With its etymological rooting in Latin separatism shares the same se stem as the words segmented and segregation and severance. A segment is something that has been cut away from a larger body thing, i.e. removed unnaturally, cut away, severed. The phenomena of identificationalism is highly reliant on fracturing.
That the word separatist has become prefixed by ecclesiastical in The Oxford Dictionary Of English Etymology is telling because the ecclesiast by necessity has to be both a blowhard and a blagger because of the nature of the product he is peddling, pie in the sky, granfaloolenery.
With its etymological origins in science fiction granfaloon means more or less inverse transcendence. The transition in its case is reliant on a foolish myth (a faloon) and has the effect of closing someone down rather than opening them up, clinging to itself in seclusion rather than letting go and embracing the world at large.
There is a poetic contradiction inherent to the nature of embracement, that to hold and be held you have to let yourself go, to hold without holding, all embraces beginning with open arms.
There is a book which I consider to be pertinent to how we divide this world up, called Fup by Jim Dodge, in which a boy responds to the death of his mother by building fences, his grandfather saying to him that the more you fence out, the more you end up fencing in.
The act of keeping something out has an inwardly coiling effect in which the subject invariably ends up disappearing into a void of self. The act of holding the imagined other at arm's length is at risk of inadvertently holding humanity at arm's length.
When I got off of a train in Edinburgh many years ago, the graffiti in the train station read Scottish not British, I remember wondering how far the author wanted to take his distinction, to illustrate; scottish not british, scottish not european, scottish not nothern hemispherical, scottish not occidental, scottish not worldly, scottish not of woman born etc. Scottish not British is a synechdoche of indentitifactionalism at large, the ceaseless subcategorisation of humanity. We have to wonder what gets lost in the gulf between what is scottish and what is british, or whatever something or other not this and that maybe.
That there are political benefits to be gained from subcategorising oneself make it an enticing prospect.
In his essay What I Believe E.M. Forster writes, 'I hate the idea of causes, and I had to choose between betraying my friend or betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' To which I would like to add the appendage, I'm not looking for the easy way out.
In his book also named What I Believe Bertrand Russell writes, 'The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge', To which I would like to add the appendage, we're all in the same proverbial boat.
A key part of growing up is looking up out into the timeless sky at night and making the decision to stop being scared of the dark and learning from the flowers that good light and good soil shall help you grow and realising that we should not want the best of both worlds, we should want the best of all worlds and to be a part of that.
He once told me that he could beat up a tyranosaurus rex in a fight. He was convinced of this, especially if he had a hammer handy. Another time he told me that he was able to throw an empty beer bottle so far that it would smash on the moon.
I had seen him in fights from time to time, he was the strongest man in the region. Being small it was reassuring to me to have him around. For some he reason he liked me. It would be hard to put into words why. We just liked each other. That's all.
I had just reached the age when I decided that people should accept that I am not interested in the things that I am not interested in. I no longer wanted to spend whole evenings feigning interest. However, I've always looked younger than my age.
A man was talking to me about the demonisation of the working class, in that way that people have a tendency to do when they have nothing to talk about, he had done his thesis on it. I started to think about the demons of the working class. Seeing through my eyes that my ears weren't listening he raised his voice. On hearing the man raise his voice Rex told the man to leave it out. The man finished his drink within the next few minutes and left.
We spent all of our time together drinking, we didn't ever do anything else. When he had nothing to talk about, he didn't talk.
One night he was talking about my parents, he said that they were nice people. He knew them as a little old man and a little old woman going gently into the night, going out to the local pub twice a week. This was not a way of going into the night he could endure himself. He thought he would die out at sea. You see, you cannot beat up the sea, not even with a hammer handy.
The next night he was telling me about fighting. He believed that fighting is the most intimate act there is. Part of beating someone up was the healing that would ensue if you reached the right level of damage. He believed a fighter should aim for a level of damage which would not be irrevocable, GBH was a sin to him, as bad as rape, if not worse. He believed the purpose of a good fight was to make the other person a better person.
The next night as we left the pub at closing time he put his hand on my shoulder and for a moment I thought he was going to ask me if I fancied a quick a fight, as though the previous night he had been building me up to it. However, instead he just finished off his drink and threw the empty beer bottle out into the night sky. We watched it disappear, listening out for the soft sound of glass smashing somewhere out in the far off distance.
Hamlet. Good afternoon Mr Williams, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by the Copenhagen Review. Do you know how I start every discussion?
Robin Williams. I'm familiar with the magazine, yes.
H. To be or not to be?
RW. As Camus famously wrote at the start of The Myth of Sisyphus, something along the lines of, 'the only true philosophical question is that of suicide.'
H. That was long after I originally posed the question.
RW. Excuse me, I'm not usually one who feels the need to justify his presence by dropping names. It's just that I'm used to being interviewed by publications such as Empire magazine. Magazines which ask the interviewee questions like, 'how much does a pint of milk cost?' To which I, in my comic persona, respond, 'that all depends on whose titties I'm sucking on', or, alternatively, if I really want to bring the house down, I respond, 'that all depends on whose dick I'm sucking on', the interviewer then giving me the feed line, 'but that's not milk,' to which I react, 'I'm going to have to call daddy, that son of a bitch has been telling me it's milk for 57 years'. Crass stuff, but it's what the public want. This is quite a departure for me.
H. Just be yourself.
RW. That's the hardest role there is. I'm much more comfortable playing a role. The most comfortable I've ever been was playing a cartoon, I didn't even have to be part of my own skin.
H. As an old friend of mine said, 'the world is a stage.'
RW. To answer your question I suppose that in the end it's all not to be. This is the cornerstone of inevitability. However, all we shall ever know ourselves is to be. But even the stars are one day not to be, some of them already so, their light taking years to finally reach our eyes even after they die. The Yin of infinity is Yanged by inevitability. Another way of putting this would be jingle jangle. Nothing lasts forever, that's the only thing that does. That and time which you so wonderfully once epitomised as dust.
H. I was originally going to say ash but changed it to dust at the last minute.
RW. You were right to do so, sooner or later or we all come to fade away even those that burnt out.
H. You mentioned earlier about time lasting forever, where do you place yourself in conjunction with infinity?
RW. I consider myself, and everyone else for that matter, inseparable from it. I am part of a waltz with eternity which will still be playing its music long after I go. To a certain extent I believe no one goes, or if they do go, where do they go to? I cannot tell you exactly what it is that the dead do, but they do it very well.
H. Speaking from experience I consider the dead to have a hold over the living which the living does not have over them.
RW. Yes, this may be a cliche, but like most cliches it is based on a significant element of truth, it's hard to give up the ghost. Is it OK to smoke here?
H. Yes, Denmark is very tolerant over cigarettes.
RW. That's one thing this piece of shit country has going for it at least.
H. Not that I'm what they call patriotic, but we also have a very impressive bus service and the trains run remarkably close to schedule.
RW. I don't use public transport. Celebrity turns you into a spectacle, people stare. Some people see me and just burst out laughing, it makes me feel like the Elephantman.
H. To a degree we're all partly John Merrick I would say. Each one of us with their own form of Elephantiasis in one way or another. Hence the girl, I forget her name, in Todd Browning's Freaks becoming so horrified in the famous 'one of us' scene, she realises not much separates any of us from those around the table. What distinguishes us all from being John Merrick or the Elephantman is how much we surround ourselves with people who recognise our humanity and whose humanity we can recognise ourselves.
RW. Could that be, in other words- sorry to be so vague- love?
H. Perhaps.
RW. It's an interesting scene that 'one of us' scene. Have you ever noticed how that phrase 'one of us, one of us' matches entirely, rhythm for rhythm, 'lone-li-ness, lone-li-ness'? There seems to be something insidious about the bunching together people do at the expense of their individuality. I try to take everyone for who they are but when you're on that stage looking at God knows how many people it's hard not to just think to yourself, mass. I become anxious about mass thinking.
H. What worries you so much about it?
RW. It dictates the way people look at things. It makes them convinced that there is only one way, their, plural, way. The world is getting divided into two conflicting points of view, the subcategorisation being that of left or right, liberal or republican in the States. To me there's always more than one way of skinning a cat. As a comedian I know from the early years on stage that you have to change the way you tell a joke depending on who you're telling it to. Have they stopped teaching the theory of relativity at schools?
H. Do you consider society to be heading in the right direction?
RW. In many ways I find this indisputable. I remember when I was little boy that you weren't allowed to sit down at the front of the bus if you were black in my country. Things have changed since then. Of course, spanners get thrown in the works. Maniacs become powerful and so on. This is part of the parcel with democracy. Things take much longer than we may have hoped. I'm a great believer in patience, you yourself are no advocate of rash decisions. Unfortunately we live in a convenience culture, everything is expected to be instant. I blame the microwave and jumbo jet for this, the progress of technology has left the progress of man behind and we have started to misconceive technological advancement as humanitarian advancement.
H. Yes, there is an act now think later mentality very prevalent in western society. In the past I have been criticised for too much thinking and too little action but I am certain more harm has been done under unthought acts than ever what has been considered. This is the basis of the word considerate.
RW. Excuse the pun, we need to get our acts together.
H. In the press release your agent sent me it mentions how your career has recently taken a turn toward darker material than that which we have come to expect. Could you comment a bit on this.
RW. That's hollywood talk. This distinction between light and dark, it's quite restrictive, after all the universe is both, just look at the sky at night. Einstein once said that out of all things he is certain of two things, the infinity of the universe and of human stupidity and he wasn't even so sure about the first one. My definition of human stupidity would roughly be how much we limit ourselves. I remember when I first came across a decimal point, I realised that everything could be made smaller and smaller and smaller, and so on. Now we border each other off at any given opportunity, everybody's something or other or other, but the last thing they're described as is human. There's people in the Southern Staes of America who think that an Arab man's head is literally made out of a towel rather than skin and bone. We should concentrate on what we share in common more and what separates us less.
H. You don't think that that's contradictory to what you said about mass thought.
RW. People become masses by collective separation more than they ever do on common ground. This is where the fractures in religion come, catholics versus protestants, sunnis versus shiites . They are concentrating on what sets them apart rather than together. The most powerful political tool there is at the moment is the creation of a bogeyman. The bogeyman doesn't have to be anything scary, it just has to be other.
H. How do you think we can bring people together?
RW. All I know is is my trade, but I do think humour helps. If you can get a room laughing, they are laughing together. This could go either way of course. The right, or, more accurately, wrong comedian could get the public laughing in the vilest possible way. We all know that there's good laughter and bad laughter.
H. Do you think there's such a thing as too soon?
RW. I think it couldn't be soon enough. Ideally people are joking about something before it's even happened.
H. You must feel that you have a lot to do.
RW. Unfortunately I feel out of the fray, I am unable to laugh at myself so how can I expect anyone else to laugh at me. There's that old chestnut, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Likewise, if a comedian makes a joke and no one laughs, is it a joke? I feel like a dead tree. I used to say that when a show was going badly for me to win the audience back over, it used to work, not anymore.
H. I saw Chris Rock make the same joke, the audience were rolling in the aisles.
RW. The industry works like that. It's why the x-factor's so popular, they turn these contestants into someone they can love for fifteen minutes and then ask not to spend the night. Being loved by the public is like being a box of Kleenex, it's only a matter of time until they reach the final tissue.
H. How does one come to terms with this, do you not feel like one of those dead stars whose light is still shining even though they are dead stars, their starpower, as they call it in your industry, long gone.
RW. You have to find beauty where you can get it, a man, a woman, a cat, a cradle, a song or game, a tree, a rock, a cloud. Now I am a star no more, back to earth, a mere mortal, maybe I can finally take some solace in the stars, as hopefully others once, in days gone by, did me.
H. All in the gutter.
RW. Yes. You have to hone your perspective. No one's born with the will to live, we have to find it where we can and when we can. There's an implication that we all just passively enjoy life 'til the day we fuckin' die, we're even supposed to passively enjoy the day we fuckin' die, it's a disgrace. As an entertainer I am no longer willing to indulge this myth. This, it seems, puts me entirely at odds with my country. So be it.
H. Good will to live hunting.
RW. Yes, that's very amusing. Forgive me for not laughing but it's been a long day and I'm still lagged from the flight.
H. With that in mind I think all there is that's left to say is thank you Mr Williams.
RW. Call me Robin.
H. Robin.
RW. It's been a pleasure sweet prince.
H. And to say how much I enjoyed your performance as Peter Pan.
There is a spot in the swimming pool, somewhere around a third of the way in along the floor's decline and water's rise, where the level of water above the floor turns from shallow into deep,. It is not exactly a hair's breadth in the space it takes up but is little more (or less) than a foot. It is in this more or less foot of space where the water flows at a level equipoised between shallow and deep where I would place Jonathon Glazer's Under The Skin. It is a film that resides neither upon the surface nor deep beneath it but inbetween.
It has been compared to Kubrick by some critics but it seems to bare more in common with the films of Andy Warhol, which I mean to its credit. The film focuses on how things look, it does not go into depth about what they are. You are left to figure that out for yourself, as though you are looking at a photograph; which you are, a moving one, light indented onto film. That people have commented on how well Scarlett Johanson does a Scottish accent is indicative of how much of a carte blanche the audience is given, they can make of it what they will if they want to (she does no such thing (you can understand everything what she is saying for one thing) and I'd suggest the people who comment that she does so are overshooting for verisimilitude).
The main surface which which Under The Skin focuses on is the surface of man, his skin, the edge of his body, in its multitude of forms. It has an interest in reflective surfaces also, particularly mirrors. This may be highly superficial, I'm not sure. However, if we are to accept that in some sort of transgenic metaphysical manner God created man in his image then there is also something divine, and, if not essential, quintessential, in studying the surface of man, the edge of his body, his skin, in its multitude of forms. Invariably when you are looking at the surface you are looking at what lies beneath it, there lurking, not even lurking, simply, beneath.
To be subjective, it's a beautiful film to look at. Like all beauty, it lies somewhere inbetween; in the eye of the beholder (the lens of a camera); a bridge to take us somewhere we would find it difficult to get to without it.
“The
philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth is
merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way.
It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out
results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet.
Vitalism as a philosophy, and evolutionism, show in this respect, a lack of
sense of proportion and logical relevance. They regard facts of life, which are
personally interesting to us, as having a cosmic significance, not a
significance confined to the earth’s surface. Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic
philosophies, show the same naïve humanism; the great world, so far as we know
it, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us either happy or
unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance, and are best
corrected by a little astronomy.
But
in the philosophy of value the situation is reversed. Nature is only part of
what we can imagine; everything, real or imagined, can be appraised by us, and
there is no outside standard to show that our valuation is wrong. We are
ourselves the irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature
is only part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature. In the world of
values, Nature is neutral, neither good nor bad, deserving of neither
admiration nor censure. It is we who create nature and our desires which confer
value. In this realm we are kings, and we debase our kingship if we bow down to
Nature. It is for us to determine the good life, not for nature- not even for
nature personified as God.”1
Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are
floating in space. They have become separated from their spaceship and shall
have to find a way of getting back to earth in order to live. From the outset
we are informed that life is impossible in space.
The
film is stripped into two plotlines, the physical journey of finding a way back
to earth and the metaphysical journey of finding a way back to earth. At first
you may worry that is your typical Hollywood
survival over all themed blockbuster. However, it’s a far more an existential
blockbuster not a million miles away from the Cuaron brothers breakthough film Y TuMama Tambien (that being set in Mexico
and this one a six hundre miles or so above earth’s hemisphere) in which a
woman with cancer lives until she dies going on a road trip with two boys
rather than getting involved with a race against the clock to find a miracle
cure, existing in a form of the present which is not concerned with prolonging
the present.
In Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron, working this time with his son, Jonas, has rendered the essence
of Y TuMama Tambien universal in its widest
sense, setting it in nearby outer space, existence being probably the major
universal theme so long as it exists. Unlike the survival themed movies which
we are so used to from mainstreamAmerican filmmakers, in which we have life
pitted in a combat against death, the existential movie has life sitting next
to death, the two going hand in hand, two peas in a pod, the owl and the pussycat, Dick and Lid.
The
key question that the film raises is how does one go on actively existing in a
wild cosmos as indifferent to us as a loved one’s corpse is to its mourners?
How does one take it? How do you not just switch off? Sandra Bullock is
existing in a physical sense only, she has switched off from engaging with the
world, going through the motions of life, unable to do anything else. She isn’t
even suicidal, that after all being an existential quandary; to be or not to
be, maybe, maybe not. This has been since her daughter died by falling and
cracking her skull open on a concrete playground floor; “the stupidest thing”
as she describes it; a line which wouldn’t be out of place in ancient Greek
tragedy when man has to face up to his fate and his grand irrelevance in the grand scheme of things (and lack
thereof); existence seeming like, when faced with this, just about the
stupidest thing in the universe. ‘Unlike the story it was written to be.’ There’s
a famous joke, if you want to make God laugh just tell him your plans. Equally
true, I believe, would be, if you want a laugh ask God what his are.
He’ll never answer you. A commentator once pontificated on Eugene O’Neill’s A
Long Day’s Journey Into Night;
“These are the age old questions, I suppose, of
life itself. Who am I? And where do I come from? And do I have a part in my own
fate? Am I simply a checker on the board, being moved around? Do I belong to
anything, to anyone? To whom do I belong? To God, who seems to be abandoning
me?”
Overcoming
this cosmic gloom is not a problem easily answered because ultimately there is
no answer, there isn’t even a question, but there are a few avenues of thought
worth walking down.
As
George Clooney lets go of the rope binding him to Sandra Bullock so that she
can carry on and pull herself into a spaceship, to live another day, as it
were, without him as he floats off into a space where life is
not possible, inevitably uttering the line, ‘Sometimes you have to let go’,
before looking at the earth maybe one last time, he remarks, ‘You should see
the sun on the Ganges, it’s beautiful’ or words to that affect.
‘Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness
lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this
helps us to die.’2
He
is a man who may not ready to die but is equipped to do so. To a certain extent
it is not overcoming the gloom but finding some other interests; ‘with one hand
on my suicide, the other on a rose,’ Yinging the Yang. Clooney needn’t necessarily
give a fuck about the sun shining on the Ganges,
what the fuck good is it to him in any physical sense? It’s not going to save
his life. However, finding the beauty within this shall enrich his life whilst
he still lives it which may be just as worthwhile in some aspects. When he recognises
beauty, man is recognising that life may not be the stupidest thing after all,
that there may be a little bit more to it than that, or other ways of looking
at it, for better or worse. Eugene O’Neil's dedication of his masterpiece, ALong Day’s Journey Into Night, to his wife;
“For
Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest:
I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and
blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem for a day celebrating
happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and
tenderness which gave me faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last
and write this play- write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness
for all the
four haunted Tyrones.
These
twelve years, Beloved One, have been a journey into light- into love. You know
my gratitude, And my love!
GENE”
Another
point that the film makes is that you can’t make any mistakes in existence, you
can just do it or not do it. That Sandra Bullock took a few minutes longer in installing
some equipment than she was supposed to ultimately has no effect on the
predicament which the astronauts find themselves in, floating in space. It’s
not her fault. It was beyond her control. The Hollywood
narrative structure of cause and effect is heavily undermined, the characters
are responsible for their perspectives more than their situation. It is the
difference between survival and existence. One is letting things be, the other
is trying to make things be. They may not be getting it right, but they are not
getting it wrong either. The truth about it is that no one gets it right. How
could they? All you one can do is try. Success and failure are more or less irrelevant to one's intentions.
In
contrast, look at the survival narrative, it will almost always involve a
confrontation between the protagonist and a person or being or structure which
threatens his life, so to survive he will inevitably kill or destroy the thing
in order to preserve his life. It suggests that we are the architects of our
lives and, furthermore, the world in general. This is not existence in a pure sense as existence encompasses a much
wider composition of everything and flourishes within a vast multitude of
coexistence.
This
is encapsulated in the differences between the television survivalists Bear
Grylls and Ray Mears. Bear Grylls is about making the environment bend to his
will and overcoming it by behaving like a lunatic, his last show being called
something nutty like Surviving Hell,
whilst Ray Mears is about blending into his environment and getting by in it,
going along with it. Of course, Ray Mears is older than Bear Grylls and
probably has a better understanding of how to live peacefully but also has a
deeper understanding of the frailty of anything with a fleeting transitory existence,
if you look at his back story he is the widower of a wife who died from Cancer
relatively early on in their marriage. After that, you have to realise that
life is not so much the fight that it has been billed to be, it just is.
Earlier this year (2013 at time of writing) I wrote a line in one of my works, ‘Rona, I remember
you wondering if the liking of neon light was enough to justify going on existing,’
ending that particular paragraph, ‘and you’ll always have existed’. I’ve been
listening to the music of Jason Molina and the Magnolia Electric Light Co. a
lot since Jason Molina’s death earlier in the year. The other day I was
listening to a live recording and he said to the audience ‘I used to say I
wanted to be a ghost when I grow up’. It’s hard not to get a haunted feeling at
times. Hank Williams may be quite right when he says 'you'll never get out of this world alive,' however, you shan't get out of it dead either.
Survival in its grandest lunacy is the
building of bombs, the justification behind doing so never apparently being the
intention to cause waves of destruction but to ensure the protection a nation’s
survival by means of deterrence. It becomes the privilege (if you want to call
it that) of the few behind the red button. Surely there’s something paradoxical
to survival through death. However, of course, there isn’t. To paraphrase probably
the most famous line in Charles Darwin’s Origin
Of The Species; survival of the shittest. It is the metaphysical equivalent
of acting like a big baby, my way or no
way at all. You have to accept, as much as you can, all ways. One should
not want the best of both worlds but the best of all worlds. For me, something
crucial to existence is to coincide with all existence rather than compromising
it.
.
True
Self
True self, True self
Has no will-
It’s free from “Kill”
Or “Do not kill”
But while I am
a novice still
I do embrace
with all my will
the first commitment
“Do not kill”
When
I hear all this talk of an overpopulated planet I think of what the ghost of Christmas present says to Ebeneezer Scrooge
regarding his talk of the surplus population;
Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear
that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and
Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It
may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less
fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear
the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry
brothers in the dust!"
I
worry that with an aggressive atheism as a reaction against religion that we
may be throwing out the baby with the holy water. In The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology,released earlier this year, Slavoj Zizek argues that we should be aiming to
reach an atheism through a progression of Christianity (or, say, any religion) rather
than as the antithesis of it. Amen. After all, how can any karass (http://bernd.wechner.info/Bokononism/dictionary.html) be based on something that you don’t believe in? What is important to a
karass is a shared system of values and beliefs which are independent and free
from the granfalloonery of the cult. The atheistic substitution of science for
faith is an abomination to both humanity and science. Knowledge may be power
but meaning is something to be shared. If we want to live well in any moral way
we have to have more than just geography and our cosmic circumstance connecting
us.
“The
good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”1
Science is not the foundation of a good life, instead it is a
compass to guide us; the ship itself is ultimately an ephemeral vessel that we
have to build upon the foundation of ideals and common beliefs in caring for
one another. Certainty, here, is not the aim.
The
universality of existence, humanity’s shared flight, coexistence, is succinctly
expressed in Gravity’s systematic
breakdown of national borders. Sandra Bullock rides back to earth in a Chinese
craft wearing a Russian space suit at the end of the film. The Cuarons are looking past the granfalloonery of national geography to our shared global
geography, both esoteric and exoteric, beneath and amidst the stars. To try and
put this as simply as possible, to paraphrase The Wizard Oz, we’re not in Kansas
any more. ‘I’m living in a foreign country and I’m bound to cross the line but
beauty walks on razor’s edge and one day I’ll make it mine.’
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country"3
When
George Clooney asks Sandra Bullock where she lives on earth he almost
immediately folksies the question, asking, ‘Where do you pitch your tent?’ With
this he denationalises location. Location, in the sense of where one is from, gets
deservedly abstracted and consequently widened. There are no local people.
More to the point, we are all local people. It’s a big location.
When Cole Porter wrote Don’t Fence Me In,apparently
as a joke, he must have realised somewhere in the writing it that he had something
in his hands with a transcendental appeal beyond a satire of cornball cowboy
sentimentality, ‘lots of land under starry skies above.’ This feeling that there’s more to location
than just where one is stood at any given moment, that the landscape is as open
as dreams may be (Oz), that we have all the space and time in the world is,
again, universal.
I
find the motif in Jim Dodge’s Fup of
the boy becoming a master fence maker, constantly building them around his home
inevitably fencing himself in as he fences the world out, prevalent here. What
is he so afraid of? Presumably death. He thinks, because he has seen violent
death, that death is external rather than, at the end of the day, internal. You
cannot separate yourself from it. It transcends all borders. In space there are
no fences, except for the ones we have constructed on earth. You can see
earth in all its wide openness, and likely you wonder why we are trying to make
it even smaller than it already is;
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”4
We
have to establish what connects us more and develop what separates us less. Open space
connects us all, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in
ourselves, that we are underlings.’ We are all in the same boat.
The
Sweetest Little Song
You go your way
I’ll go your way too
At
least God got to get a good look at the astronauts.
Other quotes, unless stated within the main body of the text come from; Joanna Newsom, Leonard Cohen (both poems taken from The Book Of Longing), Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan, William Shakespeare and David Berman respectively.
