Rushofbloodtothehead: Unedited thoughts on AVATAR

Went to see that movie with all the blue giants in it yesterday. People—my mother—were comparing it to Dances With Wolves a week and a half ago, which I thought strange because all the previews seemed to lend it more towards some kind of hybrid Lord of the Rings and amped up Pixar animation flick. These are the circumstances, because it would seem that those are always important to how a movie is understood or enjoyed: pinchy new ballet flats, Dad, Cousin, Brother, Sister, slight headache, hot theatre, wet floor, bucket of popcorn, Sour Patch kids, an orange I found in my purse. Not in 3D, as this was sold out by the time we arrived. Slightly curmudgeon-y. Munch on this, then, your grain of salt.
AVATAR was one of those movies I emerge from thinking “That was good! I didn’t like it. What’s wrong with me?” It falls in line with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I also couldn’t comprehend my dislike for. These are sound, Oscar-tailored films by wide regard—they’ve got panache, political undercurrent, fabulous special-effects, scenery out the wazoo, that sort of gravitas only really perceived in epic movies that were treated, months and months before they ever arrived in theatres, as promised, hit EPIC MOVIES. They kind of froth with high expectations, and I hold (held) both of these films to just that. And oddly, the first thing I think of when puzzling out of the theatre is not the direct issue I take with AVATAR, what exactly in the film I did not like, but it made me instead refer to that which I know I do appreciate on-screen. I’m in the process of boiling it down to a formula:
I like movies with real love in them. I like movies with strange, uncultivated, angry, crude, silent, talkative, ridiculous, estranged, unlikely love. Love in the world is all of these things, but to see the truth on screen is a rarity not typically endorsed by the masses and the makers so eager to conjure escape from this, our bleak existence (dun dun DUNNNN). Love on screen I am tired of, and AVATAR shows me why—between the good-hearted, dopey Marine ingénue and the willful, passionate native princess in the movie there erupts only the worst kind of love, as the media gives it to us—expected, almost promised from the first scene of sudden altercation. Completely predictable, from that first second of lingering eye contact right down to the sweet first kiss beneath the giving tree, and uncultivated in that we don’t SEE the actual act of people falling for one another, something I always find the most exciting. Deferring to my own movie cabinet when I get home, I take note of all the harmless mediocrities in the stack and realize that there is similar flaccidness found in the romances of other movies I didn’t like, or didn’t like as much as I might have: it’s easy, it is not electric, it is seen before. And it’s not even that I’m a cynical non-fan of the escapist culture at the movies, I love to escape—but I find a hard time escaping into something I can’t inject with even a teaspoon of reality. All our daydreams, they spin off from this, our bleak existence (dun dun DUNNN)—and conveniently acting as a microcosm for this whole condition, I see in AVATAR the whole plight realized. Without the grounding of some reality in a romance, I can’t believe in it. And love is so very exciting and earthshaking at its core that it’s almost hard to believe people can make it boring onscreen, can make it predictable. I feel gypped, even amid the fabulous blue creatures in their CGI crafted world.
Another thing I thirst for in movies is the multi-dimensionality of characters; AVATAR is all archetypes. There’s an angry colonel with a scar across his face, war-mongering, inexplicably cruel. There’s the sassy, cigarette-smoking scientist who seeks only the welfare of the native people. Dopey but heroic main guy, willful natives, all in commune with nature. Perhaps it’s not only that these characters are all predictable in and of themselves as recognizable and un-complex entities, but the mere fact that I’ve seen them all before in about thirty different films (DWW among these). And here I come to the kind-of crux of why I didn’t really like AVATAR, all that much.
There is something about storytelling that begs consistent reinvention. The cyclical nature of history dictates it, the consistent charge onwards in the way of media and special effects summons it, human hearts and minds want it, will keep paying upwards of ten bucks for something that is free online to get it. People—again, meaning my mother—have been rattling the cages of the Hollywood honchos for some time, noting all the remakes and the book adaptations that pepper our theatres with some amount of disdain. They’re not original anymore, she’ll say all the time. I tend to agree: there seem to be very few original stories winning statues or critical praise these days. I don’t know if they still exist at all, at least in the same way I assume they must have when the industry was in its heyday.
So the modern world believes in special effects. Perhaps that’s our new palette, our new motion for change. While storylines and characters suffer, explosions get bigger and giant robots grow more realistic—not-so-oddly in tandem with the military. But I for one am dissatisfied with this, especially when movies come out that seem as if they teeter on the precipice of accomplishing both a thrilling world landscape and truthfulness and marvel in character and story—AVATAR does just this, you see. But in so many other ways, this story is not a reinvention—it does not really add anything remarkable to a story I have heard told before a million different ways because the minutiae of these characters cannot draw me in no matter how many fabulous weird birds they can ride. And at ITS crux, AVATAR is the same story of disgraceful human (cough AMERICAN) colonialism without any real account made for the fifteen years of turning, reinventing, that our country has done since DANCES WITH WOLVES. I demand from my cinema that everything be, at least in some way, new, fresh, challenging. I had an English teacher freshman year who would speak of reiterating direct points in an essay without adding any new thought in a new sentence as a “BOTHSAME” (inspired by some small child cousin, I think). AVATAR is a bothsame, with the fabulous new special effects of a movie moving forward but the decaying soul of a story ten years past the sell-by date. And that’s the thing about reinvention and cyclical history: even if everything is ultimately the same, if our revolutions and our patterns seem to guarantee a cycle, we’re always trying new ways to fail, and doing it somehow differently. I ask the media to follow suit—with love, with colonialism, with characters. Tell me something new, show me something wonderful—and by this I mean old things in a new way. One Brittany, One AVATAR. Stand-off.
It’s hard to put into words exactly why I want to take issue with the colonialism story itself. For some reason it bothers me that the Na’vi (blue people) are really exactly like caricatures or stereotypes or perhaps even existing Native Americans—they commune with nature, and walk about unclothed, and draw all their energy from a majestic old tree in the forest. I wonder why we even needed to leave American soil to tell this story, besides the opportunity for special effects. It too feels oddly cheap. And then there is the money-grubbing suit with an eye for the land’s natural resources, calling the Na’vi “savages” and “blue monkeys” left and right. My mother (who features prominently in this treatise…) opines that frontier worlds, even those off-planet, might involve a certain amount of regression—Oregon Trail, prairies, etc. But in this phantasmagoric 2123 I find it so unbelievable that these words are being thrown about without even a nod to the candor of a hundred years past; America’s own painful histories with oppressed people. Really? I want to ask James Cameron. Really? Can we at least get the pretended credit of a suit feigning political correctness? What is this? Then, again, maybe I’m only uncomfortable because of the sharp, unpleasant glint of recognizing something awful about yourself. Still.
In STAR TREK, the most recent comparable multi-planet epic flick, there is a suggested racism emanating from the planet Vulcan towards Terra, but it’s treated very differently. There’s an elevated kind of scoffing, which allegedly comes from the Vulcan’s inherited sense of condescending, impressive intelligence and reasonable temperament. But we are meant to understand that this is a racism about human nature, and it is not an ancient word making an untreated revival. I believe that these constructs should be expected to change in the rotating reinvention of a hundred years history, if not in intent at least in the actual vocabulary. In my mind, I rationalize that the ‘savage’ word is disdainful, this way.
Spoiler alert! The Na’vi win the last stand. This is suddenly not the same as a lot of other stories that do similar things—we’re in Braveheart country now. Riding in on fabulous creatures and by the grace of their beloved tree they utterly slam mean, scarred colonel and his drones. But once again my history book and my movie cabinet protest—everybody knows that no matter how this particular fight ends, the humans come back. With bigger guns. They prevail and wreak havoc, until hundreds of years pass, the conscience is assuaged and only a few brave souls begin to lament the story and later make movies about it. You can’t convince me that these fabulous birds will win out against nuclear fall-out. And perhaps that’s the cynical reality coming back again, but this is something else in AVATAR that I’m not willing to buy from the movies anymore—red herring happy endings. This is the cheapest blow of all—I decide at this point that James Cameron did not have a clear intention towards a message or a history when making this film, despite all not-so-subtle-Bush-digs to the contrary.
Again, this isn’t about me wanting or needing truth from the movies—just the seedling of it, the spark the imagination emanates from. And I see in AVATAR myriad reasons why that small little fleck could not possibly be underrated, ever, no matter how fantastical the setting. It does not feel truthful that the world doesn’t even try to pretend it has not changed, socially or morally, years and years from now—if humans do anything, they slap new values on each era as if to create a sense of morale in people, to let them believe or (allow them to hope!) that things have changed in response to past mistakes. Myth of progress. The Na’vi subscribe to the circle of life; why don’t the movie crews? Why can’t they give me a love story? A character I can alternately hate or chide or adore or envy? Something to think about, here, in the real world as it is related to Pandorra (blue planet homebase. My, this is unedited…). Not because I’m too jaded or unwilling to ricochet off the face of my humdrum, slightly curmudgeon-ly headached world for two and a half hours, but because at the end of the credits I have to go home. And the point of the movies, to me, is to take part of the story with you when you leave.
So, ironically, it would seem James Cameron has succeeded in an unexpected respect. It is a full twenty-four hours after I left this movie and I can’t seem to stop…considering it.

Christmas

I sit down with the intention of having poetry kind of erupt from her fingertips: I mean summoning charms, little rivulets of gold memory, ponderous, heavy question marks, the tinkling of baby laughter. How my kid brother describes fishing: awful twenty minutes, horrendous, misplaced hours, all for one minute of absolute joy.

Today is Christmas, 2009. I've been thinking all day about all the Christmases I can remember, and subsequently how my feelings about it have changed over the years. Christmas is a big deal, here. We have two trees because all of the handcrafted, handpainted German ornaments (and English, French, Canadian, Indonesian ornaments...) that my mother has spent her whole life accumulating, naming and lovingly fondling simply do not fit on one evergreen anymore. She has, also, a collection of porcelain Dickens houses--not strictly Christmas but winter-related--which are miniature replications of all the different buildings almost every character in every Charles Dickens novel has entered. Among these are Fagin's Hideaway and Scrooge and Marley's Counting House. They live above the bookcases. There are little lights, which plug into the wall, which we stuff inside the houses so it looks as if little people occupy them.

On the mantle, there are the Santas--I could run downstairs to count how many, but I'm in my pajamas. Probably around fifteen. There are some cloth Santas, some black Santas, some fabric Santas, human-sized, abstract, some carry puppies, some have lists or packs on their back, some have wands, some stand upright and others are squashy and must lean against things. There is one Mrs. Claus.

We have living things, too. Sticky fingers, stained with powdered sugar. Cold feet, from snow drifts outside (happy incident this year!), absurdly rosy cheeks from a) all the alcohol we consume and b) loud laughter, from large company or baking stress. Four dogs running around the house, and a cat. There is wrapping paper and Johnny Mathis and cider mulling in a pan, episodes of Mad Men competing with A Charlie Brown Christmas for airtime space, there are Spode Christmas plates made out of bone china, which we must be very careful when we handle in the dishwasher. The nitty-gritty of OUR LIFE, as a family, can simply not be summarized any more neatly than this--these, twenty years of Christmases, let's say fourteen spent sentient.

Once, I re-adapted "A Christmas Carol" and forced my cousins to perform it in the old Hendricks living room, Christmas Eve. Most of rehearsal was spent herding little ones and making the paper chain Marley had to wear. Once my Aunt Bessie came to Christmas with an oxygen tube and pack, along with my Aunt Margaret (or was this the same year?) who simply sat in a chair and stared into space, saying nothing to anyone. Once we gave my grandmother a terrorist of a golden retriever, just plopped the ball of fluff into her rickety hands. We've been sledding. Each year I go shopping, hardcore, with my cousin Leslie and we buy more things for ourselves than other people. More than once, my father has crafted some elaborate charade around my mother's gift--making everyone antsy about his failure to get her a good present until we learn it's stowed somewhere hidden, or masked in a different box. I've gotten bikes, chairs, all kinds of ways to play music, dolls, clothes, candy, a record player, guitars, a sewing machine. I've known six different pets on Christmas day. I've suffered through church services, methodically and dutifully, secretly loving carols and belting them as much as I can. There is just so MUCH here, and it's all about that semi-mythical state of existence that most people in college seem to start to want to deny--roots. This is where I come from: my family, at Christmas.

It's strange to be nineteen and remember. It's young, I know, but my sister doesn't wake me up at 3am anymore, and I don't get castles or tents or adventures of my own creation anymore. There's never been anything more magical than all that three week shenanigan to me--at least not until high-school, and delayed gratification, and recycling wrapping paper, and conceding to the "spirit of Santa" over the flesh and blood existence of a jolly, fat intruder. And don't get me wrong, it's still magical, but if if I were to trace the way I have changed and aged in a most deliberate, detailed fashion I could find it all in Christmas--the inverse time it takes me to wake up these days, the presents I receive, the way I write them down, and the way my heart feels. I miss being so outrageously JUBILANT! I try to look for the perks in being wiser. I know there are some.
I look at older people, receiving even less presents, and I sometimes think about dying. Fifty Christmases from now, maybe. Or, two.

People--myself included--like to ask "do you think you've changed much at college?" or more specifically "how have you changed since college?" And the first thing I think is--how can I even begin? How can I tell them about crying and colors and rolling around on the floor and "framing" and ardent believing and poor decisions, how can I explain art and emotion and what I have decided I know about love, friendship, solitude, family, confidence? I never can. I don't. I come up with some hackneyed, write-off of a reply: "I guess I'm a little more responsible" or "LOL I'm learning to feed myself or save money!" but beyond just cheap, these explanations are flat-out lies. I have changed--or perhaps the world around me, and what I take in has changed--so very drastically that I have a hard time these days knowing at all what I want, what I believe and what I need. Christmas reminds me, but twofold: sipping tea (or coffee. Who AM I?), fretting about my waistline in regard to a new pair of pants and a plate of cookies, analyzing the emotional journey behind episodes of "Mad Men", crying over "Our Town", sitting with my family and talking about the same old things as ever, I know that I am these roots (these comfortable comfortable roots) but also more. It's both bracing and strange, in the way that strange can feel sad. I know where I am, for certain, for real.

At dinner tonight my Aunt Caroline unceremoniously shoved a copy of that old editorial, "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" into my hands and asked me to read it before we all had dinner. This comes from a long legacy of rather thick prayers, so the rupture in pattern was welcome. The editorial was first published in 1897; it's an editor's response to a one Virginia O'Hanlon, who asked for a point-blank response to that question the title implies. I remembered it because timidly, in our old house, years ago, I shuffled outside of my mother's room one day while she was either getting ready to leave or coming in and I asked her the same question. She asked me what I thought, and looked me in the eye for a long time before she gave me a copy of this semi-epic testimony. And years later, I read it at dinner--only this time, paying attention to the words in a new way, and trying desperately to ignore a small devil in the back of my cranium who begged me to pay the slightest attention to voiced endings...

So childhood ought not be extinguished, says the editor. So all the world's delight is found in intangibles, says the editor. I am comforted. Ha. Was I ever sad?
V

"Our Town"

(Emily Webb asks) Does anyone realize life while they live it?

(Stage Manager replies) No.

The saints and poets, maybe.
They do some.

On 103rd Street, by the top of the hill, circa 4:30am, a blizzard:

Do we like things because they are innately likable? Is there something in ideas, people, items that is truly ATTRACTIVE? Or do we like things because we want to see things in them, we want to be attracted? Can love, in these terms, ever be an accident?

We are tripping drunkenly down mosaic stairs of a fourth floor walk-up, we are waiting for the six train soaked to the bone, we wonder aloud if falling for anyone or anything can ever actually be voluntary. Giddy, but go home alone.

Huh.

Meditations on PSYCHOPSYCHOPSYCHO

I wonder why people think Woody Allen is so harmlessly funny. In some ways, I find him frightening--it seems to me that there is no place scarier than the inside of someone else's head and no act more vulnerable than spilling out self-aggrandizing personal neuroses in public, and having people just kind of chuckle at your tongue-in-cheek wit while you lay yourself naked before them on the silver screen feels like such a heavy write-off. Not saying we should all revisit Annie Hall and watch it with a furrowed brow and unpleasant glints of personal recognition in that examination of HOW LOVE FAILS, I just want to drop that thought into the void--people laugh at things that are fearful all the time. That scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker stabs a pencil straight into some guy's head sent movie theatres rollicking, and I was so horrified! I wonder if we laugh because we're so uncomfortable, or if we laugh because we miss the point. Aren't those the two objective things that make up standard American humor anyways? Someone else being uncomfortable, or someone else missing the point? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS???

I am uncomfortable. And as a response, I am going to directly spill self-aggrandizing neuroses out into the void. I don't think they're very funny, personally, but maybe I have no perspective, maybe I'm missing the point. BRILLIANT SEGUE!

I accidentally have a crush on a boy. I say accident because it was not premeditated or analyzed in the way that some crushes can be, it was like one single concentrated event at some point--like a hair toss, or some split second of eye contact. And it's uncomfortable because I have a bad juju feeling that this is going to make me crazier, and it is going to hurt me, and I am going to hurt and annoy other people over some indefinite period of neurotic time while I waver between plunging into and dodging this inevitability, I know it so well, I recognize it. It's happening anyways. Help! It's a mess of mixed signals and weirdness and awkward inadvertent messages and smallness amplified. Help! And I thought this was all going to end, so magically and cleanly, the day I got my high-school diploma. Is this really the world? Forever? I am thoroughly fucked, then, in every sense but the good one.

The odd thing about this whole encounter, seen through a larger context, is that idea of tinyness. How tiny can a relationship ever really be? Some moments are so small that you think you're the only one who noticed them pass by. Some are too small to tell your friends about. Some are too small to admit to, yourself. A crush, for instance, is a small small thing--it is not defined in the gravity of mutuality, or spoken words, or touching, it's just electric air and daydreams. It's silly. It's FUNNY, to be an adult and to be so vulnerable to moments of scary small strangeness. Now I'm back to this arch of vulnerability as humor, and it feels even less amusing in the second paragraph. In two years, hours, or weeks I will look back on these moments huddling next to my cell phone as idiotic wastes of time spent giggling and looking for kid-like glee, but right now I am in the midst of it. And why so serious?

Annie Hall is a movie about people being in love and then, quite suddenly, not. I love Annie Hall. I love living inside another neurotic brain, and I love how childish two adults feel in their world, and there are moments where it really is very funny. But I have a hard time laughing at it, even though it is so silly, having a kitchen to clean and a paper to write and a checkbook to balance, to believe in the hot/cold hilarity/harshness of electric air and daydreams. It's so delicate in the middle-ground, suspended between wanting and not knowing. I like this guy, and we watched a romantic comedy the other day, and suddenly that latter term feels like a very cruel oxymoron when the air is swirling with hushes and muted do I do do I's?. So maybe...think about what you laugh at this week. Maybe it won't be so funny tomorrow.

I've Got A Big Ego

Today in my Advanced Improv class, Rosemary Quinn spoke about actor and the ego:

"If I were the Quueeeeeeen of the world, actors would not be allowed to act in a production until the end of their second year of training. One and a half years is not enough time to escape that diseased love of being complimented. But that is not why we act."

What Was

I just remembered being in love with you. Not the nots, not what it looked like from the outside or through other people, not the could-have-beens, the regrets, the sadism, the unspoken, the stupid, but the magical irrelevance of flaws, snatches of single seconds that were entire. This keeps happening, it has been two and a half years, and sudden jerks of time and space put me in the center of the mushy dead tissue of THIS US (how? How?) even though now I know about psychoanalysis, art as therapy, New York City, pain through osmosis, talking through feelings, depression, absolute unflinching self-loathing, absolute unflinching vanity and self-aware self-obsession, the nobility and ferocity of what I do. I have words for things now, I have artistic diagnoses and mental health suspicions, this is not about YOU, let me just say! It’s about the music you left, and the book I won’t return. This is ‘why? Still?’ with an intentional capital letter of which you should be made very aware. Still is stealth is time passing, these are the days of my life, unentire and unfulfilled, scary, unbrave. Everything I do is unbrave. It’s easy to blame you—almost as easy as it is to dramatically believe that my entire life has been a careening mess since that lackluster, accidental, incidental trip of a destruction. There has been a lot of wondering.

Most people I know about want to be in love. It is supposed to be cheaper, less frowned upon, more durable, longer-lasting than synthetic, illegal replications of bliss. It’s the everyman’s acting gig, it’s the artist’s funnel and celebration. People feed it to us in sweet-smelling wrapped packages of Hollywood movies and matching pajama sets. My mother tells me, quite frankly, that she did know instantly looking at my father on a bus somewhere around Houston, Texas that he was her end-all be-all. If you consider yourself educated, it’s silly to completely ignore or discredit anything with bajillions of converts, it’s silly to pretend it doesn’t affect you, even if you’re ashamed of wanting it because it’s so very terminally predictable, forbidden, unbelievable, painful. The Catholic church may make you cringe but that’s where the money is, that is the crutch of an ancient civilization. Things exist. Know them. And if your disdain is only built on mutual distrust or fear, why not believe? Your excuses are pathetic! Sign me up. I will drink some of your magical potion, Mrs. Witch, I’ll leave my lasting will and testament to AIDS victims in Africa. My heart is whole and ready, let them come to me or I will go to them. We begin.

America. Diagnosis. Perpetuation: the kitchen counter is prepared for dinner, then, just not the inevitable mess of mashed potato forever trapped in the cruets. Stains on the supposedly stainless-steel, though no one wants to do the dishes! I only saw a feast when I rushed aboard. I was coerced. This is false advertising! Yet it’s my fault anyhow, I should have known. But we all have working reptilian brains at the baseline—we all should have known. This is the treatment and paradoxical reality of that which I am told (and willingly agree) to dedicate my life to the pursuit of. Fin exposition, okay?

So I gave it to someone. He didn’t hold it the way I wanted him to. I asked for it back, but it was too late—I didn’t want to hurt him, was worried I couldn’t hold them both without him seeing. His was heavy and warm and wide, I liked wrapping it around me in the cold. Time ticked on and I Told everyone, told everyone, told everyone, that I didn’t need mine, could definitely live without it, whatever, so not a big deal, was happy to see it safe (if uncomfortably clutched in a sweaty palm..). Really, it was hard to breathe, it was colder—and because it was colder, I needed the blanket all the more.

One day, he left it sitting out—just for a minute. I was furious, how dare he? How dare he let it lie unguarded for a split second, even, on the bottom rung of a staircase with no railing? I stole it back, quite selfishly. He went looking for it everywhere, but wouldn’t admit to me he couldn’t find it. This was a scary time but we lived this way for while—me, greedy, with my two, and him, terrified, searching for mine. I was so sad he couldn’t find some way to steal it back from me, so sad he didn’t even know. Furious that I had taken it in the first place. Weighed down with the girth of eight ventricles. One day, I said so—made my escape while still clutching that blanket to survive. Kept it for a long long time until it was gently pulled away from me, and I stood around naked forever after with my two hands grown together (so gnarled from that greedy death grasp) around my own. Blood runs through my fingers all the time and I watch it with a little thrill, but with two tied hands I can’t make it move anywhere, can’t give it to anyone. Watch it run, watch it run, let it dry along my elbows and ironize. Stand naked. I am so cold, all the time, having known the blanket. I am so cold, all the time, without the blasted lump working properly inside my own chest. We are unsafe this way. I freeze.

That’s the story.

To-do list. I suspect what I want is my proverbial money back. It would be nice to not feel static and preserved, it would be nice to find no shock in new Facebook relationships or feel the need to stalk you at all, it would be nice to have that cathartic, unfathomed rebound guy with some amount of ease. It would be nice to be warmer, but to be tighter, wrapped more comfortably. I’m sure it would be nice to find some way to generate happiness and validation from within, but the more I obsess the more I begin to think that that is not what it’s really about. I am loved, after all, people love me on a daily basis—but not without condition, and sometimes (lament the cruel waste!) I don’t love them back. Through with tongue-in-cheek self regulation, our heroine lays down the gauntlet—I want something so profound from all sides that I’m forced to change, I want an external deus ex machina. My mother tells me that she just knew, I want to just know, I want a chance to repeat but improve. Where (Still?) can I find those moments of being entire, how can I move past this and be better at everything? How can I even begin to respect you awful fictitious Hollywood or couples on the street outside my building sharing cigarettes and secrets, how can I not hate you for lying to me and then, after I called you on it, coming back to taunt me again with that beautiful little goodness of your lie, your exquisite lie? The playing space is no longer fertile or prepared (well, I should hope I’m still fertile) and I am weak, that’s the disease, but ultimately what I struggle with is how to open up to it again. Still? Still? I am over you, but not what it was to be with you. I am terrified. So I talk.

I want to walk through history now. I want to dance towards current events, and sentences that do not begin with ‘I’. Fat chance. On Netflix last night, I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Here is John Cameron Mitchell’s interpretation of how (on earth and above) we got into this mess:

When the earth was still flat,
And the clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky,
Sometimes higher,
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked; while they read.
And they never knew nothing of love.
It was before the origin of love.

The origin of love

And there were three sexes then,
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back,
Called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son.

The origin of love

Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
"I'm gonna kill them all
With my hammer,
Like I killed the giants."
And Zeus said, "No,
You better let me
Use my lightening, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales
And dinosaurs into lizards."
Then he grabbed up some bolts
And he let out a laugh,
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle.
Gonna cut them right up in half."
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire

And then fire shot down
From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades
Of a knife.
And it ripped
Right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth.
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay.
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane,
To scatter us away,
In a flood of wind and rain,
And a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away,
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping round on one foot
And looking through one eye.

Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
So we wrapped our arms around each other,
Trying to shove ourselves back together.
We were making love,
Making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was the sad story
How we became
Lonely two-legged creatures,
It's the story of
The origin of love.
That's the origin of love.

Biologically, we are cells splitting constantly. We are fractions of a whole milling about and expanding, but expanding as less than—we are quantitative, rather than qualitative, aim to be massive over pure. This song is lifted (gently) from Plato’s Symposium, in which Aristophanes makes a speech in praise to the God of Love Eros and outlines his version of where the death trap comes from. Zeus “cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cuts them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that man might contemplate the section of himself: he would learn a lesson in humility”. So we see the grand design, yes? Later, Aristophanes writes of Zeus’s abject cruelty: “After the division of two parts of man, each desiring his other half…they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and one of the halves died and the other survived; the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them—being entire sections of entire men or women—and clung to that.” See how I was not wrong, to use that word entire to describe our most loveliest? What did we learn from this? There is no newness to this pain; it is beyond the beginning of time. There’s no solution. I refuse to tie up this reference neatly; I swear this is not some kind of exacted academic treatise. It was wealthy recognition to hear that magnificent Hedwig tell me why I feel this way and how I am not alone, in one sense at least.

I do not want to forget us. I won’t.

I want to be more of, and than, what I am.

Don't let yourself rot, don't flagellate, don't live forever crundled (which is an appropriate word I just made up), do not die. Live, somehow. Make yourself do it, that must be the answer. Infinitely awful, but you must do it because you honestly don't have a choice. How? Still? How? Still? How? Still? HOW? STILL? I AM SCREAMING, CAN'T YOU HEAR IT?

She tritely told the captive audience to breathe. To listen to Aretha Franklin's version of "Let it Be" when the going was tough, to make art, to whine, to blog, honestly. Do more to be more. Do..something. I worry that repairing to be whole hurts just as much and takes just as long as walking around halved and unentire. I worry about a lot of things. Fewer when I was with you.