Every Single Thing I Know and Remember

Is assumed to reside in some form or other in my brain, physically, just as the following few examples also reside in a server somewhere, physically, by virtue of the fact that I have typed them using this application, even if we may characterize them as residing in the amorphous "cloud:"

• The surprising clarity and purity of the water inside the "tar bubbles" that I used to pierce with my friend Johnny Mackey in the gutter, on Cottage Park Road in Winthrop.
• The call of a mourning dove.
• How long to cook spaghetti.
• What a flying instructor means when he says "more back pressure!"
• The difference between the "hard sign" and the "soft sign" in Cyrillic.
• The tidal range in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
• The theme song of "Bonanza."
• The taste of sea water.
• The prescribed viscosity for the engine oil of a Subaru BRZ.
• The difference between a double paradiddle and a paradiddlediddle.
• How long it takes by train to go from Dublin to Galway City.
• Whether a straight flush beats a full house.
• What part of the eyeball is pierced when an eye doctor pierces the eyeball with a needle to resolve a hemorrhage.
• Which side of a horse is the mounting and dismounting side.

We say with confidence that these factoids reside in my brain, physically, because how could it not be so?  Where else could they be?

But this implies, of course, that within a week or so of my demise, when my brain turns to mush, all of this information will be gone, from me at least if not from the cloud.  Before this happens, it is said that the pineal gland will release a strong dose of the powerful mind-altering substance DMT, to ease my transition to ... what exactly?  Nothing?  What could be the evolutionary purpose of such a psychic blitzkrieg when one takes into account that I most assuredly won't be producing any offspring after it kicks in?

Or is this whole model just incorrect in some fundamental way?  

The world waits for an answer.

 

A Shared Heartsickness

That is all that someone like I can contribute.  Even entering a house of worship for a vigil feels wrong, when it seems clear that God has chosen, once again, to turn His back on His People.

 

The Recurring Furball Dream

My sister gave me a dream interpretation guide, which I keep in my library.  It has no explanation for the recurring furball dream.

Have you ever dreamt that there was a large furball attached to the surface of your tongue?  Because it inhibits your speech in an embarrassing way, you are desperate to remove it.  But the only way to do that is to reach into your mouth with thumb and forefinger and tear it off your tongue.  This leaves you with a large, wet furball in the palm of your right hand.

You are in a formal public space, perhaps in the lobby of a hotel where a Fidelity-sponsored tax conference is in progress.  You seek out the coffee station supporting the conference, hoping that there you will be able to discreetly toss the furball into a trash receptacle and wipe your palm with a paper cocktail napkin.  But just then an important client strides towards you and aggressively reaches for your hand.  You withdraw it rather than offering it, and turn your back on the man.  This offers no respite, however, because the coffee station is dense with people, and you happen to walk into a circle of businesswomen, most of them known to you, and all of them carrying a certain appeal for you.  You would date any one of them if you could.

A couple of them whom you consider particular friends then reach out to hug you.  This you can't do because you would be placing the wet furball against a woman's back, on the surface of her most stylish navy jacket.

All of these women now look mildly distressed.  They are concerned that there is something very wrong with you, because there is.

 

Watch Out, Kids, But Above All Watch!

Last week I stumbled on a very fine, a very deep movie.  Nominated for an Oscar in 2016, "Embrace of the Serpent" is loosely based on the actual life of an Amazonian shaman who, on two occasions forty years apart, led single Western scientists up the great river in search of a powerfully healing and exceedingly rare medicinal plant.  The movie is able somehow to place a modern Western viewer into a mindspace where the native culture of the shaman is natural and real, the culture of the scientist hostile and destructive, without being anti-colonialist in a conventional way, without romanticizing the indigenous peoples that it portrays.  On the little screen, thanks to our anonymous bureaucrats, it carries the usual insipid warning against being viewed by children, because it portrays "alcohol use" and "smoking."  Nothing is said on the other hand about cannibalism.

Rather late in the film, the shaman and the second scientist paddle their dug-out canoe to the shore at a forbidding settlement which, it turns out, has become a colony of native worshippers of "The Messiah," who is another Westerner gone half mad.  When the shaman cures his young bride of a usually-fatal skin disease, the Messiah decides that the two newcomers are two of the three Magi, come from the East to celebrate his presence in the world.

We then discover along with the intruders that when the Messiah gets angry, he does not kill any of his misbehaving flock, but rather condemns them to a suicide ritual that leaves them equally dead but lets him evade responsibility.  This so infuriates the shaman that he tricks the Messiah and all of his remaining disciples into drinking a potion that may be a poison, or may be a very strong hallucinogen like ayahuasca.  The Messiah goes completely mad.  He screams at his flock "This is my body!  Eat me! ... Eat me! ... Eat me!"  And indeed they proceed to eat him alive, off camera of course.  This brave perversion of the Eucharist is perhaps the most chilling scene I have watched (or rather heard) on film since, in a tale rolled out in the 1930's, Dr. Moreau, played by Charles Laughton, is carved to pieces by the monstrous hybrids he himself has created by means of vivisection, on the island that gives us the movie's name.

The shaman and the scientist escape the mad colony.  They have not become friends, rather men from disparate cultures thrown together by fate, bound together by magic.  The shaman's magic empowers him to conjure the real, live spirits of the jaguar and the serpent.  The scientist's magic is enclosed in a wooden box that has come along for the ride -- an old gramophone and a single recording, a recording of Haydn's ode to God's powers of creation.  The scientist avers to the shaman, bitterly, that he does not believe in God's powers of creation.  Just like the scientists of today, he is impervious to magic and to myth.  But the shaman knows better.

 

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson may have set out not to make an unwatchable film -- his latest is quite watchable -- but to make an all but unreviewable one, because his style so overwhelms its substance.  It is set in a tiny western desert town loosely based on Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1950's (not the 40's, when Roswell's alien crash is said to have happened).  The town has drawn brainiac children and their parents from far and wide for an annual science festival and competition when it has its own encounter with an intrusive non-human intelligence.

The film is shot in unnatural but soothing pastel colors.  The effect is like walking down the aisles at a Toys R Us before that chain went out of business.  It's a world seemingly made out of plastic, but it's not an animated one; the people are real. 

And what an assemblage of people!  Perhaps not since "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" in 1963 have so many prominent names been persuaded to share the screen.  In alphabetical order -- Adrien Brody, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Matt Dillon, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Margot Robbie, Tilda Swinton.  Wes's powers of persuasion must be enormous; Scarlett is said to have agreed to take the role for a salary of about $16,000/month.

If the film is about anything, it seems to be not about then but about the post-pandemic now.  The father of one of the boys and the mother of one of the girls, who is a movie star within the film, played by Scarlett, fall in love in a manner of speaking, and so do their children, but in both cases it's a certain pronounced and acknowledged emptiness that binds the couples together.  

God forbid there be any affect.  When the actress offers to rehearse a scene of full-frontal nudity for her opposite number, who is just getting to know her, the idea barely registers on his face.  He mumbles something that turns out to be "yes."  The movie then mocks itself by showing Scarlett in the altogether for just an instant, and in a mirror image, a frame within a frame within a frame.

Indeed, one critic has said that "Asteroid City" is about frames precisely -- our inability to escape the multiple frames in which we live.  I think that it might better be said that it is about filters, technological, psychological and cultural, that insulate us from true feeling in our new world, where only fools dream of authenticity.  We inhabit now a place of supreme irony, but also of supreme isolation and numbness.  And this we find to be good fodder for meta, meta comedy.  We stumble about Plato's Cave and see our surroundings through a glass but darkly; we smile nevertheless in smug sophistication.

 

In the Hour of the Wolf Last Night

I awoke from a dream that was relatively benign.  In the dream, I was at PwC, chatting informally with some colleagues, in the office of the managing partner.  (He himself kept his back to me whenever he spoke.)  When I looked out the window, I could peer down onto the playing field at Fenway Park.  A game was in progress, but it wasn't baseball, rather some new and stylized form of warfare.  (I know that there is no such prospect of Fenway in all of Boston; the concept must have bubbled up from a visit I made years ago to Baltimore, where there is a PwC conference room with a spectacular view into Camden Yards.)

If my dream seemed benign, my waking state thereafter was not.  Everything in my life, from my physical and mental condition, to my dubious personal habits, to my relationships, to the horror of the upcoming presidential election, to the geopolitical stage -- especially the evil spell that has come over Russia and its people, to the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, seemed immersed in a viscous fluid of noir.  

Who or what could relieve me of this?  I thought about reciting Christ's mantra from the cross -- "Into thy hands I commend my spirit."  The thought would not be authentic, but then again, don't the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy say that it doesn't matter whether you believe it or not; what matters is that you repeat it!?

In the end, I did not recite it, but sleep once again overcame me, as it always does.  I dreamt a second PwC dream, one more thematically mainstream.  I was in a rush to get to the airport for an important flight.  In my haste I realized that everyone watching me descend on the escalator down into the subway could see that my pants were on backwards.

 

My Little Skiff

In the course of just ten September days:  At her mooring, lashed but unfazed by the outer bands of a major hurricane.  Working furiously to disgorge herself of three inches of rain, fallen in a single day in a separate storm that was all but unremarked on shore.  And finally headed home for the winter, making the only ripples on a sea of perfect tranquility, at the peak of a nine-foot tide, the buoys and the blades of marsh grass barely keeping their heads under a stark, iconic afternoon Ipswich light.

The changing faces are a tonic, an I Ching for me and the mariner masses.