Eight and a Half

I finally watched Federico Fellini's 8½ last night. It was a true delight. Movie magic in the same league for me as The Wizard of Oz, both films which nearly singlehandedly justify the existence of cinema.

Despite what I'd heard about 8½'s complex mesh of dreams and reality, surrealism and narrative, I found it entirely lucid and easy to follow. It was hilarious but also very touching. A real inspiration to me as I delve more and more deeply into my own creative potential.

A tip I have for viewers: if you find yourself asking, "Gloriosky, is this scene a dream or realist?", the answer is, "Exactly." That dynamic ambiguity is exactly the question Fellini explores about dreams and experience, high-flying creativity and inescapable moral gravity. They flow into each as mutual inspirations, creating both challenges to action and fresh positions for progress.

See this film. The soundtrack is worth the time in its own rights. Hooray!

Awheel at the Sleep

This is a tale I struck upon in Camiguin while listening to someone discuss his sleep problems as a "waking dreamer": talking, walking, etc. while asleep. It is about a man, a good, decent man, who increasingly finds himself subject to these waking dreams. They disrupt his wife and children's nights, so he gradually finds himself spending time out of the house to spare them the racket.

Unfortunately, his fatigue gets the better of him so he still falls asleep at home, but, driven by the instinct to get out, he begins leading an entire alternate life in his sleep. He becomes a manager of a logistics warehouse, graveyard shift. He finds it impossible, however, to form any solid relationships, especially with women, mainly because his "conscious" mind functions as his "subconscious" mind, and "unconsciously" restrains him from infidelity based on his "conscious" loyalty to his family. Not only are his sleep patterns inverted, but so is his psychology. During the day, in his conscious life, he finds himself subconsciously drawn to elements of sleeping life. Occasionally he encounters people from his night life, but strikes them as rudely obtuse or amnesic. His wife and children are upset that he seems both deadened at home and most likely unfaithful outside at night.

At some point, his wife realizes what is happening and she tries to explain his problem to her husband. But his mind is so out of sorts that he can't tell what is a dream or real. So his wife just settles on having an affair with his night persona, since by then that persona is more responsive than his day-self. Of course, the protagonist starts to realize his wife is cheating on him, so he begins tracking his own somnabulent persona down as the source of his family's obvious estrangement.

You might see this as a kind of domestic take on Memento, Fight Club, and The Thirteenth Floor (though I never made any connection between those stories and my own until typing this sentence). Ultimately, the story will serve as an ironic indictment of how most people live their daily lives just like the protagonist: asleep but functional. We are spiritual zombies, feeding off the entropy of the world's delights and delusions, just so we can earn our keep and leave our deepest spiritual longings and visions to our unconscious, untended life.

The title is a spoonerism that an extremely tired person might say.

Tunes Out

[One day while listening to the radio, a young man, renamed Connie by his high school friend (and secret crush), is in a serious auto accident. He undergoes an experimental neural implant operation. The implant is meant to restore his lost hearing and impaired speech. He has an affinity for static and out-of-tune radio noise. His imparied hearing often gives him that kind of sound when listening to other people. Over time, the implant becomes a powerful, nanoneural receiver that collapses his speech ability into the radio signals he receives. In other words, he eventually can only speak what he broadcasts. Over time he learns to control his reception and becomes a walking jukebox. When he sleeps or is at a loss for words, he emits static and radio jumble. Ultimately, he is able to capture old radio signals in space, such as Churchill's and Hitler's speeches, etc., so that he takes on a messianic proportions for large swaths of the pop audience.
He lives in a society dominated by politically correct censorship, or "verbal shariah". In the mass media, conventional language is so religiously, politically, and ideologically charged among contending advocacy groups that pretty much the only words not censored are cuss words, trivial conjunctions, etc. So a news discussion will sound like. This will take on comic dimensions, but is also basically a grim satire on the corrosion of speech based on "special interests" and "neutrelativity".
A further problem in the society is that copyright laws are draconially reactionary. Specifically, it is illegal to sing copyrighted songs without a license. This means guys cannot croon to their girls without calling a hotline (976-Shake-4-Me), drivers get pulled over for singing along with the radio, control teams burst into showers to stop bathers from singing in the showers, etc. Again, comical but basically grimly satirical.
The problem is that, since our protagonist can only speak by using the radio, he is in constant violation of copyright laws and he can't help but utter the unassumingly blunt language of past ages in songs, jingles, speeches, etc. The climax is unclear to me right now, but I think he will ultimately be enshrined––dare I say imprisoned––in a cultural sanctuary. He can be observed as a national, living artifact.]

Tunes Out

by Elliot Bougis

The blessed sound of a radio out of tune. He liked it. It made him feel at home. Not the only one, or the only thing, at least, out of tune. In search of a tune. In search of the right frequency. In search of a sending station. Making noise but not making any sense.
This is ORM Radio. This is KTLM Radio. This is MMT Radio. But what is this, this life? This life he and everyone he knew lng enough tacitly agreed to call his real life. Day after day it was broadcast, always scratchy, hissing, flickering. Things happened and things turned the knob. People cut in and cut out and the programming changed before he even got a playlist. All he seemed to control was the volume. And even then he had trouble with a trigger finger. If someone tweaked the antenna of his heart too suddenly, or too persistently, he would blare out like a walking feedback machine. Driving helped him lower the volume.
So Connie was driving. Listening to the radio rattle out of tune. His friends usually asked him to just turn off the radio when he drove, since he enjoyed an out of tune radio so much, he left it that way on purpose. Not flagrantly, in the presence of company, but just enough off the mark to chop up the DJ's voice like a man trying to finsih his sentence as the committee pulled the mic from his hands. That made him feel good too. Hearing the DJ lose his voice in a wave of static. He wasn't the only one who couldn't speak right. Everything he said drifted away from him in the ocean of speech, a message in a bottle no one ever found. Or, if they did find it, open it, they never wrote back with the reply he was seeking. What could you expect when most of the ocean was froth? People can't breathe underwater, so they tread water on the surface, kicking up froth and passing it off as if from the deep blue. Connie preferred the silence of sunken ships to the froth he had to eat most the time.
So let the DJ get paid for talking. At least he could break a pro's stride with some static. Competition on the airways. DJ Drew Dragomore. Unbelieveable, but payable. Who makes up these DJ names? It wasn't any sane mother who gave these names to their baby. What self-respecting woman would carry someone named Drew Dragomore in her stomach for nine months?
Connie knew about fake names. His name wasn't really Connie. That's the name Galinda––or, "Galinda"––gave him when they graduated high school. And Galinda is the name he came to give her.
"The end of a season. The start of a new season."
"Fallow season, you mean."
"Jackass. Don't hate. We're done with school. We can leave these people behind. Be new."
Be new. Newbie.
"What if you don't want to leave them behind? What if you don't want to be new?"
"Why not, jackass?"
"What if you'd rather stay old, go back, and do it better a second time?"
"A second chance, a new start, whatever, man, it's all the same. You can make a new name for yourself."
"I haven't even made an old name for myself."
"Holy crap, man. Can't you ever take things less than Newtonially heavy?"
His smile almost toppled him it was so heavy.
"Did you just say 'Newtonially'?"
"What can I say? I'm a poet trapped in an idiot's body."
Trapped in her body. She kept talking so he had to pull himself out of the lines on her forehead. The spell she cast when she raised her eyebrows.
"Okay, then, give me a new name."
"What if you don't like it?"
"Well, it's not my name, so I can change it later."
"Not fair. If I come up with a name for you, you can't just junk it."
For me. For you.
"Well, I just won't tell you if I junk it."
Her forehead crinkled up as if to touch her hair. To touch her hair. He slid his hands in his pockets, his shoulders loose and desperately debonaire, swept around for pocket change, but then remembered he had no money on him. She kept talking as his hands crept behind him to restrategize.
"I'm not talking about a nickname. I mean a whole new name for you to call yourself when you wake up in the morning. You don't even have to use it with other people. But at least you will know you are new."
At least you will know I am new.
"Hmm, why do I have the feeling you've done this before? Did you see this on TV?"
"No, not quite. On the radio, though. It was a charity drive idea for immigrants or something."
"Like tagging people as they cross the border?"
"They weren't illegal aliens, jackass!"
"Totally legal aliens."

Wisdom from… [27 Feb 08]

ASTERIUS OF AMASEA: The wealth of Christ's love for us

If, having been made in the image of God, you wish to be like him, follow his example. Christians, whose very name is a profession of love for everyone, should imitate the love of Christ.

Consider and wonder at the wealth of Christ's love for us. When he was about to show himself to us in our own nature, he sent John the Baptist to preach repentance by word and example. Before John he sent all the prophets. They too were to teach people to amend their lives. Then he came himself and with his own voice cried out: Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. And how did he receive those who listened to his call and followed him? He readily forgave them their sins, instantly relieving them of all their cause for grief. The Word made them holy, the Spirit set his seal on them. Their old self was buried in the waters of baptism and a new self born; their youth was renewed by grace. And the result? Enemies of God became his friends, strangers to him became his children, idolaters became worshipers of the true God.
(Hom. 13: PG 40, 355-358.362.)

[Some say, "You are only as young as you say you are." The Gospel, however, informs us that we are only as young as God says we are. And in Christ, He calls us all, by baptism, into the childlike immortality of theosis, ever-thankful, ever-curious, ever-growing, ever-young. The seriousness we see in the visage of Christ is but the seriousness we see in the visage a child about some earnest task creation sets before him. For the average boy, it is to draw his father's car as well as he can to show Papa when he comes back, or to arrange his toy soldiers in as accurate a ranking as he can manage. For Christ, the Son of Abba-God, the task was to redeem all His brethren gone astray in their own little sandboxes, sandboxes destined to become quicksand unless they are transplanted onto the Rock of Christ's childlike vigilance and infinitude.]

Asterius was metropolitan of Amasea, and a preacher of considerable power. He lived in the fourth century. "The only fact in his life that is known is related by himself, viz. his education by a Scythian or Goth who had been sent in his youth to a schoolmaster of Antioch and thus acquired an excellent education and great fame among both Greeks and Romans. The extant writings of Asterius are twenty-one homilies, scriptural and panegyrical in content."

ST AUGUSTINE: Everything Works Together for Charity

All these endeavors for fasting are concerned not about the rejection of various foods as unclean, but about the subjugation of inordinate desire and the maintenance of neighborly love.

Charity especially is guarded: food is subservient to charity, speech to charity, customs to charity, and facial expressions to charity. Everything works together for charity alone.
-- Customs of the Catholic Church 33, 70

Prayer. How great was your love for us, kind Father! You did not spare your only-begotten Son but surrendered him for the sake of us sinners!
-- Confessions 10, 43

ST FRANCIS DE SALES:

Birds have nests in trees and stags have thickets where they can find shelter when the need arises. Deer know where to take cover, either to hide or to enjoy some cool shade during the summer. So also our hearts should each day choose some place, either on Mount Calvary or within Our Lord's wounds, or in some other place near Him, as a retreat where they can retire at various times to refresh and restore themselves during their exterior occupations. There, as in a stronghold, they can defend themselves against temptation. Blessed will be the soul that can truly say to Our Lord, "You are my place of strength and my stronghold to give me safety, my roof against the rain, my shade against the heat." [cf. Ps 46:1]
(INT. Part 2, Ch. 12; O. III, p. 92)

GK CHESTERTON:

A MAN must be partly a one-idead man because he is a one-weaponed man––and he is flung naked into the fight. In short, he must (as the books on Success say) give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man 'his best ' is! His second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
('What's Wrong with the World.')

Who can say?

Who can say that
life's bitterest nightmares are not
but its sweetest dreams
unfulfilled,
that life's darkest nights are not but
its brightest horizons
viewed as through a photo
negative?
Who can say that
the heart of most lives is not but
a series of
loosely
joined
decisions
made to justify one
inescapable past
decision,
a mosaic of tiles
aligned by all means
with one
primordial, now nonnegotiable,
tile
on the path of life?
Who can say that
this step,
and the next,
and then the next,
are not just
premeditated shadows
of a stance,
even a happenstance,
portrayed,
in resolute retrospect,
as a wise and lasting
decision?
Who can say when
looking at life through windows
stained with a beautiful dream
ends,
and looking at life through a hallowed photo-negative
from the past
begins?

And who can say that
pinpointing the past's one submerged anchor,
the one ever-sinking,
never-shifting
tile,
is not the key
to unlock
the secret
of each present moment?
Who can not see that
everything following
that one inalterable footprint
in our past
is but one complex maneuver to
justify its placement
in stone?
Who may not find
in the awareness of a granite past
the first lesson in unraveling
the intricate
yet monomaniacal
series
of
actions
we call
daily life?
Who will fail
to see that long knot
of forward leaps
and backward staggering
is but one
long
argument
to lionize,
or at least
to exonerate,
the fabric out which
it is spun
and to glorify,
or at least to shroud,
the hook
on which it sways?
Exhausted
and humiliated
by constantly revising our lives,
we may
suddenly
begin devising our lives
based on a shrouded image
we choose to call self-respect.
Self-respected self-respect.

Our freedom,
foibles,
tastes
and terrors
are but the images
that best align with,
and brighten,
that smoky negative image
we call regret.
The ego is
is but that image
projected in reverse
from the past into the future,
moment by moment,
frame by flickering frame.
We choose to play on a large, enduring scale
-- on the big screen of life --
the role, the roll,
which the microcosm of a
decision
cast for us.
What the moving image reveals is
is the dual error
of confusing being good
with having a good life
and,
in turn,
having a good life
with making good on every part of our lives.
Goodness by wholesale,
virtue by volume,
integrity by uniformity,
morality in monochrome.
Sleek
and fragile
as chrome
on the polychrome soul
Seated in the dark
theater of our souls,
we become
hypnotized by the images
of a past that
that we insist should have a better,
more explicable
place
in our lives.
Once
a point of regret,
or even of
initially
insignificant circumstance,
is transmuted
into a matter of principle,
well, then, then
even a skipping record
a recorded skipping over
can be called melodious
and even
and even vice
can be labeled as goodness.
For what really counts
under this baffling
baffling spell
is authenticity
and consistency,
as long as they apply to one's self
like the one-sided beauty of a blade
in every one else's self.
The magical error is
is rectified by remembering that
that regret is
is sometimes a healthy purgative,
sometimes
a means of liberation
from what too easily becomes
a hegemonic,
self-justifying
act
of sheer will
once upon a time.

We are,
most of us,
living
desperately
to explain,
understand,
unearth
-- or, then again,
perhaps
to dilute
and annihilate --
decisions
we no longer have a choice
but to make our own.
It only takes one
decision,
of a certain intoxicating quality,
falling
in a certain fertile time,
striking
at a precisely crippling angle,
to set in motion
the remainder
of a life,
whereupon one is
is thenceforth committed
with blind ambition
to prove,
to prove to one's self
as much as to others,
how his life is not
is not explained by,
not subject to,
a past
a past decision,
but rather is
is committed
to reconstituting it,
in clever hindsight,
as one's foresight all along.
May it not be that
from our most mundane scrabbling
to our most valiant achievements,
we are in fact simply
simply trying to look
ourselves in the mirror
with a lens
that finally unscrambles
the image
we bent into a certain shape
some time before,
some because-and-thus ago?
Gazing,
gazing into this mirror,
who can regard any action
as empty
and meaningless
when it is bursting
with the desire to explain itself,
and,
if not the whole world,
at least a whole life,
in light of an irrevocable shift
in the winds that we chose to follow
long ago?
But oh me,
who can see in any human
action
but a hollow, dessicated
corpse of freedom,
when we realize that
every moment is vampirized
by the haunting
awareness that you are
what you are,
you do
what you do,
you reject
what you reject, simply
simply in order not to retrace your way
and not to have to replace that incorrigible,
inaugural
tile?

The sense we make
of our lives may not
in fact make sense,
given the sometimes arbitrary bases
it tries to build from, but making sense
of our selves
-- predicating our purpose
on our predicaments --
is
is unavoidable.
One may either direct life
towards
a pristine,
but indefinitely delayed,
goal . . .
or lead it out,
like a rope
unfurling,
frayed,
into the briny depths
of mortality,
as consistently
and with as much decorum
as possible
from a starting point one feels
one feels obliged to make
one's own.
At some point, a
decision,
or even a failure to
decide,
takes on disproportionate significance
in the story
of our lives, and
every page
after that
cannot but be embossed
with the same theme,
the same image,
if only that
that we can read
our life as one,
coherent, progressive tale.
Pick your graven plate,
and press, then,
with care.

No Panes, New Gains

[Here's a ditty I came up with while walking to the office to sign in and then during my first period of invigilating. It's a 3/4 blues rock with some "rising action".]

It frees the ice in my heart
to know you spurned the burn of my love
because it made you cool
to freeze the fire of my love

I know it makes you happy
I'let my love for you go
Because it made you weepy*
I couldn't lose myself in the flow

When two loves collide
but along divergent planes
they only form a shattered X…
A spot marked in vain
a crisscross of dying whistles…
and sullen, empty trains

No more coal in the oven
only coal heap'd'on the floor
No more heat for the hearth
Only ancient** dust in the door

The tread I left on you
was the tread you left on me
The riddle you became to me
became a last crusade for me
My vanguard swept off by*** your rearguard
And my standard on high a lingering shame
When I outflanked all your bluffing****
You blew a trumpet in retreat…
the end of the game…
the end…

When two loves collide
but along divergent planes
they only form a shattered X…
A spot marked in vain
A crisscross of dying whistles…
and sullen, empty trains
barren, hollow trains

No more ink in the ink jar
Only a line left on the page
No more sugar for the coffee
Only hulking thirst 'neath the bed, unassuaged

When two will-be's divide
out along diverging planes
The only glass that kept you warm
Missing, broken, shattered, shattered, broken, missing panes
With no more losses left to hide
it's time to seed those past pains
it's time to harvest all new gains
it's time to put in bright new panes

POSSIBLE ALTERNATE LINES:
* sad; gloomy
** long-still; unmoved; hermetic
*** swallowed by; became
**** gambits; parries