memory

Lunchtable TV talk: Blue skies

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Music, as we know, influences how we perceive and feel about things in our lives, our environments, and nowhere does this play to its strengths than in films and television. It’s often a subtle piece of the storytelling puzzle, quietly pushing the emotion buttons of viewers.

I ended up seeing this week’s episodes of This Is Us and Star Trek: Picard on the same day, both defined by the song “Blue Skies“. I wouldn’t think this would be so … affecting. Sure, in Picard (the version used is sung by one of the stars of the show, Isa Briones), it is fitting because it refers back to the use of the song in the film Nemesis (a picture complete with a young Tom Hardy, whom I’ve also recently watched in Peaky Blinders and Taboo. Yep, all this from someone who claims not to be watching television content any more). It still seemed surprising for this old tune to turn up twice in emotionally demanding contexts.

But “emotionally demanding” is an interesting theme. In the past you didn’t really expect television to make any demands on you, other than sacrificing a certain amount of time to watch it.

With Star Trek: Picard, you can enjoy it on its surface-level merits, or you can bring a deep knowledge of Star Trek history and lore to your viewing, and assess whether or not it meets the sometimes exacting demands of Star Trek aficionados (Trekkers, perhaps, who can be unforgiving).

Some criticism has been leveled at Picard for making it into something that Star Trek resolutely has never been (bold text mine):

“The reaction, understandably, has been mixed. Some fans welcome Star Trek being brought up to date with the look and feel of contemporary television. Others maintain that such pessimism is at odds with what makes Star Trek Star Trek. The showrunner Michael Chabon, responding to questions via his Instagram page, defended Picard against the latter claim by saying that “shadow defines light”, that “if nothing can rock the Federation’s perfection, then it’s just a magical land”. It is a sentiment that has been echoed in the past by Alex Kurtzman, the showrunner of the other ongoing series set in the same universe, Star Trek: Discovery. He justified its equally violent, profane and dark sensibility by maintaining that modern Star Trek is simply a reflection of its time.”

I don’t know that the “Blue Skies” theme of the Picard finale would bring tears to the eyes of any non-Star Trek fan, but it certainly moved me to tears.

With This Is Us, everyone who knows something about the show knows it’s engineered to turn on the waterworks – you don’t exit most episodes without having a tear come to your eye. And this week’s installment was no exception, anchored by “Blue Skies”, as inexpertly but emotionally sung by guest star Gerald McRaney.

I wonder if This Is Us could possibly evoke this kind of reaction without the music. Could anything?

 

fish tales

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Fishing rights – and debate about them – formed a backdrop to my entire life. If it wasn’t in my childhood, listening to my grandfather angrily railing against Native American fishing rights, or studying/hearing about Native American fishing rights and meeting the cause’s activists, it was later the way fishing, fish, fish quotas pervade and form the Icelandic culture, even now. Moving to Norway, and later Scotland, fish tales continue to follow me (or I them).

It never occurred to me that discussions about fish, fish survival, populations and existence, and the rights to access said fish, weren’t universal to everyone who lives in a society that, in one way or another, is engaged in fishing. I suppose the distinction is whether a society relies on or merely engages in fishing. In many places I have lived, livelihoods were built on fish – and cultures revolved around fish-related identities.

quietly in a room

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“All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” –Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina

I have never been one to make grand declarations about my plans or hopes (at least not since reaching the trials of adulthood, watching hopes and plans be beaten like a piñata – what you end up with in life is some of the candies and tchotchkes that fall from the piñata. Pieces of your hopes and moments of sweetness in unexpected flavors that you’ve scrambled to pick up before someone else does), knowing that change will come regardless of what I do. I might be able to guide the changes that occur, making decisions and taking actions that will influence outcomes. But claiming – ‘everything changes and is different from today’ is a dangerous and foolhardy path. And yet, without sometimes taking leaps, if not always the grandest or furthest, palpable change isn’t possible. Sometimes to agitate movement, you have to force things through. Sometimes you have to do things that are uncomfortable or that hurt.

And this week I’ve had to do something that I long ago should have done – something that does hurt, but the longer-term effects of not taking this course of action will hurt much more. The last three years have been a long process of slow change, acceptance and finding contentment. Now, the trick is to move forward with longer, faster strides – and this is not possible with lingering elements grabbing at my ankles and trying to trip me up.

I can and do sit, happily, quietly, in a room alone. I can no longer invite those who cannot into my room with me.

The other day I was thinking about the creation of “victim selfhood”. I know a lot of people who create their own miseries (in a host of different ways). I think and write a lot about this, but reflect also on the fact that it’s not as though I am immune. We can all see our own actions and behaviors through a prism that relieves us of blame or absolves us of responsibility. I try exceptionally hard not to do this now – possibly even to the point of being annoying to the people around me who would rather that I not analyze my own actions and motivations in such detail.

Looking at youth (and this could be anything between childhood and one’s early 20s), in particular, we can, in our naivete and inexperience, really believe we were in the right and not reflect on all the things that we did wrong, excusing them, if acknowledging them at all, with mild self-exculpations: “I was a child. I didn’t know what I was doing.” I’ve written my side of many stories involving my long-ago friends, examining my own feelings and reactions – but not necessarily divining all the details of things I did to set things in motion. Yes, for example, I was competitive with others for the attentions of the one friend we all wanted to love us best; yes, I was messed up and trying to escape in my own way, leading me to slip in and undermine a close friend in a situation neither one of us should have been in at all, and then, to my own detriment, took that situation further, creating a reality that was not real, doing all kinds of things that, while they seemed innocuous to me at the time, still surface and haunt me and make me want to apologize to people 30 years after the fact. (In fact I already have – years ago, even if there is some part of me that realizes as a 40-something woman that children cannot be held accountable for emotional repercussions that they do not have the maturity and experience to understand.)

But on some level, of course we know what we are doing. But being young and inexperienced, I didn’t comprehend the seriousness of the things I did – not just in the moment, how some of my actions could lead to perilous consequences, but also further-reaching repercussions – toying with the psyches of fragile, damaged, middle-aged men (for example), but in truth, despite living with one of the most troubled, damaged people I have ever known and seeing other evidence of it all around me, I somehow didn’t really believe that adults could be that fragile – and felt that the silly games of a bored 13-year-old girl couldn’t possibly wound anyone so very deeply that it would matter and would in fact harm the trust they were able to place in all the future relationships they tried to build. It is almost as though the life I led, that all people led, before adulthood, wasn’t even real life. So much of life during that time felt surreal and out of my hands and control, that the things I could control – as destructive as they might be – were seized, eagerly, giving me a (false) sense of maturity and power.

It’s rather stream of consciousness, this whole thing. I am just coming to terms with finding strength in considering these flaws and mistakes of youth – borne as they were of youthful insecurity (wanting to be liked?), fear and fragility. It’s a strange dawning – daunting, even – to recognize how fragile people are. And how willing they are to put their fragility on display.

“How could she allow herself to break down like that, in front of everybody? Jane had never understood this willingness on the part of these from-aways to peel up the scabs of their emotions and let everyone see their festering sores. They were like children that way. They had no shame and even less self-control.” –Red Hook Road, Ayelet Waldman

Even the strongest ones. But the strongest ones have ways to cope and get through; they have people they can turn to. The weakest, well, they don’t have reserves to deplete. And some of them, like parasites, move on to deplete others of their reserves. Once depleted, though, there is just nothing left. Each experience leaves us empty, feeling as though we will never feel again. Sure, we will feel. We will make long strides. We will sprout a joystick. We will feel enthusiasm and excitement and stirring.

But to get there, we (I) must (know how to) walk away, whatever it costs. And sit alone, quietly, in a room.

Goodnight, sweetheart – lies of reality and images

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Could that illusion have only been a single year ago? Baudrillard has argued that ‘reality barely has time to exist, if it does at all, before it has begun disappearing’. It’s a bit like the last (spoiler) part of the HBO modern classic, Six Feet Under, in which Nate appears posthumously to tell younger sister Claire that she cannot capture the moment with a photograph – it’s already gone. (And this is pretty much its own snapshot of how I feel about photography. An image can be a trigger for a memory, ‘moments, nostalgia but incapable of capturing reality in its ephemeral and disappearing(ed) state’. Actually Baudrillard deals with this, too (in The Intelligence of Evil: or, The Lucidity Pact):

“Can photography exempt itself from this flood of images and restore an original power to them? To do so, the turbulent operation of the world would have to be suspended; the object would have to be caught in that single fantastic moment of first contact when things had not yet noticed we were there, when absence and emptiness had not yet dissipated . . . It would, in fact, have to be the world itself that performed the photographic act, as though the world were affording itself the means to appear, quite apart from us.”

And

“At any rate, the lens simultaneously captures the way we are there and the way we are no longer there. This is why, before the eye of the camera, we act dead in our innermost being, as God does before the proofs of his existence. Everything in us crystallizes negatively before the material imagining of our presence.” (italics – mine – as usual)

Go figure. The way this is described almost breaks my heart. Weakling.)

What does photography reveal in this possibly-real reality, though? Do we get anything from it? Especially in a now-visually-desensitized age, where a microsecond glance-and-swipe constitutes a dating decision?

“The worst thing for us is precisely the impossibility of a world without image feed – a world that would not endlessly be laid hold of, captured, filmed and photographed before it has even been seen. A lethal danger for the ‘real’ world, but also for the image, since where it merely recycles the real and immerses itself in the real there is no longer any image – not, at least, as exception, illusion or parallel universe. In the visual flow submerging us, there is no longer even time for the image to become image.” (italicized emphasis mine, emphatically mine)

It is a peculiar feeling, to be in one’s own life, or to see images of that life, and feel as though, in either case, upon reflection, you were not really there. Just outside watching it unfold, as though a secondary observer, but through a looking glass.

“This is the miracle: that a fragment of the world, human consciousness, arrogates to itself the privilege of being its mirror. But this will never produce an objective truth, since the mirror is part of the object it reflects.”

The reality is real and can be reflected but isn’t anything that can tasted, touched, felt ever again. Was it truly felt the first time… in that momentary, illusory glimpse of reality that possibly existed?

Image (c) 2018 S Donaghy (an image as good as any to convey the randomness of the simultaneously ephemeral and interminable moments of life…)

life just bounces

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There aren’t many people who read this or even people in my life who will know who Mark E. Smith was. He died at age 60. Surprised it did not happen earlier. But my god, could I ever have imagined how influential The Fall would be to me … since I was 12/13? How vast the influence of people who have been in my life who also felt that The Fall meant something to them?

It’s sad and inevitable.

Marie: “Pardon me all to hell”

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Last night, my last living grandparent died. It was not unexpected when it finally happened but was somewhat sudden in that the end came about quickly. I don’t have a lot to say about it; we were not close, she lived far away, and I didn’t really know her. I didn’t/don’t really know much of that part of the family.
But this, I suppose, is sad. I feel a certain sadness for her children, as it’s difficult to lose a parent (undoubtedly). It’s hard to come up with words about a woman I didn’t really know. When the other grandparents died, it was devastating, but I was really close to them.
I was not close to this grandmother; she was virtually a stranger. What do you say about someone whom you never really knew, whose life was defined by getting married and having children when she was a child herself and whose later life was pretty much dominated by Jehovah’s Witnesses?
I have small, incomplete memories of Marie, the distant grandmother who died, from the way my late grandfather pronounced her name, a rushed “Mree” (usually sneering or yelling), to the giant pancakes or the homemade loaves of bread she used to make.
I seem to recall that she had a crush on the late James Garner, circa Rockford Files time, which came to mind not so long ago when Mr Firewall told me about an episode (“The Empty Frame”) he had caught in reruns (yes, they are still showing Rockford in some parts of the world). The best parts happen at 42:15, when Rockford exclaims, ‘Pardon me all to hell!’
Immediately thereafter (42:30) when the episodes ‘villains’ discuss their failure to adhere to their initial socialist/hippie principles:
“Hey, David, will you knock off that stale 60s rhetoric? You’re looking at the new Jag, she wants a Kenzo wardrobe, I’m sick and tired of hearing about the pigs up on Gorki Street and the storming of the Winter Palace!”
“I’m not buying a new Jag; I’m buying a paramilitary vehicle…”
“We all sold out the day she got her first 50-dollar haircut and you and I said we liked it!”
I only saw her a handful of times in my life; the most memorable was in the early 80s. I recall that she bought some candy bars one evening, and my brother and I begged for one before bed, and in her very West Virginia way of speaking, she smiled and said, “I reckon we can have one tonight…”.
And that’s about it. May she rest in peace.
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Who wants to live forever?

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The States
–George Tsongas
it’s an
amazing
place, where
no one enjoys

life

but they
all want
to live

forever

Yesterday, going through various blogs and news outlets, there were so many articles on aging, the mind and how to live better for longer.

  • Reverse the age with exercise, particularly dancing.
  • Listen to soundwaves to enhance deep sleep, which tends to dissipate as we age, and thus improve memory.
  • And most of all, extend life: “Unless we target aging itself all we can hope is that we switch one disease for another.”

I realize that this whole living forever, staying young thing is kind of a Boomer thing/obsession, mostly. They do not want to go away quietly.

I do not want to live for any artificially long time. I am in the majority, I think, when I say I would like to live as best as possible for as long as I live, so I take measures to do that. We all want to ensure a healthy mind and youthful vigor for as long as possible. But does that mean I should want to be 120 or 150?

If our lifespans were to be lengthened, how would our brains need to adapt to cope with that? Not that they could or would not – it’s just that today, if aging itself brings on disease and decrepitude, and we fight just to keep the most minor signs at bay, how would we evolve (I suppose that is the key – evolving rather than some magic bullet) to accommodate such a long life? What would take on meaning and importance (and what would lose it)?

Photo by Simeon Muller on Unsplash

elasticity of compassion and dread

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I have spent a night filled with a growing, and somewhat inexplicable, dread. Now that darkness lasts longer at night, the sense of rare loneliness can creep in and make itself truly felt. This dissipates as the sun rises.

I have once more reached an impasse with someone in my life who has flowed into and out of the ‘rapids’ (i.e., daily life) for years. He has never been quite ‘peripheral’ but his role has changed. He is an addict, a compulsive liar, self-destructive and mentally ill. But all along, it has been hard not to care about him and feel tremendous compassion. Despite not being ‘with’ him in a relationship for a very long time, I still felt compelled by this compassion to be supportive, to help in any way I could. But there’s certainly a large emotional manipulation component that comes into play when he’s ‘off the wagon’ (as well as transparent deception; he isn’t good at it). I have done everything I have had in my power to give him support of all kinds and all the tools and coping mechanisms he could possibly need (that I could provide). But this is all one can do, really. At some point, as I told someone in describing this situation, compassion – despite its slack and elasticity – can be stretched to the point that it snaps. A point where self-preservation must take over. Watching someone self-harm, slowly kill himself, is just too painful.

With this as the backdrop, the night was accompanied by the rare feelings of missing people from long, long ago. Watching the Twin Peaks reboot earlier, and having a long conversation with someone from my life whom I met during the original Twin Peaks era, I remembered now-dead friendships that had meant so much – and some dormant friendships that, while they exist in that “say-hi-once-annually” way that Facebook affords, once pulsated with a kind of intensity that is almost impossible to feel in middle age. The viscous quality of this nostalgia left me feeling quite alone and quite cold, unable to shake the sticky links of the past.

But, as obsessed with moving forward as I always am, I have posed the question (to myself, and more rhetorically to others) as to whether this could be a pivotal moment. How nice would it be if we were actually able to recognize pivotal moments when they arrive? Do you ever look back and realize, “Ah, that was a pivotal moment” and lament that you did not notice, and made the wrong choice? Or even realize that you somehow made the right choice, even if you did not realize the significance of the moment as it happened? I have in recent days realized that while the surface of life and self has remained the same, everything underneath is a completely different organism from a year ago. And with these changes, perhaps it is time to make a clean break, closing the door on some of the things and people that/who linger from the past.

“While past and present continue to haunt/my future is nonchalant…”

Photo by Kev Seto on Unsplash

hanging on the telephone

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Technology has erased some massive inconveniences and hurdles. I doubt anyone would argue with this. It’s funny that I am not even going to go in-depth enough into the topic to highlight how very many advances have been made in so many fields, and will restrict my rambling only to the topic of immediate communication. I am thinking mostly about the once-exorbitant costs of local long distance phone calls. I don’t know if this has changed on the surface, i.e. does the local phone company still charge insane rates if you just pick up the phone (assuming you have a landline at all) and dial? Do you need to have signed up for some special plan to make all calling free or next-to-free? I mean, these are stupid questions that I don’t need to know the answers to – the whole landscape has changed to such a degree that the answers to these questions are moot.

Years and years ago, in my youth, I got into a small amount of debt because I was talking to people who lived in the next county: the most expensive kind of long distance at the time. I once knew someone who got into considerable (tens of thousands of dollars) debt because of just-out-of-range local phone calls (i.e., out of his local (free-of-charge) calling area). The funny thing, back in the “old days”, is that there were a lot of solutions for calling state-to-state or even country-to-country that made it quite inexpensive and economical to do. Early in the 1990s I think I was able to phone England or even Australia for less than calling over to the next county in my home state. You can see how this might lead to insane phone bills. Users were gouged constantly but had very few alternatives, other than perhaps, getting in the car and driving to see the person they were calling (it was after all local long distance, so most of these calls were probably to people within a 50-mile radius).

When I think now about all the money that we had to pay for these ridiculous phone bills, I can only laugh. I don’t need to rattle off all the free, instant, mobile and convenient ways we can pretty much call anyone in the world now. It boggles the mind, though, how comparatively fast this shift took place, even though it didn’t seem back then like it would ever change. We were just going to be held in the grips of the telephone company’s monopoly forever.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

Throwaways

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Three or four classrooms full of children, all around 9 or 10 years of age, were put together to take a historically oriented field trip to downtown Seattle. This was the mid-1980s, when it seemed that the homeless population had, if not reached a peak, penetrated the Pioneer Square area of Seattle… and the (paranoid) consciousness of suburbanite schoolteachers and parents. Enough visibility and paranoia that the homeless presence warranted ‘warnings’, apparently. I don’t know if these warnings were issued because 100+ unruly children are hard enough to control under the best of circumstances, so the adults thought they would ‘scare’ us into submission, or if the teachers and school really believed that the homeless population was a grave threat to us (“us” the children or all of us as a society).

We were told not just to not interact with “them”, but not even to look at “them”. “Ignore them, as if they don’t exist.” All I do know is that the message they branded on our young, malleable brains was: “You don’t need to care about these throwaway people.”

This still comes to mind and bothers me now, 30+ years later.

Photo by Zhifei Zhou on Unsplash