res ipsa loquitur

Been listening to "Hallelujah" exclusively for the past few days. It calms my nerves. I write about Cohen almost obsessively, yet I never really quite put my fingers on what it is about him that haunts me. "There is a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the Holly, or the Broken, Hallelujah." I too, or at least I hope, have returned to the point where I read and write for no more than merriment and divertion. Although words alone will not sustain the justification of me as a person, at least they fill the frequent intervals of infirmity. But today it's something else. While I was washing down puffs of smoke with instant coffee, I heard, as if for the first time, "Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand in front of the Lord of Song with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah." Suddenly a shiver came over me. It's not just the apparent resignation to fate that hits me, it's the sense of total self-acceptance. This is how I am, for better or worse, that I present to you. If only we can bring that kind of calmness to every judgement in life, by truly appreciating the magnitude of the grand scheme and the utter irrelevance of our respective individual nuances. But be it Danny Crane of some random first year three doors down, "We are all desperate to be relevant." To what though? If we could reflect our needs to be needed back onto ourselves. To be self-sustained, a cliche for sure, but be as it might. Cohen has figured this out. I think. "For many years I was know as a monk. I got up very early every morning, I acted generously but I hated everyone. No one found me out." But he has in the end moved beyond that, from forced, self-willed peace of mind to a true revelation. "If It be Your Will", and "I'm Your Man", two of his best, essentially express the same idea. The titles have said it all. He can mode himself whichever way others want, now that he accepted that he cannot change. You can bent backward more easily if in your mind you stand somewhere far off.

To say Japanese bring unrivaled enthusiasm and creativity in depicting the depressing side of life is like saying Italians are masters of pasta (Had amazing Penne in an Italian cafe in West Villiage before the movie). A less obvious fact may be that they are apt at showing the most vulnerable side of human nature through an appearance of strength to persevere. I always think there are some uncanny similarities between Japanese and Vikings. Both sea-seasoned people, both with an infatuation with glories in predestinated defeat. I wonder if it has anything to do with being born on a small island surrounded by boundless ocean, the result of life-long struggle between homo erectus' inane fear of deep water and the absolute necessity to tranverse it.

 

What struck me most is this fleeting scene of hope right in the middle of the movie before the dramatic finale unfold. An afternoon in the piano teacher's room, after Kenji finished his lesson. In the silence the ensued the camera hovered in a place somewhere between the teacher and the boy, as if unsure on whom to focus the lenses. Then it started to slowly pull away, almost painstakingly slowly, a fuller view of the room is unveiled. The room was rather dim, there was sunlight coming from the front porch, but it was bleary, depleted, like it used all its strength to pierce through the clounds and upon reaching the room it was dead tired. The teacher said, in a typical serene but deliberate Japanese way, "Kenji, listen to me." Pulse. "You are talented". Pulse. "Extrodinarily so." Prolonged pulse. And here is the amazing part, all this while, from the moment the teacher uttered her first word, the light in the room started to grow, stronger and brighter, increasingly more assertive, until the whole room was light up on golden fire, and both the teacher and the boy eventually became silhouette bathed in a blaze of light. "You should go to music school". She concluded.

 

How does it feel like to grow into a God.

 

Why is that, prophets, no matter from which variety of religions or school of thoughts, inevitably grew detached after the enlightenment? They all make passing reference to the triviality of human race, their serene expressions and monotonous voices full of explictly implied scorns. Yes, they all came back to teach, but as if out of embarassment of being the only one in the known, merely to go through the necessary motion of spreading the wealth which they knew would be futile. But it put their minds at ease: I've talked to these people, no fault of mine if they can't wrap their collective puny little brains around it. And then they took their long delayed departure with a deep sigh, leaving people behind in the dust. The existence of prophets is not a sign of hope, it's the ultimate proof of the impossibility of salvation, it's a plain stamp of condemnation on the human race. It's the Gods' way of saying, Look, I TRIED.

 

If prophets are like that, imagine how Gods will actually feel about the whole shenanigans we call society. Dr. Mahanttan burnt a circle on his forehead (never bothered to explain why) and told his once fellow human beings to go fuck themselves. How come any Joe Schmoe, once in the known, instantly becomes too good for the rest of us. Is it because once they see what there is to see, they know it's too far fetching to put it in words, or are we too far down the road to perdition there is no turning back? Have we all been doing this terribly wrong all these thousands of years.

 

btw, the monologue of Rorschach is a direct ripoff of 9th and Hennepin.

 

Foggy all day, the air is imbued with drops of rains. It's one of those days that makes you feel it's really the brink of spring, colors and noises are just waiting to burst into this grey, hushed sky. It reminds me of "Wings of Desires", in the end, when the Angel acted upon the free will and took the fall. The instant he hit the ground and splashed over the pavement, the black and white silent movie burst into a full-colored, deafening moment of hustle and bustle in the daily life. I was Absolutely stunned, or should I say, in awe, in a bliss, that is one of the very few moments in my monotonous life that I actually realized how beautiful the world around me is. To feel the privilege of being human.

Listening to Don McLean on a cigratte break. And a line got me. I thought to myself the two most beautiful lines about clouds and rains have already been said, it's not possible or no use to try to say anything more on the subject.

 

Before: "Storm clouds full of thunder, move siliently as they drum."

After: "I am the autumn cloud, empty of rain, gazing at my fullness in the field of ripened rice."

 

For a moment, maybe just a split second, I feel happy. The I realize after all, there is happiness in this life for me, or any skittish first or second year associate for that matter, who's scared senseless and worried sick in this on-going massacre. Every day brings new lines of casualty, and every word in those lines, no matter how remote, is a figurative sucker punch to the stomach or imaginative bitch slap in the face. But there, a beautiful line, or two, which can bring a tad bit of warmth for a split second, that's something I can always go back to, it might not help to put food on the table, but it is what ultimately makes eating necessary.

A night paralegal just came into my office with bunch of redwelds, gave me a blank stare for a few seconds, and asked, "Are these for you?" I looked at the bold face label on the front and laughed, "Do I look like an Allison to you?" I guess everyone is dead tired.

I'm largely, for lack of a better word, underwhelmed, for I always have a hard time imagining how one is to be whelmed in an underly way. It didn't help that I was mildly sick, but had to stand in line in the chilly night that is early spring for over half an hour, with a reservation. The club was overbooked, I'm sure intentionally so, and when I sat down my back was against the wall and the back of a woman's head was literarily inches away from my face. I had to hold the upright posture for a good hour and half, feeling like a deer in some imaginative black headlight. And in the middle of it, when the woman started to bang on the table and bob her head (all off beats and may i add unnecessarily, cause the performance at that moment was rather lackluster), I had to watch intentatively the movement of her head coming towards my nose and time my dodge to left and right accordingly.

 

And the performance itself. In an hour and half, she did 3 songs, all somewhat brokenly, from her new album "Loverly". I have no beef with one love song after another on a post-Valentine's day scenario, but lyrics like "it's so exciting, you are so inviting" just didn't sit well with my impresson of Cassandra Wilson, whose voice sinks you into the unfathomable deepth of sorrow (as in "I'm so lonesome I could cry") and serenity (e.g. in "Harvest Moon"). And she was visually tired, and apparently did not care, this being the second performance on the second night. The crowd was trying its best to be a good sport, after all everyone did have to wait for almost an half to get in. There were some cheers and claps when she did her rendition, again brokenly, of "A Day in the Life of A Fool". But except for that she gave the crowd very little to work with.

Ambiguity: When the credit rolled I felt very, very ambivalent, and certainly at a loss for words, half from shell shock half from weariness. It’s surely a long movie given its density. The last half an hour was packed with one definitive moment after another, where I said to myself, “finally…” and got ready for the nearest exist. But it just went on and on and on. I’m not necessarily saying these definitive moments weren't good, there were simply too many of them. Neither my brain nor my bladder could take such rapid foray of revelations on the topics of living or dying. As my mind started to wander, I can’t decide whether this taxing series of never-ending finales is Kuaffman simply not knowing he’s overstaying his welcome, or actually a brilliant new technique. I mean, Caden surely looked very very tired toward the end of his life, what is a better way to deliver that sense of weariness to the audience than dragging them along through this seemly endless march towards decadence and death. In the beginning of the film, Caden’s wife confessed that she sometimes fantasized about Caden’s death and it made her happy. Towards the end, every person in the audience was fantasizing the same. You just can’t be sure if that effect was intended. Same uncertainty persisted through the film. Every now and then Caden would launch a rant about loneliness or fear of death or other random all-too-obvious lamentation that made you roll your eyeballs. They were all sentimental cliché but Hoffman delivered them in such a solemn tone. You can’t be sure whether Kauffman is mocking his character for lacking of creativity, or is really tripping and falling into mediocrity himself.

 

Ambition: all in all a failed one, i'd say. This film touched on so many aspects of the post-modern existential anxiety: loneliness, mortality, identity, insignificance and meaninglessness of being, you name it. I feel if I have the time and the will, I can probably identify in this movie the ghost of every modern literature work I’ve ever read. But this is really where the ambivalent feelings came from. It has been said that reading a good book (or watching a good movie for that matter) is like engaging an imaginary conversation with the author. But here it’s like multiple voices were talking, simultaneously and incessantly, all with the same desolated and monotonous tone, very soon it became impossible to tell one from another. And none of the hundreds topics raised was explored in any meaningful depth. It’s like a typical law school issue-spotting exam, you get points for simply identifying and mentioning the issues in passing reference, no need to bother with discussion if you don’t care for the extra credits. There are just too many trains of thoughts, all too involved in following their own sub-current threads to care about engaging the audience. Towards the end a character exclaimed, “Fuck everyone!” To a certain degree, that’s exactly what this movie was trying to say.

 

Amorphousness: Half way through the movie it dawned on me maybe the old “Being John Malkovich” trick was hard at work here, although stealthily. The story proceeded along Caden’s life in a somewhat linear fashion, but not at an even pace. The first one third of the movie was pretty normal in terms of story-telling, then things got wacky from there. Sometimes time would leap 4 or 5 years ahead between one scene and the next, with a pass reference at best, then it would come to a full stop, allowing every single detail of that particular moment to be painstakingly grinded out. Then time would leap forward again without a slightly hint. As a result the sense of time and relevance was all jumbled. Taken as a whole, the movie is a silent manifestation of the decadence (or evolution you might say) from a banal, ordered life into total chaos. If you watched the first 30 mins of the movie, fell asleep (I suspect many did) and then woke up to see the last 30 mins, you can’t fail to notice the drastic contrast in tone, the all too realistic suffocating depression in the beginning and trademark surrealistic alternative existence and assumed identity in the end. The trick here is that the morphosis took place at an unnoticeable pace and in a matter-of-fact way. Looking back, you pondered how you end up getting here and realized that the surrealism in the end was not that improbable after all. It’s like slowly peeling off existence, layer by layer, from the outer appearance of sensibility to the core of absurdity. When you sneer at the absurdity you are really laughing at yourself. Not exactly a ground-breaking technique but on a whole adequately done.

When winter came, I all but renounced social life. Forty-five mins before breakfast and two or three hours after work every day is just not enough time to explore and get comfortable with the world around. So I minimize my exposure to the crispy air and retreat to my room from office as quickly as I can, satiating my social needs with excessive amount of fantasy Role Playing Games. Communication means clicking through dialogue menu in rapid succession, and interaction means wielding around magic swords of all sorts, including a magnificent silver sword that leaves traces of fire and ice hovering in the air long after it is returned to the sheath. Thus I wage on a heroic battle of ultimate cowardice, cause there I can shut it all down when I'm weary, there I can reload and restart when things go awry. It's a world where everything is predestinated in the script, yet strange enough there is almost no irreversible consequence that you have to live with.

 

And then there is reading. The first read of Borges thoroughly fascinated me. For a person who faces computer monitors 15+ hours a day, who adds drops and trickles to a sea of documents that no one will ever read by day and slashes monsters to save a world which does not exist in the first place by night, the only connection with reality I could hope for is through rational deduction and imagination. Ten years ago there was a movie called "What Dreams May Become", and that is exactly what reading Borges is. It opens up a world of imagination which you would not otherwise know that could exist, it follows a pattern of bewilderment in the process and enlightenment in the end. Although upon reflection many of the short fictions are not as incredibly creative and original as they first seemed to be, they nonetheless push imagination to its limit and the result is a triumph more in cognition and philosophy than in literature.

 

For me, many of Borges' short stories invoke an image that is a strange mix of medieval occult and futuristic anxiety. It's some sort of a darkage monastery that is run behind the scene by a future age god-like supercomputer.

 

A lot of Borges' short fictions can be, if not already are, prototypes for epic sci-fi movies. "The Thirteenth Floor", a sci-fi movie critically acclaimed to be superior to "The Matrix", almost walked directly out of "The Circles of Ruins". And the inspiration of "The Matrix" itself can clearly be seen in more than one places in Borges. "The Cube", an off-beat sci-fi movie that has long achieved cult status, has more than a fleeting resemblance to "The Library of Babel". "The Lottery of Babylon" (or maybe a combination of that and "The Library of Babel") insinuates the underlying probability theory of "Pi", another odd, more obscure cult sci-fi movie.   "The Man from the Earth", a recent favorite independent sci-fi movie of mine, should at least partly pay its tribute to "Funes, the Memorious". "The Garden of Forking Paths", maybe the best known piece of Borges (although in my opinion far from being his best), might not have been made into a movie itself, but it foretold the countless sci-fi movies of parallel universes. To take the analogy further, if these ingenious sci-fi movies are like complicated computer software, then the ideas in Borges' short fictions are the core binary machine code and mathematic theories these software are all based on. These are, of course, the futuristic part.

 

The medieval feelings of Borges' fictions come not from its philosophic content, but its literary implementation, namely the style of writing. The central themes include infinity, probability and sheer random chances, labyrinth, mirror of image etc, which Borges came back to over and over again in various forms. They all have a clear (at least to me) anti-Christ, or should I at least say pagan, tone in them, yet the stories he invoked to implement these themes have an unmistakable biblical feeling about them. It is this contrast between form and substance that fascinates me.

 

"The Library of Babel" is a good example. The biblical reference in the title jumps right at you. And the library was clearly modeled after a vast, medieval monastery. The "explorers" trudging their lives away through the endless hexagonal rooms are nothing short of pilgrims, as sacred at heart and as futile in their efforts. It is anti-Christ in the sense that it refutes any meaning for existence, or sense of purpose. The irony is this: every answer to every possible question is out there in black and white, and precisely because EVERYTHING is out there, it's impossible to find the answer you are looking for that is buried with everything else. So there is no sense asking any particular question. "It's a thousand spoons when all you need is a knife." So it attacks the Christian notion of divine existence not in a direct, philosophical way (it does not say there is no divine answer), but from a sheer logic, formalistic point of view (say the divine answers do exist, there is still no way for you to find them).

 

Another interesting example is "The Lottery of Babylon". The omnipotent entity, only dubbed as "the Company", invokes Kafka's "Castle". It permeates in every fiber of existence of the Babylon people. It oversees the smallest and darkest corners of the city, decides everything at any given moment in everyone's life, yet there is not an ounce of physical evidence of its existence. But this is not the God who is Always there and Always will be. It started out, supposedly (and this "supposedly" is very important for a reason soon revealed) as a modest lottery company with employees and offices, and it just kept growing in size and power, unstoppably, and eventually to the extent that it must be deified, its physical form as a result dissolved and dissipated. Then there comes the fatal dagger, in a passing sentence, that after eons of being subject to its wayward caprice and never sensing its physical existence, "[o]ne scurrilously suggest that the Company ceased to exist hundreds of years ago," (Nietzsche anyone?) and "some say the Company has never existed, and never will". Just imagine the terror at the moment of revelation, what you had been thinking as predestined for your whole life, turned out to be mere random chances and a sum of chaos.

 

Friday 11:26AM, on 24th floor at the corner of 43rd and Lex ave, Anna Karenina throws herself between the grinding wheels of a moving train. Meanwhile, like a drowning man dying from thirsty, I'm gulping down hazulnut-flavored coffee and vitamin water, in alternating order, trying to steady myself from the shivers. The hours, minutes and seconds leading up to that fateful moment, like dark clouds gathering storms, move silently but with absolute finality. And finally thunder rolls, and lightning breaks, ripping through the black sky like a shaft of sheer bliss. "[A]nd suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys". It's impossible not to end life as we come to know it at that split second; it's irresistable to freeze time in that blinding light.

 

Yet all the while on her way to the final destiny, in the lucidity that is peculiar to a person on the verge of death, she pondered how suicide is the only solution to everything. In that sense, death is the only way for her existence to go on, the only way for her to escape her self-destruction. A person who had truely lost her living will would not have envisioned or even fantasized the devastation her death would bring about in the triumphal way she did. Love has to live on, even as a menace, even if it's in the form of death.