality show girl on one of the lesser cable channels chattering childish epiphanies during a channel-hop yesterday. She said that if you loved something enough, that was all it took to succeed. And I laughed, with all the bitterness of poor Sam. It's not, else the world would be full to the brim with artists and musicians and writers. Instead we fall to supporting roles, like critics, teachers, assistants, and gallery buyers, or disappear entirely into other, less-creative, endeavors. Reading that story, I side with Jake. Better to be a forgotten nobody in the world you love, than standing on the sidelines, forever thinking about what you gave up.
Posted 2009.08.10 11:26 | Last modified 2011.03.02 13:37 | 1 Comment

In Fear of Dying in Little Parts

I am not the person I imagined.
A silly thought, after countless compromises.
Haven't we all made them, just to live?
But still tragic, for a person dead and never breathed.
The grand fantasies of children, that sense that someday
We still have time to be the whole we dreamed inside.
Is that the line we walk across, between young and old,
Quick and cold, when we stop thinking what we'll be
And wondering where we lost our way?  Backtracking,
Like age is a map we could retrace.
The poets dying young are fleeing disappointment,
But in what? Their arts, their hearts, or faces?
The fading ambition of youth
Or the looming inertia of old age?
Forever mourning rosy-colored photos in the past
While hiding from the ever-changing leaves
Of tomorrows falling all around.
Are wrinkled forms and wrinkled souls entwined for all,
Mind and body locked and marching on to frailty,
Till every part we call ourselves betrays us?
They told me it crept silently into our faces
In little changes never noticed till too late,
But instead it runs in fits and starts:
My eyes, my mouth, my neck, fingers trembling unasked.
I'm afraid of what comes next.  I could accept
A withered trunk if still my leaves grew green.
But everything and all of me
Fading in a murky bog
Of muddled, mumbling, sentimental Old Woman -
That I can't forgive the threatening tick-tick-tick.
A silly thought - aren't they all silly now?
Pretending that my hopes and dreams are somehow separate
From the worn-down beating of my heart and the sticky blood inside it.
They will all die together, why not tire and slow as one?
And in the end, I probably won't know, forgetting and forgettable.
One day I'll be Her, and that's that, and maybe I won't cry,
The way my mother did last year, remembering,
The way her mother did, decades past, when I drew her last.
A curse they handed down, unwilling, to their daughters
With all the other mixed gifts of resemblance.
And so the poets stop, right here - maybe even now too late.
But me, I'm nobody, so I keep going: waiting, fearing, hiding
From the fits and starts, come to take the rest away.

Posted 2009.02.22 11:40 | Last modified 2009.02.22 11:40 | Leave a reply

Observed Alterations in the Perception of Magic Versus Science

[magic]
Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This thought was also expresed in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: a modern man who travels back in time to the middle ages and awes the primitive locals with his "magic" modern technology. I think it is not too much of a stretch to say that most of our current technology would indeed appear magical to the people of the 19th century - what with iPhones, the internet, MRI scans, and so forth.

But I don't think that will be true any longer. Take a moment and think what the future could bring: immersive VR multiplayer games, anti-aging drugs, space travel, even hand-held laser weaponry... none of it sounds like "magic." It just sounds like very advanced science. If someone walked up to me with an alien teleporter from 2200, I'd just start asking them how it worked. I wouldn't think: "Oh noes! Magic!"

This reflects a two-part change in modern society, I believe. Firstly, because of the rapid advances in technology and their saturation of our daily life, we have come to accept that scientific mystery is not magic. We are surrounded every day by complex and amazing devices whose inner functions we couldn't ever hope to understand. Most of our gadgets were designed and built by whole companies of people with individual specializations. We are the product of Ford's assembly line, each doing our own little part as best we can and trusting that everyone else is doing the same. Mysteries are easier to attribute to the intellectual genius of another person than to mystical forces. Even in the most artfully executed staged displays, we look for wires and sleight-of-hand, not telekinesis.

The second part is that the idea of magic has become so very popular in the Oughts. Which probably hasn't been true for nigh on a thousand years, once the Christians started burning people at the stake for suspicion of it and all (actually, the Romans had some similar laws on that matter too, come to think of it). As near as the 1970s Dungeons and Dragons was linked with Satan-worshipping child-murderers in most people's minds. But now pretty much everyone can read Harry Potter and say they're a Wiccan without being tossed willy-nilly into prison on false-memory child abuse charges. Magic is a nice dream - an adult fairy tale to make life seem a little less cruel.

And I think these two changes have necessitated a shift in what we perceive as magic. Before, magic was just the unexplained. But now the unexplained can be very boring (advanced technology). Magic has needed to move into new ground - the unexplainable. Not just advanced science, but the anti-science. It exists outside of the laws of physics. Whereas wizards of the past were the most educated of their day, utilizing the forces of the universe in grand and unbelievable ways, now most fantasy stories internalize it into their characters as a talent, an innate ability that is powered by emotion or spirit. Magic is like perfect pitch - a special gift that only a few people have at which the rest of us can only wonder from afar.

There's something a little sad about that change. It's the difference between believing a great artist is made by working hard for years and years and becoming a master of his craft, versus believing that a great artist is born that way and produces his greatest work in his 20s and then drifts on into obscurity or monotony. It makes it easier for us to dream that we could be special, but a lot harder for us to achieve it once we have recognized that we are not.
Posted 2008.08.21 17:25 | Last modified 2011.03.02 13:32 | 1 Comment

The World Is Getting Smaller… And So Am I

[map]
Map of The Internet (src)
I'm an old-timer on the Internet - not so ancient as the Bulletin Board posters of the early 90s, but old enough to remember when AOL was a walled garden and all the links fit on one page. The internet was so big then: full to the brim with tiny sites featuring fun games and comedic rants. For the lonely and isolated (like me), it was a way of reaching out and finding new families - best friends we would never have met, constrained as we were by physical location and social habits. When the late 90s rolled around and commercialism seized the internet, we complained that the fun places were being drowned out by the big brands. You couldn't find Barbie parodies anymore, or teasing twists of trademarked phrases like "Ham, the Other White Meat," because those companies were sending out lawsuits left and right. But then things turned around a bit with blogs and MySpace and the connections people started making in the Oughts. Web 2.0 was all about bringing people together, about making collaborations and virtual families. The internet became a world where we could socialize even better than the local coffee shop.

But I think something's gone very wrong. And - admittedly - this may just be me being old and missing the point, but it seems to me that instead of becoming a place where people who don't fit in can find a niche where they belong, the internet has ballooned into a giant clique where the nonconformists are more scorned and isolated than ever. Blogging is a popularity contest and - for all I love to read Dooce and the like - as a consequence, the less popular are dropping off the map, drowned out and never seen. Instead of connecting by setting up a little home on LiveJournal or Flickr, you just get told every day how incredibly worthless and undeserving of companionship you are, staring at that zero counter month after month.

And the senior clique? They are more confident than ever that they are all the world needs to hear. The way the internet en masse attacks movies like The Crystal Skull, while blithely ignoring the other monumental failures of the genre. The way everyone reads the same books (from Harry Potter to Y: The Last Man). The way everyone knows the same celebrity gossip and CuteOverload vocabulary. You are either in, or you are out (and yes, they all watch Project Runway and blog their reality TV picks with zest).

And I've always been an outsider.

I wander the internet now and it's entertaining enough in a sugary sort of way, like green Jell-o for my morning doldrums. But it's all so same-y and predictable. Occasionally I find a new site that makes me laugh, but it wears off after a few months. I read odd books and wish I had someone to talk to about them. Someone who doesn't like Star Trek or SG-1 or Harry Potter. I wish I had a smaller community of artists where I could feel like I wasn't at the losing end of insignificant.

And I guess that's the real problem there. There are over 6 billion people on the planet, and more of them get on the internet everyday. And - as in real life - there are more desperate-to-fit-in sheep joining up than lonely outsiders. Maybe it was different once, maybe it was smaller and more selective. But it's not. The world's not. And we can't be special anymore. Even the statistical uniqueness of our fingerprints is about to disappear up against that huge number of people. And I don't know how to accept that.

I'm looking at the piece of fairy cake and I just can't grasp how very small I am.
Posted 2008.07.30 12:08 | Last modified 2011.03.02 13:32 | 1 Comment

Iain Pears' The Portrait

[Cover: The Portrait]
The Portrait by Iain Pears
I just finished reading The Portrait. It was... disturbing. It was written very like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a meandering journal of observations with plot thrown in on the side. And the plot was good, but I think the novel stood on its own without it - maybe even stood *better* without the finality of the story - just because the musings were so frighteningly perceptive.

Excerpt 1:
To impose yourself, to take the public by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking; to scream in its provincial little ear that I am a genius. And if you scream loud enough and long enough, it believes you.

Excerpt 2:
"It's like an addiction," she said. "I go mad if I can't use my hands. It's all I have, the only thing that makes it worthwhile getting out of bed in the morning."

Posted 2008.05.28 17:39 | Last modified 2008.05.28 17:39 | Leave a reply

Julia Sweeney’s "Letting Go Of God"

I had the great pleasure of seeing Julia Sweeney's One-Woman show tonight, "Letting Go Of God". I saw parts of it last year at the Paramount and instantly loved it. The extended version was amazing. I think the shorter version was a concentration of the funny bits, and the longer version had a lot more socks to the gut. When I was abandoning the Mormon faith, I belonged to a group called "Recovery from Mormonism." It was a sort of an online therapy group. They collected stories former members told of their experiences (often AWFUL experiences) in leaving the Mormon church. I always wanted to post my story there, but I never felt like I had a "finished" version. And by the time it was finished, I couldn't remember anymore how it felt like when I was actually there.

Julia Sweeney has no such problem. She elegantly carries the audience through her entire journey, in the moment, with no hints of what is to come. It was funny and satirical, of course, but it was also devastating and embarrassing and filled with all the grief of lost fairy tales. I can't say that I've read as much on the many, many topics that led her to atheism, but her conclusions resonated very strongly with me. Especially the conversation she has with her mother, where she says she is more at peace now than she was before. And that it really sucks to re-evaluate one's own impending demise, especially given the better understanding of one's own significance (or lack thereof) in the universe at large (cv. Douglas Adams and fairy cake).

As soon as the movie is released, I will be buying it for myself and all my friends. But in the meantime, you can enjoy this amusing clip of Julia Sweeney's encounter with the Mormon Missionaries.
Posted 2007.10.20 22:31 | Last modified 2011.03.02 13:41 | Leave a reply

Unfinished

Were I more clever I would be the clown, were I more stupid I would be the fool, were I less light-hearted I would be the tragic victim, were I more sociable, I would be the lady faire. Alas, fighting against stereotypes while simultaneously trying to define myself with shallow paradigms, I don't think I am anything easily stated, except, perhaps, too much like everybody else.

My life is fairly ordinary, the average nine-to-five job that drives people to load up a pair of shotguns in the trunk, just to bring a little variety back into their world. But I don't, in fact, hate my job. And I know my own character well enough that I can't see myself creating Michaelangelo's David during a six-month artistic leave of absence. I'd just sit on my ass watching TV like everybody else does. So I haven't run out to buy that gun permit yet. And I don't think a 10-foot slab of marble would really fit in the trunk of my teeny little Toyota, provided it had the horsepower to lug such a thing home.

People still tell me that I am exceptional and talented and all those fancy other words you use when you meet someone whose minor daily achievements you envy simply because you're feeling suddenly guilty that you spent the last month on your ass watching TV. I hear it a lot less than I did when I was a straight-A high school student with red hair and glasses and an inferiority complex the size of Pocatello. It could be that I've shed the glasses, and my hair is now blue, but I suspect rather the general apathy that descends on your average artistically-minded teenager forced to abandon creative pursuits and instead excel in math, science, and literature in the vain pursuit of identity, approval, and an easily stated path in a decidedly complex world. Then again, perhaps the very fact that I could construct that sentence (and recite it theatrically to anyone who asks) is enough to alter previously genial public opinion from genius to simple psycho.

Like most people, I tend to blame my past for my present failures. It's not really fair: after all, it's not like anyone made me join the cheerleading squad or the drama club. In fact, I was basically raised *in absentia*, so if I took up the misguided notion that getting an A in chemistry would make my father notice I existed, well, that was my own stupidity. Hence the opening, and why I'm not the clown, although I do still dream occasionally of becoming a stand-up comedian. I have a routine: but since I never joined the drama club, I don't think I could overcome the stage-fright.

But let's not forget the conclusion of my key sentence. The easy path. I never fought enough for what I wanted. I still don't. I still sit on my ass watching TV week after week, dreaming of painting while groggily absorbing another rerun of ER. Like imagining the emptiness that lies beyond the edge of our universe and trying to conceive of how far it does or does not stretch, life can seem an intimidating void. Any marker in that void, any approved path or witnessed career, is a hard lure to ignore, especially when up against the uncertainty of personal vision, the ties that must be cut to follow one's dreams, and the bickering back-seat driver that is my own low self esteem.

Besides, a person can find a lot of company on that easy path. A wealth of salesmen and business executives cross my path, their careers made by two years of selling Mormon religion. Young mothers with prematurely large families conceived with the same in-depth planning that attends a customer big-sizing their fast food meal. People whose lives were made by indecision, and when it occurs to them finally to be dissatisfied where they end up, they drift on as lottery junkies and mystical dreamers, patiently waiting for some cosmic hand to capriciously pluck them from their dull, directionless lives and set them in their proper paradise. I sometimes feel like the prankster yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, watching the crowds pour past me, running from that moment of deciding their life's future course. But it must have been someone else, because when graduation day came, I ran with all the rest of them.

And there must be a million different moments behind me when I had the chance to follow my heart, from selecting my college major to how I spent the 15 minutes this morning between showering and breakfast. There will likely be a million more. Myself, I'd like to think that somewhere down this road I will select one, finally. That I will look down into that void and back at the road, and maybe--just that once--think that uncertainty could be more satisfying than another hour of network television. It does help that the quality of the latter deteriorates year after year. Maybe I could graph that: the decline in interesting programming versus the effort it takes to do something which requires the use of my limbs. There might be a point in there where they equalize. It would be nice to know when, especially since that would help me plan my La-Z Boy payment plan.

I do have some genuinely brilliant friends: PhDs in music and history, top-notch lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, VPs. I think I must be that fat girl in our group, the one the cheerleaders always kept around in high school. But however closely I study them, my little troop of Bright Eyes have yet to reveal their secret key to breaking the couch potato cycle. And they aren't exactly the disciplined type, forgoing television or eating extra bran. The things they go without are fairly universal: love, cleanliness, a healthy diet, physical activity of any sort. The ways they piss away their days are not so different from my own: beer, pizza, computer games, hypochondrism. Yet at the end of the year, my friends show up with photography awards, new degrees, and job offers from all over the world. And I was rejected by McDonald's.

I wonder sometimes what opportunites they hate themselves for missing, what dreams fill their rosy-colored futures. Is there a level up there I can't see, stuck all the way down in my dead-end lower middle class world as I am? The material one of mansions and antique cars which lures the lottery junkies is one I think none of my crowd is really drawn to, but perhaps there is some other life intertwined, good food, fine wine, gallery shows, witty conversation, a chance meeting with Steve Martin or Geena Davis at the annual MENSA gathering (and finding your IQ is higher--oh, one can dream). Because somewhere in my bitter soul I think no one is ever quite ready to sit down and say, "Yup, my life is perfect, just the way it is."

It's supposed to drive us to achieve, that shrewish dissatisfaction with our lives. Maybe it works for other people: suburbanities desperately laboring for a bigger car and smaller ass than the other lemmings of the herd. I'm not much of a herd creature, unfortunately. However long I agonizingly relive my past and rescript every line like a bitter and talentless old film critic, I'm still living a life so lacking in worth that it would fall somewhere below Strom Thurmond: The Prenatal Years.

I find myself hating middle-aged housewives searching for importance at the art stores I mournfully frequent. I watch them tensely from the corner of my eye as I wander those narrow aisles, hand stretched out to brush over each color without ever quite touching. I'm afraid to buy anything, afraid of committing my meager income to a frivolity I may never summon the courage to actually use. But these greying women blissfully fill carts with second-rate pastels and teach-yourself kits, already dreaming of their first gallery showing.

Outside, men in dark suits stride purposefully down the streets like emergency room doctors to their inconsequential lunches, immaculate gangs of future corporate businessmen, in training to rob pensions and crush blue-collar lives. The tidily dressed maids of the expensive hotels follow with less pomp, but they match so well it's hard to separate the two, like dancers at some grand waltz in fancy dress. I haven't decided if I am just the little girl left outside, or perhaps the main course, stewing quietly in the corner.

I'm not fooled by the lower class, wondering about their wasted potential and unnoticed misfortunes. It's a frivolity for well-off college kids looking for griefs in others because they don't have enough of their own yet. There are no Shakespeares out there, no Berninis-in-disguise, bumming cigarettes on the street corner. I imagine we could all be Mozarts, set on the right path and pushed along until we can't turn back. But how many of us can make it there on our own? I don't know if anyone can or ever did achieve *that* act of genius. We all have our little fortunes that others envy, the little presents from fate that often go unnoticed, but carry us through hurdles others can never surmount. In the end, any artist is rated on his life's work, not his potential. Wasn't that Solon's axiom, after all?

In fact, a lack of opportunity is at times the gift from fate that creates the genius which I seem to lack. I don't mean to be fickle, rejecting my own talents because they weren't the ones I wanted, like some pouty birthday girl wishing for one Barbie over another. But I can't help but wonder that if I had been less skilled at writing, if I had shown less interest in math, less passion for music, if I had perhaps shown a general failing in all other categories, if that might not have been the gift I needed to make me pursue art with more determination. If maybe all those other artists out there, working and selling and drinking martinis with self-deprecating wit at their first big exhibition, are simply so much better than me because they are, in fact, not better than me, but simply not good enough at anything else to be distracted. I do what I must to pay the bills, and if I had been unable to make the money so much more easily by playing at a computer, perhaps I might have had to work a little harder, eaten a little less, lived a little more squalidly, as the desperate, hungry artist that I still have the outright middle-class gall to envy while I drink my moderately priced French wine and watch my latest DVD.

And it always comes back to the television, doesn't it? That time-waster, that mind-sucking, creativity-destroying, social-skills-eroding void of cheap entertainment. Everyone likes to blame the TV for our modern apathy. And in a sense it does shut off the mind, presenting us with a ready-made story which we only have to sit back and passively enjoy. Kind of like reading. Like music. Like art. It seems humanity has filled the world with media to distract us from the much-less enjoyable real world we only stay in long enough to bring home a paycheck.

Like Dorothy, we live in a world of grays, depressing, boring, where we are nothing more than one of six billion: easily replaced, completely common. But I think we desperately want that world of color, that perfect fairy tale, where we are the main character and whatever happens, good or bad, happens because we wanted it so. In the real world, all of our choices seem to have bad endings, and most of what happens is outside our control anyway. We face downsizing, divorce, financial ruin, unwanted families, bickering and demanding relatives, finger-pointing coworkers, a wildly careening economy and an electoral college which simply validates our insignificance on the planet. I don't think I need to be Cinderella to be happy, with my own personal fairy concierge, but even the Wicked Stepsisters had a choice in how their story ended.

So we invent Santa Clause and aliens and tarot cards and the whims of God, just to bring some sense, some magic back into our lives. Just so we can close our eyes and imagine that we will be OK, that the world will stop spinning around us and we won't grow old and die, we won't be homeless tomorrow so our CEO can go to Hawaii for Christmas, we won't be alone and scared as we stare down that dark and uncertain future, which we may share with six billion other humans, but which we still have to trod all by ourselves. The middle-class housewife closes her eyes and dreams of a world where she is the center of attention, talented and beautiful and beloved. The businessman dreams of the corner office where he directs the company, and instead of being the victim of layoffs, he goes to Hawaii and drives the luxury car in his Armani suits. The maid dreams of saving enough money to send her daughter to college, of spoiling her grandchildren and retiring comfortably to Florida. The perfect fairy tales, and perhaps I was too harsh in condemning them. At least they are dreaming.

Art was my dreaming. My own little bit of magic, captured on paper to be held as close as a cyncial atheist, a girl who loathes society and often herself, as close as I could ever get to those dreams. And yet I walk my dreamless path instead, afraid, I guess, to let my own magic be exposed to the gray light of day, to be unmasked and declared a fraud. As long as I hide it, it will be my own fairy tale, the dream of my dreams. And every moment is a little more gray, and a little more hopeful at once, as I walk that line between grasping it and losing it. One morning the suspense will be too much for me, one morning I'll have to give in, have to give it a try, just to see if the reality might be as wonderful as the dream.

But right now, I think I'll go watch TV.

copyright 2003 mleiv, any reproduction or distribution expressly prohibited

Posted 2003.12.06 12:00 | Last modified 2003.12.06 12:00 | Leave a reply

Larry421: A Tale Told By An Idiot

Disclaimer: The characters represented in Larry421 are fictional. They are absolutely not based on someone with a similar name who may or may not coincidentally resemble Larry421. We apologize in advance to all the real people out there with the misfortune to have chose Larry421 as their sign-on name.

Posted 2003.03.02 12:00 | Last modified 2011.10.05 19:59 | Leave a reply

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