Note to Self (and all the idealists like me)

Stop polluting your imagination with all of this goddamn reality.

The garbage gets heavy and tragic and you find yourself grounded before you can redirect.

The end. <3

Tolkien: a silly movie that may well have changed my life trajectory

Forewarning: this is a little heavier than my normal fare.

I watched a movie on a flight today. Groundbreaking stuff, I know. I was hesitant at first, really. I was curious because I have never really -gotten- fantasy novels, not really. I understood escapism, having wanted a departure from real life on so many occasions myself. Surrealism and space for interpretation have always been my literary jam, elements that world builders tend to be largely devoid of. If I am wrong, please leave examples in the comments. I love to be proven wrong.

Onto the point.

Throughout this three-hour flight, I watch. And watch. And watch. And watch. My hesitance turns into interest and then into a very deep personal connection. Thirty minutes in, I find myself trying my hardest not to be the crazy bitch in the seat adjacent, bawling because life hits back rull hard. 

In life some beautiful moment exists, series of moments if you’re truly lucky, in which a lovely racket is stirred inside of you. It is something wild and unafraid. Your chest fills up.

It isn’t air, though you feel you can finally breathe.
It isn’t your heart so much; in fact, it stops in its tracks.
This something shoves your shoulders back and draws you, undeniably, from the chest.

It exists as an unyielding need to simply -be- in whatever context it is that all of this started. Like hearing someone sing—REALLY belt it out– and understanding that such resonance doesn’t come from lungs or vocal chords, it fills a space with courage and vulnerability and strength and openness. So completely shared is this discourse because air inhaled in a breath to power the story/moment/insight into the world passes through the alveoli, washes everything within from head to toe and passes so forcefully back out into the world with strength of experience as a new entity in itself.

Have you tried? REALLY tried to sing something? Have you felt like your very heart could roll off your tongue because you’re belting out everything you have? It is as if there is not a thing between your heart and your output—cries of joy, love, sorrow, some mix thereof. It doesn’t matter what it is because you’re turning yourself inside out in front of the masses so they might…understand.

I have this unholy adoration for Bert McKracken –oh yeah. Screamo gold. The guy got so into the band’s music, the lyrics, the meaning, the moment, that he would vomit on stage every night. My weird brand of romantic idealism sees that as an expression of feeling and depth. How beautiful, my dudes! That, or I am actually still thirteen on the inside. Dunno.

Anyway. That is what this silly movie made me feel. It is a masterful thing. Little John Ronald seeing all of the beauty in the world around him. His mind creating a dance that teases fantasy as it whips and twirls around in reality. Presented is some genuine, heartfelt, quixotic appeal to commonplace beauty, emotion (the importance of feeling and expressing it) and comradery.

I am crying on a plane. I am crying because I had all of that as a kid. A huge group of very close friends: intelligent, artistic, expressive. I am crying because I understand that, at some point, this will end for Tolkien. I am crying because it kills. It feels bad—but it also literally kills. I can’t count the number of people who have taken their own lives because of deep feels like these, not to mention those who have tried and failed.

That’s the real tragedy of our age, isn’t it? The inevitable boot in one’s rib? The understanding that, when at the top of the world, we are always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For Tolkien, it happens, in its own way. The movie brushes over sort of strangely and dismissively. The problem is acknowledged then changed. An entire pile of struggle and growth is flown over. Maybe that is meant to demonstrate how fleeting struggle can be if you make it that way. Perhaps it is an appeal to dreamers like me: “Please forget about this hard thing and know that there is an accomplishment on the other side of this.” I am still unsure what this means to me in the context of the original earth-shattering inspiration.

Words, Language and Lack There Of

Tolkien, the movie, talks about Roland’s love of language, and how he created four of his own unique tongues by his first year at Oxford.

The movie lays out the philosophy that language is everything. It demonstrates how language is not a word and language is not the syntax and semantics that build and chain one word to the next.

Language is both the object it refers to and the history, the entire breadth of experience, that belongs with it.

I have always been in love with language.

The great calamity of my past several years is feeling strongly that I have lost my words. I keep saying, “I have lost my words,” “I can’t talk.” Progressively I shut myself down, unable to recall or to communicate or, eventually, to operate genuinely even among some truly incredible friends. I have lost more than words.

The genesis of all of this had something to do with little romp in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I find him a fun intellectual exercise that, when I am very tired, often ends in some serious jamais vu: a personal favorite phenomena.

Wittgenstein poses that if all words mean so much more than text on a page---if they contain HISTORY and personal experience and bias and…and…and… there is no possible way that my understanding of “tree,” for example, has anything at all to do with your understanding of the same.

In that, I cannot communicate anything with any degree of certainty because our perspectives are, inherently, very different, you and I.

When you think about it for too long, as Wittgenstein definitely did (check out the introduction to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), you find that the only thing you can truly trust as undeniably real is yourself: solipsism at its finest.

There is a book that I was certain would BREAK me; Wittgenstein’s Mistress (by David Markson), a work of experimental fiction that reads as the diary of a woman slowly losing her mind after some time as the very last conscious living thing on earth. There exists some really fantastic writing about the fallibility of memory, identifying both on each side of the Madonna-whore dichotomy and as various famous women throughout history. The main (and only, really) character cites the stories of historic women as her own. It is not a thrilling book by any means. It is interesting. The reader is left to wonder if Kate is really all alone in the world, or her sanity has long been misplaced.

Wittgenstein's writings, or David Markson’s book didn’t break me. It was, however, the diving board that lead to a sharp descent into something desperate. The novel was a measure of how far I was from turning myself inside out for the sake of art and understanding, my life fuel.

It took what feels like forever to understand.

I was never much of a reader as a kid, but the idea of collecting and understanding cultures different than my own was really exciting. I had (and still have) a lot of ephemeral, romantic ideals: “Build a home on the horizon of the known and the unknown,” and, “rip the false bottom out from my small, comfortable world to find an infinite expanse and fall in love with all I was missing out on.”

I had an incredible group of friends, we were all kids then, really, who shared some lovely tie to art. Each of us experiencing so. Damn. Much. In our young lives and bleeding the expression of the impact of the trauma we experienced individually. It never had to be said explicitly, nor a story ever laid out. It was understood that we all felt deeply. We all thought deeply. That was lost—taken by time and distance and growth in all directions.

That’s the way of life, isn’t it? Without a defined “true north,” how are we to put the work necessary into maintaining all that we want to define us?

So, here I am, on my return flight, the same movie queuing up. With this knowledge, this compass, and the whole world in front of me, I am wondering if I should try my hand at…

• Russian first, so I can read Nabokov’s original, poetic, seamlessly surreal prose in Invitation to a Beheading?
• Or maybe French to see what I am missing about Camus?
• Perhaps I could jump back into Spanish and find new nuance in el Hombre de la Mancha.
• Some time ago I put some effort into Lojban, a constructed language developed in 1987 (a good year). Why not jump back into the world of limiting ambiguity?

Maybe I could visit all of these places. Maybe find a little divey bar and sit for hours with an old man whose stories turn him inside out and offer some truth I have yet to know.

Maybe, just maybe, I can live again.

Words werdz wuuuurdzzz.

I have some favorite words, friends:

Obstreperous (adj) : Noisy and difficult to control

• He was an obstreperous sub, yet she persevered. (heh)
• The feeling, all passionate and torrid, racketed about her chest like some glorious, obstreperous tennis ball, bouncing from side to side, top to bottom, and expanding her plural cavity until she could burst.

Vicissitude (n) : The change of circumstance from alternating between opposite or contrasting things

• The vicissitudes of napping and playtime were tall too much for Sampson, who plopped on the floor after only a few bats at some stringed feather.
• Anxious attachment rendered her catatonic among the natural vicissitudes of love and loneliness.

Facing the vicissitudes of defining worth by who she is -with- and not just who she -is- proved an obstreperous challenge over the space of several years. However, those times are ending and the luminosity returning. 

What are yours? :)