there's a hole in the ocean the size of the sea

-Oh, I could tell you why the ocean is near the shore
  I could tell you things I've never thought before
      (and then I'd sit and think some more)
-Time is an ocean
   but it ends at the shore

Gravity

Gravity

  “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 mainstream American 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, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to his wife;

“For Carlotta, on our 12^th 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.

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Footnotes and Acknowledgements

1. Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

2. Albert Camus, The Sea Close By

3. E.M. Forster, What I Believe

4. Edgar Mitchell, http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/30206152130/well-right-naturally-you-should-hate

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.